Abstract
Elizabeth Cary’s literary career was bracketed by translations. Her first known work, The Mirror of the Worlde (1598), was written in early adolescence and is a translation from the French of regional descriptions by Abraham Ortelius that he wrote to accompany maps in a world atlas. Cary’s last published text, which reportedly she thought of as her finest endeavour, is The Reply of the Most Illustrious Cardinall of Perron (1630), a translation that Cary used to gain entry into political and religious debates that were of particular importance to her as a convert to Catholicism. At present her most famous work, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), a Senecan drama that adapts the writings of Josephus, is, I suggest, rooted within and indebted to early modern translation practices, practices that contributed significantly to the material conditions of women’s writing during this period.1 Over the last two decades, critical attention has turned to translations produced by early modern women, quickly shifting from an initial view that the practice limited women to subservient literary roles to analyses of the complex set of authorial choices and negotiations that go into producing even the most ‘faithful’ translations.2 In my own work on the subject, I have argued that translation, which even now is often viewed as an uninspired or menial activity, gave women entry into the rich literary culture of the Renaissance.
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Notes
The debate on the value of faithful translations surfaces frequently. See, for example, Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes toward Learned Women in the Renaissance’, Silent But for the Word, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985), pp. 107–25.
Jonathan Goldberg, ‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Literal Translation’, in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, eds Margreta De Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 321–36.
Danielle Clarke, ‘The Politics of Translation and Gender In the Countess of Pembroke’s Antonie’, Translation and Literature, 6 (1997): 149–66.
Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 20.
Lamb, ‘The Cooke Sisters’, pp. 124–5. Micheline White. ‘Renaissance Englishwomen and Religious Translations: The Case of Anne Lock’s Of the Markes of the children of God (1590)’, ELR 29.2 (1999): 337.
Brenda M. Hosington, ‘Tudor Englishwomen’s Translations of Continental Protestant Texts: The Interplay of Ideology and Historical Context’, in Tudor Translation, ed. Fred Schurink (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 122.
For an excellent discussion of women’s religious writings, see Kimberly Anne Coles, Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), in which she argues for the singular importance of women’s religious writings in the sixteenth century and for the ‘shaping force’ exerted by religious women that led to the English Reformation, pp. 2–5.
Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (New York: Allen Lane, 1993), pp. 4–11.
Karen Nelson, ‘“To Informe thee aright”: Translating DuPerron for English Religious Debates’, in The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680, ed. Heather Wolfe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 147.
Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), p. 43.
John Florio, The Epistle Dedicatorie to his translation of Montaigne’s Essays, from The essays of Michael, Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910).
Lori Chamberlain discusses the implications of this long-lasting phrase and its tag ‘Les belles infidèles’, noting that it establishes an ‘implicit contract between translation (as woman) and original (as husband, father, or author)’ as well as upholding the double standard of female and male behaviour, in ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, in Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 58.
Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 78–9.
Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 32, 20.
This discussion of collaboration is drawn from my article, co-authored with Belén Bistué, ‘Translation as Collaborative Authorship: Margaret Tyler’s The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood’, Comparative Literature Studies, 44, 3 (2007): 298–323.
Quotation from The Collected Works of Mary Sidney Herbert Countess of Pembroke, vol. 1, eds Margaret P. Hannay, Noel J. Kinnamon, and Michael G. Brennan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
In using the phrase ‘third term’, I am borrowing from Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992).
Patricia Demers, ‘“Nether bitterly nor brabingly”: Lady Anne Cooke Bacon’s Translation of Bishop Jewel’s Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae’, in English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625, ed. Micheline White (Burlington, CT: Ashgate, 2011), p. 206.
Michael Drayton, ‘To my Honoured Mistress, Mrs. Elizabeth Tanfield’, dedication for England’s Heroicall Epistles (London: N. Ling, 1597).
Marta Straznicky, ‘“Profane Stoical Paradoxes”: The Tragedie of Mariam and Sidneian Closet Drama’, in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700, vol. 6 Elizabeth Cary, ed. Karen Raber (Burlington, CT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 142, 145.
Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 31.
Gunilla Florby, ‘Bridging Gaps: Cary as Translator and Historian’, in Writing and Religion in England, 1558–1689: Studies in Community-Making and Cultural Memory, eds Roger D. Sell and Anthony W. Johnson (Burlington, CT: Ashgate, 2009), p. 226.
From The Essays of Dryden, vol. 1, p. 237. Translation was also understood more symbolically as physical and spiritual transformation and as metaphor. In a conversation with Derrida, Eugene Vance looks at the etymology of translation and other similar terms and suggests that today ‘we are dealing with a term that has become greatly impoverished’, in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation: Texts and Discussion with Jacques Derrida, ed. Christie V. McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), pp. 136–7.
For discussions of how The Tragedy of Mariam is part of 12 plays (two of which are translations) written in the neo-Senecan tradition, see Laurie J. Shannon, ‘The Tragedy of Mariam: Cary’s Critique of the Terms of Founding Social Discourses’, in Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700, vol. 6 Elizabeth Cary, ed. Karen Raber (Burlington, CT: Ashgate 2009), p. 358 and Straznicky, ‘Profane Stoical Paradoxes’, p. 148.
Sandra K. Fischer, ‘Elizabeth Cary and Tyranny’, in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1985), p. 228.
Laurie J. Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 73.
Naomi J. Miller, ‘Domestic Politics in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam’, Studies in English Literature, 37 (1997): 355, 360.
Margaret W. Ferguson, ‘Running On with Almost Public Voice: The Case of “E.C.”’, in Tradition and the Talents of Women, ed. Florence Howe (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 49, 59.
Alison Shell, ‘Elizabeth Cary’s Historical Conscience: The Tragedy of Mariam and Thomas Lodge’s Josephus’, in The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680, ed. Heather Wolfe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 53.
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© 2014 Deborah Uman
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Uman, D. (2014). Translation and Community in the Work of Elizabeth Cary. In: Pender, P., Smith, R. (eds) Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342430_5
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