Margaret Tudeau-Clayton

Supplementing theAeneid in early modern England: Translation, imitation, commentary

Analysing the translators’ representations of their ‘object’—purpose and text—as well as their translation practices this paper undertakes to examine the only two complete translations of Virgil’sAeneid available in sixteeth-century England—by Gavin Douglas, and by Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne—focusing especially on their intertextual relations to mediations of the source text in circulation. Particular attention is paid to the inclusion by both Douglas and Twyne of a translation of theSupplementum, a thirteenth book in imitation of Virgil by Maffeo Vegio, whose importance for sixteenth-century English readers’ reception of theAeneid is underscored. More specifically, both translators point up the structure of moral/spiritual significance which theSupplenentum shares with the important extended moral commentary on theAeneid by Cristoforo Landino. It is, moreover, in terms of this binary structure that Gavin Douglas represents his own ambivalence as a Christian translator of the pagan Virgil.

Stepping Out of Narrative Line: A Bit of Word, and Horse, Play in Venus and Adonis

Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds, And now his woven girths he breaks asunder; The bearing earth with his hard hoof he wounds, Whose hollow womb resounds like heaven’s thunder; The iron bit he crusheth ’tween his teeth, Controlling what he was controlled with. Picked out in bold type here is a piece or ‘bit’ of word-play in Shakespeare’s erotic narrative poem Venus and Adonis , which has not been noticed, or at least not recorded, and which has ramifications far and beyond its immediate context which I shall explore in what follows. Briefly, it consists in a verbal mimesis of the violence done by the horse to its ‘iron bit’, an image which thus acquires an emblematic metatextual significance as well as inter- and extra- textual significances. More precisely, the formation of ‘tween’ from between – a formation exemplary of poetic linguistic licence, as I shall indicate – is reactivated by a virtual homophone of the elided syllable or ‘bit’ before the verbal phrase ‘he crusheth. Releasing the polyvalency of the word bit this evokes at the same time its relation to the word bite , from which it is formed (again by elision), together with the relation of both to the body’s organs of articulation (‘tween his teeth’). Evoking these relations this bit of word-play makes them new, illustrating a poetics of recreative licence, a stepping out from narrative and syntactic linearity in a discursive equivalent to the intemperance of holiday, which, breaking with common or ordinary discourse, liberates and regenerates desire in a pleasurable re-creation of relations, especially of the word to the body.

‘The King’s English’ ‘Our English’?: Shakespeare and Linguistic Ownership

The focus of this chapter is the one Shakespearean instance of ‘the King’s English’ in the Folio version of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Used from the first instances as a rhetorical/ideological tool to produce by exclusion the centre of ownership and authority it represents, the trope is specifically mobilized by non-elite educated protestant men to promote citizen plainness. While ‘plainness’ is the object of ironic interrogation throughout the Shakespearean corpus, ‘the King’s English’ is specifically interrogated in the Folio version of Merry Wives, which sets against it an inclusionary idea of ‘our English’ as a ‘gallymaufry’ without a centre. The stakes of this opposition are raised by the appropriation of the ideology of ‘the King’s English’ by/for the Scottish Stuart King James.

‘The Lady Shall Say Her Mind Freely’: Shakespeare and the S/Pace of Blank Verse

Tudeau-Clayton argues that, in line with developments in contemporary rhetoric, Shakespeare conceived of blank verse as ‘spatious’, using it to figure the emancipation of the individual. The form became linked to the early modern discovery of infinity, so that the development of blank verse can be seen as a chapter in the history of modernity. Not following the example of ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’, Shakespeare uses techniques such as enjambment to produce a ‘“plastic” or “malleable” line’ designed to transgress linguistic and physical limits. Resisting linearity and closure, Shakespearean blank verse opens up a space for an individual’s negotiation of infinity—an approach particularly conspicuous in Hamlet, but also to be traced in Juliet’s ‘infinite bounty’.