Definition of “Romantic” appeared less complicated in the early nineteenth century than subsequent critical disputation might suggest. Within the parameters adumbrated by the German critic and poet Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) – for René Wellek “the fountainhead of universal literary history” – application of the term as systematized by the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel and by Madame de Staël came to be understood and acknowledged all over Europe. It was in 1814 under the heading “Reflexiones de Schlegel sobre el teatro, traducidas del alemán” (“Schlegel’s Reflections upon the Theatre, Translated from the German”) that Johann Nikolaus Böhl von Faber (1770–1836), an expatriate German merchant and bibliophile resident in the southwest port city of Cadiz, first sought to acclimatize within Spain those new aesthetic doctrines originating in his native land. Using principally the twelfth and fourteenth lectures of A. W. Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur (“Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature”) of 1809–1811, Böhl exhorted a return to national traditions, to a literature reflecting popular ideals that was heroic, monarchical, and Christian, the expression of a discernibly Spanish worldview embodied in Golden Age drama; he signed himself an “apasionado de la naciön española” (“passionate admirer of the Spanish nation”).

There was a significant ideological dimension. Böhl, a Catholic convert with servil – i.e. conservative and Absolutist – connections, was combating what he saw as the deleterious consequences of Enlightenment rationalism; he resented the imposition upon Spain of a foreign Neoclassical preference, dismissing detractors of Calderón and of Spain’s literary heritage as unpatriotic subversives.