COMPROMISOEPP ENTREGADOS
ESPECIFICACIONES SOBRE NORMAS Y PROCEDIMIENTOS SEGUROS
Royal Magnificence and the Common Weal:
John Ogilby’s Virgilian Opera (1649 & foll.) as a Stuart Entertainment John Ogilby was the first Briton to translate the entire Virgilian corpus for publication: the Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid.50 His Virgil first appeared in a spare octavo edition in 1649, the monumental year of the execution of Charles I, and a second version (this one an annotated translation) first appeared in print in 1654. Both versions provided serviceable renderings, in heroic couplets, of Virgil’s works,51 and they proved to be a lucrative venture for the translator. Ogilby exercised significant control over the printing of his work almost from the start, eventually winning protective patents from Charles II, setting up a press in his own home, organizing the sales of his books, and securing a place for himself in a print market dominated by the Stationer’s Company.52 His translations were republished at least six times through the Commonwealth, the Protectorate, and the Restoration, and he brought out a Latin version in 1658.53 Ogilby’s best-known editions of Virgil are still his illustrated folios (1654 & foll.), lavish volumes
50 Excluding the Appendix Vergiliana (minor juvenilia, now thought to be spurious).
51 In my own experience, Ogilby’s translations are possibly even more functional than Dryden’s version in
their rendering of plot elements. Although his syntactical inversions can be distracting, his inclusion of footnotes and sidenotes aids the identification of key figures (as in the Aeneid) and the discernment of the basic action.
52 Katherine S. Van Eerde, John Ogilby and the Taste of His Times (Folkestone, Eng.: Dawson, 1966), 28-
29; Margret Schuchard, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Works of John Ogilby and William Morgan
(Bern: Herbert Lang / Frankfurt and Munich: Peter Lang, 1975), esp. 9-14, 19-21.
53 Schuchard differentiates among publications of the unannotated first translation (1649, 1650, 1665), the
annotated second translation (1654, 1668, 1675, 1684), and the Latin edition (1658, 1663), whose copy-text “was probably the 1641 edition of the imprimerie royale in Paris” (40).
whose design was projected as early as 1652. Printed on the finest French paper,54 these volumes boasted conscientious annotations and more than one hundred “sculptures” that had been commissioned by an innovative system of subscription in which each of the first subscribers had his or her name, title, and arms engraved in Latin at the bottom of the illustrated plates (Appendix A). Anthony à Wood (1691) described Ogilby’s Virgil as “the fairest Edition that till then the English Press ever produced”—an edition “reserved for libraries and the Nobility.”55 It provided the model for Ogilby’s subsequent
publications, including his Homer, which Alexander Pope remembered as “that great edition with pictures” that had introduced him to the Greek bard when he was a child.56
Thus far, Ogilby has received far less scholarly attention than his better-known successor in Virgilian translation. Although Ogilby has become an increasingly
interesting figure to scholars of the history of the book, his rather undignified appearance in Dryden’s MacFlecknoe (1682) has relegated him to the category of “dunce” for many years. I follow Annabel Patterson in thinking that Ogilby was not necessarily the dunce that he was (or is) reputed to have been.57 This case study aims to provide a framework for assessing his distinctive vision of the English common weal and therefore also his importance to English literary history. Virgil, I argue, provided Ogilby with an important model for his pious, industrious mode of civic service. Virgil was, as Ogilby conceived him, a king’s poet who united ambition with humility and discretion with talent. As Ogilby imagined him, Virgil had supported the nation by addressing himself to the ear of
54 Schuchard notes that it very likely came from France and that a firsthand examination attests to its
quality (14).
55 Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U California P,
1987), qtd. 170.
56 Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (NY: Norton / New Haven: Yale UP, 1985), 44. 57Pastoral and Ideology, 169-70.
the monarch and his noblest servants, and his work proved useful beyond its own historical moment by glorifying righteous monarchical government and modeling virtue for the noblest men in the land. With his translations of the Virgilian corpus, I argue, Ogilby attempted a parallel service for modern Britain.
