This study responds to two great orthodoxies about English Renaissanc The one, established by Voltaire in the Age of Enlightenment, expl apparent similarities between Shakespeare and Calderon and Lope de Vega Spanish Golden Age in terms of direct literary influence and imitation. advanced and devoutly held by historicists of various persuasions in our has it that English Renaissance drama as a whole constitutes a narrati struggle for hegemony waged between the power elite based at the ab court and the new one emerging from the capitalist society. Both theor place English Renaissance drama in the larger context of the liter politics of early modern Europe. Interestingly enough, however, they bo take into account the fact that the Reformation, more than any other event of the time, changed the configuration of the cultural and politi Europe. This study, then, seeks to engage scholarly attention in exam ways in which the Reformation dictated the form and content of E Renaissance drama. This study points out that the story of the Reformation as the shapi of English Renaissance drama is also the story of religious and encounters and conflicts between England and Spain. Out of the enc between these two nations grew the new genre of historical drama, Voltaire seized upon as evidence of Spanish influence on English Ren drama. Indeed, English drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centur whole can be characterised as a response to the Reformation, and the and religious issues these events generated. The first English history Bale`s King Johan, was also the first dramatic engagement in a propaganda war against the Roman Catholic Church. Bale reads the Reformation as an English triumph over the evil and corrupt Rome, an event inscribed in the Apocalyptic vision of a universal history, and which was prefigured in King John`s struggle to protect English independence from papal control and invasion in the thirteenth century. Bale`s reading goes a long way toward the creation of the myth of the Protestant England as the elect nation persecuted by an army of Antichrists. Catholic Spain and its threats to England were interpreted within the framework of this narrative of the elect nation. Spain became the chief target of the English Anticatholic campaign, and Anticatholicism interchangeable with Anti-Hispanism. The twin themes of the elect nation and Anticatholicism/Anti-Hispanism, born in response to the Reformation, proved to be the major impetus in the inception of English Renaissance drama and its development after King Johan. The project of rewriting the history of the Protestant England as G nation initiated by Bale continued in the harrowing years of the reign Mary. The Geneva Bible and Foxe`s Book of the 1ar`tyrs, both begun, and completed, in exile on the continent, are the culminating expressions o themes of the elect nation and Anticatholicism/Anti-Hispanism. And, as s set the ideological context of the plays staged in England at every cr in the Anglo-Hispanic relationship during the period between 1558 an Thomas Kyd`s Spanish Tragedy, the work that opened a long and brilliant of the revenge play in the English literary Renaissance, for example, c as a response to the threat of an imminent invasion by the Spanish Ar the 1580`s. Shakespeare`s Henry VIII can also be read as a response to explosion of Anti-Hispanism triggered by the sudden death of Prince champion of the international Protestant alliance against Spain, and th a second invasion of the Spanish Armada. In this work, Shakespeare directly to the originary moments of the English Reformation, pro remarkably balanced analysis of the forces, both political and personal, that impelled Henry VIII to what amounted to a radical reformation of the church. Henry VIII as such, affords an illuminating commentary on the Anticatholicism/ Anti-Hispanism that played a decisive role in the shaping of English national identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Calderon`s La cisma de Inglaterra, written in the early years of t when the projected match between Prince Charles and lnfanta Maria England into yet another bout of Anti-Hispanic hysteria, provides an glimpse at Spanish reactions to the English Reformation. Calderon t national drama of the English Reformation into the personal tragedy VIII, placing his attention squarely on the personal motives behind He divorce from Catherine, and his eventual rebellion against the Roman Church and papal authority. In his hand, Henry VIII becomes an Everyman from the grace of God, seduced by the devil in the beautiful shape Boleyn, and England a victim led astray by such a king: England is an o pity rather than of hate. Calderon`s play shows in little the chie between Catholic Spain and Protestant England in regarding the English tion. Whatever the Spanish felt about England, very little of it seem added up to anything comparable to the Anti-Hispanism of the English virulence and its significance in the shaping of national identity. continued to dream their imperial dream of the dominus mundi, little per the real power of the island country`s Anti-Hispanism so unmistakably strated in the defeat of their Armada in 1588.