Hard happ where halves must disagree
Or truce of halves the whole betraye
Southwell, Mans Civill Warre
If the depth of a biography is measured by how it faces its main character’s complexity, then Braulio Fernández’s Robert Southwell: Jesuita, poeta y mártir (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2026) succeeds remarkably in combining the varied facets of its biographee into a portrait—betraying neither the whole nor its parts, in a style both clever and current—of a sixteenth-century English poet whose life and work are here addressed for the first time in Spanish.
For a start, we come to understand the character as a Catholic priest persecuted and condemned for high treason in Elizabethan England, hence the historical and biographical framework in which he is contexualized, “Hispanizing” the matter in no small measure. There is an indisputable bigger picture at play: schismatic secession, national fracture, and fratricidal conflicts without quarter, marked by the figures of Mary and Elizabeth—which of the two was more bloody, more persecutory?—both daughters of the same father, and what a father: a “defender of the faith.” As we delve into this story, its conclusion is not yet defined. It involves great powers, a Counter-Reformation, and squads of Ignatian footsoldiers trained in Rome, as well as underground networks that reach the upper echelons of English society, through which Southwell moves as if right at home. Obviously, politics is inescapable. And the book does not take sides; rather, it seeks to familiarize its Spanish-speaking readership with this world, for which its non-English and non-Protestant reference points come in useful.
The book’s biographical focus also allows for narrative effects. “Father Robert,” as he is called from time to time, is followed, accompanied, and imagined, creating empathy in the reader. This strategy lends greater power to what comes after, once the protagonist and his environment are thoroughly depicted: nothing less than the translation into Spanish of his entire collected poetic oeuvre, including prose poems and other texts (but not his correspondence, which promises to form the basis of a future volume). This is a prodigious contribution, which analyzes the texts one by one—from an academic angle, with all the corresponding scholarly rigor and technical precision—but that, by granting the newly described character words, allows him to speak and recite for himself. All the while, like a persistent subliminal image, he appears to us, wandering the streets of London, and he hides, offers spiritual relief, preaches, and prays alongside others. Oftentimes we come across a poem as awe-inspiring as his most famous “The Burning Babe” and do not know what we have found. “A truly beautiful poem,” though simple and plain, about a child in flames who appears one winter’s night, or an enlightenment, a vision, an anticipation or “prolepsis” of the passion of Christ on theological grounds? This study is an extraordinary guide to how and on which different levels literary texts can be appreciated. It teaches us to read and interpret said texts.
What’s more, the book is far from dull in its specific literary endeavor; it is, on the contrary, provocative. It aspires to recover Southwell’s legacy and correct what it considers his marginalization from the English literary canon. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, he became the most published author in England after Shakespeare, which gives rise to two additional chapters. One examines his connection to the so-called “metaphysical poets”—Donne, Milton, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, and Marvell—whose subjects, tastes, and confluences with Baroque conceptism, wit, and paradox allow us, following Fernández, to classify Southwell as their predecessor, if not as “the first metaphysical poet.” Another chapter examines his possible connection to Shakespeare, with clear awareness that this angle is more speculative, though no less grounded in the author’s impressive handling of the relevant analytical literature.
It goes without saying that Fernández decidated three years of his life to this book—written after the death of his dauther, Sara—which holds great personal meaning for him, and there is no need to list his various talents and skills: he is a specialist in English literature, a professor, a poet, and a translator, and in this study and colossal translation, he also plays the role of translation team leader and, broadly speaking, of interpreter: he translates just as he writes history and tells a story. It is plain to see that Fernández cannot help but carry out his undertakings in a multifocal manner.
In any case, it is through martyrdom that the book produces an even greater effect: it brings Southwell back, present and alive—a paradox, like his death, which, despite being violent, seemed to be anticipated as the decisive prefiguration of a spiritual wish. “By force I live, in will I wish to dye…/ Life is but losse where death is deemed gaine,…/ Come Cruell death, why lingrest thow so longe?” he wrote in prison.
In this day and age, we do not tend to speak this way, much less to speak of martyrdom in such terms. Martyrdom has been desacralized or lost its currency; it is considered anacrhonistic or reserved for “causes” linked to social justice or associated with collective entities categorized as victims (“a martyred people,” “a sacrificial community,” “a geography of pain”), but is rarely used for individuals. The same goes for depictions of the killings of martyrs in Renaissance paintings. Curiously, none of these paintings is necessarily moving. Nor is the “vertigo of lists” described by Umberto Eco: the hoped-for effect is more saturated than strengthened. It gives the sensation of quantifiable “news,” not of a testimony of faith, nor, let’s say, of a martyred individual who accepts his martyrdom.
Nor was this martyrdom easy to recognize. The Catholic Church took 384 years to beatify Southwell and another forty-one to canonize him. Even before having to be proven according to canon law, his martyrdom faced accusations that denied his sacrifice. Martyrs tended to be classified as mere enemy or criminal casualties (rebels, conspirators, traitors). And while it is understandable that, in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, he is not considered a saint, it is shocking that he is not deemed a martyr. Martyrdoms traditionally presuppose an undeniable “testimony” and, therefore, why shouldn’t they be able to speak for themselves, whether the faith in question is shared or not? Should they require certification? And should their manifestations of conviction, integrity, moral fiber, and character be considered vestiges of other ages that have nothing to tell us today?
Southwell is too powerful an individual to be silenced. What he has to tell us is still eloquent today. This book proves it. It shows us that his martyrdom is still a relevant denunciation, as well as a pressing, individual, and subjective explanatory challenge. This biography, if somewhat pious for those who wish to read it in this key—I say so as a non-Christian myself—is not hagiographic. It is another offshoot of a long tradition of “exemplary lives” that serve as models to follow. Leon Edel and Henry James keep watch. They have demonstrated that it is possible to capture an essence or a soul, that the death of the biographee sets and seals. It is a matter of overall symmetry, sensitivity, and intuition, this act of unraveling the “figure” from the tapestry’s design in the midst of so many circumstantial absurdities, including death.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
