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Richard Carew, William Shakespeare, and the politics of translating Virgil in early modern England and Scotland

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Abstract

After a brief critique, in a first part (pp. 507–510), of previous scholars' biographical approach to the politics of translating Virgil, this paper proceeds to offer an alternative approach by looking at the “linguistic ideology” underpinning translations (especially of theAeneid) (parts II and III [pp. 510–512 and 512–517]). What emerges is a contradictory tension between the idea of a single, unifying national vernacular and competing varieties or kinds of English. Inherent to this tension is the question of whose English (and consequently who) was to be included in the constituency of the “our” in “our English tongue”—a recurring phrase in translators' comments on their work. In a fourth and final part (pp. 517–527), these linguistic—and political—stakes are shown to have accrued around a critique, by George Puttenham inThe Arte of English Poesie (1589), of Richard Stanyhurst's translation of the opening lines of theAeneid. Specifically, this critique is taken up in the following decade (the 1590s), and the politics of its hierarchical and exclusive linguistic ideology opposed, on the one hand, by Richard Carew, in an important essay on the English language, and, on the other, by William Shakespeare, in two of his early plays, most importantly,The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play unique in the Shakespearean canon for its focus on “our English tongue,” a focus which is here precisely placed in its intertextual relation to contemporary debate surrounding Richard Stanyhurst’s translation, of Virgil'sAeneid.

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References

  1. Christopher Hill,Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford, 1997), pp. 27–31 (p. 29). Though “revisited,” the first edition of 1965 has not been significantly revised; specifically, the argument about translations remains unchanged.

  2. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton,Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 87–94.

  3. C. H. Conley,The First English Translators of the Classics (New Haven, 1927). In recent years Richard Helgerson has made superb use of a much more sophisticated version of the generational model of explanation, though not (yet) in relation to translation. See Richard Helgerson,Forms of Nationhood. The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London, 1992), pp. 303–04.

  4. H. B. Lathrop,Translations from the Classics into English from Caxton to Chapman 1477–1620 (Madison, 1933), pp. 230–33.

  5. Colin Burrow, ‘Virgil in English Translation’, in: Charles Martindale, ed.,The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 21–37 (p. 24). Burrow gives only one example—the marginal note “no grace without prayer”—which seems a less obvious example of “catholicising” than the example I give.

  6. William Frost, ‘Translating Virgil, Douglas to Dryden: Some General Considerations’, in: George de Forest Lord and Maynard Mack, eds.,Poetic Traditions of the English Renaissance (New Haven and Yale, 1982), pp. 271–86.

  7. Burrow, ‘Virgil in English Translation’ (n. 6 above), in: Charles Martindale, ed.,The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge, 1997), p. 21.

  8. Vincent Crapanzano,Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire. On the Epistemology of Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass. and London, England, 1992), p. 12; Michael Silverstein, ‘Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology’, in: P. Clyne, W. Hanks and C. Hofbauer, eds.,The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels (Chicago, 1979), pp. 193–247. In adopting this approach I am obliged to, set aside questions of critical evaluation of the translations, except as these bear on my concern with linguistic ideology. For a recent, historically sensitive, introductory overview, swe William S. Anderson, ‘Five Hundred Years of Rendering theAeneid in English’, in: Christine Perkell, ed.,Reading Vergil’s Aeneid.An Interpretative Guide (Oklahoma, 1999), pp. 285–302. See too Alexander G. McKay’s review ofVirgil in English edited by K. W. Gransden (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1996), inVergilius 42 (1996): 133–36.

  9. My attention was drawn to Spenser's compelling phrase by Richard Helgerson’s use of it as the title to the introduction toForms of Nationhood (n. 4. above).The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London, 1992). As Helgerson points out the phrase is used (in a letter of 1580) in relation to the debate over the experiments in quantitative forms of English metre, to which, as we shall see, translations of Virgil were central.

  10. The ‘Aeneid’ of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne, edited by Steven Lally (New York and London, 1987), pp. xv–xvi (from which the quotation is taken); O. B. Hardison, ‘Tudor Humanism and Surrey’s Translation of theAeneid’, Studies in Philology 83:3 (1986): 237–60 (p. 241). I examine Phaer's translation in relation to received mediations of the Virgilian text and the question of readership in Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Supplementing theAeneid in Early Modern England: Translation, Imitation, Commentary’,International Journal of the Classical Tradition 4 (1997/98), pp. 507–525 (pp. 515–16).

  11. Quotations from Virgil are taken fromVirgil, translated by H. Rushton Fairclough, 2nd. ed. repr., ser. Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1974).

