EN356 The Classical Tradition in Translation: The Renaissance.

Week-by-Week Readings

Useful coursebooks would be:

George Chapman (tr.), Jan Parker (intr.), The Iliad and The Odyssey (Classics of World Literature), (Wordsworth
Classics; Ware, 2002; Kindle Edition, 2012).

Sarah Annes Brown and Andrew Taylor (eds), Ovid in English, 1480-1625. Part One: Metamorphoses (MHRA Tudor
and Stuart Translations, vol. 4 (i); London, 2013).

Jessica Winston and James Ker (eds), Elizabethan Seneca: Three Tragedies (MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations,
vol. 8; London, 2012).

I have asked the library to order some of these as soon as possible, but feel free to buy them if you can afford it.

You may also like to consider getting your hands on:

Neil Rhodes (ed.), with Gordon Kendal and Louise Wilson, English Renaissance Translation Theory (MHRA Tudor and
Stuart Translations, vol. 9; London, 2013).

Weekly Reading: Each week there will be short additional readings to help you understand the primary
material in its context. It is my expectation that you will come to class having read at least one, and usually
two of them. Consistent failure to do so will prejudice your ability to answer the assessment questions and
will incur my (just) wrath.

Square bracketed items are not compulsory but just there as further suggestions.

WUL: ebook in or journal available through Warwick University Library

CoEx: Course extract on the course extracts page

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/library/electronicresources/extracts/en/.

Week 1. Homer. George Chapman’s translation of the Odyssey, especially books 10-11 (1616).

Valerie Worth-Stylianou, ‘Translatio and translation in the Renaissance: from Italy to France’ in The Cambridge
History of Literary Criticism Vol. 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton, pp. 127-35. (Ebook via WUL)

Karl P. Wentersdorf, ‘The Rout of Monsters in Comus’, Milton Quarterly 12:4 (Dec, 1974), pp. 119-125. (CoEx)

[Zajko, V., ‘What Difference Was Made?’: Feminist Models of Reception, in A Companion to Classical Receptions, eds
L. Hardwick and C. Stray (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, 2008), Ch. 15, pp. 195-206. (Ebook via WUL)]

Week 2. Vergil. We shall look at four sixteenth-century translations of the fourth book of the Aeneid: Gavin Douglas
(1513, printed 1553), Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1554), Thomas Phaer (1558), and Richard Stanyhurst (1582).

Gordon Braden, ‘Epic Kinds’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 2: 1550-1660, ed. G.
Braden, R. Cummings and S. Gillespie (Oxford, 2010), pp. 167-193. I will provide a copy of this.

ODNB articles for the translators above. (WUL)

Week 3. Ovid 1. The class will study extracts from Renaissance translations of the Metamorphoses. It will be based
on Sarah Annes Brown and Andrew Taylor (eds), Ovid in English, 1480-1625. Part One: Metamorphoses (MHRA
Tudor and Stuart Translations, vol. 4 (i); London, 2013). Read as much as you can, but especially the introduction
and the paired treatments of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus and Jupiter and Callisto.

Raphael Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses 1567-1632 (Oxford University Press, 2001), chapters
1 (‘Golding’s Englished Metamorphoses’) and 4 (‘Sandys’ Virginian Ovid’). (Ebook via WUL) You may want to read
one or the other for this class and catch up later.

Week 4. Euripides. Euripides’ play Phoenissae was translated into Latin in 1541, from the Latin into Italian in 1549,
and then from Italian into English as Jocasta by George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh. This English text was
acted in London in 1566 and printed in 1572. We shall study this collaborative version available on EEBO and on the
module filespace (text starts at image 169), edited by John D. Cunliffe in Early English Classical Tragedies (Oxford
UP, 1912).

Sarah Dewar-Watson, ‘Jocasta: A Tragedy Written in Greek’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 17:1
(March 2010), pp. 22-32. (Ejournal via WUL)

Robert S. Miola, ‘Euripides at Gray's Inn: Gascoigne and Kinwelmersh's Jocasta’ in The Female Tragic Hero in English
Renaissance Drama, ed. Naomi Conn Liebler (Palgrave, 2002), pp. 33-50. (CoEx)

ODNB entry for Francis Kinwelmersh.

