Abstract
Tyler’s image of the female translator as hostess seeks to trope the translation process as a ‘passive, nonthreatening activity appropriate to women’, in order to ensure her work’s acceptability.2 However, studies of women translators have shown that it could be a form of ‘intellectual self-assertion’.3 Not only was translation an important part of the humanistic education programme, but the very idea of original as opposed to secondary writing had little weight in this period.4 For women, moreover, translation provided a way of evading the polarities circumscribing female authorship: public versus private, speech versus silence. Yet Tyler’s defence of translation as a woman’s activity does not entirely escape these terms. Her ‘giuing entertainment to a straunger’, with its possible sexual connotations, suggests the potential of translation to empower the woman writer. Translation enables the writer to engage with the text both through her choice and her treatment of it. Ostensibly a mediation or ventriloquizing of another (male) voice, translation can enable intervention and resistance.5
The inuention … is wholy another mans, my part none therin but the translation, as it were onely in giuing entertainment to a straunger.
Margaret Tyler1
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Notes
Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Countess of Pembroke and the Art of Dying’ in Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 207–26 (223).
Adaptation is, of course, as much a form of translation as literal rendition. See Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, eds Theories of Translation: an Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 17.
See David H. Greene, ‘Lady Lumley and Greek Tragedy’, Classical Journal xxxvi (1941), 537–47;
Frank D. Crane, ‘Euripides, Erasmus, and Lady Lumley’, Classical Journal xxxix (1941), 223–8; Krontiris, ‘Mary Herbert: Englishing a Purified Cleopatra’ in Oppositional Voices, pp. 64–78 (68);
Gary Waller, Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke: a Critical Study of her Writings and Literary Milieu (Salzburg: Salzburg University Press, 1979), pp. 105–6.
Lamb (1990), p. 141; see also Beilin (1987), chapter 6. For an account of the performance of early modern women’s plays and the implications of theatrical spaces, see Alison Findlay, Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
B.L. MS. Reg. 15. A. ix. See Harold H. Child, ed. Iphigenia at Aulis Translated By Lady Lumley (Oxford, 1909), pp. v–vi. Quotations from the text will be cited by line number from Child’s edition. For recent accounts of Lumley’s play setting it in its cultural and biographical contexts, see Lorraine Helms, pp. 48–75, and Purkiss’s introduction to her edition of the text in Three Tragedies (1998). See also
Gweno Williams, ‘Translating the Text, Performing the Self’ in Alison Findlay and Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, with Gweno Williams, eds Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700 (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2000), pp. 15–41.
See Bruce R. Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage 1500–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), pp. 203–5.
Helms, p. 49, using Lynda E. Boose, ‘The Father’s House and the Daughter in It’ in Daughers and Fathers, ed. Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 19–74. For a reading of Euripides’ Iphigenia in the context of other Greek myths and the connections between violence against women and female language, see Joplin, pp. 38–43. For marriage as martyrdom, see Purkiss (1998), pp. xxviiiff.
See Greene, pp. 540–1. Like Erasmus, she also gives a speech by Clytemnestra to Iphigenia. See Lumley, ll. 921–4; Arthur S. Way ed. and trans., Euripides (London: William Heinemann and NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920), i. ll. 1123–6; Erasmus, trans. Hecuba, et Iphigenia in Aulide, Euripidis tragoediae (1544), f. 66–66v. In quoting the original, I shall use Way’s translation where it is sufficiently literal (citing by line number), and distinguish my own translations by putting them in italics. All translations of Erasmus are mine.
‘De vous mesme / Perdre’ (531–2), ‘à nous-mesmes deüe’ (587) and ‘mon espous est moymesme’ (588) respectively. Robert Garnier: Two Tragedies: Hippolyte and Marc Antoine, ed. Christine M. Hill and Mary G. Morrison (London: Athlone Press, 1975).
See Geoffrey Bullough, ed. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), v. 231; Witherspoon, p. 86.
For Elizabeth’s deployment of this gender-neutral term, see Leah S. Marcus, ‘Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines, Elizabeth I and the Political Uses of Androgyny’ in Rose (1986), pp. 135–53. Philip Sidney calls Elizabeth ‘prince’. The Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and A.J. van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 55, 57.
See Sir Fulke Greville’s Life of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Nowell Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), pp. 155–7.
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© 2011 Jocelyn Catty
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Catty, J. (2011). Translation and Intervention: Jane Lumley and Mary Sidney. In: Writing Rape, Writing Women in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230309074_7
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