IMITATIO: The third requisite in our Poet, or Maker, is Imitation, to be able to convert the substance, or Riches of another Poet, to his own use. To make choice of one excellent man above the rest, and so to follow him, till he grow very He, or, so like him, as the Copy may be mistaken for the Principal.
—Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries
The translators of Elizabeth’s age pursued their craft in the spirit of bold adventure which animated Drake and Hawkins. It was their ambition to discover new worlds of thought and beauty. They sailed the wide ocean of knowledge to plant their colonies of intellect where they might, or to bring back to our English shores some eloquent stranger whom their industry had taught to speak with our English tongue.
—Charles Whibley, Literary Studies
In the eventful century after humanist Antonio Nebrija’s Spanish Gramática (1492) famously identified language as the companion of empire, vernacular languages became a key element of national distinction in an increasingly fragmented and belligerent Europe.1 The development of the various vernaculars also produced great anxiety about the belatedness and relative poverty of each language in relation to both classical models and contemporary rivals. As Europe embarked on a century of exploration and expansion, linguistic and literary rivalries became an expression of imperial competition. Translation, for its part, functioned as a key site for negotiating national as well as authorial prerogatives, as self-effacing translators claimed to serve their country and prefatory poems praised the superiority of translated texts to their originals.2 As Massimiliano Morini notes, over the course of the sixteenth century, “The English discovered that rhetorical translation also meant domestication, for the transformation of rhetorical elements of the original could be effected with an eye on the rights of the target language (and culture) rather than of the original author.”3 Yet despite the recent critical interest in early modern translation, English translation from the Spanish has not been accorded the same centrality as translation from the classics, Italian, or French, so that, for example, one recent collection on “Anglo-Continental relations” includes no mention of Spanish texts.4
England’s anxiety about a muscular language was particularly acute, given the sense of belatedness that haunted both literary and imperial projects. In the crucial years of the later sixteenth century, a new confidence appeared among English writers, as the rich and copious language they had so longed for finally seemed to be within their grasp. This chapter charts the metaphorics of this newly confident translation, to demonstrate how it borrowed a language of rivalry and territorialization from the contemporary imperial competition with Spain.5 While most evident in the translations of strategic works such as geographies, manuals for navigation, and military treatises, the pugnaciousness of these projects itself translates onto linguistic and literary enterprises.
Humanist accounts of language routinely emphasize its richness and power. As Terence Cave explains in his famous study of Renaissance copia, the etymology of this rhetorical term for invention and amplification connects it to “the domains of material riches, natural plenty . . . and figurative abundance,” as well as military strength.6 Thus copia “confidently asserts the values of affluence, military power, and rhetorical fluency,” while referencing also the source and the very stuff of abundance—the store, treasure-chest or hoard of language.7 These associations are evident in Renaissance usages that we have inherited, such as thesaurus (treasury or store-house) to designate collections of words, and the related treasury for anthologies or encyclopedic texts, such as Pedro de Mexía’s Silva de varia lección, translated into English as The Treasury of Ancient and Modern Times (1613). As Cave notes, in medieval Latin copia acquired an entirely different dimension of meaning, quickly taken up by the vernaculars in such words as copy and copyist. Thus in rhetorical terms copia simultaneously signals both the possibility of endless enrichment and expansion, and the anxiety over what might become simple iteration.
The metaphor of copia was taken up over and over again by early modern writers worried about the relative poverty of England’s vernacular. The humanist longing to enlarge and enrich the language is a familiar story, well told in Richard Foster Jones’s The Triumph of the English Language and, more recently, in Richard Helgerson’s magisterial Forms of Nationhood and Paula Blank’s Broken English.8 The debate in the later sixteenth century over “inkhorn terms,” as latinate words were despectively described, centered on their utility for enriching English. For the writer and translator George Pettie, there was no question that incorporating such terms “is in deed the way to inrich our tongue, and make it copious.”9 Following several decades of anxiety about their impoverished vernacular, by the end of the century English authors such as Richard Carew or Samuel Daniel touted a muscular version of their language in terms quite as confident as those of Nebrija. As Blank notes, for the antiquarian Carew “the ‘excellency’ of English lies in what he calls its ‘copiousness’ or wealth with respect to other languages, that is, in the extent to which English appropriates foreign words for national ‘profit.’ ”10 Carew envisions the enlargement of English in territorial terms: “But I must now enter into the large field of our tongs copiousnesse, and perhaps long wander up and downe without finding easie way of issue, and yet leave many parts thereof unsurveied.”11 Predictably, he surveys a landscape of triumphal English appropriation, as even the Spanish enemy, whose language is “majesticall, but fulsome, running too much on the O, and terrible like the divell in a play,” is forced to yield words to the English, who “feare as little the hurte of his tongue as the dint of his sword.”12
Though couched in a conditional, interrogative mode, these famous lines by the poet Samuel Daniel suggest that the notion of language as the companion of empire became ever more crucial as England attempted to reproduce Spain’s imperial successes:
And who in time knowes whither we may vent
The treasure of our tongue, to what strange shores
This gaine of our best glorie shal be sent,
T’enrich unknowing Nations with our stores?
What worlds in th’yet unformed Occident
May come refin’d with th’accents that are ours?13
Whereas Nebrija imagines language as a companion to empire, Daniel portrays the English language itself as the commodity that England will “vent” to new shores. In this vision, the English tongue has become so rich and abundant that there is plenty available for export.14
Following Helgerson’s lead, this chapter traces how the imperial, religious, and commercial rivalries between England and Spain in the period affect the narrative of humanistic and national development via the vernacular.15 These fraught connections, I argue, made linguistic or literary appropriation from Spain in the period much more complex, and potentially more fruitful, than taking from the classics, France, or Italy. At the same time, the capaciousness of the humanist notion of copia allowed writers working in very different genres, from geographies and travel writing to military manuals to defenses of poetry, to invoke similar advantages in forcible appropriation. Only by situating these rhetorical strategies in their historical context, I suggest, can we fully reconstruct the ideological vectors of transnational exchanges.
During the war between England and Spain (1585–1604), literary translation from Spanish into English continued unabated, with chivalric romances, in particular, remaining very popular, as I discuss in Chapter 2. Yet the war raised the stakes of translation, as accessing Spanish geographical and military information became newly urgent.16 It was one thing for prolific translator Philemon Holland to figure translation from Latin as a belated revenge for the Roman conquest of Britain, “subduing their literature under the dent of the English pen, in requitall of the conquest sometime over this Island, atchieved by the edge of their sword,”17 and a different matter entirely for the Elizabethans living in the wake of the Armada to contemplate their contemporary, and most concrete, rivalry with a threatening Spain. In their prefatory dedications and addresses to readers, translations from the Spanish published during these years emphasize the opportunity translation represents for England, and the profit to be reaped from it. Taken together, these Elizabethan translations of military manuals, accounts of voyages, and other specialized knowledges tether the humanist longing for copia to an insistently nationalistic and pragmatic corpus.