  12. For example,Opera…cum XI commentariis (Venice, 1544), reprinted inThe Renaissance and the Gods, 2 vols. (New York and London, 1976), vol. 1, fo. iiv. For the variant versions see ‘Vita Donati’, in:Vitae Vergilianae Antiquae, edited by Colin Hardie (Oxford, 1966), pp. 5–18 (p. 16). Compare this description of Virgil with the strategically placed description of Chaucer as “the Loadestarre of our Language” and of Spenser’s comparison of Chaucer to Virgil, in the opening lines of the dedicatory epistle by ‘E. K’ inThe Shepheards Calendar (1579), which was itself in self-conscious imitation of Virgil. See ‘E. K.’ in:elizabethan Critical Essays, edited by G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904; repr. London, 1964), vol. 1, pp. 127–34 (p. 127). See further below note 58.

  13. For a particularly resonant recent example, see: ‘“Ain’t nuttin' to wor' abaht, me old mate,”’The Sunday Times, News Review 5.3. June 7, 1998. Provoked by a television appearance in which the British prime minister Tony Blair deliberately ‘dropped’ into the variety of his native tongue known as ‘Estuary English’, this (unsigned) article treats English prime ministers' use, or rather abuse, of their native tongue, singling out Ted Heath, for the “unique variety of his own”: “No previous prime minister in living memory had mangled the language of Shakespeare in quite that way.” Though the tone is lighthearted, there is nevertheless an underlying assumption that the centre of political power should coincide with the centre of a bounded, unified and single national language represented by the national poet. The assumption that the centre of power should coincide with the centre of the national vernacular also underlies the phrase ‘the King’s English’, which was used in Shakespeare’s day (and, as we shall see, on one occasion by Shakespeare himself, if ironically) as “the language of Shakespeare” is used here; indeed, the two phrases are here interchangeable.

  14. Burrow, ‘Virgil in English Translation’ (n. 6 above) in: Charles Martindale, ed.,The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 24–25.

  15. Helgerson,Forms of Nationhood (n. 4. above),The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London, 1992), pp. 25–40, see also Burrow, op cit., in: Charles Martindale, ed.,The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge, 1997), p. 25.

  16. Derek Attridge,Well-Weighed Syllables. Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, 1974), p. 166.

  17. Richard Stanyhurst,Translation of the First Four Books of the Aeneis (Leyden, 1582), edited by E. Arber (London, 1880), p. 4 (u/v i/j spellings modernised).

  18. Helgerson,Forms of Nationhood (n. 4 above)The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London, 1992), p. 28.

  19. Roger Ascham, ‘Of Imitation’, fromThe Scholemaster (1570), in:Elizabethan Critical Essays (n. 13 above) edited by G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904; repr. London, 1964), vol 1 pp. 1–45 (p. 29). See Helgerson,Forms of Nationhood (n. 4 above),The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London, 1992), pp. 29.

  20. For a representative example of twentieth century opinion, see H. D. Lathrop,Translations from the Classics (n. 5 above),into, English from Caxton to Chapman 1477–1620 (Madison, 1933), pp. 116–22. Other negative comments are cited by D. E. L. Crane, who goes on bravely to attempt critical rehabilitation in D. E. L Crane, ‘Richard Stanyhurst's Translation of Vergil’sAeneid (1582)’, in: G. A. M. Janssens and F. G. A. M. Aarts, eds.Studies in Seventeenth-Century English Literature, History and Bibliography. Festschrift for Professor T.A. Birrell on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, Costerus, new ser., vol. 46 (Amsterdam, 1984), pp. 67–82.

  21. Tudeau-Clayton,Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (n. 3 above) (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 62–65.

  22. Burrow, ‘Virgil in English Translation’ (n. 6 above) in: Charles Martindale, ed.,The Cambridge Companion to Virgil (Cambridge, 1997), p. 25.

  23. Commenting on the “our” in Spenser’s phrase “the kingdom of our language” Helgerson suggests that it is “no longer” (but when was it?) “a communal ‘our’ standing indifferently for all speakers of English”; rather, Spenser’s “first-person plural pushes in the direction of a royal ‘we’” (Helgerson,forms of Nationhood [n. 4 above],The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London, 1992), p. 3). While not denying the particular author’s will to legislate usage (Ben Jonson immediately, comes to mind), I think the more important contended territory is the middle ground between the all-inclusive and the all-exclusive alternatives posited here.

  24. Caxton’sEneydos 1490, edited by W. T. Culley and F. J. Furnivall (London, 1890), p. 3. All citations are from this edition (i/j and u/v spellings modernised).

