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Did Renaissance England Have a Problem with Indirect Translation?
In the last decade, a substantial number of studies have tried to answer those questions, mainly, though not exclusively, with reference to the contemporary Western world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most general of those studies seem to have reached two sets of related conclusions: on the one hand, indirect translation is as a rule not viewed favorably, and its existence tends to be kept silent or actively denied; on the other, as Hanna Pieta put it as recently as 2019, ITr is still very much \"alive and kicking in today's society.\" While it is relatively easy to gauge the feelings and reactions of one's contemporaries or near-contemporaries, one must be wary of applying one's values to cultural phases which ran their course several centuries ago. Translation norms influence translators' behavior, but they also have their bearing in the judgments of translation historians. In terms of cultural distance from the present, it seems particularly difficult to take the measure of the English Renaissance, for a set of complex related reasons. In practical terms, and particularly if one focuses on the sixteenth century, early modern English translators appear to behave in contradictory ways.
Journal Article
'Et dat alapam vita': A Stage Direction in the Chester 'Noah's Flood'
This note considers the role of one of the stage directions in the Chester cycle. The direction 'et dat alapam vita', found only in British Library MS Harley 2124, records the blow struck by Noah's wife after her sons force her aboard the ark, and is typically discussed in the context of the misogynistic 'humour' found in other dramatic and non-dramatic texts of the period. In this note, I provide an alternative, typological reading of the stage direction.
Journal Article
The Cambridge companion to English Renaissance tragedy
\"Written by major international scholars, this Companion combines analysis of topics crucial to Renaissance tragedy with the interpretation of canonical and frequently taught texts. Part I introduces key topics, such as religion, revenge, and the family, and, uniquely, discusses modern performance traditions on stage and screen. Bridging this section with Part II is a chapter which engages with Shakespeare's generic distinctiveness as well as the difficulties our familiarity with Shakespearean tragedy engenders for our appreciation of the tragedies of his contemporaries. Individual essays in Part II introduce important critical conversations about specific canonical tragedies and provide their own contributions to those discussions. Topics include The Revenger's Tragedy and the theatrics of original sin, Arden of Faversham and the preternatural, and The Duchess of Malfi and the erotics of literary form. Providing fresh readings of key texts, the Companion is an essential guide for all students of Renaissance tragedy\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
“Speaking Pictures”: Ways of Seeing and Reading in English Renaissance Culture
Neither in Antiquity nor in the Middle Ages could literary theory settle the debate about the primacy of inspiration or imitation, Plato or Aristotle. It was in the Renaissance that serious efforts were made to reconcile the two theories, and one of the best syntheses came from England. Philosophical and aesthetical syncretism between Plato and Aristotle makes Sidney’s Defense of Poesie a non-dogmatic and particularly inspiring foundation for English literary theory. Also, Philip Sidney’s notion of “speaking pictures” needs to be revisited, in view of the ontology and epistemology of art, as a ground-breaking model for understanding the multimediality of cultural representations. The first part of the following essay is devoted to this. Furthermore, it will be examined how Sidney’s visual poetics influenced and at the same time represented emblematic ways of seeing and thinking in Elizabethan culture. These are particularly conspicuous in the influence of emblem theory in England and in Renaissance literary practice related to that. In the final section I intend to show that Shakespeare’s intriguing, although implicit, poetics is a telling example of how Renaissance visual culture enabled a model that put equal stress on inspiration and imitation, and also on the part of the audience, whose imagination had (and still has) to work in cooperation with the author’s intention.
Journal Article
Literature, travel, and colonial writing in the English Renaissance 1545-1625
What was the purpose of representing foreign lands for writers in the English Renaissance? This book argues that writers often used their works as vehicles to reflect on the state of contemporary English politics, particularly their own lack of representation in public institutions. Sometimes such analyses took the form of displaced allegories, whereby writers contrasted the advantages enjoyed, or disadvantages suffered, by foreign subjects with the political conditions of Tudor and Stuart England. Elsewhere, more often in explicitly colonial writings, authors meditated on the problems of government when faced with the possibly violent creation of a new society. If Venice was commonly held up as a beacon of republican liberty which England would do well to imitate, the fear of tyrannical Catholic Spain was ever present—inspiring and haunting much of the colonial literature from 1580 onwards. This book examines fictional and non-fictional writings, illustrating both the close connections between the two made by early modern readers and the problems involved in the usual assumption that we can make sense of the past with the categories available to us. The book explores representations of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and the Far East, selecting pertinent examples rather than attempting to embrace a total coverage. It also offers fresh readings of Shakespeare, Marlowe, More, Lyly, Hakluyt, Harriot, Nashe, and others.
eBook
Volition's face : personification and the will in Renaissance literature
\"Modern readers and writers find it natural to contrast the agency of realistic fictional characters to the constrained range of action typical of literary personifications. Yet no commentator before the eighteenth century suggests that prosopopoeia signals a form of reduced agency. Andrew Escobedo argues that premodern writers, including Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton, understood personification as a literary expression of will, an essentially energetic figure that depicted passion or concept transforming into action. As the will emerged as an isolatable faculty in the Christian Middle Ages, it was seen not only as the instrument of human agency but also as perversely independent of other human capacities, for example, intellect and moral character. Renaissance accounts of the will conceived of volition both as the means to self-creation and the faculty by which we lose control of ourselves. After offering a brief history of the will that isolates the distinctive features of the faculty in medieval and Renaissance thought, Escobedo makes his case through an examination of several personified figures in Renaissance literature: Conscience in the Tudor interludes, Despair in Doctor Faustus and book I of The Faerie Queen, Love in books III and IV of The Faerie Queen, and Sin in Paradise Lost. These examples demonstrate that literary personification did not amount to a dim reflection of \"realistic\" fictional character, but rather that it provided a literary means to explore the numerous conundrums posed by the premodern notion of the human will. This book will be of great interest to faculty and graduate students interested in Medieval studies and Renaissance literature. \"This exhilarating and brilliant book will be a most welcome and timely addition to the ReFormations series, to which it will add distinction. It is also a book that can be relished sentence by sentence, as Escobedo is a writer of intellectual verve and boldness, making hard-won claims look obvious once made.\" --Sarah Beckwith, Duke University\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
'SOUND THIS ANGRIE MESSAGE IN THINE EARES': SYMPATHY AND THE TRANSLATIONS OF THE \AENEID\ IN MARLOWE'S \DIDO QUEENE OF CARTHAGE\
This article proposes that Marlowe's Dido Queene of Carthage engages with both the English tradition of Virgil translation and the Renaissance commentaries on the Aeneid. Instead of looking at the divergences from Virgil, the focus is on Marlowe's direct translations of the Aeneid. These translations are shown to be carefully selected and structured: they focus on speeches that were associated with Virgil's formidable rhetorical power in Renaissance commentaries. In particular, Marlowe highlights the oratorical strength in the speeches of Virgil's gods as they impose their wills upon humanity. Where Marlowe differs from previous translators and adapters of the Aeneid, however, is that he presents these divine imperatives without the sympathetic narrative that usually softens their violence. In doing so, he composes the one truly pessimistic response to the Aeneid in the English Renaissance.
Journal Article