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.
Barnaby 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 imaginati
on 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.
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