Abstract
My title ‘pure and common Greek’ comes from the last of a series of polemics fired off by the militant Catholic, John Rastell, against John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, printed in Antwerp in 1566. On the face of it the phrase is nicely paradoxical, like the mechanicals’ ‘tedious brief scene … of very tragical mirth’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After all, few attainments carry a greater air of elitism about them than the ability to read classical Greek. There is certainly nothing ‘common’ about it. Virginia Woolf found the remoteness of the Greeks reassuring: ‘Fate … has preserved them from vulgarity’, she declared in The Common Reader.1 More recently, the exclusiveness of Greek helps to account for the extraordinary success of Donna Tartt’s novel, The Secret History, where the reader enjoys the sense of special access to the private and privileged world of the Hampden Greek class while remaining, like its narrator, an outsider. But the aura of elitism, social as well as academic, that surrounds the study of classical Greek in the English-speaking world is not something that was present from the start. In the early sixteenth century, when Greek learning was first established in England, its role was far from being purely ornamental. Indeed, like all novelties, it was viewed with suspicion by many.
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Notes
Virginia Woolf, ‘On not knowing Greek’, in The Common Reader (London, 1925), p. 39.
On the ‘Great Controversy’ see F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, 1967), pp. 106–9;
Gary W. Jenkins, John Jewel and the English National Church (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 114–31.
P. S. Allen, Erasmus: Lectures and Wayfaring Sketches (Oxford, 1934), p. 153. On Erasmus’s contribution to Greek studies and the impact of Lucian see Goldhill, pp. 14–107.
Desiderius Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 142 to 297 (Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 2), translated by R. A. B. Mynors and D. R Thomson (Toronto, 1975), p. 112. See also The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 993 to 1121 (CWE, vol. 7), translated by R. A. B. Mynors and annotated by Peter G. Bietenholtz (Toronto, 1987), p. 19; The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 1252 to 1355 (CWE, vol. 9), translated by R. A. B. Mynors and annotated by James M. Estes (Toronto, 1989), p. 319.
Thomas More, The Complete Works of Thomas More, Vol. 3, Pt. 1: Translations of Lucían, edited by Craig R. Thompson (New Haven, CT, 1974), pp. xvii–lxxii;
for a comprehensive bibliography of editions of Lucian printed before 1600 see Thompson, ‘Lucian and Lucianism in the English Renaissance: An Introductory Study’, unpublished PhD Diss., Princeton, 1937.
On Lucian’s literary influence in the Renaissance see Christopher Robinson, Lucian and His Influence in Europe (London, 1979)
and Douglas Duncan, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (Cambridge, 1979).
On Erasmus in England see Léon E. Halkin, Erasmus: A Critical Biography, translated by John Tonkin (Oxford, 1993), pp. 30–45 (Chapter 3, ‘England: A Second Homeland’).
Thomas More’s Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts edited by Terence Cave (Manchester, 2008), pp. 16, 90, 94;
also Brenda M. Hosington, ‘“Compluria opuscula Longe festivissima”: Translations of Lucian in Renaissance England’, in Syntagmatia: Essays on Neo-Latin Literature in Honour of Monique Mund-Dopchie and Gilbert Tournoy, edited by Dirk Sacré and Jan Papy (Leuven, 2009), pp. 187–205.
T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s ‘Small Latine and Lesse Greeke’, 2 vols. (Urbana, IL, 1944), I, 215.
See Necromantia. A dialog of the poete Lucyan, translated by John Rastell (Southwark, [1530?]); A Dialogue betwene Lucian and Diogenes, translated by Sir Thomas Elyot ([London], [1532?]); on ‘Slander’ see David Marsh, ‘Lucian’s Slander in the Early Renaissance: The Court as locus invidiae’, Allegorica, 21 (2000), 62–70. (Elyot did not attend either university, but probably learned his Greek from Linacre.)
The Correspondence of Sir Thomas More, edited by Elizabeth Frances Rogers (Princeton, NJ, 1947), p. 115;
translation based on St Thomas More: Selected Letters, edited by Rogers (New Haven, CT, 1961), p. 98.
Arthur Tilley, ‘Greek Studies in England in the Early Sixteenth Century’, English Historical Review, 53 (1938), 221–39, 438–56 (p. 233).
Richard Croke, Orationes Richardi Croci duae (Paris, 1520), sigs C4r–C6v; the lectures are summarized and paraphrased by James Bass Mullinger, The University of Cambridge: From the Earliest Times to the Royal Injunctions of 1535 (Cambridge, 1873), pp. 529–57 (pp. 531, 533).
Henry Bynneman’s edition of 1581, which included ‘To Demonicus’ and ‘To Nicocles’, two dialogues by Lucian, and the pseudo-Plutarchan ‘On Bringing Up Children’ was reprinted in 1585, 1589, 1592 and 1599; see Kirsty Milne, ‘The Forgotten Books of Elizabethan England’, Literature Compass, 4 (2007), 677–87. It should be noted that a fuller treatment of this subject would need to address the reception of Plutarch in early Tudor England; on this see Plutarch: Essays and Lives, edited by Fred Schurink (forthcoming).
Meric Casaubon, De quatuor linguis (London, 1650), p. 221. On Greek-English affinity see John F. Eros, ‘A 17th-century Demonstration of Language Relationship: Meric Casaubon on English and Greek’, Historiographia Linguistica, 3 (1976), 1–13;
on Budé and Greek-French affinity see John Considine, Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 34, 61;
also J. B. Trapp, ‘The Conformity of Greek and the Vernacular: The History of a Renaissance Theory of Languages’, in Classical Influences on European Culture, A. D. 500–1500, edited by R. R. Bolgar (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 239–44. Sigismund Gelen, Lexicum Symphonum (Basle, 1537) provides wordlists to show the ‘concordia consonantiaque’ between Greek, Latin, German and Slavic.
William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, edited by David Danieli (London, 2000), p. 19. Danieli suggests that the text of Isocrates translated by Tyndale was the Panegyricus; see William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, CT, 1994), p. 85. However, Nicocles stresses the duties of subjects, which might have influenced Obedience (sub-title: ‘how Christian rulers ought to govern’).
Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti, and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge, 2004), p. 121, citing the Annotations on Romans (the note was added in 1535).
John Cheke, The Gospel according to Saint Matthew, edited by James Goodwin (London, 1843), pp. 29, 31, 37. Cheke held the chair from 1540 to 1551 and made the translation of Matthew in the early 1550s.
Cheke, Matthew, pp. 46, 73; Douglas Gray, ‘A Note on Sixteenth-Century Purism’, in Words: For Robert Burchfield’s Sixty-Fifth Birthday, edited by E. G. Stanley and T. F. Hoad (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 103–19 (p. 115).
Sir Thomas Smith, Literary and Linguistic Works (1542, 1549, 1568), edited by Bror Danielsson, Vol. 3: De recta et emendata linguae Anglicae scriptione, Dialogus (Stockholm, 1983), p. 39.
On Smith see Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 143–81.
The ‘Anonymous Life’ of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, edited by Alan G. R. Smith (Lewiston, ME, 1990), p. 44.
Based on figures calculated in Hosington, Brenda et al., Renaissance Cultural Crossroads, online at: http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/rcc [accessed 22 August 2014].
The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, edited by J. A. Giles (London, 1864–5), 1:1, 26 (letter of 1542).
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Rhodes, N. (2015). Pure and Common Greek in Early Tudor England. 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_4
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