[In the essay that follows, Venuti examines The Destruction of Troy, Denham's translation of part of the Aeneid, exploring the social and political implications of his method of translation and the circumstances of its publication.]

In 1656, Sir John Denham published a translation with the running title The Destruction of Troy. An Essay upon the Second Book of Virgils Æneis. Written in the year, 1636.¹ The title page is one among many remarkable things about this book: it omits any sign of authorship in favor of a bold reference to the gap between the dates of composition and publication. Most early seventeenth-century translations of classical texts are published with a signature, if not a full name (John Ashmore, John Ogilby, Robert Stapylton, John Vicars), then at least initials and some indication of social position (“Sir T: H:,” “W.L., Gent.”). Denham's omission of his name may be taken as the self-effacing gesture of a courtly amateur, presenting himself as not seriously pursuing a literary career, not asserting any individualistic concept of authorship (the title page presents the translation as no more than an “essay”) and thus implying that his text is the fruit of hours idle, not spent in the employ of royal authority, in political office, or in military service.² Denham's title page presented his text as a distinctively aristocratic gesture in literary translation, typical of court culture in the Tudor and Stuart periods, and this is clear even in the imprint, For Humphrey Moseley, one of the most active publishers of elite literature during the seventeenth century and a staunch royalist who advertised his political views in the prefaces to his publications. Once the social conditions of Denham's book are recognized, the temporal gap indicated by the dates on the title page fills with significance from his own activities in support of the royalist cause, both in the royal government and army during the civil wars and for the exiled royal family and court during the Interregnum. Perhaps the omission of his name should also be taken as an effort to conceal his identity, a precaution taken by royalist writers who intended their work to be critical of the Commonwealth.³

“Written in 1636” proclaimed a continuity between Denham's translation and the years when court poetry and drama were setting the dominant literary trends in England, when the Caroline experiment in absolutism reached its apex, and when Denham himself, the twenty-year-old son of a baron of the Exchequer, was preparing for a legal career at Lincoln's Inn, dabbling in literary pursuits such as translating the Aeneid. The Destruction of Troy was revised and published much later, in 1656—after Denham returned from several years of exile with the Caroline court in France, soon after he was arrested in the Commonwealth's campaign to suppress royalist insurgency, a suspect in a military counterplot, and just a year after the second edition of the text by which he is best remembered today, Coopers Hill (1642), a topographical poem that offers a politically tendentious evocation of English history on the eve of the civil wars. At this later juncture, Denham's translation assumes the role of a cultural political practice: “Written in 1636,” it functions partly as a nostalgic glance back toward less troubled times for royal hegemony and partly as a strategic cultural move in the present, wherein Denham plans to develop a royalist aesthetic in translation to be implemented now and for the future, when hegemony is regained. “The hope of doing [Virgil] more right,” Denham asserted in his preface, “is the onely scope of this Essay, by opening this new way of translating this Author, to those whom youth, leisure, and better fortune makes fitter for such undertakings.” Denham saw his audience as the coming generations of English aristocracy, who, unlike him, would have the “better fortune” of escaping social displacement in civil wars.

The aristocratic affiliation would have also been perceived by contemporary readers from various classes and with differing political tendencies. The translation was cited in “An Advertisement of Books newly published” that appeared in Mercurius Politicus, the widely circulated newsweekly licensed by Parliament to present a propagandistic survey of current events. The notice revealed the translator's identity and used the title “Esquire,” indicating not only his status as a gentleman, but perhaps his legal education as well: “The Destruction of Troy; an Essay upon the second Book of Virgils Æneis. Written by JOHN DENHAM, Esquire.”⁴

The social functioning of Denham's translation becomes clear when his preface is considered in a broader context of translation theory and practice during the seventeenth century. The first point to observe is that Denham's way of translating was hardly new in 1656. He was following Horace's dictum in Ars poetica that the poet should avoid any word-for-word rendering: “For, being a Poet, thou maist feigne, create, / Not care, as thou wouldst faithfully translate, / To render word for word”—in Ben Jonson's un-Horatian, line-by-line version (1605).⁵ But where Horace took translation as one practice of the poet, Denham took poetry as the goal of translation, especially poetry translation: “I conceive it a vulgar error in translating Poets, to affect being Fides Interpres,” he wrote, because poetic discourse requires more latitude to capture its “spirit” than a close adherence to the foreign text would allow. Denham's term fides interpres refers to translations of classical poetry that aim for such an adherence, made not by poets, but by scholars, including scholarly poets (Jonson's Horace) and teachers who translate to produce school textbooks. John Brinsley described his 1633 prose version of Virgil's Eclogues as “Translated Grammatically, and also according to the proprietie of our English tongue, so farre as Grammar and the verse will well permit. Written chiefly for the good of schooles, to be used according to the directions in the Preface to the painfull Schoolemaster.” Denham's slur against this method is tellingly couched in class terms: “I conceive it a vulgar error.”

