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CHAPTER 5 Dido's Double Wound in Caxton's Eneydos and Gavin Douglas's Eneados My mastir Chauser gretly Virgill offendit. All thoch I be tobald hym to repreif, He was fer baldar, certis, by hys leif, Sayand he followit Virgillis lantern toforn, Quhou Eneas to Dydo was forsworn. Was he forsworn} Than Eneas was fals— That he admittis, and callys hym traytour als. Thus, wenyng allane Ene to haue reprevit, He haft gretly the prynce of poetis grevit. (Prol. 1.410-18) Bot sikkyrly, ofresson me behufis Excuft Chauserfra all maner repruffts, In lovying of thir ladeis lylly quhite He set on Virgill and Eneas this wyte, For he was evil (God wait) all womanis fiend.1 (Prol. 1.445-49) s we saw in the last chapter, the narrator in Chaucer's House of Fame 1 initiates his version of the Aeneid with the statement: "I wol now singen, yif I kan" (143). The addition of "yif I kan" to Virgil's stately opening lines—"arma virumque cano"—is a standard piece of Chaucerian irony, an irony that turns on questions of authorial authority in narrative. With his "yif I kan/' the narrator invites us to contemplate his poses, his irony, and our susceptibility to his manipulative strategies. Such a comment reminds us, if we need reminding, that Chaucer's narrators continually draw attention to the intertextual nature of authorial performance. In producing his 1513 Scottish translation of the Aeneid, the Eneados, Gavin Douglas confronts in deferential seriousness the very qualities of Virgil's text that this Chaucerian narrator exposes: the canonical authority attached to Virgil's Aeneid in the late Middle Ages. In the Prologue to the second book of the Aeneid, Douglas articulates his purpose and poetic stance as "followand Virgil, gif my wit war abill," (Prol. 163 A Dido's Double Wound 2.10). Especially compared to the Chaucerian "yif I kan," Douglas'sassertion , "gif my wit war abill," resonates with respect for Virgil's status as a master poet.2 Such a rhetorical stance is frequently evoked throughout the Eneados and provides the interpretive framework for Douglas's translation of Virgil and his approach to Dido. Douglas's Eneados—a text that includes prologues to each book of the Aeneid—marks an early moment in the modem reception ofVirgil's text. In this chapter, I will consider Douglas's subject positions as a reader (which he carefully delineates for us in the prologues).As a translator of Virgil's Aeneid, Douglas explicitly works to make Aeneas the focus of the epic and to displace Dido, whose thematic centrality in earlier vernacular versions of the Aeneid greatly troubled him. In the Eneados, the first fulllength translation of Virgil's Aeneid into English, we can witness the formation of modern attitudes toward a monumentalizing view of Virgil's text. Like the paradigm of "chaste thinking" that Stephanie Jed traces in Salutati's text on the rape of Lucretia and the culture that produced it,3 the attitudes to Virgil's Aeneid and Virgil's Dido evident throughout Douglas's Eneados continue to shape modern critical practices among academicreaders. In the passages quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Douglas constructs Virgil as a master poet and censures Chaucer's version ofAeneid 4 in the Legend of Dido. In the process, he applies a gendered model of interpretation when he asserts that Chaucer's text shows that "he was evir (Godwait) all womanis frend." Douglas bases these complaints on the assumption that Chaucer intended to "follow" the text of the Aeneid in the Legend of Good Women. Chaucer, of course, had no such intention , as the ironic narrative strategies in the Legend of Dido demonstrate. Yet Douglas's criticism of Chaucer—that Chaucer does not "follow" Virgil—illustrates Douglas's approach as translator of the Aeneid. To Douglas, the Aeneid should be read for its "exemplarity," in Timothy Hampton's terms, for its ability to provide "the reader with an imageof the self, a model of an ideal soul or personality which mediates between ideals of public virtue and the reader's self-understanding."4 As a master text, the Aeneid exhibits a set of cultural norms framed by a masculine point of view: Eneas is the hero of the epic, which is about the greatness of Rome, a city founded with the gods' consent and under their direction. Douglas articulates a reading of the Aeneid as a text "in praise of Aeneas"—as one scholar characterizes...

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