  25. Paula Blank,Broken English. Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London, 1996), p. 17.

  26. The nyne fyrst bookes of the Eneados of Virgil converted into Englishe vearse, by T. Phaer (London, 1562), n. pag. Lally notes, as a particularly striking feature of Phaer’s translation, the “fondness for medieval diction” characteristic of those called by William Ringler the “patriotic purists” of the Tudor period. Lally, ‘Introduction’, in: Lally, ed.,The ‘Aeneid” of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne (n. 11 above) edited by Steven Lally (New York and London, 1987), pp. xvi–xvii.

  27. Richard Bailey,Images of English. A cultural history of the language (Cambridge, 1992), p. 37. Of general relevance here too is the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who argues, against both Saussurean and Chomskian linguistics, for an understanding of the acquisition and use of language in relation to socially specific power structures. See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, ‘La production et la reproduction de la langue légitime’ in: Idem,Ce que parler veut dire: léconomie des échanges linguistiques (Paris, 1982), pp. 23–58, translated in: Bourdieu,Language and Symbolic Power, edited by John B. Thomson (Oxford, 1991), pp. 43–65.

  28. Timothy, J. Reiss,Knowledge, discovery and imagination in early modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), p. 56.

  29. Aeneid I, 132–156. As Luba Freedman points out, this passage lies behind Renaissance visual representations of Neptune as an “image of a contemporary ruler”. Luba Freedman, ‘Neptune in Classical and Renaissance Visual Art’,International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2 (1995/96), pp. 219–37 (pp. 229, 231). See too, Tudeau-Clayton,Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (n. 3 above), (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 236–37.

  30. I have looked atPublii Vergilii Maronis Opera … (Basle, 1545); place and date of the first edition are Hagenau, 1530, according to G. Mambelli,Gli annali delle edizioni virgiliane (Florence, 1954), p. 62. Mambelli records five reprints before 1550.

  31. T. Twyne,The whole xii bookes of the Æneidos. The residue supplied, and the whole newly set forth (Lodon, 1573). Gavin Douglas,Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ translated into Scottish Verse, edited by David F. C. Coldwell, 4 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1957–64). All citations will be from this edition. I discuss the relation of this translation to the mediations of the source text in circulation, especially the commentary by Cristoforo Landino and the imitation by Maffeo Vegio in Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Supplementing theAeneid”, pp. 510–15, 517–25 (n. 11 above.The ‘Aeneid’ of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne, edited by Steven Lally (New York and London, 1987), pp. xv–xvi (from which the quotation is taken); O. B. Hardison, ‘Tudor Humanism and Surrey’s Translation of theAeneid’, Studies in Philology 83:3 (1986): 237–60 (p. 241). I examine Phaer’s translation in relation to received mediations of the Virgilian text and the question of readership in Margaret Tudeau-Clayton, ‘Supplementing theAeneid in Early Modern England: Translation, Imitation, Commentary’,International Journal of the Classical Tradition 4 (1997/98), pp. 507–525 (pp. 515–16)).

  32. ‘Introduction’, in: Douglas,Virgil's ‘Aeneid’ (n. 32 above)translated into Scottish Verse, edited by David F.C. Coldwell, 4 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1957–64). vol. 1, p. 42.

  33. A. E. Christa Canitz, ‘“In our awyn langage”: the nationalist agenda of Gavin Douglas'sEneados’,Vergilius 42 (1996), pp. 25–37.

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  34. Virgil's ‘Aeneid’ (n. 32 above)translated into Scottish Verse, edited by David F. C. Coldwell, 4 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1957–64), vol. 4, p. 187, line 11. Though a case primarily of individual authorial ambition it is worth noting here the point reiterated by the sociolinguist Peter Trudgill that the distinction between a national language and a variety is often made not for linguistic, but for strategic, political and cultural reasons. See, especially, J. K. Chambers and Peter Trudgill,Dialectology, repr. (Cambridge, 1990; orig. 1980), p. 5. This is borne out by the representation of Scots and English as dialects of a single language during the reign of James 1 (see n. 37 below). Priscilla Bawcutt,Gavin Douglas, A Critical Study (Edinburgh, 1976), pp. 144–45

  35. Priscilla Bawcutt,Gavin Douglas, A Critical Study (Edinburgh, 1976), pp. 144–45 and Coldwell, ‘Introduction’, in: Douglas,Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ (n. 32 above),translated into Scottish Verse, edited by David F. C. Coldwell, 4 vols. (Edinburgh and London, 1957–64), vol. 1, p. 111.

  36. See Coldwell, ibid. ‘Introduction’, in: Douglas,Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ especially pp. 9, 17. Paula Blank associates Douglas with the “Anglicization” of Scots, which accelerated with the century and especially with the accession of James I (1603), when the representation of Scots and English as “dialectes of ane (i.e., one) tonge” worked obviously in the political interest of James for political union. See Blank,Broken English (n. 26 above)Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London, 1996), pp 154–55 (the quotation is from Alexander Gill,Of the Orthographie and Congruite of the Britan Tongue [London, 1619], as cited by Blank, ibid.,Of the Orthographie and Congruite of the Britan Tongue [London, 1619], p. 155.

