In the half century following King Henry VIII’s break with Rome around 1530, translations of ancient Greek and Latin texts achieved a cultural centrality they have rarely, if ever, enjoyed since in England, or indeed before. There was a boom in the publication of classical translations in the late 1520s, and this surge continued throughout the remainder of the reign of Henry VIII, those of Edward VI and Mary I, and into Elizabeth I’s, before tailing off in the 1580s relative to the general increase in print production.Footnote 1 In total, over a hundred translations of the classics were published during this period, including the first printed English versions of Cicero and Demosthenes, Virgil and Ovid, Livy and Plutarch. These translations self-consciously participated in the project of forging a nation in the wake of England’s separation from the Catholic Church that had been a unifying force in Europe in the Middle Ages. By translating the literary remains of ancient Greek and Roman culture into the vernacular, humanists longed to effect a renaissance of the cultural magnificence and political power of what they took to be the two greatest civilizations in history, in specifically national contexts.
Translation offered translators the opportunity to shape the fate of the new nation by applying ancient texts to the political, religious, and social debates of Tudor England. Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England: Classical Translation and the Politics of Counsel, 1530–1580 considers how translators transformed the meaning and significance of their sources by relocating the classics into new literary, cultural, and political environments. Humanist translation was always active, and it was as much – or more – concerned with the reproduction of the effect of the source text in its new setting as with textual fidelity to the original.Footnote 2 Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England is the first book-length study to apply the insights of Lisa Jardine and Antony Grafton’s landmark study of the Elizabethan humanist Gabriel Harvey’s annotations to Livy’s Ab urbe condita (‘History of Rome from the Foundation of the City’) systematically to classical translation, ‘tak[ing] that notion of activity in a strong sense: … reading as intended to give rise to something else. … Scholarly reading … was always goal-orientated’.Footnote 3 Focusing, like Jardine and Grafton, on ancient texts considered relevant to public affairs – histories, military manuals, oratory, and moral philosophy – it will be concerned above all with the question how classical translations intervened in the political developments and debates of sixteenth-century England. The book will show the range of sometimes unexpected applications of ancient texts to different events and institutions in Tudor England: orations originating in the democratic institutions of ancient Athens to the Elizabethan House of Commons; a philosophical treatise on peace of mind to Henry VIII’s ‘Great Matter’ (his effort to annul his marriage to Katherine); a history of ancient Rome’s conflict with Carthage to England’s wars with Scotland and France in the 1540s. By demonstrating the creativity, originality, and urgency of Tudor translations in applying the classics to the social and political circumstances of their production, it challenges the distinction drawn by earlier scholars between the annotations of a humanist scholar such as Harvey and vernacular translations of the classics, seen as little more than props for uneducated (that is, Latin-less) readers.Footnote 4
Translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts bear a close resemblance in this respect to sermons, which drew on the other main source of textual authority in early modern England, the Bible, and whose more highly codified practice sheds considerable light on classical translations. In That the pope is that antichrist (1590), Laurence Delos, chaplain to John Aylmer, defined preaching as ‘the expounding of scripture and applying of it to the present state’.Footnote 5 Preaching manuals systematically identified a number of stages of the composition of sermons. The first was the choice of the text, which needed to be relevant to the circumstances in which the sermon was delivered. Next came the interpretation or explication, in which the preacher would draw out the lessons most appropriate to the audience and the structure of the sermon. At least equal weight was carried by the final stage, the application of the sermon to the occasion on which it was delivered and the lives of the listeners, as well as the exhortation to the audience to follow its teachings and apply it to their lives. As the most prominent preaching manual of the period, by Hyperius, put it, ‘to apply aptly and properly the scriptures to present business and affaires is the principall vertue that belongeth to a preacher’.Footnote 6
In applying ancient Greek and Roman texts to the politics of their time, classical translators were, more often than not, somewhat at variance with their governors. Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England will show how classical translators made ancient texts speak to a range of occasions in Tudor England from a variety of competing perspectives, reflecting the precipitous shifts in the politics of the period, the diverse political, religious, and social commitments of the translators, and cultural trends in the popularity of ancient writers and their uses in sixteenth-century Europe. This book is thus in conversation with recent studies of the reception of individual classical authors, which have highlighted that due to the active nature of translation, a single text could be interpreted and applied to its historical circumstances in multiple, sometimes contradictory, ways in early modern England.Footnote 7 Scholars such as Sheldon Brammall, John-Mark Philo, and Freyja Cox-Jensen have demonstrated how Tudor translations of ancient texts reflected ‘subversive or at least competing readings’ and ‘oppositional perspectives’ and ‘challenged and helped to transform established ideas concerning politics, religion, and gender’; how, as Gordon Braden put it in his review of Brammall’s book on early modern versions of Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘the translations relate to different understandings of England’s national destiny’ – understandings that are often strikingly different from the ‘monarchical and pacific’ view of the poem that became dominant after the Restoration.Footnote 8 Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England similarly shows how, for example, the translations of Plutarch’s Lives by the social and religious conservative Henry Parker, Lord Morley opposed Henry’s return to war in the 1540s while ardent Reformers such as Richard Morison and John Elder urged him on in their versions of Plutarch and Frontinus; how Thomas Elyot and John Hales pushed for social change under Henry VIII in their translations of Plutarch’s Moralia, and Nicholas Carr and John Osborne made a case for freedom of speech and political liberty under Elizabeth in their English renderings of Demosthenes; and how the Catholic John Christopherson expressed support for Mary during the reign of her brother Edward VI in his version of Plutarch’s essay ‘Superstition’.
