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To understand how space contributed to the imperialization of history in Lope’s comedias, this essay focuses on the relation between monarchy and territory in El mejor alcalde, el rey. In this play Lope makes a twelfth-century king, Alfonso VI of León and Castile, embody the ideal of universal monarchy embraced by the Habsburgs. In turn, he depicts the relation between metropolitan León and remote Galicia in the same terms he used a few years earlier in his “American plays” to portray conquest in the New World. By adopting this two-pronged strategy, Lope presents an image of the past that coheres with the imperial present and that reinforces the claims by the Spanish Habsburgs to universal monarchy.