  37. Compare Lathrop’s equally damning comment on Caxton’s vocabolary as “even more unintelligently French than that of the Ovid” (i.e., Caxton's version of theMetamorphoses). Lathrop,Translations from the Classics (n. 5 obove)into English from Caxton to Chapman 1477–1620 (Madison, 1933), p. 6.

  38. See Lally, ‘Introduction’, in: Lally, ed.,The ‘Aeneid’ of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne (n. 11 above) edited by Steven Lally (New York and London, 1987), pp. xxiii–xxvi.

  39. Douglas,Virgil's ‘Aeneid’ (n. 32 above)translated into Scottish Verse, edited by David F. C. Coldwell, 4 vols. (Edinburgh and London 1957–64), vol. 2, p. 11, note to line 283;Caxton's Eneydos (n. 25 above), edited by W. T. Culley and F. J. Furnivall (London, 1890), p. 3

  40. Caxton's Eneydos (n. 25 above), edited by W. T. Culley and F. J. Furnivall (London, 1890), pp. 3, 4.

  41. For further discussion see Tudeau-Clayton,Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (n. 3 above) (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 57, 62–65.

  42. George Puttenham,The Arte of English Poesie, edited by G. D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1936; repr. Cambridge, 1970), p. 273 (u/v i/j spellings modernised). Stanyhurst's translation runs: “I blaze thee captayne first from Troy cittye repairing / Lyke wandring pilgrim too famosed Italie trudging”, Richard Stanyhurst,Translation of the First Four Books of the Aeneis (n. 18 obove) (Leyden, 1582), edited by E. Arber (London, 1880), p. 17. The pharase “when the with shame did trudge” in used of the ‘rustic’ Lalus by his fellow ‘rustic’ Nico in the imitation of Virgil's third eclogue in Philip Sidney,The Complete Works, edited by A. Feuillerat, 4 vols. (cambridge, 1912–26), vol. 4, p. 135. For further discussion of this imitation, see Tudeau-Clayton,Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (n. 3 above) (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 67–69.

  43. My evidence is more specific than that cited in support of 1605, the date proposed by D. N. C. Wood and assumed as fact by Richard Bailey. See D. N. C. Wood, “Elizabethan English and Richard Carew’,Neophilologus 61:1 (1977) 304-315; Richard Bailey,Images of English (n. 28 above)A cultural history of the language (Cambridge, 1992), p. 42. Both scholars beleive that Carew was responding directly to Richard Verstegan’sA Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, which was published in 1605. Verstegan is never named, however, as Wood admits, and the arguments made by Carew address the points made by Verstegan (which are themselves not original) only at a very general level. The allusions I discuss are much more precise. In addition the list of contemporary English figures favourably compared by Carew to ancient authors at the close of his essay corresponds more obviously to the Elizabethan mid-1590s than to Jacobean 1605, especially in its closing eulogy of the “miracle of our ageSir Philip Sidney” (who had been dead almost twently years in 1605). Richard Carew, ‘The Excellency of the English Tongue’, in:Elizabethan Critical Essays (n. 13 above) edited by G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904; repr. London, 1964), vol. 2, pp. 285–94 (p. 293). Citations will be from this text unless otherwise noted.

  44. John Brinsley,Virgil’s Eclogues, with his Booke De Apibus (London, 1633). The translation was first published in 1620.

  45. John Birnsley,Virgil’s Eclogues, with his Booke De Apibus (London, 1633). p. 28.

  46. Carew, ‘The Excellency of the English Tongue’ (n. 44 above),Neophilologus 61:1 (1977): pp. 292, 291. Carew's is the first use of the verb ‘synonymize’ recorded in theEOD; it is another example of the inventiveness demonstrated by Carew in his own practices when translating Tasso. See Wood, ‘Elizabethan English and Richard Carew’ (n. 44 above)Neophilologus 61: 1 (1977): pp. 309–313 (and further below, p. 523 with n. 64). ‘Synonymizing’ as a translation practice which incorporates alternative forms within the translation (rather than as marginal glosses) is mentioned in passing by Lathrop, who appears to regard it merely as characteristic of early, bad translations (Lathrop,Translations from the Classics [n. 5 above]into English from Caxton to Chapman 1477–1620 (Madison, 1933), p. 28). With copiousness Carew was of course invoking a central value and purpose of humanist education (and especially of translation and imitation exercises), which, as Patricia Parker has pointed out, was in contradictory tension with the other central value of “orderly arrangement” or decorum. Patricia Parker,Literary Fat Ladies. Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York, 1987), p. 114. See too Tudeau-Clayton,Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (n. 3 above) (Cambridge, 1998), chapter two, where I also discuss John Brinsley's work more fully. As I indicate, certain aspects of his theory and practice as a pedagogue are, like this translation practice, ideologically consistent with his pronounced Puritan sympathies, while other aspects remain more tranditionally humanist.