Ogilby is now well established as a royalist translator—one who stayed loyal to the Stuarts throughout the Commonwealth and Protectorate and whose Virgilian translations bear the marks of this loyalty.58 My discussion of Ogilby’s Virgil builds upon and extends this scholarship. Assessing Ogilby’s approach to Virgilian translation in a manner that bridges all of his published versions from 1649 forward,59 I highlight two questions central to a consideration of Ogilby’s orientation toward the British common weal.
First, I ask why the task of translating and publishing the works of Virgil might have presented itself as a profitable endeavor to a writer in Ogilby’s position as a gentleman who had shown little previous interest in “Poesie.” While answers to this question may seem self-evident to those familiar with Virgil and the history of Virgilian reception, the points emphasized below have not been spelled out clearly or fully in existing scholarship on the subject. Part of the work of this chapter is therefore to explain why, in seventeenth-century terms, Virgil seemed to be a poet whose entire corpus was worth translating in its entirety. The answer, at least in part, is that Virgil’s poetry was widely conceived as poetry profitable to the modern common weal—poetry thought to cultivate moral integrity and civic virtue in a manner conducive to civic order, especially
58 For full discussions see Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology, 170-85, and Van Eerde, John Ogilby, esp.
chaps. 1-3, whose broad lines have been confirmed by subsequent scholars.
monarchical order. I seek to explain why Virgil’s seventeenth-century interpreters (particularly royalists in Ogilby’s vein) presumed that this was the case.
Secondly, I ask in more specific terms than have been employed previously what brand of royalism Ogilby’s Virgilian publications promoted. Here again, conceiving the production of a translation as a strategic contribution to the common weal proves useful, for the concept carries with it a sense of the national body addressed by the translator. Ogilby, I argue, appealed to a vision of civic influence in which the monarch is the highest embodiment of civic virtue and the poet who contributes the most to the nation is the poet who has the ear of the monarch and his most loyal noble servants. In his
Virgilian publications, Ogilby envisioned the wealth of the English nation emanating principally from the king and his most loyal subjects—a notion of civic influence that had shaped the Stuart masque and that would continue to shape Ogilby’s later endeavors as a writer, cartographer, and printmaker. Ogilby envisioned the strength of the British common weal persisting in its inheritance of Roman, patriarchal traditions; he envisioned its righteousness as a consequence of the progress of Christianity that Augustus’s Pax
Romana was perceived as having enabled; and, although he incorporated a historicist
strain into his translation typical of this period of Virgil’s reception, he emphasized notable parallels between the Roman common weal and its British counterpart. Indeed, he imagined Virgil’s corpus acting on modern England in much the way that it had acted on ancient Rome: instructing the monarch and his loyal servants in the ways of good government, bringing glory on righteous monarchical assemblies of the present (as of the past), and confirming the righteousness of monarchical government as a natural
I. Ogilby’s Virgils within a Career of Royal Service
Ogilby did not begin his public life as a writer or printer. His first translations of Virgil, which marked the starting point of his literary endeavors, first appeared in print when he was nearly 50 years of age. Ogilby had begun as a dancer. Born in Scotland, the son of a member of the Merchant Taylors Company, he is said to have “bound himself” at a fairly young age to a London dancing master in Gray’s Inn Lane.60 By the 1620s, he performed in one or more of the Duke of Buckingham’s “great masques” at court, where he would have come into contact with King James “and perhaps danced with Prince Charles,” as his modern biographer conjectures.61 Although badly injured in a dance performance (and permanently lamed because of it), Ogilby remade himself as a dance master, a choreographer, and a businessman invested in theatrical pursuits. By the early 1630s, presumably utilizing the contacts he had made during his time at court, he journeyed to Dublin to assist in the construction and direction of Ireland’s first theater. Thomas Viscount Wentworth, Lord Chief Deputy of Ireland, was developing a viceregal court in Dublin that promised to be “a microcosm of the one in Whitehall,” and Ogilby lent his hand to this project.62 Receiving the official title of “Master of the Revels in and through the Kingdom of Ireland,” he helped to supervise the new theater’s construction, hired actors, and may have written and choreographed some of the performances. These activities came to a halt with the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Ogilby had two narrow escapes from death before arriving back in England, “penniless” and “patron-less,” amidst the
60 Van Eerde, John Ogilby, qtd. 17. 61 Ibid., 20.
turmoil of civil war.63 Because the theaters were closed by state mandate during the Interregnum, the pursuits in which he had defined his expertise were at least temporarily lost to him. He seems to have begun his translations of Virgil during this period or soon thereafter.