‘England’s national destiny’ was contested by classical translators right from the start of the Reformation. Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England will thus argue against previous accounts of classical translation in the middle years of the sixteenth century, from C. H. Conley’s in 1927 to Jessica Winston’s in 2016, which have characterized their political agenda as largely unified and directed from above. Conley, whose arguments were given greater currency by Christopher Hill in Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), claimed that translators of the classics from the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign were engaged in a coordinated effort to promote the related values of Protestantism and liberalism through translation, orchestrated by members of the privy council in support of the regime.Footnote 9 While the specific connection Conley made between Protestantism and liberalism has been widely questioned,Footnote 10 his wider conception of the period has proven remarkably enduring. Thus, the best short overview of English Renaissance translation, by Warren Boutcher in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (2000), similarly characterizes the period 1500–1570 in terms of hegemony and orthodoxy, drawing on James McConica’s argument that the English Reformation from Henry VIII to Edward VI was dominated by ‘Erasmianism’, a blend of humanism and moderate evangelical pietism:
The ideological policy of the English monarchical, ecclesiastical, and patriarchal state during and after the Reformation was to maintain political and institutional control over … reading. … Thus all directed reading and translation was supposed to redound to the good of the commonwealth. … The era … saw sustained court and governmental interest in the publication of religious and secular translations conducive to the emergent Protestant establishment’s version of civility and piety. … Thereafter, the interests at work are more various, and the image of the good commonwealth man … becomes openly contentious.Footnote 11
Translators certainly trumpeted their patriotism and proclaimed their service to the commonwealth. Some translations were specifically written as propaganda for the regime, including several that denounced sedition, such as Thomas Paynell’s English version of Costanzo Felici’s adaptation of Sallust’s De Catilinae coniuratione (‘The Conspiracy of Catiline’, 1541) and W. B.’s translation of Appian’s Roman history (1578).Footnote 12 Patrons such as Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary, William Cecil, Lord Burghley, encouraged the translation of practically useful and morally improving literature, including Three [morall] treatises of Plutarch by Thomas Blundeville (1561), Onasander’s treatise on generalship by Peter Whitehorne (1563), and Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum (‘The Gallic War’) by Arthur Golding (1565).Footnote 13 The translators of this period were almost all members of a tightly-knit group of nobles, courtiers, and university and Inns of Court-educated scholar-statesmen, with close connections to the court, the privy council, and key figures in the government of Tudor England.Footnote 14
Within this relatively closed circle, however, there was considerable divergence of opinion, fuelled by the religious and political divisions opened up by the Reformation. As G. R. Elton and others have pointed out, McConica’s ‘Erasmianism’ obscures the very real differences in religious and political outlook of some of the key English writers and politicians of the 1530s (such as More, Cromwell, Pole, and Elyot) and beyond.Footnote 15 Conley also overstated the agency of patrons in the production of literature: in the large majority of cases, a dedication was an attempt (often speculative) to attract the patronage, or at best to strengthen an existing service relationship, not a reflection of a concerted campaign by a patron to publish certain kinds of texts.Footnote 16 Conley in like wise exaggerated the homogeneity of the politics of Queen Elizabeth and her advisers. There were deep divisions between Elizabeth and some of her leading privy councillors, notably Lord Burghley, Sir Francis Walsingham, and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, all ardent Protestants, over a number of the key political questions of her reign, in particular a potential Catholic match and succession and military intervention in support of England’s fellow Protestants on the Continent of Europe. Neil Younger has recently argued that there were similar tussles between the hotter Protestants and nobles and courtiers more sympathetic to Catholicism on the council.Footnote 17 What is more, both Conley and McConica tended to overlook Catholic translators and ignore the fact that the translation of the classics continued apace during the reign of the Catholic Mary.Footnote 18 Mid-century classical translations in many cases reflect these conflicts within the regime and attempt to intervene in the controversies of Reformation England through an appeal to the authority of ancient texts.
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Central to the application of the classics to Tudor England was the concept of counsel.Footnote 19 From their reading of the classics, Renaissance humanists derived the idea that it was the duty of citizens to participate actively in public affairs for the good of the commonwealth instead of withdrawing from civil life to engage in abstract philosophical speculation. Under a monarchy, where opportunities for direct involvement in government were more limited, the main avenue for humanists to contribute to the public good was to offer instruction and counsel to princes and nobles, as political advisers and as teachers.Footnote 20 By highlighting the centrality of counsel and the figure of the counsellor in classical translations, Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England shares common ground with the accounts of intellectual and literary historians such as Quentin Skinner, Markku Peltonen, and David Norbrook, who have argued that classical humanism stimulated a revival of republican ideas in early modern England that came to fruition during the Civil War and Protectorate. Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England contributes to these arguments by showing how translators applied ancient Greek and Roman texts that challenged absolutist monarchy to the circumstances of early modern England and thus furthered the development of republican ideas. The final chapter in particular demonstrates that some readers saw an intrinsic connection between oratory as a political form and the democratic government of ancient Athens and related such ideas directly to the Tudor House of Commons.