  47. Bailey,Images of English (n. 28 above)A cultural history of the language (Cambridge, 1992), p. 44.

  48. Carew ‘The Excellency of the English Tongue’ (n. 44 above),Neophilologus 61:1 (1977): p. 292; for the echo of Puttenham in the phrasing here see below, p. 520.

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  49. ‘The Excellency of the English Tongue’, in: William Camden,Remains Concerning Britain (London, 1974), pp. 42–51 (p. 50); see Smith,Elizabethan Critical Essays (n. 13 above) edited by G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904; repr. London, 1974), vol. 2 pp 444–45 (where the reference is taken as evidence of Puttenham’s authorship ofThe Arte). It has not been possible to establish with certainty who was responsible for the insertion, but given the close friendship between Camden and Carew it may well have been Carew himself. See J(ames) G(airdner), ‘Carew, Richard’,The Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 22 vols. repr. (London, 1937–38), vol. 3 (orig. 1887), pp. 969–71.

  50. Contrast Carew's inclusive, universal “one” with Puttenham's restrictive “to such maner of people” (above, pp. 517–18).

  51. My quotations will be from William Shakespeare,The Comedy of Errors, edited by R. A. Foakes (London, and Cambridge, Mass., 1962) (henceforthComedy); The Merry Wives of Windsor, edited by David Crane (Cambridge, 1997) (henceforthMerry Wives). The exact date of both plays is uncertain:Comedy probably dates from the early 1590s, while 1597 is now generally agreed upon as the date ofMerry Wives. My argument will tend to corroborate this date forMerry Wives as well as the date of 1595–96 for Carew’s essay.

  52. Richard III (?1591), I. i. 73;The Comedy of Errors (?1592/94), III. ii. 151;The Merry Wives of Windsor (?1597), I. iii. 63; III. iii. 10;Romeo and Juliet (?1594/96), I. ii. 34; I. iii. 34. The references, other than those inComedy andMerry Wives, are as given in Marvin Spevack,A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, 9 vols. (Hildesheim, 1970), vol. 6, p. 3668. In what follows I revise a brief comment made in Tudeau-Clayton,Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil (n. 3 above), (Cambridge, 1998), p. 63, note 33.

  53. This example of synonymizing might well be taken as another form or mode of the ‘doubling’ which, Parker suggests, structures the play at every level, from the line to the plot. Parker,Literary Fat Ladies (n. 47 above),Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York, 1987), p. 70.

  54. While David Crane writes of the “inexhaustible linguistic vitality” of the play, H. J. Oliver condescendingly describes the play’s linguistic range in terms of “one of the most astonishing galleries of perpetrators of verbal fun that even (sic) Shakespeare ever put in a play” (‘Introduction’ in: William Shakespeare,The Merry Wives of Windsor, edited by H. J. Oliver [London and New York, 1971], p. lxxiv). For a more specific and sometimes insightful discussion, which nevertheless betrays a similar point of view, see R. S. White,The Merry Wives of Windsor (New York, London etc., 1991), pp. 7–8, 48–72. White's argument is flawed by his insistence on a correspondence between characters' use of language—plain versus affected—and the divide between insiders and outsiders to Windsor society which is the basis of his analysis of the play. As he remarks, most of the insiders turn out to be “linguistically eccentric” after all (p. 7); indeed, there is just one character—Mr Page—who uses the plain language which White argues is the ‘norm’ of bourgeois Windsor society advocated by Shakespeare.

  55. There are six explicit references to the language of (the) English: I.iv.4 (“the King's English”); II.i.114 (“English”); II.iii.48 (“our English tongue”); III.i.63 (“our English”) V.v.123 (“good English”); V.v.130 (“fritters of English”). In no other play in the canon is there such explicit insistence on the national vernacular. Patricia Parker notes in passing the appropriateness to Shakespeare’s “only ‘English’ comedy” of the many references to English in Patricia Parker,Shakespeare from the Margins (Chicago and London, 1996), p. 124. A useful, brief history of the phrase “the King’s English” is given by Blank, who points out that it was hinted at in the fourteenth century, notably by Chaucer, explicitly associated with the reign of Henry V, and “general currency in the sixteenth century”. See Blank,Broken English (n. 26 above),Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London, 1996), pp. 172–73. She does not mention the one instance of its use by Shakespeare.

