TuDOR England saw the publication of four, arguably five, translations of Virgil’s Aeneid, all within a thirty-year period between 1553 and 1584. In 1553 William Copland printed the translation by Gavin Douglas (completed in 1513) of Virgil’s twelve books and a thirteenth book, the Supplementum (1471), by the Italian Renaissance poet Maffeo Vegio; in the next year, 1554, John Day printed Henry Howard’s translation of book 4, and in 1557 Richard Tottel printed this again together with the translation of book 2 (both completed at an unknown date before Howard’s death in 1547); John Kingston immediately followed this up in 1558 by printing Thomas Phaer’s translation of the first seven books (completed by Phaer in 1557); then in 1562 Rowland Hall printed the nine books completed by Phaer before his death in 1560; and in 1573 William How printed the Phaer translation as completed by Thomas Twyne, an ‘entirely different version’ according to Steven Lally (Phaer 1987, p. xlviii); Twyne’s translation of Vegio’s thirteenth book was added in another edition printed by How in 1584; finally, in 1582, John Pates in Leiden printed the one translation produced outside England, a translation of the first four books by the Anglo-Irish Catholic exile Richard Stanyhurst, which was printed for a second time the following year in London by Henry Bynneman. What was the cultural and political importance of these translations for the Tudor era?
At stake for printers and translators alike was a capital of cultural authority that printers could bank on to generate sales, especially given the demand created in this period by the expansion of a formal education apparatus to which Virgil was central (Tudeau-Clayton 1998:31, 44-77). The success of the Phaer-Twyne translation, which by 1620 had been printed four more times, was doubtless due in part to its capture of this market, itself an outcome of the advertised consensus established by the end of the sixteenth century, after published skirmishes over the merits of the perceived principal rival version by Richard Stanyhurst, that it was ‘without doubt the best’ (Webbe 1971: 243; see Phaer 1987, pp. xxii-xxiii).
As cultural and literary historians have often remarked, this was an epic age of translation when to translate carried significant sociopolitical and ideological stakes. Translation of Virgil’s epic, however, carried particularly high stakes. For if national identity is arguably always at stake in translation, this was especially the case for the text that furnished a source as well as model for founding myths of national origin in western Europe, including the legend of Brute, putative eponymous founder of Britain. With such cultural authority at stake, translation of Virgil’s Aeneid undoubtedly offered translators an occasion for self-promotion, as Colin Burrow has argued (1997). Still more important, however, if linked to self-promotion, was the occasion it offered for the promotion of cultural forms, notably verse forms and forms of diction, as national equivalents to the unifying model furnished for the Roman people by the ‘columen linguae latinae’ (‘the pillar of the Latin language’), as Virgil was described in one of the biographies in circulation (Tudeau-Clayton 1999: 510). In this respect the Tudor translations are striking in their diversity. Indeed, diversity is highlighted by the title pages. These consistently advertise the verse form which is invariably described in national terms. This advertised specificity suggests how the high ground of Virgilian cultural authority constituted at once the object and site of competition between verse forms as between the authorial translators that promote them. Centrifugal rather then centripetal in its effects, this competition is specifically in tension with the shared aspiration to ‘defence’, as Thomas Phaer puts it, ‘of my countrey language’ against its denigration as ‘barbarous’ (1987: 296), the defence, that is, of a national as well as linguistic totality—‘my’ language and so ‘my’ country— in its differential relations to the surrounding nations of Europe, specifically with respect to the crucial ideological oppositional hierarchy of‘civilized’ and ‘barbarous’. It is a competition that turns precisely around the possessive pronouns ‘my’ and ‘our’: whose forms, whose language, will gain the cultural high ground of national equivalent to the Virgilian model? What is at stake, in short, is the question voiced at the centre of Henry y, the Shakespearean play that most nearly approaches a national epic for the end of the Tudor era: ‘What ish my nation?’ (1997a: 3. 3. 62). Addressed by the figure of an Irishman to the figure of a Welshman in the presence of the figure of a Scot in a scene of centrifugal, multivocal Englishes that ironize the centripetal rhetoric of Henry’s immediately preceding speech to those he addresses as ‘noblest English’ (3. 1. 37), the question embraces each and all of the four nations gathered round the English king under the flag of St George. It is this question, then, that is at stake in the different and diverging Tudor translations of the Virgilian epic. Indeed, three of the translations were done respectively by a Scot (Douglas), an Englishman who lived in Wales (Phaer), and an Anglo-Irish exile (Stanyhurst). It is, moreover, the translation done by an Englishman (Howard) who lived particularly, indeed dangerously, close to the geopolitical and cultural centre of the Tudor court that hit upon the verse form that would ultimately, if not immediately, ‘become the standard’ (Sessions 2006: 256), that would, that is, survive as the fittest form of a national equivalent to Virgil, in part, at least, precisely because it was best adapted to the speech rhythms of an emerging standard of English: first advertised as ‘strange metre’ by John Day, then as ‘English meter’ by Richard Tottel, subsequently dubbed ‘blank verse’, Howard’s third way between traditional, accentual rhymed forms (Douglas and Phaer) and unrhymed classical ‘quantitative’ forms (Twyne and Stanyhurst) succeeded in constituting itself as the national verse form—the ‘English meter’—first for a self-conscious national drama and subsequently (with Milton) for an equally self-conscious national epic.
World History