In other, more prominent, ways, however, Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England complicates and questions the intrinsic relation between the humanist revival of classical antiquity and the development of republican ideas that inexorably led to the Civil War and Interregnum. Surveying sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English translations of the histories of Sallust, Livy, Florus, and Tacitus (as well as Cicero’s moral philosophy), for example, Quentin Skinner concludes:
By the time the English Parliament met in 1610, these observations by the Roman historians about ‘free states’ and the attendant dangers of enslavement had all been turned into works of English political thought. Carrying with them the unparalleled prestige accorded to the wisdom of antiquity, these works provided at the same time an explicitly anti-monarchical perspective from which the English could begin if they chose to reflect anew on their own political experiences. As Hobbes rightly perceived, such reflections were almost certain in the end to have a destabilising impact on the Stuart monarchy.Footnote 21
If this was bound to happen, as Skinner claims, we may wonder why similar political developments did not take place across Europe, where the same ancient Roman texts were translated into the vernacular. We should also note the significant discrepancies in the political outlook of these Roman historians: there may be ‘antimonarchical’ elements in the works of both Livy and Tacitus, but they offer radically different perspectives on distinct periods of ancient Roman history. Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England further explores how Greek historians excluded from Skinner’s account, as well as orators and moral philosophers like Plutarch and Demosthenes, and their reception histories may vary our sense of the political significance of the translation and reception of the classical heritage in early modern England.Footnote 22 It is thus in conversation with the large body of scholarship published over the last decade or so that has transformed our understanding of the classics in sixteenth-century England by showing the extent, depth, and significance of its engagement with ancient Greek texts. Studies by scholars such as Tanya Pollard, Jessica Wolfe, Tania Demetriou, Micha Lazarus, Jane Grogan, and Neil Rhodes have demonstrated that sixteenth-century English readers had access to – and eagerly studied – virtually the complete corpus of ancient Greek literature in Latin translation, and how their reading of authors such as Homer, Xenophon, Aristotle, and Lucian shaped the literature and culture of early modern England in ways that were as profound as that of ancient Roman texts.Footnote 23 This book extends these insights by showing that the Athenian orator Demosthenes had a surprisingly rich translation history in Tudor England, and how his outlook, if anything more alien and hostile to monarchy than Cicero’s, found numerous echoes in the period. Similarly, the works of Plutarch of Chaeronea, a Greek philosopher and historian who lived under the Roman empire and offered accounts of the history of the Roman republic in his Parallel Lives, were more frequently printed than those of almost any ancient Roman historian or moral philosopher in sixteenth-century Europe.Footnote 24 The fact that the political uses of Plutarch’s writings were inextricably bound up with his purported status as tutor to Trajan, which derived from a medieval forgery, challenges Skinner’s exclusive focus on the revival of Roman conceptions of political freedom as the source of ideas about counsel and political participation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England on a number of levels.
Above all, Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England draws attention to the agency of translators in producing diverse interpretations and applications of the classics. Ancient texts, including those with an openly republican outlook, could be appropriated to quite different agendas by translators, through their translation choices, through their framing of the text, and through the selection or combination of different works. Thus, for example, Edward Paleit has shown how early modern English readers and translators of Lucan’s Pharsalia (equated with republicanism by David Norbrook, who makes translations of the Roman poet central to his account of the development of a republican culture in seventeenth-century England) were not uncommonly impressed by the energy and force of Caesar, despite Lucan’s openly anti-Caesarist reading of the end of the Roman republic.Footnote 25 In her study of the reception of a broad range of sources on the end of the Roman republic in early modern England, Cox Jensen similarly concludes that early modern English readers, including translators, expressed widely divergent views, sometimes in the same text, on a variety of different topics, which far exceed, and at times contradict, the framework of a republican tradition in early modern England.Footnote 26 Philo’s recent study of early modern English translations of Livy too has demonstrated the ancient author’s ‘surprisingly varied contributions to the political and cultural spheres of Tudor and Stuart England’, ranging from the status of women to foreign policy, with few English translators and readers showing an interest in the question of political liberty that Skinner identified as his history’s key contribution to English political thought.Footnote 27 Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England broadens these accounts by looking at a wider range of classical authors in different genres of writing, Greek as well as Latin, and by stretching the chronology backwards to around 1530, which saw the beginning of the classical translation movement and the Reformation, accompanied by a considerable acceleration in the process of nation-building and the development of a sense of English nationhood.
By concentrating on the specific applications of translations of ancient texts in early modern England and the differences in interpretation and context between translators of the same text we may risk losing the bigger picture out of view, however. As Paleit notes with reference to the scholarship on the early modern English reception of Lucan in relation to republicanism by David Norbrook, Andrew Hadfield, and Patrick Cheney, ‘One of the important achievements of these more recent studies has been … to make a variety of forms of engagement with the Bellum Ciuile, notably translations, worthy of attention’.Footnote 28 If every translation is sui generis, and the reception of ancient texts is characterized by the variety of interpretations and applications, what is their wider historical significance? Recent accounts of the development of the public sphere as a space for debate and negotiation of political opinion, notably the application of the concept to early modern England by Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, offer a way forward in this respect. Lake and Pincus argue for the centrality of methods and strategies of communication to our understanding of the politics of the post-Reformation period from the 1530s through the 1630s, highlighting ‘the interaction of ideas, political and factional manoeuvre, socio-economic, and institutional change’.Footnote 29 The appeals to the Protestant nation in response to the threat of Catholicism aiming to induce the queen to support their political agenda by key members of the Elizabethan regime, and the mobilization of publics by their various Catholic opponents, increasingly made the discussion of public policy (supposed to take place in secret in privy council or Parliament) a matter of public concern and debate. Where Lake and Pincus invoke ideas of counsel and political participation as the legitimation for these practices, Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England argues that counsel was an integral part of the development of the public sphere. Rather than an abstract idea conveyed through a static body of ancient Roman texts by humanist translators and writers, counsel is more productively conceived as an iteratively produced sociopolitical practice, which drew authority (always contested) from classical antiquity and had the potential to mutually reinforce emphases on active citizenship in the ancient texts that it accompanied – emphases that took highly varied forms in different texts and were by no means realized in every instance.Footnote 30 Classical translations, especially of the kinds of texts deemed most relevant to the vita activa, thus contributed to the development of a forum in which controversial political policies and ideas could be publicly presented and discussed and pressure could be applied to the monarch and other members of the regime, both in private and in public, to adopt different policies in the crucial half century after England’s break from Rome. The practice of counsel combined with the authority of ancient Greek and Latin writers enabled a substantial group of writers, highly educated but from a comparatively broad range of backgrounds, and a yet more diverse readership in socio-economic, educational, geographical, and gender terms to stake a claim in the public debates of Reformation England. Central to these changes was the combined turn to print and the vernacular of classical translations, which rapidly accelerated after 1530, though in line with the arguments of Lake and Pincus for the continuities between the court and the public sphere and between manuscript and print, Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England will consider printed translations in the vernacular alongside manuscript and Neo-Latin versions of ancient texts in order to explore both the connections and the divergences between the two.