  56. Sending her servant to look out for the French doctor, Caius, Mistress Quickly declares that if he should “find anybody in the house, here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the King’s English” (I.iv.4–5). Crane groups Mistress Quickly with Caius and the Welsh priest Evans as speakers who inhabit singular linguistic worlds which “achieve their intensity by falling short of what would be thought acceptably correct English” (see ‘Introduction’, in:Merry Wives [n. 52 above], as well as the date of 1595–96 for Carew's essay, p. 8). Contrast “Mistress Quickly is yet another enemy of the English language”, along with Evans and Caius, in Oliver, ‘Introduction’ (n. 55 above), in: William Shakespeare,The Merry Wives of Windsor, edited by H. J. Oliver [London and New York, 1971], p. lxxiv. Crane's affirmative view is a refreshing departure from the tradition of commentary (exemplified by Oliver) which views Shakespeare as linguistically (and therefore implicitly politically) conservative upholding the idea of the King's English (now interchangeable with “the language of Shakespeare” as I pointed out above [n. 14]), through characters whose ‘incorrect’ use of English is merely a cause for laughter at their expense. This view is virtually explicit in White,The Merry Wives (n. 55 above)of Windsor (New York, London etc., 1991), pp. 49, 63. The tradition continues even in so-called revisionist work: see, for instance, Blank,Broken English (n. 26 above)Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London, 1996), pp. 135–36. Contrast Parker,Shakespeare from the Margins (n. 56 above), (Chicago and London, 1996), p. 118.

  57. The Chaucerian associations of this figure have not, I think, been remarked. Their importance for my argument is suggested not only by the contemporary representation of Chaucer as “the Loadestarre of our Language” (see above, n. 13), and of Spenser's comparison of Chaucer to Virgil, in the opening lines of the dedicatory epistle by ‘E. K’ inThe Shepheards Calendar (1579), which was itself in self-conscious imitation of Virgil, but also by Blank's point that inThe Canterbury Tales (with its genial, authorial Host) “Chaucer may have… been the first to introduce dialectal diversity into literature” without judging one as “more ‘correct’ or prestigious than others” (Blank,Broken English [n. 26 above],Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London, 1996), p. 172).

  58. ‘Introduction’, in:Merry Wives (n. 52 above), as well as the date of 1595–96 for Carew's essay, p. 7. Compare the suggestion by Patricia Parker that the “fat” of Falstaff (though primarily the Falstaff of the Henriad) “is repeatedly associated with the copiousness or dilation of discourse”, an association which she sees as carrying a ‘feminine’ inflection embodied in his appearance as a woman inMerry Wives. Parker,Literary Fat Ladies (n. 47 above),Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York, 1987), pp. 21–22 (p. 21).

  59. For example: “What wouldst thou have, boor? What, thick-skin? Speak, breathe, discuss; brief, short, quick, snap” (IV.v.1–2). This is exactly comparable with Falstaff's performance discussed below. With a very slight change in word order it is reproduced in the Quarto version of the play (1602), which endorses the argument (first put forward by W. W. Greg) that the actor who played the Host was responsible (perhaps with some help from the actor who played Falstaff) for this memorial reconstruction. See Crane, ‘Introduction’, in:Merry Wives (n. 52 above) as well as the date of 1595–96 for Carew's essay, pp. 152, 153. For the Quarto version I have consultedThe Merry Wives of Windsor, in:Shakespeare Quarto Facsimiles no 3, repr. (Oxford, 1963). While White describes the Host as lingusitically “versatile” (White,The Merry Wives [n. 55 above],of Windsor (New York London etc., 1991), p. 57), Jane Donawerth notes that he “praises the qualities of Master Fenton”, because “he speaks Holiday” (III.ii.68), but does not connect this to the Host's own linguistic practice or to the centrality of “our English” to the play (Jane Donawerth,Shakespeare and the Sixteenth Century Study of Language [Urbana and Chicago, 1984], p. 157).

  60. The invented word provokes the repetition of the mispronunciation: “Mockvater? Vat is dat?” (line 47)

  61. Mistress Quickly ‘translates’ Latin words homophonically: “He teaches him to hic and to hac, which they'll do fast enough of themselves, and to call ‘horum’” (IV.i.56–58). While ‘whore’ is clearly how she translates ‘horum’, the sense of the verb she hears in ‘hic’ is not so obvious, although generally assumed to be sexual like ‘hac’. The verb ‘hack’ is explicitly used in its sexual sense by Mistress Page of Falstaff in II.i.40–41 (‘These knights will hack”), as Parker points out, suggesting how this links the scene of translation to the sense of ‘translation’ as social mobility. Parker,Shakespeare from the Margins (n. 56 above), (Chicago and London, 1996), pp. 123–24. There is also an echo of the Host, who in his reconciliatory arbitration of the quarrel between the Frenchman and the Welshman suggests conflict be channelled (or translated) into verbal exchange: “Let them keep their limbs whole and hack our English” (III.i.62–63).