Even before war was formally declared, hostilities mounted as England encroached on Spanish possessions in the New World. Spain retaliated by providing support for the Irish uprisings against English rule, creating widespread suspicion and anxiety. The 1582 Compendious Treatise entitled De Re Militari, from an original by Luis Gutiérrez de la Vega, was translated by Nicholas Lichfield in this heightened climate. Lichfield stresses in his dedication to none other than Philip Sidney the martial provenance of his original and the utility of the translation for the improvement of the English military: “This little Treatise (Right Worshipfull) entitled, De re militari: beeing lately found in the Forte in Irelande, where the Italians and Spaniards had fortified themselves, by fortune came into my hands by a Souldier of good experience, who latly served there.”18
The source of the text bears noting: “the Forte in Irelande” was the Smerwick garrison of Dún an Oír, or the Fort of Gold, where in 1579 and 1580 two successive waves of Spanish and papal forces had landed in an effort to abet the Irish revolt, and where they retired to defend themselves from the English. The siege of the fort by the English ended in the brutal massacre of soldiers and civilians after their negotiated surrender, in an episode that was widely condemned across Europe.19 In this light, the “little Treatise” appears as a lone survivor, after the Spanish soldiers who might have consulted it have all been killed. There is a dark irony in the treatise’s careful description of military strategy and idealized formations, given its provenance in a scene of carnage that transgressed all military and civilized norms.
Abstracting himself from such contradictions, the translator emphasizes the need to improve England’s own military by incorporating the Spanish innovations described in the treatise, which focuses on the nimble mixed-infantry formation known as the tercio. Effective imitation depends on the translation’s rendering of Spanish expertise into English: “which briefe introduction (being common in our language) may be an inducement to betrer [sic] knowledge, and further understanding, wherby in time our servitours by good observance and imitation, may attaine the lyke perfection, that all other forreine Nations doe generally embrace.” Beneath the text’s prevailing triumphalism, there emerges a chagrined recognition of how short the English fall of “the lyke perfection,” despite the overwhelming force of their scorched-earth policies in Ireland. Incongruously, the text places great emphasis on order: Ch. 3 is entitled “How the Souldiers shall ioyne or come together, and in what order”; Ch. 6, “How, and in what order they shall enter to the alodgement,” thereby underscoring the contradiction between an ideal of carefully imitated military theory and the reality of ruthless military practice.
“Beeing . . . most ready & adventerous in all exercises of feats of warre and chivalry,” as the dedication puts it, Sidney serves as the perfect audience for this rather tarnished trophy. His own multiple connections to Spain, impeccable status as a chivalric soldier-poet, and Protestant heroism render him the ideal reader for the Compendious Treatise. The translation resonates uncannily with Sidney’s own famous contemporaneous treatise, The Defence of Poesie (written in 1579, and published in 1595, after Sidney’s death). Replete with military imagery, the Defence extols the importance of imitation and exemplarity while bemoaning the relative stature of poetry in England: “That poesy, thus embraced in all other places, should only find in our time a hard welcome in England, I think the very earth lamenteth it, and therefore decketh our soil with fewer laurels than it was accustomed. For heretofore poets have in England also flourished; and, which is to be noted, even in those times when the trumpet of Mars did sound loudest.”20 Sidney implies that there is no choice to be made between arms and letters, stressing poetry’s concrete effects upon subjects and polities: “substantially [poetry] worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency, as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him.”21 Effective poetry enables imitation of the great Persian, in a multiplication of Cyruses and presumably, of their attendant empires.22 Thus the humanist’s defense of vernacular poetry and the translator’s looted military manual converge in a vision of appropriation and imitation as technologies for territorialized increase.
Translation is similarly aligned with military might in the 1590 Dialogue of the Office of a Sergeant Major, translated from the Spanish by John Thorius. Here, translation trumps proprietary knowledge, allowing a new, English audience to profit from the Spanish original:
And forasmuch as thys booke was written to instruct those that are professed enemyes to our estate, I thought that we might reap some profit by them, if this their Sergeant Maior were as well knowne unto our men as unto themselves; and that not so much for any poynts of pollicy which might be in their souldiers more than in ours, or for that I think them to have more knowledge in matters concerninge warfare than our English warriors, who are no whit inferior to any of them; as for that theyr orders being knowen unto us, we may the better and more easily hurte them and benefit our selues by reason of this advantage. I have therefore bestowed some pains in unarming this Spanysh Sergeant and doffing his Castilian and hostile armour, and haue clothed him in English apparel, to the end that our men may use him to theyr pleasure, and he finding him selfe metamorphosed, learne how to serue English men.23
Thorius’s preface uneasily negotiates England’s self-worth and his proposal to take from Spain: it is not that the English need to learn anything from the Spanish, he stresses, but that it may be useful to know how they do things, the better to “hurte them.” The common image of translation as a new suit of clothes for the text here takes on a distinctly violent sexual cast: figured as a Spanish soldier unarmed and reclothed “in English apparel,” Thorius’s translation embodies its own operation, claiming for England what was once Spanish via the forcible use of the transvestite soldier.
Later translations also flirt with the pleasure of the Spanish, betraying a certain jouissance in the language for its own sake, even when that pleasure contrasts most markedly with the material being translated. The pragmatic Theorique and Practise of Warre (1597), translated by diplomat, scholar, and committed Protestant Edward Hoby, is a text profoundly imbricated in Anglo-Spanish rivalries. The original military manual was written by Bernardino de Mendoza, the much-reviled former ambassador to England whom Elizabeth expelled in 1584 for his plotting against her. The translator notes that he learned his Spanish from the prisoners taken from the English raid of Cadiz in 1595 [“de los rehenes del cativerio español”24], and implies that his original, too, was part of the spoils. Hoby dedicates his translation to soldier and colonial administrator George Carew, who had served in Ireland in the 1580s and would ruthlessly “pacify” it as Lord President of Munster at the turn of the century. Yet despite this belligerent context Hoby addresses Carew in Spanish, reveling in the pleasure of the enemy’s language. Although the dedication is meant to serve as a testament to Hoby’s skill and a mark of gratitude to the patron who had encouraged him to learn the language, the choice of medium contrasts strongly with both the text’s jingoistic, combative message and its charged setting. Even if Hoby’s confident command of Spanish becomes one more sign of English superiority, his pleasure in the language seems to exceed a certain national decorum.
