ABSTRACT
Luis Astrana Marín, in his biography of Cervantes, suggested some fifty years ago that Shakespeare may have traveled to Valladolid in 1605 along with the English mission led by Lord Charles Howard.1 There, he would have come across the text of Don Quixote, although he probably did not meet its author (Astrana Marín, 6.58). In this essay, I would like to suggest one way in which the texts of these two writers did meet. Between 1603, the year of Queen Elizabeth’s death, and 1605, the year of the future Philip IV’s birth, a number of celestial events took place that signaled to astrologers throughout Europe that a new era was at hand. The many interpretations of these celestial phenomena brought together writers and thinkers throughout Europe, including Cervantes and Shakespeare. The English playwright points to these heavenly signs in King Henry IV, Part II and King Lear, while two of Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares [Exemplary Novels] hint at the same celestial occurrences.2 I will argue that Cervantes uses the celestial events to foreground the political contexts of La gitanilla [The gypsy] and La española inglesa [The English Spanish Lady].
