| Sumario: | This essay examines the intertextual relationship that exists between the cycle of popular Spanish ballads that narrate the fall of the Iberian Peninsula's last Visigothic King, Rodrigo, in the year 711 CE and Lope de Vega's play El último godo (The Last Goth) (1618), which is partially based on this ballad cycle, and which stages this crucial moment of Spanish history for an early modern audience at the height of its own imperial power. Through an examination of various residual echoes that connect Lope's play to a number of romances fronterizos (the "frontier ballads" of the medieval borderlands between Christian and Islamic Spain), this essay argues that The Last Goth obliquely sings the praises of a very successful (and already completed) Christian "Reconquest" of the Iberian Peninsula at the very same moment that it overtly stages what was considered by Lope and his contemporaries to be the greatest tragedy in Spain's national history.
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