Hoby’s dedication is quite playful—he calls both himself and Carew “sr” (punning on “sir” and “señor”) and his queen “Donna [Doña] Elizabeth.” Yet these linguistic games pale beside the more intriguing dissolution of difference in the full title he assigns Elizabeth, referring to her as “su Sacra Cesárea Cathólica Real Magd” [her Sacred Caesarean Catholic Royal Majesty]. Elizabeth’s “Catholicism,” though it might surprise the modern reader, was invoked strategically to argue for the queen’s dynastic rights and the universal reach of Protestantism, as in the striking 1597 composite portrait of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth. The portrait presents the three, in a legend across the top, as “Professors and Defendors of the True Catholicke Faythe,” repurposing for the defense of Anglicanism the title Leo X had granted Henry in 1521, as a reward for his treatise against Martin Luther. As Clark Hulse notes, that title is thereby passed to Henry’s children, and Christianity focused in the person of the ruler.25 The imperial title, for its part, was usually reserved for the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain Charles V, while kings of Spain, such as Charles’s heir Philip II, received the title “Sacra Católica Majestad.” Although the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals had declared England an empire, neither Henry nor Elizabeth could claim “Caesarean” authority. The striking imperial translatio from Spain to England in Hoby’s preface is hardly born of the translator’s insufficiency, however, but comes from more complex rhetorical operations.
Hoby does warn his addressee that technical foreign vocabularies are virtually impossible to translate—“es de advertir que las materias y instrumentos de las milicias, por ser entre todas las naciones diferentes, según lo que acostumbra cada nación al pelear, es imposible con puntualidad exprimirlas en otra lengua, sin mezclar la propia donde fueron primeramente inventadas” [one must be warned that the matter and instruments of war, which are different for every nation, according to each nation’s custom in warfare, are impossible to express precisely in another language, without mixing in the very one in which they were first invented].26 Yet his entire project depends on the translatability of both arms and letters, and Elizabeth’s own protocolary title could hardly have proved a challenge. Instead, the surprising analogy between Elizabeth I and Charles V, in a text that expresses its longing for peace between England and Spain, reveals its author as a contradictory subject, fragmented in his linguistic fluency and pleasure in the Spanish language, his allegiance to an England for which he harbors imperial ambitions, and his recollection of a time when these avocations were not at odds with each other:
. . . que vea yo una paz entre Inglaterra y Castilla, como en el buen tiempo que mi tío Don Felipe Hoby fue embajador de la parte de Don Henrico Octavo, de pía y sancta, y felicísima memoria, padre de su SCCRM, en la Corte de Don Carlos quinto Emperador, los dos azote de la ambición y tiranía papal . . .
[. . . may I see peace between England and Castile, as in those good old days when my uncle Philip Hoby was the ambassador from Henry VIII, of pious, saintly, and most happy memory, father of her Sacred Caesarean Catholic Royal Majesty {i.e., Elizabeth} to the court of Emperor Charles V, both of them scourges of papal ambition and tyranny . . . ]
Figure 2. Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, and Edward VI as “Professors and Defendors of the True Catholicke Faythe.” Art Institute of Chicago.
In this version, the pleasure of translation adumbrates English nationalism, suggesting the possibility of a political rapprochement to match the linguistic reconciliation of their majesties.
In the translation itself, however, a more belligerent English position emerges, as the translator annotates the theoretical Spanish original with concrete examples of Spanish failings. From the margins, the translator has the last word, undermining and exploding the original’s considerations on when and how Philip II should go to war. Where the translated text respectfully announces: “Your Highness going about to conquere a kingdom, state, countrey, or part of any such, which is the most secure warre for Princes,” the annotation scathingly observes: “Better teach him by clemencie and pietie to recover such his grandfathers territories as his father hath loste, before he overbusie himself with other, or about the Armada.” When Mendoza mentions the possibility of “great inconveniences,” the translator pointedly invokes the recent experience at Cadiz, where “her sacred Majesty[’s . . .] powerfull generals found 6000 of your Gallants at your owne home but Galinas [chickens].” Even more snidely, when the original warns the king against bad counsel, the note chimes in: “As to your cost your experience of 1588 tried.”27 The pleasure Hoby takes in these put-downs is palpable. In these and similar annotations to Mendoza’s text, the theoretical project of translation becomes concretized into an imperial translatio, with England claiming precedence over Spain in such encounters as the raid of Cadiz and the defeat of the Armada, while the note’s bilingual pun on “Gallants” and “Galinas” flaunts the linguistic deftness on which the commentator’s ascendancy depends.
The conception of translation as a forcible technology appears not only in military manuals but in a broader range of texts that purport to offer the English the knowledge they will need to best Spain. Richard Perceval, who had translated captured Spanish dispatches for Elizabeth, dedicates his 1591 Bibliotheca Hispanica, an early dictionary and grammar book, to the Earl of Essex, “remembering that having employed your selfe so honorablie against the Spanyard in Flanders, Spayne & Portugal; you had gained an immortall memorie with all posteritie, & might perhaps encounter with them againe upon like occasion.”28
Perceval’s pragmatism contrasts with the heightened rhetoric of the Latin dedicatory poem by “a certain unskilled friend,” which makes of the English new Jasons, inheritors to the Spaniards’ power by virtue of the primer at hand:
Hactenus Hispanis, Hispanica lingua refulsit;
Sed reliquis, sicut nocte Diana micans.
Latius at splendet nunc multis gentibus; alma
Sol velut excurrens, per sua signa, die.
Praestitit hoc Anglus, constanti pollice, scriptor,
Ut Tartessiacae detegerentur opes.
Non unum Typhin Graecum, sed mille Britannos
Spe lucri accendet, nominis atque magis,
Colchica qui levibus volitent nova regna carinis,
Aureaque apportent vellera mille domum.29
[Thus far for the Spanish, the Spanish language has shone brightly; yet now they are left behind, just like Diana shivering in the night. Now it glistens uplifting many peoples, just as the nourishing sun displays itself in the day with its own signs. Here the English author stands forth, with firm promises that may sweep away the riches of the Tartessians. Not one Typhon of the Greeks but a thousand Britons he will inflame with hope of profit and also of a name of higher degree, Colchians of Carinis who swiftly fly to their new kingdoms and bring home a thousand golden fleeces.]