  62. “What islapis, William?” “A stone” “And what is ‘a stone’, William?” “A pebble”. “No, it islapis”. (IV. i. 26–30) William here synonymizes instead of translating back into Latin, an exercise recommended by John Brinsley as well as by Lilly (from whom the example is taken, as Crane notes).

  63. This is one of several examples given to illustrate Carew's “enthusiams for foreign borrowings” in Wood, ‘Elizabethan English and Richard Carew’ (n. 44 above),Neophilologus 61:1 (1977), p. 309. For his use of dialect words, see ibid. p. 313. The translation of Tasso first appeared in 1594.

  64. Mention should be made of Falstaff’s follower and companion Pistol, in Particular his improvised turning of the Spanish or Latin for lips (labras [I. i. 129]), since this is exactly like Carew’s coinages from the Italian. But in this play even the more linguistically sober characters have their momemts of versatility: Mr Ford, for example, turns the name of Mrs Pratt ‘into a nonce word, used as a threat” (Crane): “I'll pratt her” (IV.ii.150).

  65. For discussion of the first performances of the play and their relation to the 1602 Quarto and 1623 Folio texts see Crane, ‘Introduction’, in:Merry Wives (n. 52 above), as well as the date of 1595–96 for Carew's essay 1–3, 17 ‘Textual Analysis’, ibid.,Merry Wives pp. 151–62. For our purposes the most important point is that Falstaff’s performed synonymising (like the Host's) appears in the Quarto version as well as in the Folio version, although in the Quarto version it is truncated, as one might expert from this memorial reconstruction. Socially speaking, Falstaff, of course, straddles the world of the court (an off-stage presence inMerry Wives) and the middle-class world of the play. His performance not only works to ‘spread’ the symbolic capital possessed by an educated social elite to the broader constituency of the theatre audience, it also illustrates the ‘spread’ of this capital from this (increasingly impecunious) elite to the new monied classes, a ‘spread’ which was in fact taking place through the development of the apparatus of formal education (as the translation scence indicates), although not perhaps to the extent suggested in Lawrence Stone, ‘The Educational Revolution in England 1560–1640’,Past and Present 28 (1964), pp. 41–80. White astutely describes the impecunious Falstaff's “rhetoric” as the “assets” he brings to Windsor. White,The Merry Wives (n. 55 above)of Windsor (New York, London etc., 1991), p. 15. For the relevance of the work of Pierre Bourdieu here see n. 28 above.Language and Symbolic Power, edited by John B. Thomson (Oxford, 1991), pp. 43–65.

  66. ‘E. K.’ in:Elizabethan Critical Essays (n. 13 above), edited by G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904; repr. London, 1964), vol. 1 p. 130. Closer to the date of the play is Thomas Nashe's use of the trope in the 1590s, especially in his attacks on Gabriel Harvey, whom he describes as a “galimafrier of all stiles” immediately after accusing him of “supplanting and setting aside the true children of the English, and suborning inkehorne changelings in their steade”. SeeStrange Newes (1592), in:The Works of Thomas Nashe, edited by R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (London, 1904), vol. 1, p. 317. He uses “galimafrie” in another attack on Harvey's language inHave with You to Saffron-Walden (1596), ibid., vol. 3, p. 42, and “galymafries“ in a more general attack on scholars' mechanical imitations of Cicero, inThe Unfortunate Traveller (1594), ibid., vol. 2, p. 251. InKind-Hartes Dreame (1592) Nashe's fellow pamphleteer Henrie Chettle has his eponymous narrator tell how he was “put…downe with…a galliemafrey of latine ends” by a cozening tooth-drawer. Henrie Chettle,Kind-Hartes Dreame, edited by G. B. Harrison (Edinburgh, 1966), p. 32.

  67. Bailey,Images of English (n. 28 above),A cultural history of the language (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 47–48 (from which the quotations are taken).

  68. Westward Ho, II. i. 23–26 in:The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, edited by Fredson Bowers, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1953–61), vol. 2 (1955), pp. 311–404 (p. 331) (u/v, i/j spellings modernised). Like Green, this advocates a return to an imagined ‘pure’ form of the native vernacular, corrupted by the practices of writing pedants (i.e., scholars) whose ‘neat’ (i.e., refined) discourse is to be cut out or censured as “uplandish”—i.e., beyond the pale or outside the boundaries of our English tongue. The radical thrust of ‘uplandish’ may be gauged if we recall Caxton's use of it to refer to rural speakers (discussed above, p. 513). The phrase “Neates tongues” here is a (common) quibble on the senses of ‘neat’ as a noun (ox) and as an adjective (refined).