Week 5. Ovid 2. The Heroides and female complaint. (Tutor: Katherine Smith)

Anne Killigrew, Penelope to Ulysses: in Anne Killigrew, Aldershot : Ashgate, 2003, pp. 81-2. (CoEx)

Anne Wharton, Penelope to Ulysses: in The surviving works of Anne Wharton edited, with textual notes and
commentary by G. Greer and S. Hastings, Stump Cross : Stump Cross Books, 1997, pp. 132-7. (CoEx)

Aphra Behn and John Cooper (in Dryden’s compilation Ovid’s Epistles), on EEBO John Dryden, Ovid's epistles
translated by several hands (1681), page 97, 109.

All texts are also available on EEBO.

Wiseman, Susan, ‘Rome’s wanton Ovid: reading and writing Ovid’s Heroides 1590–1712’, Renaissance Studies, 22
(2008), 295-306. (E-journal via WUL)

Andreadis, Harriette, ‘The early modern afterlife of Ovidian erotics: Dryden’s Heroides’, Renaissance Studies, 22
(2008), 401-413. (E-journal via WUL)

[Wiseman, Susan, ‘Perfectly Ovidian’? Dryden’s Epistles, Behn’s ‘Oenone’, Yarico’s Island’, Renaissance Studies, 22
(2008), 417-433. (E-journal via WUL)]

[Heavey, Katherine, ‘Pedantry, Paraphrase or Potty Humour? The Art of Translating Ovid’s Heroines in 1680’,
Studies in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature, 2 (2009) and online: http://appositions.blogspot.com/2009/]

Week 6. Reading week. No class.

Week 7. Horace. Epigrams. (Tutor: Thomasin Bailey)

Read the dedication and epistles (with special attention to the second Maecenas epistle)
Horace his arte of poetrie, pistles, and satyrs Englished and to the Earle of Ormounte by Tho. Drant addressed.
Imprinted at London : In Fletestrete, nere to S. Dunstones Churche, by Thomas Marshe, 1567. EEBO
http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99839960

Jonson, Ben. "Forest 3 and 4, Underwood 13", Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985), pp. 285 - 289 and 327 - 331. (CoEx)

Wyatt, Sir Thomas. "Epistolary Satires CXLIX, CL", Wyatt: The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (London: Penguin
Books, 1997), pp. 186 – 189.(CoEx)

Burrow, Colin. "Horace at home and abroad: Wyatt and Sixteenth-century Horatianism", Horace Made New:
Horatian influences on British writing from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, eds Charles Martindale and
David Hopkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 27- 49. (CoEx)

[Martindale, Joanna. "The best master of virtue and wisdom: the Horace of Ben Jonson and his heirs", Horace Made
New, eds Charles Martindale and David Hopkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 50 – 85.]

Week 8. Seneca the Younger. In this session, we shall study Jasper Heywood’s translation of Seneca the Younger’s
play Thyestes (1560). Jessica Winston and James Ker (eds), Elizabethan Seneca: Three Tragedies (MHRA Tudor and
Stuart Translations, vol. 8; London, 2012).

Kraye, Jill. ‘Stoicism and Epicureanism: Philosophical Revival and Literary Repercussions’ in The Cambridge History of
Literary Criticism Vol. 3: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton, pp. 458-65. (Ebook via WUL).

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation.” Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1951. I will provide
a copy of this.

Braund, S. M. “Haunted by Horror: The Ghost of Seneca in Renaissance Drama.” in E. Buckley and M. T. Dinter (eds),
A Companion to the Neronian Age (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 425-443. (Ebook via WUL).

[See also Joost Daadler’s introduction to the New Mermaid edition, which you can find on the module filespace.]