This was, in any case, the way Ogilby dated his Virgilian turn. As he described it some years later in the Preface to Africa (1670),
[I]n the first Fluctuations of the late Grand Rebellion, I being left at leisure from former Imployments belonging to the quiet of Peace wherein I was bred, in stead of Arms, to which in parties most began to buckle, I betook my self to something of Literature, in which, till then, altogether a Stranger; And drawing towards the Evening of my Age, I made a little Progress, bending my self to softer Studies, adapted to my Abilities and Inclinations, Poesie: And first Rallying my new rais’d Forces, a small and inconsiderable parcel of Latin, I undertook no less a
Conquest, than the Reducing into our Native Language, the Great Master and Grand Improver of that Tongue, Virgil, the Prince of Roman Poets.64
Ogilby stops short of envisioning his literary endeavors as a continuation of his “former Imployments.” Indeed, nowhere in this Preface does he say what those “former
Imployments” were: perhaps he assumes that Charles II, his dedicatee and addressee, already has some knowledge of those activities. Nonetheless, within the trajectory of his career, as he describes it here, the translation of Virgil emerges as kind of transitional endeavor for Ogilby—transitional not only in the sense that it necessarily promised to mediate between Latin and English, Rome and Britain, but also because of the way it serves in his account to connect the portions of his career interrupted by the war—the “late Grand Rebellion,” as he terms it. His deferent orientation toward the monarch provides a sense of continuity throughout these transitions, linking with a common
63 Ibid., 25.
64Africa being an accurate description of the regions of AEgypt, Barbary, Lybia, and Billedulgerid, the land of Negroes, Guinee, AEthiopia and the Abyssines… (London: Printed by Tho. Johnson for the author, 1670), image 2, reel 139:01 in Early English Books Online (accessed June 13, 2010). Van Eerde describes this Preface as Ogilby’s “only effort at autobiography” (11).
purpose and a common point of focus the pursuits of the masquer to the pursuits of the man of letters, the duties of the Master of Revels to the duties of the book maker.
And the Virgilian corpus itself serves an intermediary function, occupying as it does an important middle ground between peace and war, “soft[ness]” and manly vigor. Requiring Ogilby to learn new skills (in particular, to augment his “small and
inconsiderable parcel” of boyhood Latin), Virgilian translation emerged for Ogilby as a form of royal service parallel to military service. With an elaborate military conceit, Ogilby imagines himself carrying out the translation with the verve of a military
“Conquest”—a parallelism authorized, we might infer, by the content of the Aeneid itself, which famously begins, “Arma virumque cano” (“Arms, and the Man I sing”65), and which figures forth the military conquest necessary for Aeneas to found Rome.66 And yet, for all its thematic resonances, this foray into “Poesie” is the very stuff of “Peace”: a peaceable, “leisure” activity that presumably retains something of the peaceable,
principled character of the world in which the translator was “bred.”
Moreover, this entry into the realm of “Literature” prepares Ogilby to take on a series of increasingly ambitious, peacetime activities—feats in English letters and
bookmaking that are all conducted with the same royal orientation. He enumerates these
65The works of Publius Virgilius Maro translated, adorned with sculpture, and illustrated with annotations by John Ogilby ... (London: Printed by Thomas Roycroft for the author, 1668), 128, in Early English Books Online (accessed June 13, 2010). Unless otherwise noted, quotations are drawn from this edition, which is almost identical in its textual content to the 1654 annotated version, including pagination and annotations. It includes slightly different prefatory materials and accoutrements (related to the honoration of Charles II) and, by virtue of these freedoms, proves more comparable to Dryden’s Virgil than the earlier editions, which were published amid republican rule.
