Albion (28 page)

This curious art of reincarnation was also maintained by John Dryden who, in the preface to one translation, remarked: “I desire the false Criticks wou’d not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet, or may be fairly deduc’d by him.” This of course might be used simply as a device to divert attention or criticism; contemporary satires, in particular, might be open to perilous scrutiny if they were not presented as the work of Juvenal or Horace. It affords the opportunity of what is called “plausible denial.” With the use of allusion and quotation, for example, the political situation of the 1640s could be depicted in the convex mirror of the Roman civil wars; indeed Thomas Hobbes discovered one of the causes of the war between Charles I and Cromwell in the excessive reading of classical history.

But there are also more powerful forces at work in the adoption of a persona through translation. It offers access to an earlier world or previous civilisation, so that writer and reader are both in their own time and somewhere other. Ben Jonson’s drinking songs use sixteenth-century London taverns as the doorway into the banqueting halls of first-century Rome; the cities of the second and eighteenth centuries are mingled in Samuel Johnson’s “London,” modelled upon Juvenal. It is a way of understanding the past by seeing it as part of the present, affording glimpses of a larger continuity which can be vouchsafed through language itself. Much can be discovered in the process. Entirely new moral structures, or structures of feeling, can emerge from an enriched and more complex language. New verse systems can lead ineluctably to new forms of perception; the “pagan beauty” of the classics can create a new aesthetic, and the introduction of blank verse can help to fashion a new sensibility. The importation of the essay, the epigram and the satire directly fashioned the English virtues of individualism and scepticism.

It was believed at the time that newly translated works would create new knowledge. Nicholas Udall declared, in a work published in 1549, that “a translator travailleth not to his own private commodity, but to the benefit and public use of his country.” Ten years earlier Richard Taverner translated Erasmus “to the furtherance and adornment” of his country and its language. The culture was “refined” in every sense. Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, in 1561, was extraordinarily influential in the social and administrative life of the nation; it had been read in the original by Thomas Wyatt, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More, among others, and its “Englysshing” conferred upon it instant popularity. John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays in 1601 modified the consciousness of an entire age; it altered, in particular, the language of Shakespeare’s plays. Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans assisted Shakespeare’s art, also, and furnished material for
Antony and Cleopatra, Julius Caesar
and
Coriolanus
. Thomas Hoby, in the preface to his translation of Castiglione, had encouraged “profound learned men in the Greek and Latin” to undertake similar work so that “wee alone of the world may not be still counted barbarous in our tongue, as time out of mind we have beene in our maners.”

The English language was indeed strengthened and rendered more resourceful. One of the merits of translation, for example, was its encouragement of variety in both syntax and vocabulary. When John Dryden suggested that Virgil “maintains majesty in the midst of plainness” he was signalling his own ambitions for his translation, and so successful was he that in the process he managed to recast the native idiom. It appeared at the time to be an experiment, but two hundred years later Dryden was celebrated by Gerard Manley Hopkins for evincing “the native thew and sinew of the English language.” Foreign sources and idioms were so thoroughly absorbed that they became “native.” When Dryden put Virgil’s
Georgics
into English it was remarked by Addison that the Roman poet “has so raised the natural rudeness and simplicity of his subject with such a significance of expression, such a pomp of verse, such variety of transitions and such a solemn air in his reflections ”; at the same time he was complimenting Dryden on his ability to bring these qualities into English verse. It has in fact been suggested that Dryden’s greatest poetry does indeed lie within his translations, but that his genius lay in his conceiving of them as “new” poems. Dryden’s prose furnishes another example, in his ability to incorporate the Latin periodic sentence within the English language and thereby to produce an Augustan prose which was admired for its copiousness and grace; it became the standard for all eighteenth-century prose so that Englishness itself, the English of Addison and Steele, of Gibbon and of Johnson, was created out of a foreign idiom.