In this case, the text is not the loot but instead the shining tool that enables the supersession of the “Tartessians” by the “thousand Britons” who will be the new Argonauts.
For these Elizabethans, translation becomes the instrument of imperial translatio. These are surely the terms in which one must understand the partial, unpublished English translation of Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana ((1569/1578/1589), the preeminent Spanish New World epic, on the protracted conquest of Chile. Produced around 1600 by George Carew, to whom Hoby had dedicated Theorique and Practise of Warre, the translation is an attempt to adapt the Spanish experience in the Americas to an Irish imperial context. As Lord President of Munster from 1597 to 1602, Carew was heavily involved in suppressing Tyrone’s revolt and “pacifying” the colony. In his translation, Carew strips the epic of all poetic adornment, rendering it as a guide to conquest. His version digests Ercilla’s text into a manual for conquest by which England might emulate Spain’s actions in the New World. Translated from its original setting, Ercilla’s description of Araucanian customs and battle lore is reduced to all-purpose instructions for defeating nomadic savages. The passages Carew translates in greatest detail are those that seem to offer instructions for how to defeat the natives, as in the following example from stanzas 23–32 in Ercilla’s first canto:
There manner of fight is in Manuples and small squadrons, minglinge or Entertyninge there pikes with bowes, the one to offend farre of, the other to defend the archer, and when any of the squadrons are broaken or beaten, another is brought vppe to mayntayne the fight: Of horse they stand in suche feare (which they never saw vntill they were invaded by the spaniardes) as when they fight itt shall ever be neare vnto boggie and Moorishe grounds, or suche places of advantage, where they may have a safe retrayte: To provoke skirmishe they turne ovt forlorne hopes with Drumes and musique vnder the Comand of daringe Leaders that are ambitious of honnour, who are bravelye armed, paynted with divers Coullours and adornde with bewtifull plumes: vppon straytes and grounds, of advantage, they erect forts, made of great tymber, built foure square with sundrie towers, whereof one is lardge and hyghe to comande the rest, all of them full of spike holes for the vse of there archers, and in the myddest a spatious markett place to put there men in battell, they forget nott to make posternes for sallies and with out there forts (to imperille the Enemies approache) they digge deepe holes in the ground, artificiallie Covered with turfe or grasse, and in many of them they fix sharpe stakes by which stratageme we have receved great losse.30
Here as elsewhere, Ercilla’s text is “Englished” in a vocabulary that invokes the English presence in Ireland—bog, turf, and so forth. Thus the Chileans become the Irish, and the Spanish models their English imitators, in both poetic and imperial terms.31 From the translation of textual loot acquired in a massacre in Ireland, to the vision of an empire via poetry in Sidney’s manifesto, to the repurposing of an epic poem for military conquest, once again in Ireland, the striking interpenetration of literary and imperial imitatio comes full circle.
Though often in less exalted terms, translations of geographical texts also emphasize the advantage for England in accessing proprietary knowledge in Spanish. Linguistic appropriation becomes the first step to territorial expansion, as England attempts to match its rival. Editor, translator, and diplomat Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1589), perhaps the most influential volume in promoting English exploration and itself a compilation of translations and other texts, vaunts its own translations from secret Spanish texts, claiming among his sources “a secret mappe of those partes made in Mexico” and “their intercepted letters come into my hand.”32 As Donald Beecher has shown, even before Hakluyt’s seminal collection Elizabethan translators from the Spanish expressed “many of the nationalist, mercantile, and explorational goals, implicit and overt,” conveyed there.33
Beecher traces the work of John Frampton, one of the Hispanized “merchant adventurers,” to Spain who had lived there in the 1550s and 1560s, before falling afoul of the Inquisition. When he was finally able to go back to England, Frampton turned to translation, producing six timely volumes in the years 1577–81.34 He first translated the treatises of Nicholas Monardes of Seville, a kind of botanical treasury detailing the New World pharmacopoeia now available for collection and trade.35 He also promoted English expansion more directly, with several volumes on the Far East and a manual significantly entitled The Arte of Navigation, wherein is contained all the rules, declarations, secrets & advises, which for good Navigation are necessarie & ought to be knowen & practised (1581).
Most striking for its pugnaciousness, perhaps, is Frampton’s A Briefe Description of the Portes, Creekes, Bayes and Havens conteyned in the West India, the originall whereof was Dedicated to the mightie Kinge, Charles the V Kinge of Castile (1578), which suggests by its very title the imperial translatio it would effect, from Charles to Elizabeth and Spain to England. Published at the time of Francis Drake’s piratical circumnavigation of the globe, Frampton’s translation of Martín Fernández de Enciso’s Suma de geographia was dedicated to Humphrey Gilbert, one of the many navigators who had been seeking for England the elusive “Northwest Passage” to the East that would allow it to bypass—and surpass—Spain’s empire. “What might appear at first glance to be a mere travelogue or geographical account,” Beecher notes, “in the hands of English buccaneers might easily be interpreted as a corsair’s manual.”36
Even though he worked from a published text, Frampton stresses that his translation discloses secret and valuable information. Although his original had been published in Spain, he notes, it was “called in aboute twentie yeares past, for that it reuealed secrets that the Spanish nation was loth to haue knowen to the worlde.”37 Yet in encouraging English travel Frampton’s dedication must navigate its own awkward course, including the fact that his dedicatee (like Carew above) could actually read the original Spanish:
And Sir, albeit this small gifte (in respect of ministring any knowledge to you your selfe) may seeme nothing, in that you doe understande the tongues, wherein this and many other knowledges of high value, lie hid from our Seamen, although not from you: yet this may for our meere English Seamen, Pilotes, Marriners, &c. not acquaynted with forrayne tongues, bring greate pleasure (if it fortune our Mariners or any other of our Nation, to be driven by winde, tempeste, currents, or by any other chaunce to any of the Ilandes, Portes, Havens, Bayes, or Forelandes mencioned in this Pamphlet,) and so it may also in the voyage, be a meane to keepe them the more from idlenesse, the Nurce of villany, and to give them also right good occasion by way of example, upon any new Discoverie, to take the Altitude and Latitude, to set downe the tracte of the Ilandes, the nature of the soyles, and to note the qualitie of the ayre, the several benefites that the Soyles and the Rivers yeelde, with all the discomodities and wantes that the same places have, and if our Countrie men fortune the rather to be awaked out of their heavy sleepe wherein they have long lien, and the rather hereby be occasioned to shunne bestiall ignoraunce, and with other nations rather late than never to make themselves shine with the brightnesse of knowledge, let them give Sir Humphrey Gilbert the thankes, for whose sake I translated the same.