66 Ogilby’s annotations suggest that he was well aware of this thematic point of focus. He actually
emphasizes the military theme in his annotations to the opening lines of the poem: “Some blame our Poet for putting Arms before the Man, because the first six Books discourse more of him, the last more of Arms,” he observes, “but they forget that the second Book sets Arms out to the height, charactering both Valour and Deceit, a most prudent Leader, and a most daring Souldier exactly” (128). I have silently regularized the use of italics in my transcriptions of Ogilby’s annotations because he is not consistent in his italicization.
feats in the paragraphs that follow: paraphrases of Aesop’s fables; translations of Homer (which required him to learn Greek); folio illustrations of Charles II’s coronation; an illustrated version of the Bible; an epic based on the life of “Charles, the Royal Martyr”; and then, after losing both this original epic and a large store of printed folios in the Great Fire of London, a relatively late, independent venture into geography and cartography, his Africa being the first work in a projected four-part series attempting “the Reducement of the whole World.”67
This prefatory discussion already reveals a good deal about Ogilby’s conception of civic service—a conception that I will suggest he had formed long before, at least in its broad outlines, by the time he took up the task of translating Virgil. Ogilby hints at a vision of the arts as a product of civilized society. He hints at a conception of “Peace” as the predictor of a happy, settled nation. And his ongoing deference to royal authority is especially striking. Ogilby points out specifically, for instance, that his translation of the
Iliad was completed “with much Cost and Labor, … being Dedicated to His Sacred
Majesty, and Crown’d with His Gracious Acceptance.” The formality of his phrasing resembles the language of the Dedication, too, where he addresses his “Dread Soveraign” in flattering tones and presents his atlas with a correspondingly deferential image of subservience:
Thus Prostrating at Your Sacred Feet, that which if Your Majesty be pleased to receive with a Smile, Your Subjects through Your British Monarchy, not onely Ambitious in obeying Your Commands, but ready to follow, in what they may, Your Royal Example, will give the Work also a Civil Reception.68
67 Preface to Africa, images 2-4. 68 Dedication to Africa, image 5.
It is easy to see why one of the commendatory poets attached to Dryden’s Virgil would have referred disparagingly to “the lewd Rhymes of groveling Ogleby.”69 Ogilby imports into his language an elaborate sense of ceremony, as if to replicate within the text the rituals of bowing and curtseying observed at court. His discourse is imbued with the ideology of absolute authority: the monarch smiles, his subjects are pleased; the monarch commands, his subjects obey; the monarch sets the “Royal Example” for his subjects to follow. But Ogilby does not “grovel” unthinkingly. His Preface, like his Dedication, outlines a clear concept of loyal service as a desire to obey the dictates of the monarch and the promise of a good reputation—ambitions almost indistinguishable from one another. His Virgilian edition, he says, was
the fairest that till then the English Press ever boasted.
Yet this first Endeavour rais’d my Reputation no farther, than to be accounted a Good Translator, a Faithful Interpreter, one that had dabled well in anothers Helicon; but I, greedy of more, having tasted the sweetness of a little Fame, would not thus sit down, but ambitious to try my own Wing, endeavor’d to Sore a little higher.70
Ogilby therefore moves on to Homer’s Iliad “swoln with the Breath of a general Applause” and already projecting a “double Design, not onely to bring over so Antient and Famous an Author, but to inable my self the better to carry on an Epick Poem of my own Composure.”71
What Ogilby does not spell out plainly here is why he set himself to translating Virgil in the first place—why a former masquer, a dance master, and a theater manager would see Virgil as the gateway into “Literature” and “Poesie,” why he would take up Virgil even as he was “drawing towards the Evening of [his] Age,” why he would
69Works of John Dryden, V.59.82. 70 Preface to Africa, images 2-3. 71 Ibid., image 3.
conceive this literary labor as an active (if not militant) response to the English Civil Wars and the republican government established in their wake, and why he would take on the entire Virgilian corpus. Indeed, even in the prefatory comments that introduce his translations of Virgil themselves, Ogilby says very little about why he chose to translate Virgil (and the works of Virgil) at this particular time—about what he imagines this translation contributing to the common weal. He may presume that the ideology behind this selection is already abundantly self-evident: the decision to translate the works of Virgil constitutes a statement in itself, not unlike the decision to write an original epic in