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To bring out the full range of applications and interventions of early modern translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts in their specificity while also connecting them to larger developments, Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England deploys an innovative methodology that combines literary-textual, book historical, and historical-contextual approaches and substantially expands the range of translations analysed. The book brings together close reading of translations and their paratexts with in-depth study of their continuities with, and divergences from, related translations and other interpretations and adaptations of ancient texts in England and on the Continent. It extends close textual analysis of the choices made by translators in converting the ancient Greek or Roman source into a new language and environment to the paratexts surrounding the translation and its material presentation, whether in manuscript or print, which are often revealing of the application of the translation to its new context. It also directs attention to the multiple ways in which English versions were shaped by intermediary translations published on the Continent, particularly (though not exclusively) of ancient Greek, with a specific focus on their applications of classical texts to the historical circumstances of early modern Europe. The book breaks new ground by considering vernacular translations alongside manuscript annotations, literary adaptations, and other kinds of evidence of the reading of ancient texts in Tudor England, which show both that humanist reading and vernacular translation were closely connected and that readers (including authors like Shakespeare) turned to English translations of the classics not as simple substitutes for the original but for the applications of the ancient texts to the conditions of sixteenth-century England that they offered. Last but not least, the book substantially expands the canon of early modern translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts, thereby offering a richer account of the distinctive features of individual translations as well as their connections with related versions in other genres, material forms, and languages. On the one hand, Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England studies vernacular translations of ancient texts in print alongside manuscript and Neo-Latin versions of the same texts, authors, and genres. On the other hand, it shows how the kinds of applications that literary scholars have found in Tudor translations of classical poetry and prose fiction were not unique to literary texts but extended to the other humanist genres in translation in the period from about 1530 to 1580: moral philosophy, history, and oratory. This novel, multilayered approach to translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts enables this book to offer for the first time a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of their interventions in, and contributions to, political debates in early modern England and multiple relationships to other translations, their Continental sources, and the wider reception of the ancient texts they translate.
In considering the political import of classical translations, Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England pays particular attention to the ways in which the paratextual and material presentation of the translated text shaped its application to the circumstances of Tudor England, acting as a bridge between the worlds of classical antiquity and early modernity. In the physical book of the translation, whether printed or in manuscript, one space above all provided a privileged platform for translators to speak and to apply classical translations to their historical circumstances: the preface – the textual equivalent of the pulpit from which the preacher expounded the relevance of biblical passages to his audience. The preface is, in Gérard Genette’s well-known formulation, a ‘threshold’ between the world of the reader and the world of the text, its role ‘to make present, to ensure the text’s presence in the world, its “reception” and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book’.Footnote 31 The role of the preface takes on particular significance in relation to translations of the classics, which made ancient Greek and Roman texts newly available to their readership and at the same time had to fashion a place within early modern culture for texts that were already between one and two millennia old. Letters of dedication and addresses to the reader are particularly revealing of the various agents and networks involved in the conception, production, and circulation of translations (including printers, patrons, and friends), as well as the people, events, and debates to which they are directed. Genette further emphasizes the role of paratexts – and the preface in particular – in shaping the response of the reader, in making the reader think or act in a particular way in relation to the text. The paratext, he writes, is a ‘zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public’.Footnote 32 As Helen Smith and Louise Wilson note, however, the preface is directed towards the text as well as towards its audience: ‘Paratextual materials work both outwards, altering the contexts and possibilities of the book’s reception, and inwards, transforming not only the appearance but the priorities and tone of the text.’Footnote 33
The preface offered the translator a culturally sanctioned place from which to speak and, specifically, advise their readers. Calling for ‘a comparative study of the sociology of the preface’, Pierre Bourdieu has described prefaces as ‘typical acts of the transfer of symbolic capital’, either from the translator to the original author or vice versa.Footnote 34 Here a translator could put on the mantle of a classical author, so to speak, and draw on their cultural capital to address contemporary questions from a position of authority. Specifically, Tudor translators of the classics repeatedly invoked the authority of ancient authors as political advisers in their paratexts. Sixteenth-century humanists, including English translators, time and again allude to the role of Aristotle as a tutor and counsellor to Alexander the Great.Footnote 35 While Aristotle’s status as a tutor is based on fact, his alleged position as a counsellor derives from the influential pseudo-Aristotelian manual Secretum secretorum, translated from the Arabic into Latin in the twelfth century and reprinted in English a number of times in the sixteenth century, including one version for the recently acceded King Henry VIII in 1511.Footnote 36 Two of the most commonly translated ancient authors in sixteenth-century England, Plutarch and Seneca, were likewise reputed to have been tutors and counsellors to Roman emperors, and their translators took them as models for their self-presentation as counsellors to the ruling class of Tudor England. Demosthenes likewise was turned into a ‘glasse’ (mirror) for Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary William Cecil, Lord Burghley in Thomas Wilson’s translation of the ancient Greek author’s orations.Footnote 37 While Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England will often take its starting point from the preface in recovering the interventions of translations in Tudor England, it will not rest at the threshold. Other paratextual materials, from the title page to the index, similarly point to issues that the translation sets out to highlight, as do material features of the text, such as the use of italics to emphasize particular words or phrases.