Frampton is evasive about the English agency required for imperial expansion, first arguing that “winde, tempeste, currents, or . . . any other chaunce” just might bring the English to the Spanish ports where they had no legal reason to go. This evasive cover for piratical activity contrasts with the much franker desire at the end of the passage for an end to English slothfulness, “rather late than never.” Translation is here aligned not just with a nascent imperial project but specifically with pirating both Spanish knowledge and Spanish ports in an effort to replicate Spain’s successes. As Beecher points out, “the act of revealing to one’s own nation the private cache of knowledge of an enemy nation makes translating an act of strategic intelligencing,”38 and the translator a full participant in the imperial project.
If Frampton’s aspirational translations are easily aligned with the project of English empire, to what extent does their tenor characterize the broader project of early modern translation as a whole? Clearly, not all translation was conceived as a pugnacious extension of imperial longing—entire genres of texts translated from Spain in the period, such as Counter-Reformation tracts, do not participate in this dynamic. As my early examples show, however, a broad range of texts beyond the explicitly imperial imagine translation as a violent taking for the national good. In this shared discourse, the more openly martial and violent figurations of translation incorporate and reiterate humanist conceptions of language’s imperial potential, from Nebrija’s understanding of the role of language in the formation of empire, to the English commercial version of Daniel. This significant overlap among the mercantile, military, and humanist spheres extends to the actors involved: the same figures participate in furthering the English language as the English empire, from such distinguished exemplars as Sidney to scholar-soldiers such as Hoby and Carew. In the shared understanding of humanists and promoters of their early modern nations, vernacularity itself produces national distinction.
In what follows, I show how the Elizabethan metaphorics of translation as a forcible appropriation in service of the nation affects the construction of an early modern English canon into the Jacobean period and beyond, as an emerging literary sphere adopts the same pugnacious language that characterized translation in a context of imperial rivalry. Even after the peace with Spain, that is, the sense of translation as a site of contested cultural primacy remains, and the vexed fascination of English writers with Spanish literary materials continually renews the tensions over the terms of appropriation. I focus here on two dedicatory poems by Ben Jonson, appended to translations from the classics and from contemporary Spain, respectively. As Joseph Loewenstein notes, Jonson is a “crucial node of an encompassing economy in which intellectual possessiveness was coalescing,”39 a central figure in the development of commercial authorship in England, expert in negotiating possession and imitation to construct poetic authority. Yet Jonson attends also to the problem of national belonging and national distinction in the literary sphere, providing a strong link between the pugnacious Elizabethan translation I have described above and the broader literary arena of the early seventeenth century and beyond.
Early modern commendatory poems are not often deemed worthy of critical scrutiny in their own right. Conventional wisdom tells us they are little more than conventional flattery, somewhere between flat and flatulent.40 There are notable exceptions, to be sure. Ben Jonson’s elegiac “To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare,” which prefaced the 1623 folio and which I discuss in Chapter 4, is perhaps the most famous commendatory poem in the language, combining as it does euphonious praise for the “sweet swan of Avon” with a remarkably successful attempt to delineate a canon of English literature in a European context. Jonson’s rich reconstruction of his literary world, in praise of writing that “neither man, nor muse, can praise too much,” exemplifies the possibilities of commendation for establishing standards of cultural value in a particular time and place.
A closer look at terms of praise may well afford us a more complete understanding of how poetic authority, literary competition, and international rivalries figure in calculating the value of a given early modern text. Beyond the dictates of convention, what contemporary poets choose to praise, and, more important, the metaphorics of their praise provide key insights into the valuation of literary appropriation and imitation, understood not as timeless aesthetic categories but as historical constructs deeply embedded in political and social relations, including the tradition of forcible translation I have charted above. Just as the metaphorics of translation itself is significant, the language used to praise translations provides a useful gauge of literary and national worthiness in the eyes of contemporary practitioners.
Jonson’s many commendatory verses form part of his project to influence the shape and standing of English letters.41 My focus here on translation expands the relevant contexts for Jonson’s puffery from the immediate rivalries of the London literary scene to an international context of imperial rivalry. While praising translations into English of a classical Greek text and a Spanish picaresque novel, Jonson evokes imperial and economic struggles in order to portray English literary culture—original or otherwise—as a collective, national treasure.42 If, that is, the Epigrams illuminate Jonson’s rivalries with his English contemporaries, often accompanied by scathing comments on their imitative efforts, these two poems locate English translators—who practice a different kind of appropriation—as part of a national project in which cultural and material value are inextricably intertwined.43
Jonson’s “To my Worthy and Honoured Friend, Mr. George Chapman, on His Translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days” (1618) and “On the Author, Work and Translator” (1621), in praise of James Mabbe’s The Rogue, evince the importance of translation as a gauge of England’s cultural status. Both poems quite naturally focus on literary value, but do so, significantly, in terms of the nation’s standing. First published along with the works they praise, they delineate quite different modes for England’s engagement with classical literatures and contemporary vernacular works. The disjunction between these forms of engagement signals, I argue, the contradictions attendant upon England’s position as a literary and imperial latecomer. In both cases, the resort to translation becomes an attempt to restore primacy, yet each is figured very differently by Jonson.
Jonson’s poem to Chapman, along with a more extensive poem by Michael Drayton, prefaced the 1618 Georgicks of Hesiod, as the translator termed the Works and Days. The question of material value and national treasure is central to Jonson’s rhetoric, and is foregrounded from the very first lines:
Whose worke could this be, Chapman, to refine
Olde Hesiod’s ore, and give it us; but thine,
Who hadst before wrought in rich Homer’s mine?44
The abundant deposits of Greek culture, Jonson suggests, can be profitably mined and refined only by this English poet, whose broad previous experience extracting Greek copia includes translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.45 Yet, depending on how one interprets the “us” in line 2, the answer to Jonson’s rhetorical question could be long and varied: there were earlier humanist “refinements” of Hesiod into both Latin and several European vernaculars, and Chapman himself seems to have mined Latin translations as often as the Greek original.46 Chapman’s novelty—and a rather delayed one at that—is rendering Hesiod (whether the original or an intermediate translation) into English to give it to an “us” of English speakers instead of to a humanist audience familiar with Latin. Jonson thus elides the first “miners” of the Greek—continental humanists of varied provenance—to praise a national achievement in the vernacular.
