Abstract
In 1582, Richard Stanihurst, a Dublin recusant living in exile in the Spanish Netherlands, published The First Four Books of Virgil’s Aeneis translated into English Heroical Verse in Leiden. Nobody, and certainly not Virgil, had sung of ‘arms and the man’ quite like this before:
Now manhood and garbroyls I chaunt, and martial horror.
I blaze thee captayne first from Troy cittye repairing,
Lyke wandring pilgrim too famosed Italie trudging,
And coast of Lauyn: soust wyth tempestuus hurlwynd
On land and sailing, bi Gods predestinat order.1
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Notes
Richard Stanihurst, Aeneis, edited by Dirk van der Haar (Amsterdam, 1933), 1.5–9. Subsequent verse references are in-text.
Virgil, Eclogues, Georgia, Aeneid I–VI, translated by H. Rushton Fairclough, revised by G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 1.1–4. Subsequent verse references in-text.
Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, edited by Laurence V. Ryan (Ithaca, NY, 1967), p. 145.
For this episode in literary history more generally see Richard Helgeson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, IL, 1992), pp. 25–40,
and Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: English Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, 1974).
The Aeneid of Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne: A Critical Edition Introducing Renaissance Metrical Typography, edited by Stephen Lally (New York, 1987). Subsequent verse references are in-text.
He exhibited the same prickliness when he folded some of Campion’s unfinished Two Bokes of the Histories of Ireland into his own ‘Irish Chronicle’, published as the sixth part of Ralph Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (London, 1586): at first, ‘I would neyther openly borrow, nor priuily imbezell, ought … taking it not to stande with good maners, lyke a flittering flye, to fall in an other man his dishe’, in Richard Stanihurst, Holinshed’s Irish Chronicle [1577], edited by Liam Miller and Eileen E. Power (Dublin, 1979), p. 8.
The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, Vol. 10: The Prose Works, edited by R. Gottfried (Baltimore, MD, 1949), p. 16.
The ‘Old English’ were the descendants of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman colonists; their heartland was ‘the Pale’, comprised of Dublin and surrounding counties. While culturally distinct from the Gaelic Irish, their traditional Catholicism set them on a collision course with the ‘New English’ who arrived in the vanguard of the Elizabethan conquest. See ‘Hiberniores Ipsis Hibernis’, in Studies in Irish History Presented to R. Dudley Edwards, edited by Art Cosgrove and Donai McCartney (Dublin, 1979), pp. 1–14.
Edmund Campion, Two Bokes of the Histories of Ireland, edited by Alphonsus F. Vossen (Assen, 1963), p. 6.
Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts, 1575–88, edited by J. S. Brewer and William Bullen (London, 1868), pp. 485–9;
see also Colm Lennon, Richard Stanihurst the Dubliner, 1547–1618 (Dublin, 1981), pp. 35–44
and Vincent P. Carey, Surviving the Tudors: The ‘Wizard’ Earl of Kildare and English Rule in Ireland, 1537–1586 (Dublin, 2002), pp. 190–1.
Harry R. Hoppe, ‘The Period of Richard Stanihurst’s Chaplaincy to the Archduke Albert’, Biographical Studies, 3 (1955), 115–17.
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, edited by G. D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 273–4.
Colin Burrow, ‘Virgil in English Translation’, in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, edited by Charles Martindale (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 21–37 (pp. 23–4).
Phaer’s marginality is principally geographical: he moved from the Inns of Court to work as a solicitor in the Welsh Marches. There is little evidence that his Catholicism ever amounted to defiant recusancy. Interestingly, those who savaged Stanihurst’s Aeneis heaped praise on Phaer. See Rick Bowers, ‘Thomas Phaer and the Assertion of Tudor English’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 21 (1997), 25–40;
see, e.g., Thomas Nashe, ‘Preface to Greene’s Menaphon, 1589’, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, edited by G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols (Oxford, 1904), Vol. I, pp. 307–20 (pp. 315–16).
On the anglocentric bias of literary-critical forays into early-modern Ireland, see Patricia Palmer, ‘Missing Bodies, Absent Bards: Spenser, Shakespeare and a Crisis in Criticism’, English Literary Renaissance, 36 (2006), 376–95.
Richard Stanihurst, Great Deeds of Ireland: De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis, edited and translated by John Barry and Hiram Morgan (Cork, 2013), p. 81.
See Andrew Zurcher, ‘Spenser’s Studied Archaism: The Case of “Mote”’, Spenser Studies, 21 (2006), 231–40.
Spenser’s archaisms are, moreover, of a piece with his embrace of contemporary Italian and French influences, influences which Stanihurst shows no inclination to emulate. As David Scott Wilson-Okamura demonstrates, ‘Spenser’s archaisms … show him once more to have been a sailor in international waters’, in Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge, 2013), p. 59.
Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Antwerp, 1605), sig. ††3r: ‘restitue[re] patriae patria verba suae … linguae prima elementa suae’. On Verstegan’s co-option of Anglo-Saxon to counter-reformation polemic and on his relationship with Stanihurst, see Donna B. Hamilton, ‘Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605): A Catholic Antiquarian Replies to John Fox, Thomas Cooper, and Jean Bodin’, Prose Studies, 22 (1999), 1–38.
For Thomas Nashe’s assault on Stanihurst’s ‘strange language’, see Nashe, ‘Preface to Greene’s Menaphon, 1589’ in Elizabethan Critical Essays, p. 316. For his attack on his ‘foule lumbring boystrous wallowing measures’, see Nashe, ‘(from Strange Newes, or Foure Letters Confuted), 1592’ in Elizabethan Critical Essays, Vol. II pp. 239–44 (p. 240). On epic’s imperial bias, see David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ, 1993), pp. 8–9, 41.
‘Nadsat’ of course is from Anthony Burgess, Clockwork Orange (London, 1962). As ever, Phaer’s directness is instructive: ‘after this for your deserts be sure I shall you pay’ (1.126).
Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Language as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London, 2004), p. 155.
The phrase is Thomas S. Omond’s, in English Metrists (Tunbridge Wells, 1903), p. 16.
Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland, edited by Andrew Carpenter (Cork, 2003), p. 70.
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Palmer, P. (2015). Richard Stanihurst’s Aeneis and the English of Ireland. In: Demetriou, T., Tomlinson, R. (eds) The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401496_7
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