The power of translation
is nowhere more evident than on the English stage. It would hardly be overstating the case, in fact, to suggest that English comedy and English tragedy, as we now understand them, sprang directly from the imitation of classical models. Once more the native genius, or what is generally taken to be a wholly native art, was created and maintained by a broadly European culture. The Latin tragedies of Seneca were first printed in 1474, with further editions some twenty years later. They were translated in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The first known performance of Senecan tragedy in England, that of the
Troades
, took place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in the winter of 1551; eight years later the first English translation of the play was published. Three years after that publication, in 1562, what is generally regarded as the first English tragedy,
Gorboduc
, was staged in the hall of the Inner Temple. The important point, in this medley of dates and places, is that
Gorboduc
itself is directly based upon the plays of Seneca; the line of English tragedy then continued with
Jocasta
and
Gismond of Salerne,
which are also modelled upon Seneca in their fervent rhetoric and sensational effects. These Roman plays were profoundly congenial to the sixteenth-century English imagination, filled as they were with high sentence and bloody action, impassioned meditations upon fate and melodramatic turnings of the plot. Out of Gorboduc and Jocasta come Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and the whole panoply of English tragedy; the basic five-act structure of the drama was also copied out of Seneca, and the plangent bombast of his monologues helped to colour the blank verse of the English stage. It is a direct example of the manner in which translation becomes a creative principle.

It is appropriate, therefore, that what by common consent is Marlowe’s first play,
Dido Queen of Carthage
, should be in large part a dramatic transcription of Virgil’s
Aeneid
; that
Tamburlaine
relies upon a translated life of that ruler by Petrus Petrondinus; that
Doctor Faustus
was inspired by a translation out of the German
Historia von D. Johann Fausten
.

If we look deeply enough, the great works of the English language appear to spring from mixed and muddled origins. It is well enough known that Shakespeare employed translations of Latin originals, among them North’s Plutarch and Golding’s version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses; phrases from them emerge in his verse as if by some surreptitious act of magic.

It is recognised, too, that for the plot and structure of his comedies Shakespeare freely borrowed from the Roman dramatists Terence and Plautus. But it is less readily understood that the form and texture of English comedy itself are derived from classical originals. In 1527 the pupils of St. Paul’s staged the
Menaechmi
of Plautus and then, in the following year, Terence’s Phormio. The first translation of a Roman play, published in 1530, was that of Terence’s Andria. This may be seen as part of the curriculum of the “new learning,” as promulgated by More and Erasmus, but it also had material consequences for the development of English drama. In 1533 Nicholas Udall, a schoolmaster of Eton and Westminster, published a translation entitled
Floures for Latine Spekynge Selected and Gathered oute of Terence
; it was a grammatical treatise, but four years later Udall wrote a play,
Ralph Roister
Doister
, which has the merit of being the first formal English comedy. The connection, then, is clear. The five-act structure of English tragedy came out of Seneca; the five-act structure of English comedy emerged from Terence.

The
debt to
the classical tradition is various and profound. It created what might be called the horizon of English literature, beyond which the bright multifarious works arose. In fact by force of example it can be said to have created the English literary tradition itself. Dryden once remarked that “Shakespeare was the Homer or father of our dramatic poets; Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing” with the farther analogy that “Spenser and Milton are the nearest in English to Virgil and Horace in the Latin.” After the language had gained a fresh access of strength and power from classical sources, therefore, English itself could be seen as equivalent to Greek or Latin with its own history and traditions. The antiquarian William Camden began to compile an historical digest of the language, for example, and in the early seventeenth century Richard Verstegan wrote of “the great Antiquitie of our ancient English toung.” In succeeding years the Old English of the Anglo-Saxons was thoroughly examined, too, with the appearance of the “Caedmon manuscripts” of homiletic verse. But principal attention was paid to the poetry of the medieval period. “As Greece has three poets of great antiquity,” it was written, “and Italy other three auncient poets: so hath England three auncient poets, Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate.” Thus a literary tradition was formed.

The passion for classical literature also engendered an image which has endured for almost five hundred years. Hopkins called it the “Sweet especial rural scene.” It first emerges in Virgil’s pastoral poetry, where the shepherd Tityrus lies beneath the shade of a spreading beech and pipes a woodland song upon his reed; generations of schoolchildren assimilated this sylvan picture of ease and gracefulness since, according to Sir Thomas Elyot, “the pretty controversies of the simple shepherds therein contained wonderfully rejoiceth the child that heareth it well declared.” It became the inspiration for Edmund Spenser’s
Shepheardes Calender
as well as for the pastoral poetry which sprang from it; it was also the context for Sir Philip Sidney’s defence of poetry itself, when he declared that “Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as diverse poets have done.” The use of this classical landscape may even represent the beginning of nature-worship itself in English, as opposed to the Anglo-Saxon wariness concerning the natural world. The contrast between city and country, and the role of the poet as a simple Orpheus murmuring:

. . . let woods and rivers be My quiet though inglorious destiny

echoed through English poetry, until the pastoral vision was taken up in transcendental form by William Wordsworth. Wordsworth himself translated Catullus. So, in a sense, the cycle of influence is complete. A country parson in Mrs. Gaskell’s Cousin Phillis puts a similar point very well—“It’s wonderful how exactly Virgil has hit the enduring epithets, nearly two thousand years ago, and in Italy; and yet how it describes to a T what is now lying before us in the parish of Heathbridge, country——, England.”