Whereas the first stanza imagines simply localized extraction, the second introduces the conceit of transported—or translated—riches that will prove central to the poem’s project:
What treasure has thou brought us! And what store
Still, still, dost thou arrive with, at our shore,
To make thy honour, and our wealth the more!
The trader, or chapman, brings the refined ore to England as mercantile wealth.47 The image of a vernacular enriched by linguistic appropriation is familiar from Elizabethan sources: as Foster Jones notes, writers such as Parry, Nash, Puttenham, and Florio all emphasize the copiousness of an English tongue that has borrowed abundantly from the classical languages for some time.48 Yet they liken industrious borrowing to production or commerce. Florio, for example, describes the “yearly increase” of words: “daily both new words are invented; and books still found, that make a new supply of old.”49 Jonson, by contrast, emphasizes treasure. As the conceit develops, his transformation of the earlier image of domestic industry into a heroic conquest of far shores becomes more pronounced:
If all the vulgar tongues, that speake this day,
Were askt of thy discoveries; they must say,
To the Greek coast thine only knew the way.
Such passage hast thou found, such returnes made,
As, now, of all men, it is call’d thy trade:
And who make thither else, rob, or invade.
Strikingly, these stanzas figure translation as an inaugural voyage. England, as represented by Chapman, actually discovers the one route to Greece, and claims exclusive trading privileges based on its primacy. Translation thus becomes an imperialist act of acquisition that ensures British greatness.50 Yet the English version of the story depends on a complicated rewriting of historical events that recasts national failures as cultural successes.
Perhaps the clearest example of this rewriting is the emphasis on a “passage” in the last stanza, which suggests a very specific reference for the poem’s patriotic claims: England’s search for a sea-route to Cathay—the project that John Frampton had sought to aid with his translation of Spanish geographical and navigational treatises. In the middle years of the sixteenth century, the English had attempted in vain to find a Northeast passage by sailing around Muscovy.51 From Sebastian Cabot on, they sought instead a North west passage to the fabled riches of the East around what is today Canada. This geographical chimera was a linchpin of the nation’s imperial project in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Though, like the eastward attempts, it proved a spectacular failure in Elizabethan times, it continued to inspire merchants and seamen well into James’s reign.52
England had come late to the table. Because the more likely routes to the riches of the Indies had already been taken, there was no choice but to search for an unknown and improbable passage. As Richard Willes pointed out in his 1576 “Certain arguments to prove a passage by the Northwest,” Iberians had taken possession of the likelier paths both East and West:
[The Portuguese] voyage is very well understood of all men, and the Southeasterne way round about Afrike by the Cape of Good hope more spoken of, better knowen and travelled, then that it may seeme needfull to discourse thereof . . . The [Southwestern] way no doubt the Spaniardes would commodiously take, for that it lyeth neere unto their dominions there, could the Easterne current and levant winds as easily suffer them to returne.53
The belatedness of English expansion thus forced tenacious explorers such as Martin Frobisher and John Davis to probe the frigid waters beyond Novaya Zemlya in search of the riches of the East. Frobisher’s voyages proved especially embarrassing, for he twice returned to England with a rich load of “gold ore” that turned out to be worthless pyrites. The only real treasure “mined” by England, or ever to make its way to England’s shores, seems to have been the pillaged loot captured by Elizabethan privateers such as Drake, who engaged in secondary extraction from Spanish ships instead of New World mines. Needless to say, the heroic English privateers were denounced as pirates by those who suffered their ravages.
The early years of the seventeenth century saw renewed efforts to find the fabled Northwest Passage. Following Henry Hudson’s seemingly auspicious discovery of the huge inlet that now bears his name (and despite the disastrous fate of his expedition), a wave of optimism led to the incorporation of the Northwest Passage Company in 1612. Its directors held the hopeful title “Governor and Company of the Merchaunts of London, Discoverers of the Northwest passage” and employed a ship named, with similar optimism, the Discovery. Nomenclature aside, the Company’s efforts soon came to an impasse in frozen waters: William Gibbons’s voyage in 1614 was a complete failure, and William Baffin’s two attempts convinced that renowned navigator that there was “no passage or hope of passage” along the routes explored by his predecessors.54 By the time Chapman’s translation was published in 1618, the existence of a passage to be discovered and exploited exclusively by England seemed newly implausible.
Yet where actual voyages would not serve as models for the licit enrichment of the nation, Jonson’s poem—through the alchemy of metaphor—turns pyrites into gold and mere pirates into dashing adelantados. The failure of proprietary discovery, whether imperial or cultural, is reimagined as an exclusive cultural triumph.55 “Vulgar tongues”—those contemporary vernaculars that actually occupy the viable trading routes—must grant the primacy of the English passage to Greek culture, even though Chapman’s achievement succeeds many other foreign translations. With their suggestion that it is others who are belated, and reduced to pirating culture, the last lines of the poem flaunt English ownership. They also make England sound suspiciously like Spain, a power bitterly resented for its restrictions on New World trade.56 The Greek “trade,” at least, here belongs to England; all others are interlopers who “rob, or invade”—pirates preying, for once, on England’s primacy. Thus Chapman’s individual, belated project of translation, and by extension other belated British voyages, are transformed into an exceptional national achievement. The English version traduces history even as it translates empire.57
“On the Author, Work, and Translator,” Jonson’s poem for Mabbe’s The Rogue (1622), a highly popular translation of Alemán’s picaresque Guzmán de Alfarache, presents a very different picture of literary property. Whereas the poem to Chapman lauds a heroic English vernacular exploiting the riches of Greece, these commendatory lines on Mabbe’s work (which also features two dedicatory poems by “I. F.,”—John Fletcher) must justify a translation from the Spanish.58 The questions of literary value and national standing are even more pressing in this poem, as Jonson negotiates the delicate question of the relative value of two vernaculars. If the worth of Greece is beyond question for the late Renaissance—a kind of gold standard for which the different national vernaculars vie—the idea of enriching English through a translation from the vernacular of a contemporary rival begs the question of their relative value. The poem tacitly addresses the Jacobean fascination with Spanish literature, the resultant asymmetry of Anglo-Spanish translation, and the general English unease with Spanish cultural dominance.59 The questions become especially pressing given that the translated “work” of the title is a prime example of the picaresque, a Spanish invention that was immensely popular throughout Europe. The project here, I will argue, is both to commend and to erase the labor of translation by emphasizing the quality of the finished English product over the Spanish raw materials.60 Whereas the praise of Chapman’s Hesiod lauds the value of Greece and England’s exclusive right to refine its riches, the poem to Mabbe suggests that culture cannot be proprietary. Instead, it universalizes literary value in order to allow those who come second, such as the English translator of a Spanish original, equal or even greater claim.