Equally significant are the choices made by translators in converting ancient Greek and Roman source texts into early modern English. These start with the selection of the text or parts of it and their combination within a single book, as is well illustrated by the choice of texts from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives and Moralia: a medical regimen for an ailing politician, a biography of an ancient general for a soldier, a treatise on superstition to comment on the progress of the Reformation, and so on. Translation choices and methods are similarly revealing of the social and political agenda of English versions of the classics. Translators regularly made it appear as if ancient texts directly addressed specific institutions or customs in Tudor England through their word choices. Features such as punctuation and grammar could likewise help to fit an ancient text to its new environment: the simplification of the grammatical structure and shortening of the length of the sentences in North’s translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, I will argue, reflect its emphasis on action in Elizabethan England. Omissions served not only to expurgate material that conflicted with the dominant religious, political, and social ideology of Tudor England but also to focus attention on the features of the text deemed most relevant to the occasion addressed by the translation. Similarly, additions might simply offer explanations of ancient names, institutions, or customs to early modern readers, but they could also increase the urgency with which the text addressed its new context. Finally, the connotations of the literary and rhetorical forms used by translators were significant, for example Queen Elizabeth I’s choice of verse to translate a prose essay from Plutarch’s Moralia in imitation of Thomas Blundeville’s earlier translations from the same work, dedicated to the queen, to signal her affinity with a prominent group of humanist scholars and administrators at court and in government. Linguistic conversion and historical transformation went hand in hand.
In many cases, English translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts were mediated by editions and translations into Latin or modern European vernaculars printed on the Continent. While Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England focuses on the applications of the classics to the particular social and political circumstances of Tudor England and the contribution of the surge in classical translations to the development of a specifically national culture following Henry VIII’s break with Rome, it emphasizes throughout how English translations of the classics depended on these Continental European models.Footnote 38 Not only was the sudden increase of classical translations in mid-sixteenth-century England paralleled elsewhere in Europe, likewise in the context of emergent national cultures, but the particular interests and uses of classical translations in Tudor England were in many ways shaped by their reliance on Continental editions and translations. There were two main reasons for this, both reflecting England’s relatively marginal cultural and economic position within sixteenth-century Europe. Firstly, the Renaissance revival of interest in classical antiquity in general, and the translation of the textual remains of ancient Greece and Rome specifically, occurred later in England than in many other parts of Europe. As a result, by the time English translators came to turn ancient Greek and Roman texts into the vernacular, prior versions in Latin and other European languages were generally already in existence. Secondly, the print industry was much less well developed in England than on the Continent and was almost exclusively focused on the publication of books in the vernacular, with the result that virtually all books in ancient Greek and Latin (with the partial exception of textbooks for the grammar schools and, to a lesser extent, universities) were imported from Continental Europe.Footnote 39 English translations, consequently, were almost without exception based either on editions of ancient Greek and Latin texts produced by Continental scholars and printers or on translations into Latin or one of the European vernaculars – even Latin texts were not infrequently translated from the French.Footnote 40
The impact of Continental editions and translations on English versions of the classics was wide-ranging, starting with the availability and popularity of particular authors and texts. There was a surge in editions of Frontinus’s Strategemata (‘The Stratagems’) in the years leading up to Morison’s English translation of 1539, for example, including vernacular translations into French (1536) and Italian (1537).Footnote 41 Similarly, the selection of essays from Plutarch’s Moralia for translation into English reflected the choices made by the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus in converting the corpus into Latin, as we shall see in Chapter 1. Continental translations and editions appropriated ancient texts to the norms and expectations of sixteenth-century Europe in a variety of ways, either through translation choices or through various forms of commentary, Christianizing references to pagan religion, censoring or muting sexually and politically transgressive material, explaining references to ancient myth and history, and so on. Thomas North, for instance, consistently followed, and at times expanded, the Christianizing language and glosses on ancient terms and customs of his French source text, Jacques Amyot’s Les Vies des hommes illustres grecs et romains. Most significantly in the context of this book, Continental editions relocated ancient texts in the social, cultural, and political context of sixteenth-century European monarchy, offering English translators a model for their own application of ancient texts to the historical circumstances of Tudor England. Thus, Thomas Wilson’s use of Demosthenes’ orations to warn against the Catholic Spanish King Philip II as a foreign invader who threatened Protestant England echoed Bessarion’s and Johannes Reuchlin’s earlier uses of the texts as a call to arms to Christian Europe against the menace of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. While Wilson was unusually explicit about his engagement with earlier editions of his source texts, this book will offer numerous other examples of English writers who followed Continental editors and translators in their application of ancient Greek and Latin texts to the political world of early modern Europe, from Wyatt’s relocation of Plutarch’s ‘Quiet of Mind’ to the early sixteenth-century European court in imitation of Budé’s Latin version to Blundeville’s adoption of the Greek author’s ‘The Uneducated Prince’ and ‘How to Profit from Your Enemies’ as political advice for the young Queen Elizabeth, following Erasmus’s earlier annexation of the texts to the mirror for princes genre. That is not to say, of course, that English translators slavishly followed Continental European examples – no more than that they unimaginatively reproduced their ancient source texts – but to argue, instead, that the interventions of English translators of the classics, while often highly specific to the political circumstances of the British Isles, were inherently transnational; that is, they simply cannot be meaningfully separated from what was happening on the Continent.
