Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editors’ Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Text
- Introduction
- 1 The Search for a Lofty British Virgil: The Early Elizabethan Aeneids of Thomas Phaer, Thomas Twyne and Richard Stanyhurst
- 2 ‘Sound this Angry Message in Thine Eares’: Sympathy and the Translations of the Aeneid in Marlowe's Dido Queene of Carthage
- 3 Courteous Virgil: The Manuscript Translations of an Anonymous Poet, Sir John Harington and Sir William Mure of Rowallan
- 4 Virginian Virgil: The Single-Book Translations of Sir Thomas Wroth, Sir Dudley Digges and George Sandys
- 5 Rome at War: The Military Virgils of John Vicars, Robert Stapylton and Robert Heath
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Series Editors’ Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Text
- Introduction
- 1 The Search for a Lofty British Virgil: The Early Elizabethan Aeneids of Thomas Phaer, Thomas Twyne and Richard Stanyhurst
- 2 ‘Sound this Angry Message in Thine Eares’: Sympathy and the Translations of the Aeneid in Marlowe's Dido Queene of Carthage
- 3 Courteous Virgil: The Manuscript Translations of an Anonymous Poet, Sir John Harington and Sir William Mure of Rowallan
- 4 Virginian Virgil: The Single-Book Translations of Sir Thomas Wroth, Sir Dudley Digges and George Sandys
- 5 Rome at War: The Military Virgils of John Vicars, Robert Stapylton and Robert Heath
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The oppositional readings of the Aeneid that used the epic to challenge the ideals of the Stuart peace came to an end during the Civil War. The translators of the epic were by no means unified in the second half of the century. In the 1650s, for instance, there were translations of the Aeneid according to the Stuart Augustanism of Denham, the Cromwellian Augustanism of Waller and the irreverent republicanism of Harrington. But the grand confidence that was placed in Virgil by all types of translators during the period from Phaer until Stapylton seems to have been shaken. James Harrington's publications from the late 1650s are indicative of a change in how oppositional translators treated Virgil. To the extent that Harrington approaches Virgil seriously, it is because he views the Aeneid as a part of the historical moment when the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire. Harrington feels that the new Roman peace was unstable and he thus reflects upon the delicacy of Virgil's hopes for the future. However, Harrington's translation is not only a historical reflection; it is also part travesty. Unlike Digges, Vicars and Stapylton, Harrington did not find a positive example in Virgil's poem. Instead, he saw it as a work that needed taking down a notch. By the late 1650s, the sort of language that Vicars had used seriously in his translation had become the sort of language one found in travesties of Virgil's epic. Such an attitude towards Virgil is foreshadowed in Sir John Harington's translation, but it is not a primary part of the English tradition until the middle of the seventeenth century. At that time, there was no longer a division in Aeneid translations between military, parliamentarian readings of the epic and panegyric readings that encouraged gratitude. Rather, the natural division in the translations must be drawn between the Augustan Virgils on the one hand and less decorous travesties on the other. This is the reason Butler associates Vicars with the travesties rather than with his proper context. This contrast reflects the changing position of the Aeneid within English culture.
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- The English AeneidTranslations of Virgil 1555-1646, pp. 187 - 193Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015