Week 9. Lucan. This class will study the first book of Lucan’s poem on the Roman Civil War in three verse
translations on module filespace: Christopher Marlowe (by 1593), Thomas May (1626) and Nicholas Rowe (1718).

Philip Hardy, ‘Lucan in the English Renaissance’ in Brill's Companion to Lucan, ed. Paolo Asso (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp.
491-506. Ebook via WUL.

Susanna Braund, ‘Violence in Translation’ in Brill's Companion to Lucan, ed. Paolo Asso (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 507 –
524. Ebook via WUL.

Week 10. Plutarch. We shall study extracts from Plutarch's biographies of Marcus Brutus, Julius Caesar and Mark
Antony, in the influential translation of Thomas North (1579). Some extracts will be compared with the relevant
passages in Shakespeare’s plays.

Stuart Gillespie, “Two-Way Reception: Shakespeare's Influence on Plutarch”, in English Translation and Classical
Reception: Towards a New Literary History, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2011, pp. 47-59. (Ebook via WUL)
Lara Dodds, “Reading and Writing in Sociable Letters; Or, How Margaret Cavendish Read Her Plutarch”, English
Literary Renaissance, 41 (2011): 189–218. Ejournal via WUL.

Further Reading
The following is a list of suggested, not required, reading.

Agorni, M., ‘The Voice of the ‘Translatress’: From Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Carter’, The Yearbook of English Studies,
28 (1998): 181-195.

Braden, Gordon, R. Cummings and S. Gillespie (eds), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 2:
1550-1660 (Oxford, 2010).

Ellis, Roger (ed.), The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the Middle Ages. Cambridge,
1989.

Ellis, Roger (ed.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 1: to 1550 (Oxford, 2008).

Gillespie, Stuart, English Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary History, Wiley-Blackwell,
Oxford, 2011.

Greene, Thomas M. , The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, New Haven, 1982.

Hankins, James, ‘Translation Practice in the Renaissance: The Case of Leonardo Bruni’, in Études classiques, fasc.
IV.Rencontres scientifiques de Luxembourg 1992. 3. Actes du colloque «Methodologie de la traduction: de l’antiquité
à la Renaissance», ed. C. M. Ternes and M. Mund-Dopchie (Luxembourg, 1994), pp. 154-75.

Kelly, Louis, The True Interpreter: A History of Translation Theory and Practice in the West. Oxford, 1979.

Krontiris, T., Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance,
(London: Routledge, 1992)

Matthiessen, F. O., Translation: An Elizabethan Art. Cambridge, MA, 1931. Available to read online here:
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015011682690;view=1up;seq=4

Norton, Glyn P., ‘Humanist Foundations of Translation Theory (1400-1450): A Study in the Dynamics of
Word.’ Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 8, no. 2, 1981, pp. 173-203. Available to download here:
http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/crcl/article/view/2550/1945

Norton, Glyn P., The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance France and their Humanist Antecedents.
Geneva, 1984.

Rener, F. M., Interpretatio: Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler. Amsterdam, 1989. Limited access
available
here: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=EjQkUpGazFUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=
0#v=onepage&q&f=false

Rhodes, Neil (ed.) with Gordon Kendal and Louise Wilson, English Renaissance Translation Theory (MHRA Tudor and
Stuart Translations, vol. 9; London, 2013).

Schwarz, Werner, Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation. Cambridge, 1955.

Simon, S., Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission, (Oxford: Routledge, 1996)

Smith, G. Gregory (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, (2 vols; Oxford, 1904). Of especial interest are the extracts from
Thomas Campion's Observations in the Art of English Poesie and Samuel Daniel's A Defence of Ryme, vol. II, pp. 327-
55 and 356-84 respectively. https://archive.org/details/elizabethancriti029989mbp

Steiner, T.R., English Translation Theory 1650-1800 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975).

Uman, D., Women as Translators in Early Modern England (Maryland: University of Delaware Press, 2012)

Von Flotow, L., Translation and Gender: Translating in the ‘Era of Feminism’ (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing,
1997).