This collection addresses an important yet often neglected historical event in a remarkably interdisciplinary way. Prince Charles's impromptu but prolonged attempt to secure his Spanish bride is a story rich in detail, and this volume is at its best when elucidating the nature and depth of some of the less obvious or well-treated aspects of the prince's visit. Jerry Brotton deals with Charles's art purchases in Madrid, arguing that, while the trip did have a significant impact on English trends and tastes in collecting, the prince himself was in fact already an aficionado. He also shows how art and its display played a major role in the initial attempts to impress the prince and that Philip IV was much more willing to part with his Titians when he thought that they were going to his future brother-in-law. In a similar vein, Lesley Ellis Miller looks at what Charles wore while in Spain, going far beyond a simple description of outfits into an analysis of what contemporaries thought of them and what this meant in a political and cultural sense. She makes a strong case for the prince's conscious use of dress and portrays him as a surprisingly subtle and attentive player in this world of sartorial one-upmanship.

The real heart of the book comes with David Sánchez Cano's essay on the numerous entertainments and festivals in Madrid and Henry Ettinghausen's chapter on the journalism regarding them. Both succeed in illustrating the size and scale of these events and the public's overwhelming excitement for and participation in them. Whether it was a religious procession, a bullfight, or a juego de cañas with the king himself, most of the city turned out each time, and these events were all anyone was talking about. As Ettinghausen describes it, it was the greatest news story since the Resurrection, or at least of the seventeenth century, and people were watching (and reading) very closely.

The episode's interdisciplinary relevance is further demonstrated in the book's later chapters, which shift the focus from the events in Spain and demonstrate their broader impact both in time and space. Alexander Samson shows how the trip to Madrid inspired a wave of English translations of Spanish works, bringing to light the oft-forgotten Hispanophilia that continued to exist despite the well-documented anti-Catholicism and xenophobia of the day. This is followed by three pieces that treat the question of Charles's ultimately unsuccessful Spanish match in relation to the French one he was later able to secure. Karen Britland looks at an English pastoral play and a French prose romance from the period in order to show precisely how the Spanish match was explained away in literature and how it was later used by Charles's Catholic queen to argue for English support of the Protestant cause in the Palatinate. Marie-Claude Canova-Green works with the same French piece, showing just how strongly it was based on contemporary relations of the events. And Claire Jowitt looks at precisely how a couple of Philip Massinger's plays deal with the Spanish and French matches. The final two chapters in the book address some of the English literary and theatrical implications of the failed negotiations, through Trudi Darby's look at Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess and Clare Wikeley's insightful discussion of how the works of John Taylor the Water-Poet fit into the mounting public opposition to crown policies regarding the twin issues of the Spanish match and the Palatinate. Darby succeeds in showing a different but crucially important subversive side of Middleton's well-studied 1624 theatrical phenomenon, pointing among other things to how the Spanish side, unconvincingly vanquished, actually comes out as stealing the show. The book concludes with Roberta Anderson's helpful resource concerning Habsburg diplomatic representation in England during the reign of James I.

For all its interdisciplinary richness, if there is a failing in this book, it is in the omission of any real political history of the events described. There is no chapter set aside for this, and little beyond the early chapters’ aforementioned but tangential successes. For this most political of episodes, politics is often an afterthought here, and even when it is not, conclusions are in several cases based on supposedly definitive historical judgments, with little or no reference to the real debate over the nature of these events. Most striking is a relatively odd moment in the middle, where Jeremy Robbins essentially dismisses much of the work of his cocontributors. His chapter, on the Spanish literary response to the visit, is illuminating. But the outlook is skewed, as he views the entire trip through the lens of its supposedly predestined failure. In his view, “The poets seemed to have gone through the motions of commemorating the event, just as Philip and the Count of Olivares had necessarily to go through the motions of entertaining Charles and pursuing the match” (108). The evidence for this turns out to be merely that the writings about the events tend “towards purely describing and commemorating facts … rather than offering opinions concerning the political impact of the proposed marriage” (108). To the reader who has just read several chapters about precisely how much information such descriptions contain, and about how the people of Madrid and ultimately the crown itself were doing anything but going through the motions, this comes as a bit of a surprise.

In all fairness, this book does not really claim to be a political history, and it is, ultimately, more about the oft-ignored details of the prince's trip and its literary repercussions than about international relations and the history of the Anglo-Spanish match itself. In this, it is an admirable success. Indeed, even at the moments where it is least successful, this collection still manages to find ways to contribute, most notably by broadening our understanding of the specifics of this event, its repercussions, and its importance to contemporaries, and by providing a wealth of welcome detail to a subject that has sorely needed it. And for all of this, it is a more than welcome addition.