Upon the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary celebrations of the deaths of Shakespeare and Cervantes, this collection of essays, edited by José Manuel González, explores the many angles from which Shakespeare's and Cervantes's literary achievements can be compared. Through the studies of some of the most renowned scholars in both English and Spanish Renaissance literature, an original and innovative approach to their work emerges. It is not often that, in the same volume, one can pass from one language to another in contributions dealing with the same subject matter. In just a few pages, we move from Darío Villanueva's (Spanish) digression on how Shakespeare anticipated cinematic technique, to Michael Dobson's (English) discussion of how he always suspected that the Stratfordian and the man from Alcalá were as one in contributing to the development of Western literature, to Stephen Greenblatt's (in Spanish) fantasizing with the spurious letter that an admiring Shakespeare once wrote to his Spanish literary soulmate.

The introductory section gives way to a tripartite organization of the rest of the articles, along the lines of the writers’ times (in Spanish), their work (also in Spanish), and, more particularly, their connecting points (entirely in English). Here I have to say that not all articles are equally relevant to the discussion at hand, especially in the first section, where scholars mainly focus on local power relationships in the Levant area, with special attention to the situation of the Moriscos. Things change, though, in the second section. Here, with the piece by José Manuel Lucía Megías, one starts actually sensing what this collection is really about: for Lucía Megías, Shakespeare and Cervantes are just sons of their own time and they both share the understanding of the power of literature as a means to obtain similar goals in life and for posterity. The creation of myths, such as those of Shakespeare and Cervantes, he claims, must give way to a realistic scrutiny of their lives and careers, as they were only common men who, with their craft, became increasingly self-conscious of their fate as professional writers. In this section, I would also mention Eva Valero Juan's discussion on the two-way relationship between the Quixote and America, and how Cervantes's most universal work was used as a referent both in the establishment of Spanish colonial policies in America and in these colonies’ later claim to independence. The chapter closing this section, by María Paz de Miguel Ibáñez, is of special interest as coming from the expert who led the search and discovery of the bones of Cervantes and his wife in the convent of the Trinitarias Descalzas, in Madrid.

The third section is the most potent and engaging of the entire collection. Kiernan Ryan gives his interpretation of why Shakespeare's works still hold water in our time, and he does so by discussing what he terms “Shakespeare's utopian realism”—that is, the bard's proleptic vision of a world that is still unfulfilled today. Elizabeth Drayson historicizes Cervantes's use of the trope of the discovery of an ancient text as a framework for his narrative, and she links this to the actual discovery of a set of parchments in Granada staging the drama of the Moriscos living there. In a piece with a highly suggestive title, “Cervantes's Bones,” Brean Hammond explores the traces of Cervantes's work in several of Shakespeare's plays, inferring what the allegedly lost play Cardenio might have looked like. Also reading Shakespeare through the works of Cervantes, the two articles that ensue, by Trudi L. Darby and Eric Griffin, respectively, conclude that the dramatist was much more versed on the literary achievements of Cervantes than has been conceded until now. They examine clear and revealing overlaps between their work so as to prove that Shakespeare and some of his most illustrious fellow writers in England freely used not only the Quixote but also some other Cervantean narratives. Barry Ife takes this comparison to another level when he argues that Shakespeare was as convinced of the importance of the written word as Cervantes was sure of the relevance of theatricality for the development of the new narrative he was giving birth to. A nice closing piece on Orson Welles's problematic, though unbalanced, relationship to Shakespeare and Cervantes when filming his famous adaptations brings the volume to an end and leaves the reader with the impression that these two lucid minds operating on both sides of the Channel could have actually formed an unbeatable partnership if only Greenblatt's apocryphal letter had reached its destination.