Translation has been so often and so thoroughly understood as a sort of code for courtiers that a section on the practice may seem superfluous or to imply that I aim here only to extend the established critical practice to new works. Certainly, this chapter partly establishes the current conversation about translation as a jumping-off point for understanding other courtly verse. I want also, though, to draw attention to how establishing as ‘conventional’ this reading of translation work as coded can obscure some important facts about the practices of the creation of the verse. This framework may by now have become so accepted that our interpretation of it has become traditional and even conservative: we see the same tropes, and so we miss the resistant and even shocking nature of the content. In practice, writers at court were able to spend years using translation as coded commentary on contemporary events without ever becoming repetitive in that commentary. In our efforts to restore reading and writing networks, we can try to restore the immediacy and urgency of the work this kind of verse was doing.

In fact, the tradition for the practice was important in its contemporary setting, rather than devaluing the technique through any sense of tired repetition. Position-taking verse in the Henrician court gained energy by positioning itself as and within a specific poetic technique and tradition.