Another key innovation of Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England is its analysis of English translations of ancient Greek and Roman texts alongside evidence of reading, particularly manuscript marginalia but also literary adaptations like Shakespeare’s plays. The book reveals significant continuities between the interests in, and applications of, Livy’s History of Rome of the humanist reader Gabriel Harvey and the English translator Sir Antony Cope. Such connections underpin the application of the paradigm of the ‘active’ humanist reader to sixteenth-century English translations of the classics central to this book. As I will show in Chapter 2, these links have often been obscured by artificial distinctions between learned humanist scholars like Harvey and vernacular translations that allegedly did little more than make the classics available to readers who did not have Latin. At the same time, translations can make visible tendencies that are perhaps less obvious in Harvey’s annotations. In particular, translators and readers did not passively produce interpretations and applications of ancient texts on behalf of their patrons and dedicatees but actively advanced their own political, religious, and social views and agendas in pointing the relevance of ancient texts to the circumstances of Tudor England. Manuscript annotations to, and literary adaptations of, English translations of ancient Greek and Roman works complement these arguments by bringing out how readers often turned to classical texts in the vernacular for the translator’s application of the ancient text to the circumstances of Tudor England. Thus, Chapter 3 will show how Gabriel Harvey’s marginalia in his copy of Richard Morison’s translation of Frontinus’s Strategemata, which he would have been perfectly capable of reading in the original Latin, show how he responded to the English translation’s use of the text for the defence of Reformation England against Catholic invasion and its association with an ideology of militant Protestant nationalism. Chapter 2 turns to a different but related form of reading: Shakespeare’s adaptations of Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives in his Roman tragedies. While the English dramatist ransacked the translation for plot details, he was equally attentive and responsive to its connection to the forward Protestant ideology of the Earl of Leicester and the questions that it raised about heroism, masculinity, and war in early modern England. What is more, Shakespeare’s plays point forward to the role played by vernacular translations of the classics in print in transforming the literary and political culture of early modern England through their impact on the flourishing of vernacular literature from about 1580, examined further in the Epilogue.
Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England will also reconnect printed translations in the vernacular with two forms of translation that were central to English Renaissance humanism but have often been overlooked in earlier scholarship on Tudor translations of the classics: manuscript and Neo-Latin translations. In their recent study of the Greek translations of the early seventeenth-century writer Francis Hickes, Stuart Gillespie and Christopher Pelling note how ‘we [have] come more and more to realize how much early modern translation from ancient texts into English never made its way into print’.Footnote 42 This book furthers that process of recovery, presenting the first extended analysis of early modern English translations of the classics in manuscript in a range of different genres. More than that, it will show how due to their more personal and occasional nature manuscripts are particularly revealing of the relationships between translators, dedicatees, and specific historical events and circumstances. Some translations, of course, remained in manuscript simply because they were private exercises, although the element of self-presentation in Queen Elizabeth’s clerk’s misleading statement that her English verse rendering of Plutarch’s ‘Curiosity’ was produced from the original Greek, for instance, should alert us to the fact that authors were conscious of the possibility that manuscripts could become public too. Many translations were presented as a gift for New Year or another significant occasion to a patron or ruler, often in a formal or calligraphic hand by the translator or a professional scribe. The more limited and controlled circulation of manuscripts compared to print (which was subject to censorship and more likely to land the author in trouble with the authorities) also made possible the inclusion of religiously or politically sensitive or controversial material, as in John Osborne’s expression of sympathetic interest in ancient Greek ideas about freedom and democracy in his manuscript translation of Demosthenes’ Against Leptines.Footnote 43 As we shall see, however, Osborne’s English version of Demosthenes equally shared many features with the printed translations by Carr and Wilson. While manuscript and print each presented distinctive possibilities for translators, there was no absolute division between the two.