Just as there are archetypal scenes and images echoing through the classicism of English literature, so there are representative passages in translation which, passing through many hands, create new forms of English music. One such is the chorus from the second act of Seneca’s
Thyestes
, a passage from which was first translated by Sir Thomas Wyatt:

For hym death greep’ the right hard by the croppe That is moche knowen of other, and of him self alas, Doth dye unknowen, dazed with dreadfull face

That last phrase, in its dark magnificence, is redolent of a whole language. In the translation of Jasper Heywood it becomes:

That knowne hee is to much to other men: Departeth yet unto him selfe unknowne

The lines carry the open vowel sounds that are so much part of the melody of English and, in the seventeenth-century translation of Sir Matthew Hale, they take on the dying fall of the couplet:

To be a publick Pageant, known to All, But unacquainted with Himself, doth fall

They become more complex in the poetry of Abraham Cowley:

Does not himself, when he is Dying know Nor what he is, nor whither he’s to go

But they reappear, refreshed, in Marvell’s gay perplexity:

Into his own Heart ne’er pry’s, Death to him’s a Strange surprise

There had been much critical debate about the disabling number of monosyllables in the language, which resisted the attempts to beautify and “benefit” that language through translation; the example of Marvell, however, suggests that the native resourcefulness of English can be carried even by its simplest words. The line continues.

CHAPTER 27

The Italian Connection

In The Arte of English Poesie
the Elizabethan critic and poetaster George Puttenham recorded that in the last years of the reign of Henry VIII

sprang up a new company of courtly makers, of whom
Sir Thomas Wyat
th’elder &
Henry
Earl of Surrey were the two chieftaines, who, hauing travailed into Italie, and there tasted the sweete and stately measures and stile of the Italian Poesie, as novices newly crept out of the schools of
Dante Arioste
and
Petrarch
, they greatly polished our rude & homely maner of vulgar Poesie from that it had bene before, and for that cause may iustly be sayed the first reformers of our English meetre and stile.

The earlier generation of More and Colet had been part of a European humanist culture and Catholic civilisation, but then the gradual process of national self-awareness after the Reformation intervened. Wyatt and Surrey were in a sense native reformers who wished to benefit and amplify the language of their country without necessarily identifying themselves with any continental dispensation. Yet their debt to Italy is clear. Another Elizabethan writer argued that “for we are (as pretely noteth the Poet) severed from the worlde, it is thought, the common knowledges came later to us, then to other our neighbours: for our farther distance from the places where artes first sprang.”

The Italians, in particular, considered the English to be lacking in “civilitie.” In
Volpone
Ben Jonson creates a garrulous and affected “Lady Would-Be”—“Which o’your poets? Petrarch? Or Tasso? Or Dante? Guarini? Ariosto? Aretine? Cieco di Hadria? I have read them all.” Italian poetry was not so much fashionable as indispensable for anyone pretending to literacy. Elizabethan literary criticism was established upon the models of Italian Renaissance criticism; the Italians gave to England the sonnet and the
terza rima
; the works of both Machiavelli and Castiglione were extraordinarily influential. Geoffrey Chaucer, himself under the spell of Italian masters, had at an earlier date experimented both with the sonnet and with
terza rima
; but the new forms fell rapidly out of use. The language was not yet ready for them, and so they lay dormant within its fabric until Sir Thomas Wyatt conjured them forth.

