Abstract
This chapter studies a copy of the first English translation of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia held at the Huntington Library, its first reception during the second half of the sixteenth century, and its later reception history among the great scholars and editors of Shakespeare in the eighteenth century. It argues for a more dynamic, dialogic model of literary reception than what the term “intertextuality” ordinarily allows. Finally, it examines the contribution this text made to the notion of Shakespeare as a native genius, free from schoolroom classicism, arguing that Richard Farmer—main proponent of this theory in his influential Essay on the Learning of Shakespeare (1767)—has been misinterpreted: Farmer presented no lone genius, but a Shakespeare engaged in a rich scholarly culture of translations and translators.
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Notes
- 1.
This copy is available to view on Early English Books Online (EEBO). The second edition (1567) presented the complete textual translation, but Reed never acquired this edition.
- 2.
- 3.
Nonetheless, in 1791 Reed also acquired a copy of the first English translation of Herodotus (1584), which comprised translations of Books 1 and 2, on Persia and Egypt. This was also bought by Heber and is now held at the Huntington Library.
- 4.
Farmer was also a member of several clubs and literary societies, among them the Unincreasable Club, which met at the Queen’s Head, Holborn, of which Reed was sometime president. Reed would later write the biographical sketch of Farmer in Seward (1799, vol. 2, pp. 579–598).
- 5.
Malone issued a defence of his Shakespeare edition in the form of a published letter addressed to Farmer.
- 6.
Johnson himself accorded significant status to the translation activities of his early modern subjects in his seminal Lives of the Poets (1779–1781; see 2006 edition).
- 7.
Several trade voyages to Persia nonetheless took advantage of local trading privileges in Astrakhan, and travelled through Persia to prominent trading-posts such as Bukhara. Little more than a decade later, however, the struggling Anglo-Persian trade would be stymied by moves to establish relations with Persia’s Ottoman enemies, with the establishment of the Turkey Company in 1581, the same year as the return to London of the final English Muscovy Company voyage to Persia.
- 8.
Farmer and Reed may also have had Persia on their mind, if less consciously: after the fall of the Safavids in 1736, Persia fell into instability (from which the British East India Company profited) until the establishment of the Qajars in 1785. So the matter and history of Persia certainly attracted British attention in the latter half of the eighteenth century, strengthened by the fashion for “oriental” writings such as Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721), translated by John Ozell as Persian Letters in 1722, and the phenomenon of the Arabian Tales/ Les Mille et une Nuits, first printed in Europe by Antoine Galland (1704–1717).
- 9.
See also his comment on the “Hystorie of Hamblet,” a fragment of which he had seen thanks to “a very curious and intelligent Gentleman” and later as a book held by the Duke of Newcastle (Farmer 1767, pp. 57–59).
- 10.
The first edition of the Essay (also 1767) cites the 1590 edition of Sidney’s Arcadia as a book he owns, predating the earliest known edition in Ames’s Typographical Antiquities (p. 23). Farmer also refers to William Painter’s two volumes of The Pallace of Pleasure (1566, 1567) as a gift from a friend not known to Ames (second edition, p. 61), and a collection of “novels” from which Shakespeare derives plot-material. But in the third edition, Farmer worries about Shakespeare’s sources in “old books, which are now perhaps no where to be found” (p. 58).
- 11.
The Preface has no page numbers.
- 12.
It is true that Farmer cites, with some relish, Nashe’s 1589 dig at the grammar-school-educated readers of English translations, who “feed on nought but the crumbs that fall from the translator’s trencher” (from Nashe’s preface to Greene’s Menaphon, 1589). But this was by no means the dominant view on translations, but more likely betrays Nashe’s attempt to establish himself early in his career by way of provocation.
- 13.
One reference directs readers to the 1560 edition of the English translation of Carion’s Chronicle, and an internal reference to Thomas Lanquet’s contribution to the text that became known as Cooper’s Chronicle indicates that it cannot be earlier than 1559. Given that the full eight Books of the Cyropaedia appeared in 1567, one must presume that a reader as engaged, knowledgeable, and interested in the Cyropaedia as this annotator is would have had the interest and means to acquire the second edition as soon as possible.
- 14.
The STC date is 1552, and given that the title by which Barker addresses his dedicatee were only awarded Herbert in September 1551, there is no additional authority for believing a 1550 date inscribed on this copy.
- 15.
On sixteenth-century readers’ marks, see Sherman (2008). The marks found in this copy are consonant with those Sherman describes.
- 16.
An excellent and relevant recent example of work that combines book history with an appreciation of Tudor translation as an agent of literary and political change is Coldiron (2015).
- 17.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam identifies “inter-imperial competition” as one potential framework through which the world history of the early modern period could be studied on a global level (Bentley et al. 2015, vol. 1, p. 6).
- 18.
“I cannot omit heere the hunting, namely with running hounds; which is the most honourable and noblest sorte thereof: for it is a theeuish forme of hunting to shoote with gunnes and bowes; and greyhound hunting is not so martiall a game: But because I would not be thought a partiall praiser of this sport, I remit yon to Xenophon, an olde and famous writer, who had no minde of flattering you or me in this purpose: and who also setteth downe a faire paterne, for the education of a yong king, vnder the supposed name of Cyrus” (James 1918, pp. 48–49).
- 19.
Wiggins argues for a 1580s date for The Warres of Cyrus, based on its influence from Tamburlaine (Wiggins 2008).
- 20.
As the liberator of the Babylonian Jews, Cyrus is praised in the 1560 Geneva Bible: “For he was chief Monarche, and had manie nacions vnder his dominion, which this heathen King co[n]fesseth to haue receiued of the liuing God” (note on Ezra 1:2; sig. 2F3v). Johannes Carion describes him as “rekened one amonge the moost doughtyest kynges & lordes of the worlde. For besyde the manyfold excellent and very princely vertues had God geue[n] and endued him wyth sundery luck and fortune in rulyng, and very excellent vyctoryes of hys enemyes” (Carrion 1550, Sig. [D7]).
- 21.
Especially in Discorsi 2.13 and 3.20 (Machiavelli 1965).
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Grogan, J. (2019). Ancient Persia, Early Modern England, and the Labours of “Reception”. In: Gallien, C., Niayesh, L. (eds) Eastern Resonances in Early Modern England. New Transculturalisms, 1400–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22925-2_5
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