The poem insists on praising both author and translator, making room for two—as purported equals—where we might expect praise for one. From the title itself, which frames the “work” with the two very different kinds of labor involved, “On the Author, Work, and Translator” rejects the notion of exclusive literary property that figures so prominently in the poem to Chapman. The opening lines focus instead on a shared worth, emphasizing the value of multiplicity:
Who tracks this Authors, or Translators Pen,
Shall finde, that either hath read Bookes, and Men;
To say but one, were single.61
The two pairs in these initial lines—author and translator, books and men—link Alemán’s and Mabbe’s dual labors to the literary and moral value of the work. The ambiguity of the referent in “To say but one, were single,” suggests that it is impossible to disentangle one set of doubles from the other, and introduces a purely phantasmal correspondence between the two penmen and the two aspects of the text’s value. The conclusion sounds like a tautology: of course, at one level, “to say but one” is “single.” Yet a quick perusal of the OED yields a number of meanings that dispel the apparent redundancy and obliquely support Jonson’s argument for secondary literary labors. One meaning of single, now obsolete, is “slight, poor, trivial.” Thus in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV the Lord Chief Justice attacks Falstaff with: “Is not your voice broken, your winde short, your wit single . . . ?” (I. ii. 182–83).62 Another OED example, from Daniel, suggests that single is also, in an apparent paradox, the opposite of singular: “Having married a wife of singulare beautie, but (according to the common rumour) of single honestie.” The notable or exceptional singular is here separated from its belittled etymological cousin. If we reinsert this particular contrast into Jonson’s poem, lines 1–3 seem to suggest that the exceptional quality of a work need not depend on its single authorship. Yet there remains the nagging suspicion that Jonson’s lines are themselves not single—in its more positive sense of “simple, honest, sincere, single-minded; free from duplicity or deceit” (OED)—but instead hypnotize us with their oscillation between singular and plural. The separation of the singular and the single validates the labors of the translator’s pen, but enacts a semantic violence that underscores the inherent duplicity of language and its manipulators.
The poem seems to relish polysemy as a way to bridge the gap between “old words” and “new times,” and makes The Rogue a prime example:
Then it chimes,
When the old words doe strike on the new times,
As in this Spanish Proteus; who, though writ
But in one tongue, was form’d with the worlds wit . . .
The image of a Spanish Proteus marks a move from polysemy to even more complex transformations. While the pícaro in Alemán’s novel may be a master of disguise, he is no match for Jonson himself, who here metamorphoses character into text and “one tongue” into “the world’s wit.” And while the translation of the Spanish original into a lingua franca of creativity suggests a move away from proprietary national claims, these are in fact quickly reinstated. As the rest of the poem will make clear, the supranational interlude functions simply as pretext for a reinforced English claim to the text.
The poem enacts the confusion between single and double, Spanish original and English translation, in its very terms of praise. Jonson recalls a famous Cervantine conceit in order to commend an extraordinary translator of Spanish:
Such Bookes deserve Translators, of like coate
As was the Genius wherewith they were wrote;
And this hath met that one, that may be stil’d
More than the Foster-father of this Child . . .
The image of Mabbe as more than foster-father to his translation inverts Cervantes’s distancing claim, in the prologue to the first part of Don Quijote (1605), that although he might seem a father he is but a stepfather to his creation, and thus well aware of its faults.63 Jonson probably knew the original, and would certainly have been familiar with Thomas Shelton’s 1612 translation of Part I.64 Shelton’s version, although not an exact translation, preserves the biting Cervantine irony on literary paternity:
It oft times befals, that a father hath a child both by birth evil-favoured and quite devoide of all perfection, and yet the love that he beares him is such, as it casts a maske over his eies, which hinders his discerning of the faults and simplicities thereof, and makes him rather to deeme them discretions and beauty, and so tels them to his friends, for witty jests and conceites. But I (though in shew a Father, yet in truth but a stepfather to Don-Quixote) will not be born away by the violent current of the modern custome now a daies, and therefore intreate thee, with the teares almost in mine eies, as many others are wont to doe (most deare Reader), to pardon and dissemble the faults which thou shalt discerne in this my sonne.65
Jonson’s praise of Mabbe as more than foster-father to his translation thus appears quite singular, if not single. First, because it distortedly echoes a Spanish original, simultaneously appropriating it and problematizing any notion of fidelity or originality. Mabbe, for his part, no longer stands alone, as Jonson adulterates the notion of exclusive literary paternity. Second, by collapsing Cervantes’s critical distance and inverting the topos of humility in a poem of praise, the emphasis on unalienated fatherhood suggests that Mabbe himself, and certainly Jonson, may well be (willfully) blind to the translation’s faults.66
There is a pronounced contrast in tone between Jonson’s poem and Mabbe’s own claims in his prologue, where he deplores his lack of skills. Although Mabbe, in a flourish of virtuosity, writes his own dedication to “Don Iuan Estrangwayes” in (a rather stilted) Spanish, he tentatively signs himself “Don Diego Puede-Ser,” or James May-be (8). And while he claims to have clothed the pícaro in an English costume, he admits, “En algunos lugares, hallo mi Guzmanico escuro como la noche” [In some spots, I find my little Guzmán dark as night] (7). He follows this admission with a flat-footed pun that reminds us of the difficulty of his enterprise: “Pero, yo he hecho algunos Escolios, para quitar los Escollos” [“I have provided some schooling [notes] to remove the shoals”], and ends with a highly conventional description of his literary voyage. Nonetheless, the translator’s authority as annotator is recognized by another commendatory poem to the volume, by Mabbe’s friend and fellow translator Leonard Digges:
As, few, French Rablais understand; and none
Dare in our Vulgar Tongue once make him knowne:
No more our Plodding Linguists could attaine
(By turning Minshewe) to this Rogue of Spaine,
So crabbed Canting was his Authors Pen
And phrase, e’en darke to his owne Countrey-men;
Till, thankes and praise to this Translators paine,
His Margent now makes him speake English plaine.67
Even John Minsheu’s recent Most Copious Spanish Dictionary (1617), Digges suggests, is not enough to render “this Rogue of Spain” legible; in fact, Mabbe’s annotations often cite the contemporary Spanish dictionary of Sebastián de Covarrubias (1611) to justify his readings. Yet Digges’ hyperbolic praise grants the translator the power to “make knowne” the “Rogue of Spaine,” his marginal authority the last word in a text forced to speak plainly.
