Jonson's Virgil: Surrey and Phaer

In a recent issue of this journal Victoria Moul has drawn attention tothe symmetry in Ovid's recitation of Amores I.15 at the beginning of Poetaster and Virgil's recitation from Aeneid IV at the beginning ofAct V.¹ The Ovidian passage is, as she notes (p. 24), 'something akin tothe "filching" of a "translation": it varies only slightly from Marlowe's version of these lines in his edition of the Elegies – one form of "translation" nested within another'. The relevant lines were reprinted, apparently from the Quarto of Poetaster, in the third Middleburgh edition of the Amores (probably 1602). The charge of plagiarism, delicately alluded to by Moul, made typically by Malone ('he has merely altered a word here & there, generally for the worse'),² is unconsidered. Jonson cannot have expected the lines to go unrecognized, and he may not even be responsible for the changes. Bringing the English closer to the Latin, smoothing the metre – these are of a piece with changes introduced by Marlowe between the two previous editions.³ And whether or not the changes are Jonson's, they are best understood,as Moul proposes, as the 'nesting' of a specimen of translation, recognizably not Jonson's own, in a play preoccupied with issuesof translation as a cultural process that involves various forms of mediation, including critically observed previous translations. In aplay concerned more generally with issues of moral and stylistic transparency, Ovid's way of talking is slightly opaque. Even when he is represented dramatically, as in parting from Julia at IV.ix–x, Ovid is made to speak a version of his own Tristia I.3, but filtered through Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Chapman's Banquet of Sense.⁴ Jonson does not want to identify himself with Ovid. With Horace, by contrast, the case is altered. There is no overlay of alien voices in the versionof Horace Satires II.1 introduced into the Folio edition of Poetaster(at III.v). Jonson's Horace speaks in Jonson's voice – or with no hintof caricature such as resorting to, say, Drant's version would have suggested.

Jonson does not want to identify himself with Virgil either. But the symmetry of the Virgilian translation with the Ovidian one does not quite extend to Jonson's borrowing wholesale a previous translation. The version of Virgil offered by Jonson proceeds more or less lineby line and literal in the way both he and Marlowe preferred – the metaphrastic way deplored by Dryden. Cain calls it 'laboriously close' and quotes Gifford's characterization of the 'ancient' metaphrastic method in translation.⁵ But it is noticeably unJonsonian, and distinctively awkward. It is evidently filtered through something. This note presents evidence that Jonson colours his own fairly literal Virgilian translation with borrowings from the two widely admired English versions available to him, both apparently sympathetically viewed by him. He distances himself from the Virgilian mode 'refined / From all the tartarous moods of common men' (V.i.102–3) by employing a slightly unearthly diction borrowed from his own dead predecessors.

Jonson admires Surrey, listing him in Timber among those who 'were for their times admirable; and the more, because they began eloquence with us'.⁶ Surrey's translation of Aeneid IV survives in two printed versions: The fourth boke of Virgill … drawne into a strange metre (Day and Awen, 1554); and Certain bokes of Virgiles Aeneis turned into English meter (Tottel, 1557). Neither was reprinted in the sixteenth century. A third version survives in BL MS Hargrave 205. The relationship between the three variant texts is uncertain.⁷ It's likely that Jonson used Tottel, but variation between the three versions is minimal.⁸ Phaer's The seuen first bookes of the Aeneidos (1558) is enlarged successively to nine books (1562), with Thomas Twyne's additions to twelve (1573), and to thirteen with Mapheus Vegius's Supplement (1584), in that form reprinted four times by 1620. In some matters the distinction between Surrey's version and Phaer's is muted by Phaer's borrowings from Surrey.⁹

In what follows, distinctive resemblances between...