The film Miguel y William (Inés París, 2007) depicts a fictitious encounter between Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare in 1590 and fantasizes about the possibility of both writers competing for the love of the same woman while collaborating in creating a play. Criticism on this film has focused on the historical inaccuracies and the lack of realistic verisimilitude of this romantic comedy, which was clearly conceived as an exercise of fantasy and imagination rather than as a documentary biopic of the two literary giants. However, beyond the distorted specific details about the life of the two great writers as individuals, the film manages to create a compelling representation of two conflicting worlds (Renaissance England and Spain) which collide in the imagined encounter of the two geniuses. This paper will provide a reading of Miguel y William making use of the critical notion of “orientation”, as developed by Sara Ahmed in her influential work Queer Phenomenology, Orientation, Objects and Others (2006), in order to analyse the way the film constructs the opposing images of both nations at the time. If we look beyond its anachronisms and its conventional romantic comedy plot, Miguel y William can be read as a serious engagement with the authors’ time which reveals differing life attitudes that ultimately come to underline and reaffirm, in some cases through the traditional clichés and stereotypes about both countries taken from the “Black Legend”, the differences in their national identities.