The renewed study of ancient Greek was one of the most characteristic features of Renaissance humanism, and translations from Greek into Latin were a prominent aspect of humanist activity, in England as elsewhere in Europe. As we saw earlier, recent scholarship has shown the depth of engagement with ancient Greek texts in Tudor England; contrary to the so-called triumph of the English language, it has also demonstrated the persistence of Latin in a wide range of social and cultural spaces in sixteenth-century England.Footnote 44 Instead of reflecting a sharp divide ‘between an international, elitist humanist culture and a national, egalitarian “bourgeois” community that gradually won importance’, the languages ‘coexisted together … in overlapping and interacting communities’.Footnote 45 This is borne out by the Latin translations studied in this book, which applied ancient Greek texts to the circumstances of early modern England in ways that are often similar to vernacular translations. But if Latin translations in many respects mirrored vernacular translations, they also afforded translators alternative opportunities. By having Latin translations printed in the major centres of learned publishing in Continental Europe, authors like John Cheke and John Christopherson were able to reach a wider European audience and forge connections with scholarly communities on the Continent, while at the same time staking a claim for their own humanist credentials, as well as England’s, within the international republic of letters. Conversely, as with manuscript circulation, a more restricted and controlled readership at home gave Latin translators potentially greater scope for controversial or subversive material, enabling Nicholas Carr’s translation of orations by Demosthenes to engage with ideas about political liberty and popular rule in ways that have no equivalent in printed texts in the vernacular of the time.
Finally, Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England will reconnect translations of literary texts with those in the other humanist genres. This expansion of the canon not only provides a fuller and more rounded sense of classical translation in sixteenth-century England but also facilitates a stronger sense of both the continuities between different types of translations and the distinctive characteristics of individual genres and texts. The boom in translations of ancient Greek and Latin texts in sixteenth-century England was a reflection of the rise of the humanist movement across Renaissance Europe. The studia humanitatis from which our term humanism derives had come to denote a defined set of disciplines that reflected the literary and practical concerns of its practitioners as scholars and teachers: grammar, poetry, history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy.Footnote 46 It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the texts selected for translation in the half century following England’s break from Rome largely belonged to these five disciplines. As we have seen, humanists echoed the emphasis on the vita activa and vir civilis that they discovered in ancient Greek and Roman texts, particularly in popular authors such as Cicero, and their writings reflected the conception of their role as teachers and advisers to princes and nobles.
Recent studies of English Renaissance translation have focused largely on the second of the humanist disciplines, poetry, taken to include drama and prose fiction, as Sidney famously explained in An apology for poetry (1595). This reflects the priorities of the modern discipline of English Literature, which developed in the wake of the shift in the meaning of the term literature from good letters (bonae litterae) to imaginative writing in the eighteenth century.Footnote 47 Since the turn of the millennium, detailed studies of the main classical authors of poetry and prose fiction translated in the period 1530–1580 have been published, and many of these are attentive to the ways in which such translations shaped, and were shaped by, their historical contexts: Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Apuleius, Heliodorus.Footnote 48 There have, in particular, been a number of excellent studies of translations of ancient drama as political advice in Tudor England, which deploy strategies of counsel that are comparable to the translations considered in this book. Jessica Winston has shown how many of Seneca’s plays, of which nine were translated between 1559 and 1567 and which were published with the final, tenth play in a collected edition in 1581, were presented as political guidance in the translations. In his version of Seneca’s Oedipus (1563) Alexander Neville adds a chorus characterizing the eponymous king as ‘A mirror meet, a pattern plain, of princes’ careful thrall’, for instance, while John Studley ‘invents a final chorus on the nature of kingship’ in his English version of Agamemnon (1566).Footnote 49 Likewise, John Heywood turns Troades (‘Trojan Women’), dedicated to Elizabeth as a New Year’s gift immediately following her accession in 1559, ‘into a form of political expression, offering it as a salutary gift of cautionary advice for the new queen’.Footnote 50 These concerns reflected both the politically oriented literary culture of the Inns of Court, with which the majority of the translators were associated, and the sixteenth-century understanding of the genre of tragedy ‘as commentaries on kingship or, more specifically, tyranny’.Footnote 51
Translations of ancient Greek drama in Tudor England, it has been persuasively argued, shared similar political agendas. The action of Francis Kinwelmersh and George Gascoigne’s English version of Lodovico Dolce’s Italian adaptation of Euripides’ Phoenissae (‘Phoenician Women’), Jocasta (performed 1565–1567, published 1573), which was produced at the Inns during the mid-1560s just like the Seneca translations, reflects the political events of the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign. Throughout this period, and particularly in the Parliament of 1566–1567, members of the Commons and Lords, as well as the queen’s councillors, urged Elizabeth to marry and thus settle the succession in order to prevent a civil war between rival claimants to the throne breaking out after her death. Euripides’ play about the struggle between the two sons of Oedipus, Polyneices and Eteocles, over who will succeed to the throne of Thebes dramatized precisely such a scenario, and the changes by Kinwelmersh and Gascoigne further highlight the theme of the succession. Whether Elizabeth is figured as the wise and temperate queen Jocasta or the blind king Oedipus (the latter perhaps more likely in consideration of the predominant view of her subjects – and of Gascoigne in particular – on the question of the succession), the translation evidently presents the characters of the play, in the words of one of the printed marginal notes, as a ‘mirror for Magistrates’ in Tudor England: ‘Example here, lo, take by Oedipus, / You kings and princes in prosperity’.Footnote 52 Despite being produced in manuscript in a domestic setting, Lady Jane Lumley’s English translation of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis – the first English version of an ancient Greek play (c. 1557) – appears to share the interest in topical political application and counsel of the translations of ancient drama associated with the Inns of Court.Footnote 53 There are uncanny similarities between the events of the play, in which Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia in order that the Greek fleet can sail to Troy, and the sacrifice of the nine days’ queen Lady Jane Grey, who was Lumley’s cousin and of a similar age, background, and education, by her father and uncle (who was Lumley’s father) to advance their own political objectives: the latter was instrumental in putting Mary on the throne at the expense of Jane, who was imprisoned, and the former brought about his own daughter’s execution through his participation in Wyatt’s rebellion.Footnote 54 More broadly, Lumley’s translation of Euripides’ play demonstrates a concern with counsel similarly evident in her Latin translations of Isocrates’ orations, to which we will return briefly in Chapter 4.Footnote 55 Lumley ‘presents Clytemnestra as a potential political counsellor with a solid grasp of commonwealth theory’, and Iphigenia’s explanation of her decision to embrace a heroic death ‘draws on a Greek political model of citizenship, underpinned with Christian notions of sacrifice’.Footnote 56
In restoring to view the key humanist genres of history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy, Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England reveals how unique literary texts like Jocasta were, in fact, part of a much larger movement. In particular, it will show how the emergence of a public sphere in connection with the publication of classical translations in the vernacular was not tied to a single institution at a single moment, the Inns of Court in the 1560s.Footnote 57 Instead, it will argue that translators from a range of institutional and social backgrounds intervened in a variety of debates on political issues and questions during the sixteenth century. In so doing, the book will demonstrate that translations of ancient history, rhetoric, and moral philosophy – many of which have received little or no previous scholarly attention – repay the same kind of detailed textual, material, and historical study as more overtly literary texts. By giving close attention to the rhetorical, social, and political resources and effects of different forms of classical translation, counsel emerges as a multifarious practice that could be taken up by agents from different social and political positions and perspectives but contributed in its manifold forms to the development of classical translation as a medium for discussions about the direction of public policy. With their origins in, and engagement with, conceptions of active citizenship, translations of ancient history, oratory, and moral philosophy played leading roles in this development.