Wyatt’s first translation had been of Plutarch’s Quyete of Mynde; he had attempted a prose treatise by Petrarch himself, but grew tired of its prolixity and repetitiveness. Significantly, however, he blamed the tedium upon “lacke of such diversyte in our tong,” so that “it shulde want a great dele of the grace.” This was precisely the “grace” he wished to emulate in his poetry, specifically in his imitations of the Petrarchan sonnet, which (
pace
Chaucer) was to initiate in English the sonnet tradition which spread out from Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare into the language of Milton and then wider still into Wordsworth and Keats. Wyatt translated sixteen sonnets from Petrarch; he gained from the Italian originals melodic strength and complexity, even as he added the reflections of troubled individual experience. But the important point is this: it was only by imitating the play of contrasts and opposites in Petrarch’s poetry that Wyatt was able to discover his own ambiguous and haunted voice. His famous sonnet reputed to be cast around the image of Anne Boleyn, opening “Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,” is modelled upon Petrarch’s
Rime
190, which creates a symbolic vision of a white hind. The contraries of Wyatt’s love poems—

I find no peace, and all my war is done. I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice

—are directly based upon Petrarchan conceits. They became so much part of English vocabulary and style that it is easy to forget or ignore their European origins; but they remain there nonetheless. The image of the spring or river occurs in Wyatt’s poetry before it flowed through the melodies of subsequent poets:

From these high hills as when a spring doth fall, It trilleth down with still and subtle course

But it is hard to resist the suggestion that his metaphor is charged with a recognition of his own “high” sources. The metaphor might also be applied to Wyatt’s epistolary satire, where his colloquial style and apparent plain speaking are established upon the satires of the Italian poet Alamanni. One opens abruptly with

Mine own John Poyntz, since ye delight to know—

where the name of Alamanni’s friend Tommaso Sertini has been substituted. Wyatt imitates Horace and Chaucer also, conflating foreign and native sources.

Yet the paradox, as contrary as anything within Wyatt’s difficult and divided poetry itself, is this. Out of these voices Wyatt has created something wholly fresh and original. Critics have often adverted to the fact that he is more concrete and particular than his Italian sources, and that he imposes the constraints of individual experience and circumstance upon the more declamatory address of the Italian originals; all this is true, and all this is characteristic of English translation. But the most extraordinary transformation lies in the mingling of old forms and old voices to create something entirely new; it is akin to the process of alchemy, that obsession of the sixteenth century, when a compound is changed into a rare element. It is the English imagination itself which has worked this miracle of transmutation. Many of the greatest poems in the language are the product of it, especially since that language is composed of borrowed tongues and purloined phrases.

Wyatt’s sonnets themselves entered general circulation with the publication by Richard Tottel of
Songes and Sonnettes
in the summer of 1557. It was designed in large part to advertise “the honorable stile of the noble earle of Surrey, and the weightinesse of the depewitted sir Thomas Wyat the elders verse.” Publication was deemed “to the honor of the Englishe tong, and for the profit of the studious of Englishe eloquence” with a “statelinesse of stile remoued from the rude skill of common eares. . . . And I exhort the vnlearned, by reding to learne to be more skillfull, and to purge that swinelike grossenesse.” Here eloquence bears a moral as well as a stylistic burden, and the importance of English translation is nowhere more apparent than in the dismissal of “swinelike grossenesse” as unworthy of a national tradition. In fact the publication of what was also known as
Tottel’s Miscellany
marked one of the first stages in the creation of a vernacular tradition, and the volume was of exemplary importance in the deployment of the sonnet as a fashionable English form. The pre-eminence of the book can be judged, perhaps, in the fact that the first collection of an individual poet’s work—that of Barnaby Googe—was actually published six years later. The translation from manuscript to print, and thus the creation of a larger English public for poetry, was largely the work of Richard Tottel who after William Caxton can be described as the begetter of book culture in England.

B
arnaby
Googe’s Eglogs, Epytaphes and Sonnetes
was followed sixteen years later by Edmund Spenser’s
Shepheardes Calender
, which has the distinction of being the most carefully fashioned and self-conscious literary debut up to that date. It has been said that artistic genius must create the taste by which it is to be judged, but Spenser also managed to formulate a tradition. The book was published anonymously but the editorial glosses composed by a certain “E.K.” hailed the writer as “the new poet” gathering up the inheritance of Virgil and of Chaucer, of Marot and of Skelton. It is in fact a testimony to the newly acquired power of the vernacular that it could be presented in this fashion; the book itself was accompanied by woodcuts as well as textual glosses, thus enhancing its status as an art object and a permanent memorial to the importance of English verse which has, as it were, acquired a classical veneer. Spenser was more audacious, however, in his desire to reclaim the old strengths of the English language. As “E.K.” put it, “in my opinion it is one special prayse, of manye which are dew to this Poete, that he hath laboured to restore, as to theyre rightfull heritage such good and naturall English wordes, as have ben long time out of use and almost clene disinherited.” He adds that there are some who, upon hearing or reading “an olde word albeit very naturall and significant,” dismiss it as “gibbrish” but such ought to be ashamed “in their own mother tonge straungers to be ranked and alienes.” Spenser’s project here is all of a piece with the rising current of nationalism and Protestantism shaping the English sensibility of the late sixteenth century, evinced also in the bloody conquest of Ireland in which Spenser himself played no insignificant role.

