Gerardo the Unfortunate Spaniard. Or A Patterne for Lasciuious Louers. Containing seuerall strange miseries of loose Affection. Written by an ingenious Spanish Gentleman... in the time of his fiue yeeres Imprisonment. Originally in Spanish, and made English by L[eonard] D[igges].

Bookseller Notes

The scarce first edition in English of this picaresque and yet largely autobiographical novel. It was written in prison by the oft-incarcerated and frequently banished Gonzalo de Cspedes y Meneses, who repeatedly fell foul of the Spanish authorities. First published in Spanish in 1618, it narrates the desperate love of the protagonist for four ladies (Clara, Jacinta, Nise and Lisis). It was hugely influential both in Spain and elsewhere in Europe; John Fletcher used it for his Spanish Curate and Maid of the Mill. The translator 'Leonard Digges's father was Thomas Digges, the mathematician - the first English author publicly to declare his support for Copernicus. 'After Thomas Digges's death [in 1595] his widow married Thomas Russell of Alderminster, whom in 1616 William Shakespeare named as an overseer of his will. The remarriage of his mother had literary repercussions for Leonard Digges. He went to University College, Oxford, in 1603, aged fifteen, and graduated BA on 31 October 1606. Having left Oxford, he returned briefly to London before embarking on a period of study in foreign universities. In 1611 it seems that he went to Spain with his friend James Mabbe, a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, who was secretary to the English ambassador, Sir John Digby. The evidence for their companionship in Spain is provided by a copy of Lope de Vega's Rimas (1613), now in the library of Balliol College, Oxford, which Mabbe sent to another Oxford friend, Will Baker. In a note to Baker on the flyleaf Digges compared Lope's sonnets to those of Shakespeare, which were clearly regarded, at least in Digges's circle, as the finest of their kind. In consideration of the accomplishments Digges acquired in classical and modern languages he was created MA at Oxford on 20 November 1626, and allowed to reside at University College, where he died on 7 April 1635 and was buried in the chapel' (ODNB).2 copies sold at auction in the 1920s are the last to have appeared at auction.