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Antiquity Made Present in Reformation England is organized according to the main genres of ancient Greek and Roman prose in translation between 1530 and 1580: moral philosophy (Chapter 1), history and biography (Chapter 2), military manuals (Chapter 3), and oratory (Chapter 4). Each of these kinds of writing, I will argue, presented a different but related set of possibilities and questions. Grouping texts in the same genre together makes visible both affiliations emerging from shared resources and expectations and the unique and innovative ways in which translators appropriated and applied these to their specific circumstances. Attention to genre also encourages consideration of the interrelationship between form and meaning and the concrete textual and material formations and historical conditions in which ideas were expressed, presented, and circulated.
The book moves from forms of writing that offered more general and abstract advice (though, as we shall see, its applications could be highly specific and particular) to those that were inherently more practical and applied and tied to specific social and political uses. Moral philosophy (Chapter 1), the most common genre of classical translation in Tudor England, was seen to underpin the other humanist kinds of writing, which likewise aimed to instruct readers in virtuous conduct. History and biography (Chapter 2) were conceived as moral philosophy teaching by example, providing readers with models for action in the present through their depiction of figures and events from ancient Greek and Roman history. Military manuals (Chapter 3) were largely based on examples from history but in a predigested format that was explicitly oriented towards practical application on specific occasions in a well-defined domain of human action, war. Oratory (Chapter 4) had similarly strong links with history, with many collections of speeches published in the period deriving from ancient histories. However, oratory was inextricably tied to the art of rhetoric, another of the disciplines of the studia humanitatis, and to the political debate and form of government of ancient Athens and the Roman republic.
This gradual move towards more specific and practical applications is reflected in the thematic development of the book. The first chapter examines how translators presented ancient moral philosophy as advice for governors, often in response to specific crises in the Tudor state. It focuses on the Moralia by Plutarch, whose alleged role as tutor and counsellor to the Roman emperor Trajan provided a model for Tudor translators. In addition, vernacular translations of moral philosophy in print frequently set out to reform the commonwealth by making available practical advice on how to live well to a wider audience of readers not educated in the ancient languages, women as well as men. Chapter 2 zooms in on the challenging questions raised by the representation of figures from ancient history as exemplars for the ruling elite of early modern England, particularly Scipio Africanus in Livy’s History of Rome and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Comparisons with illustrious ancient Greek and Roman statesmen and generals acted as praise for dedicatees and patrons, of course, but this chapter also explores how translators deployed such parallels as precept, and even criticism, by urging sixteenth-century monarchs, nobles, and governors to live up to ancient exemplars and drawing attention to disparities between the two. The shift towards a genre designed for a specific use in Chapter 3, military manuals, leads to a consideration of how direct, particular, and urgent the response of translations of the classics to contemporary events could be. It centres on the paradigmatic case of Richard Morison’s version of the Roman general Sextus Iulius Frontinus’s Strategemata, directed towards immediate practical action in response to the threat of invasion by Catholic France and Spain in the early months of 1539, one of the major military and political crises of the Tudor period. The chapter also shows, however, how Frontinus’s ancient manual came to be associated with a particular ideology of militant Protestant nationalism in Tudor England through the preface’s anti-Catholic rhetoric that was intended to spur its readers into action. The relevance and applicability of the form of writing that forms the subject of the fourth and final chapter, ancient oratory, to Tudor England was more controversial. The chapter explores to what extent the translation of the Greek orator Demosthenes’ public orations in Tudor England involved the effacement of the origins of the speeches in the institutions and practices of ancient Athenian democracy or engaged seriously with ideas of political participation and republicanism and advocated their application to sixteenth-century English politics and the House of Commons in particular. The book ends with a brief Epilogue, which considers both what was distinctive about classical translation in the period 1530–1580 and how its innovations shaped what came after from the vantage point of developments in the translation and adaptation of ancient Greek and Roman sources in the period from 1580 onwards.