Despite the Spanish flourish of the dedication and his authority as bilingual editor, Mabbe turned often to Barezzo Barezzi’s Italian translation of the Guzmán, presumably as a way to shed more light on the obscure pícaro or skirt the perilous shoals.68 Thus Mabbe is often far indeed from Alemán’s original—a “cozen-german,” perhaps, but not an unadulterated father. The discrepancy between Jonson’s praise and Mabbe’s own tone and practice may well be attributable to the difference between the commender and the humble author, and the generic conventions associated with each space of enunciation, yet the contrast is so pronounced as to suggest that Jonson’s larger claims for English primacy over Spanish sources themselves motivate his project of praise, regardless of Mabbe’s skill.
After the internationalist interlude, Jonson’s poem moves to assertions of English primacy through the metaphorics of cloth, first introduced with the reference to translators “of like coat” in line 11. Jonson turns to the conventional sartorial image for translation to emphasize the improvement of the poem in its English version:
. . . For though Spaine gave him his first ayre and Vogue,
He would be call’d, henceforth, the English-Rogue,
But that hee’s too well suted, in a cloth,
Finer than was his Spanish . . .
Whereas Elizabethan instances of the clothing metaphor generally emphasize the crudeness of English—whether to condemn it as rude attire or praise it as simple homespun—Jonson here suggests that English cloth is better than Spanish.69 In this sartorial vein, the “single” in line 3 reads as “unlined material” (OED); thus the thread of imagery runs from a poor cloth associated with the misguided effort to distinguish between author and translator, to the “like coat” of a translator well-suited to the material to, finally, the fine English cloth that rehabilitates the rogue. Paradoxically, the translation improves the original to such an extent that Jonson’s proposed title becomes untenable: an English-Rogue would be an oxymoron because English itself ennobles the work.
Thus Jonson mobilizes the cloth industry as a powerful image of national pride, in order to “English” what was originally a Spanish possession.70 The brief moment of humanist generosity in line 6, when the poet argues that the Spanish work actually belongs to the world, quickly gives way to an emphasis on English achievements. Free trade in Spanish texts enhances England’s stature, and the end product is so thoroughly domesticated as to disguise its status as an import.
Yet the Spanish provenance of the original is not the only thing that Jonson’s poem cloaks with its powerful metaphors. The cloth industry, it turns out, is an odd choice for mobilizing national pride in 1621, given that, for contemporary readers, the imagery would most likely recall the desperate straits of that industry in England. The years 1620–1624 saw, as economic historian Barry Supple puts it, “perhaps the most acute breakdown of the English economy of the first half of the seventeenth century.”71 The ill-conceived project of Alderman Cockayne to restrict exports to finished English cloth, and its relative dearness as the start of the Thirty Years’ War wreaked havoc with continental currencies, essentially paralyzed the cloth industry in these years, profoundly affecting domestic well-being as well as England’s economic standing vis-à-vis its European rivals. As one M.P. put it in the somber parliamentary debates of 1621: “The kingdom is hindered even within the kingdom by a decay of the trade of cloth.”72 Despite Jonson’s claims for the excellence of English cloth, contemporary observers complained bitterly that it was the poor quality of the material that was causing the problem.73 Thus the cloth industry could not prove a source of national pride in 1621; ironically, instead of the picaresque being Englished in fancy clothes, it was enacted everywhere in England through the impoverishment of large groups of unemployed laborers from the cloth trades, who suffered scarcity and dislocation.
Whereas in his praise of Chapman’s translation Jonson reimagines England’s failure to discover a Northwest Passage as a cultural triumph, he here disguises the economic realities of his time as a new victory for the English language. In the poetic economy of commendation, the value of all things English can rise freely, untrammeled by the setbacks of economic history. Jonson’s imagery of production and exchange is gloriously free of material constraints, and value accrues for the object of commendation regardless of the historical aptness of the poet’s metaphors. Poetry that thus creates value irrespective of historical circumstance—or better yet, in absolute defiance of it—is, I would suggest, a powerful tool not simply for promoting an individual work but for constructing a literary culture as an enduring and powerful source of national worth.
The dynamics of cultural production and exchange that Jonson imagines in these two poems suggests an overwhelming concern with bringing home the riches. While the classical ore of Greece is available for conquest and appropriation by (English) first-comers only, the contemporary cultural productions of rival nations should be circulated freely in order to be more effectively Englished. Whether the appropriation is achieved via cultural protectionism—Greece is ours alone—or by shady expropriation—the picaresque is the world’s but, ultimately, ours—the end result is to enhance England’s cultural standing, at least in its own view. Beyond the models of exemplarity and imitatio imagined by Sidney and his Elizabethan contemporaries, Jonson’s dedications claim for poetry a central place in the production of national distinction.
Metaphors of empire and value are central to Jonson’s project, since by the 1620s—and despite the crisis of the cloth industry—trade was England’s preeminent source of national pride. Whether such trade be restricted or free, Jonson’s poetics of acquisition provides a powerful way to reimagine cultural and material empire, in which late arrival does not bar success. More important, the cultural currency of his images, in their partial historicity, is dissociated from the specific historical circumstances of English trade and expansion—the economy of metaphor supplies any lack in actual English fortunes. The poetic project of these commendations is thus even more ambitious than the belated humanist goals Jonson sets forth in his English Grammar (pub. 1640), to “free our language from the opinion of rudenesse and barbarisme, wherewith it is mistaken to be diseased: we shew the copy of it, and matchablenesse with other tongues.”74 The poems also free England from the limitations of historical circumstance, as they construct a literary sphere in which the national tradition—a tradition of literary predecessors, but also of powerful myths about English greatness—itself becomes a source of value.
In Jonson’s poems to Chapman and Mabbe, as in the actual translations discussed earlier, the nexus between linguistic authority and imperial conquest appears singularly charged. The empire of language comprises far more than explicit writings on empire: it includes, too, the insistent figuration of cultural authority as the conquest of poetic and material terrain, whether through translation, silent appropriation, or rewriting. The peculiar force of this piratical translation—as opposed to more heavy-handed paeans to empire—lies in its versatility, its ability to take from what is beyond the nation’s experience, and to yoke together the projects of poetry and of empire. In the chapters that follow, I explore how the rich vein of poetic ore tapped by Jonson as a way to enhance England’s cultural capital finds its expression on the stage, as Jacobean playwrights negotiate the complications of taking from Spain.