The Bastard Don John: Driver of the Plot of Much Ado (1575).

This figure provides the driving force of Much Ado in Sicily, like the other Spaniard, Iago, in Othello's Venice and Cyprus. Don Juan de Austria (1547 - 1578), in English known as the Bastard Don John of Austria, was a prominent contemporary of Lope de Vega in Madrid. He was an illegitimate son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and was thus the half-brother and rival of King Philip II of Spain and brother in law to his wife, Queen Mary Tudor. He became a military leader in the service of King Philip and is best known for his naval victory at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 against the Ottoman Empire. He proposed an Armada to reconquer England for Catholicism and was much hated there. Both Shakespeare and Calderon put him on stage. Detail from "The Victors of Lepanto" by an unknown artist, 1575, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Picture and data courtesy of the Yorck Project, under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License (Wikipedia).