  69. The Arte (n. 43 above),of English Poesie, edited by G. D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1936; repr. Cambridge, 1970), pp. 252–53. This vice follows, and is closely related to that of “fonde affectation” which is “when we affect new words and phrasesother then the good speakers and writers…or then custome has allowed” (my emphasis) and is exemplified by “schollers” fresh from university who wish to show off with their Latinate coinages (ibid., pp. 251–52). It is such ‘schollers” turned “Play-Poets” that are the object of the critiques by Dekker and Webster as well as by Green. Puttenham was no doubt conscious, like Green, of the etymologically ‘mixed’ character of ‘mingle-mangle’ and hence its appropriateness. The first examples given in theOED of ‘gallimaufry’, from the Frenchgalimafrée, date from the midsixteenth century.

  70. The translator, who is not named by Puttenham, has been identified as John Soowthern inPandora (1584); seeThe Arte (n. 43 above),of English Poesie, edited by G. D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1936; repr. Cambridge, 1970), p. 325. The phrase “extremely narrowly” is from Derek Attridge's excellent discussion of Puttenham's restrictive definition of the variety of English to be used by writers in: Derek Attridge,Peculiar Language. Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca, New York, 1988), p. 34. See too the italicised phrase in the quotation from Puttenham in n. 70 above and the quotation in n. 75 below. The term ‘mingle-mangle’ will be used again in what may well be a direct response to John Green by William L’Isle, who shares Carew's enthusiasm for the diversity of English forms, as Bailey points out, and who (in about 1623) writes: “Tell me not it is a mingle-mangle; for so are all” (i.e., all national vernaculars). See Bailey,Images of English (n. 28 above).A cultural history of the language, (Cambridge, 1992), p. 45 (from which the quotation is taken).

  71. See Helgerson,Forms of Nationhood (n. 4 above),The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago and London, 1992), p. 334. The quotation comes in a note to a brilliant chapter entitled ‘Staging Exclusion’ in which Helgerson associates Falstaff with an improvisatory and inclusivetheatrical practice, the exclusion of which is staged by the banishment of Falstaff inHenry 4, part 2. Unfortunately, he does not take into consideration the implications for inclusion/exclusion of linguistic practice in the theatre; more importantly perhaps he makes no mention at all of the Falstaff ofMerry Wives. His argument contributes to a widespread trend to regard the plays of Shakespeare as tending towards a conservative and elitist ideological and political position. My work in a small way seeks to resist this trend.

  72. The comparison between actor and translator is made by a twentieth-century translator quoted in Lawrence Venuti,The Translator's Invisibility. A History of Translation (London and New York, 1995), p. 7. The relation between translation and threatre, especially in early modern England, is the subject of a forthcoming study provisionally entitled, ‘Shakespeare's Englishes: translation, theatre and the national vernacular in early modern England.”

  73. The word “gallimaufrie” is actually used of the language of a Welsh knight by Thomas Dekker inPatient Grisil (published 1603), II.i.96. See Dekker,Works, ed. Bowers (n. 69 above), vol. 1 (1953), pp. 207–98 (p. 228). It is also used of the mixed variety of English spoken in Ireland by Richard Stanyhurst, in an undated passage quoted in Blank,Broken English (n. 26 above), p. 194.

  74. To close on a biographical note, it is worth mentioning that all three writers had their roots in geographic (and linguistic) regions well beyond the pale of Puttenham’s prescribed boundary for the variety of English to be used by writers: “the usual speach of the Court, and that of London and the Shires lying about London within lx. myles…” (The Arte [n. 43 above], p. 145). While Richard Carew was born into the principal family of Cornwall and Richard Stanyhurst into a distinguished Anglo-Irish family in Dublin, William Shakespeare was the son of an ambitious glover on Stratford, lying “in the rain-shadow of Welsh hills.” See Park Honan,Shakespeare. A Life (Oxford, 1998), p. 3.

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  1. Englisches Seminar, Universität Zürich, Plattenstraße 47, CH-8032, Zürich, Schweiz/Switzerland

    Margaret Tudeau-Clayton

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My thanks to colleagues Andreas Fischer and Richard Waswo as well as the journal's anonymous reporters for their helpfully precise comments on this paper, the first version of which was given at the ISCT conference at the University of Tübingen, July 29, 1998.

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Tudeau-Clayton, M. Richard Carew, William Shakespeare, and the politics of translating Virgil in early modern England and Scotland. Int class trad 5, 507–527 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02701799

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