Spenser was a Londoner, born in 1552, who imbibed Protestant humanism at Cambridge. He became a member of the Earl of Leicester’s household but, more importantly, he was acquainted with Philip Sidney; these young men started a literary club under the name of Areopagus which, according to John Aubrey, was established “for the purpose of naturalizing the classical metres in English verse.” In 1580 Spenser became secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland and was a witness, if not a participant, in the English terror against that country’s native inhabitants; he directly benefited from the spoliation, also, when he was awarded a castle and estates in County Cork. It was in Ireland, too, that he completed the first three books of
The Faerie
Queene
—a strange jewel to emerge from the blood and mire. He was given a pension by the queen in 1589 but the affairs of state rarely remain beneficent for long. His castle in Ireland was burned down during Tyrone’s rebellion of 1598, and Spenser’s youngest child perished in the flames. It is said that the poet returned to England with a broken heart. He died in the following year.

In an essay of 1820, William Hazlitt first recognised the association between poetry and power. In a discussion of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus he declared that “the principle of poetry is a very anti-levelling principle. It aims at effect, it exists by contrast. It admits of no medium. It is every thing by excess. It rises above the ordinary standard of sufferings and crimes. It presents a dazzling appearance. It shows its head turreted, crowned and crested. Its front is gilt and blood-stained.” Hazlitt was a wonderfully astute critic, and he has here discerned an aspect of the English imagination which is manifest in writers as diverse as John Milton and Christopher Marlowe. In this passage, too, he might have been directly describing the work of Edmund Spenser.
The Shepheardes Calender
is embellished and ornamented as if it were a classical text, but this is only an acknowledgement of Spenser’s debt to the Roman poetry of empire and of power. Yet there were more recent continental models. Spenser’s production imitates an edition of
Arcadia
, written by the Italian poet Sannazaro and published seven years before, and there is a more general obligation to the cult of Italian neo-Platonism which had arrived in England a hundred years earlier. It is the philosophy of
The ShepheardesCalender
. A vision of divine harmony and order can be glimpsed in all created things, through the medium of which the soul aspires to spiritual revelation; the appetite for virtue and for beauty is the same, while all things work harmoniously on earth as they do in heaven. Spenser’s interest in symbolism, and his obsession with numerology, are aspects of a doctrine which was by degrees assimilated into his native Protestantism. This is the paradox which reflects the nature of the English imagination itself. A highly charged European culture, of which England was really only the marginal recipient, was used by Spenser to promote the cause of the vernacular language and the native sensibility. The authors to whom Spenser alludes in his verse are Chaucer and Langland, with the implicit understanding that they represent a national spirit of reform and renovation. For example, one of the two characters in the eclogue for May is named “Piers,” which had become a token of English rootedness and sincerity.

The same conditions apply to Spenser’s epic of nationhood,
The Faerie
Queene
, which is fashioned after European models. There are passages literally translated from Ariosto’s
Gerusalemme Liberata
, as well as more general borrowings from European epics or romance. Yet once more Spenser mingles these contemporary or near contemporary European elements with a self-conscious English antiquarianism. Thus he combines a modern vocabulary, among its words being “fierce,” “piercing” and “noblesse,” with such Middle English borrowings as “ydrad,” “troden” and “brast.” He manages to be both ancient and modern at the same time, and so becomes sufficiently representative of the national tradition.

S
penser’s
century was
obsessed by its past, just like every succeeding English century. The justification for Tudor governance lay in inheritance or continuity. The Tudor monarchs claimed to draw their lineage from Arthur, and to find their origins even further back in the story of Brutus and of the foundations of England itself. The great displays of heraldry and genealogy come from the Tudor period, as do the history plays of Shakespeare; the image of empire was to include America, the land which Henry VII “causyd furst for to be founde,” but its authenticity was based upon a supposed Arthurian empire which according to Dr. Dee comprised “twenty Kingdomes.” The Arthurian myth of “Britaine” and “this Brytish Monarchie” was thus linked, for example, with the sixteenth-century conquest of Ireland. In
The Faerie
Queene
itself Spenser extols