I consider the position of Aeneid translations in the career patterns of a spectrum of poets and scholars in a range of languages, with attention to those who tackle other high-prestige texts, such as the Homeric epics, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Divine Comedy. I ask whether the Virgil translation was the chef d’œuvre or an apprenticeship, whether the sequence of translating had any impact on the translator’s other output, and what difference this makes to our reading of the Aeneid translations. After highlighting some of the issues via Harington, whose Ariosto translation influenced his Aeneid translation, I analyse the synergy between Dante and Virgil in Villena’s Castilian translations. Most of the chapter deals with Virgil translators who also translated Homer, including Mandelbaum, Fitzgerald, Lombardo and Fagles, with longer discussions of Ogilby, Dryden and Morris. I close with an examination of Day-Lewis who translated the Georgics first, then the Aeneid and finally the Eclogues.

Here I examine the phenomenon of partial as contrasted with complete translations: some translators publish complete translations of the Aeneid and the Eclogues, while others select individual books or poems. Some selections, for example Eclogue 4 and Books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid, are consistently popular, while others wax and wane. My chief focus is on partial translations of the Aeneid, where the ability to select and isolate individual books or passages gave translators great flexibility and the freedom to domesticate the material or to turn it to particular aims. After a glance at the ‘Messianic’ Eclogue (Eclogue 4) and the ‘Aristaeus epyllion’ (from Georgics 4), I analyse some famous and less famous translations of Books 4, 2, 1 and 6. Factors that explain some of these selections include the translator’s self-image, education and circumstances, their aims and ambitions, and their motivations for writing as generated by patronage and the venue of publication.

I explore the question of equivalences or identifications between Virgil’s characters and events and the translators’ own times. In Part 1, I consider how translators invite readers to make identifications between present-day monarchs and Virgilian figures such as Aeneas and Dido, then how some translators appear to identify with aspects of Aeneas and Meliboeus. In Part 2, I address the phenomenon whereby particular translators and cultures respond to Virgil as if he were addressing them specifically and personally, with examples drawn from Polish and Irish literature. In Part 3, I discuss poet-translators’ self-identification with Virgil himself and the implication that they are writing for their equivalent of Augustus. Finally, I move to the phenomenon of ‘transcreation’ or metempsychosis, whereby the poet-translator claims to channel Virgil, and I conclude with translators’ claims to make Virgil speak their own vernacular, taking Dryden as my case study.

As the most ‘delightful’ and ‘useful’ of genres, biography occupied a high place in Johnson’s ranking of literary genres, and he wrote many kinds of biography. All were aimed at raising the audience’s moral aspirations, showing them what was humanly possible. By the same token, sentimental panegyrics were no use, because they were too unrealistic to help the reader; they might also be based on falsehood, and Johnson is consistently sceptical towards stories that sound too good to be true. In his early biographies, Johnson explicitly draws conclusions about virtue and vice – even condemning his late friend Richard Savage, who despite his many admirable qualities set a dangerous example of contravening ordinary ethical standards. Yet by the time Johnson wrote the Lives of the Poets more than three decades later, he approached these questions more subtly, speculating on the connection between bad morals and bad writing, and delivering his lessons with restrained irony.

This essay establishes a link between Garrick’s operatic adaptation of The Tempest, which opened at Drury Lane on 11 February 1756, and the imminent escalation of the French and Indian War (1754–63) into the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). In this essay, Massai argues that Garrick’s Tempest, generally dismissed as a flop and as an embarrassing misjudgement on his part, takes on greater topical significance and political resonance if reconsidered alongside the ‘Dialogue’ that Garrick wrote to be performed as prologue to the opera. By means of a close analysis of both texts, alongside Dryden and Davenant’s earlier adaptation of The Tempest (1667), Massai shows how Garrick’s opera and ‘Dialogue’ are in fact representative of wartime uses of Shakespeare, which, as this collection shows, often served as an important platform for the fashioning of current attitudes towards military conflict.

This chapter explores georgic writing that appeared during the second half of the seventeenth century, with special attention to engagements with civil war and its aftermaths. The discussion also attends closely to Virgilian strains in English georgic writing and to the significances of literary imitation and translation. Authors covered include Andrew Marvell, John Evelyn, Abraham Cowley, John Milton, Joseph Addison and John Dryden, as well as the ancient writers Hesiod and Virgil.

Writing to Lord Holland in 1812, Byron anxiously petitioned the peer for help in completion of a couplet: ‘I wish I had known it months ago, for in that case I had not left one line standing on another.—I always scrawl in this way, and smoother as much as I can but never sufficiently, & latterly I can weave a nine line stanza faster than a couplet, for which measure I have not the cunning’ (BLJ, II. 210). Byron’s implausible boast about the velocity of his Spenserian scribbles is in part an attempt to re-establish his poetic credentials with a socially superior friend, yet it remains an odd pretension to assert. Not because of the improbability that he could write nine rhymed lines that incorporated a terminating couplet of sorts faster than a single pair, but because by the date of this letter he had already proven his skill in the couplet form in no fewer than three satires – English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), Hints from Horace (wr. 1811) and The Curse of Minerva (also wr. 1811) – and would soon compose his second blockbuster Eastern narrative, The Corsair (1814) in the same form. For the purposes of this chapter, what’s most intriguing about Byron’s brag is not that he is dismissive of a form he returned to throughout his life, but that the forms that most preoccupied him during his early career were avowedly English.

This chapter traces the growth of Chaucer’s reputation from the early eighteenth century through the Romantic period. It begins with Dryden’s free modernisations that helped to popularise Chaucer’s works, examines the effects of John Urry’s 1721 edition, and looks closely at the groundbreaking linguistic and editorial work of Thomas Tyrrwhitt, who was the first to edit Chaucer’s verse from the manuscripts, and explained for the first time both the grammar and pronunciation of Chaucer’s Middle English, as well as an explanation of his metre. Tyrrwhitt’s edition generated new interest in Chaucer among the Romantic poets, especially evident in William Blake’s “Canterbury Pilgrims,” the modernisations of Chaucer written by William Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt and Elizabeth Barrett, and the dubious effort by the literary hacks R. H. Horne and Thomas Powell to publish a new set of Chaucer modernisations in 1841.

However well-regarded Chaucer’s works were during his lifetime, it was his immediate successors who fashioned him into the ‘father of English poetry’ they then bequeathed to the subsequent English literary tradition. In particular, the poets Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate not only represented Chaucer in this manner in their own, widely disseminated works, they were also instrumental in the broad dissemination of Chaucer’s works. Importantly, these activities were motivated not just by admiration but also by a politico-literary context in which Hoccleve and Lydgate, unlike Chaucer, were asked to produce works that spoke both for a prince and to a prince. Their invention of Chaucer’s literary authority cannot then be separated from their intervention into politics, and this conflation they also bequeathed to the English literary tradition, where it remained plainly visible in the works of their own successors, and where it persists, more obscurely, to the present.