Still, in recommending greater freedom against the grammarians, Denham was advocating a classical translation method that reemerged in England decades before he published his version of Virgil. Thomas Phaer, whose translations of the Aeneid date back to 1558, asserted that he “followed the counsell of Horace, teaching the duty of a good interpretour, Qui quae desperat nitescere possit, relinquit, by which occasion, somewhat, I haue in places omitted, somewhat altered.”⁶ A freer translation method was advocated with greater frequency from the 1620s onward, especially in aristocratic and court circles. Sir Thomas Hawkins, a Catholic who was knighted by James I and whose translations of Jesuit tracts were dedicated to Queen Henrietta Maria, prefaced his 1625 selection of Horace's odes by fending off complaints that he did not imitate classical meters: “Many (no doubt) will say, Horace is by mee forsaken, his Lyrick softnesse, and emphaticall Muse maymed: That in all there is a generall defection from his genuine Harmony. Those I must tell, I haue in this translation, rather sought his Spirit, then Numbers; yet the Musique of Verse not neglected neither.”⁷ In a 1628 version of Virgil's eclogues that imposed a courtly aesthetic on the Latin text, “W.L., Gent.” felt compelled to justify his departures with a similar apology: “Some Readers I make no doubt they wil meet with in these dainty mouth'd times, that will take them, for not comming resolved word for word, and line for line with the Author. … I used the freedome of a Translator, not tying myselfe to the tyranny of a Grammatical construction, but breaking the shell into many peeces, was onely carefull to preserve the Kernell safe and whole, from the violence of a wrong, or wrested Interpretation.”⁸ As early as 1616, Barten Holyday, who became chaplain to Charles I and was created doctor of divinity at the king's order, introduced his translation of Persius by announcing that “I haue not herein bound my selfe with a ferularie superstition to the letter: but with the ancient libertie of a Translator, haue vsed a moderate paraphrase, where the obscuritie did more require it.”⁹ Holyday articulated the opposition to the grammarians that Denham would later join, and with a similarly Latinate tag, calling close translation “a ferularie superstition,” belief propagated with the rod (ferula), school discipline—a joke designed especially for a grammarian.

In 1620, Sir Thomas Wroth, a member of the Somerset gentry who affected the literary pursuits of a courtly amateur (he called his epigrams The Abortive of an Idle Houre), anticipated Denham in several respects. Wroth likewise chose to translate the second book of the Aeneid and to call it The Destruction of Troy, but he also defined his translatorly “freedome” in “A Reqvest to the Reader”: “Giue not vp your casting verdict rashly, though you find mee sometimes wandring (which I purposely do) out of the visible bounds, but deliberately take notice that I stray not from the scope and intent of the Author, iustified by the best Commentaries: and so I leaue you to reade, to vnderstand, and to encrease.”¹⁰ Wroth's freer method ultimately rested on a scholarly rationale (“Commentaries”) reminiscent of Jonson's neo-classicism. And indeed Wroth's farewell to the reader (“to reade, to vnderstand, and to encrease”) was stated with a peculiarly Jonsonian sententiousness (“Pray thee, take care, that tak'st my booke in hand, / To reade it well: that is, to understand”; Epigrammes [1616]). In 1634, Sir Robert Stapylton, a gentleman in ordinary of the privy chamber to the prince of Wales, published a version of Book Four of the Aeneid in which he anticipated Denham both by questioning any close translation of poetry and by assigning the freer method the same class affiliation: “It is true that wit distilled in one Language, cannot be transfused into another without losse of spirits: yet I presume such graces are retained, as those of the Noblest quality will favour this Translation, from an Original, that was sometimes the unenvied Favourite of the greatest Roman Emperour.”¹¹

Denham consolidated the several-decades-long emergence of a neo-classical translation method in aristocratic literary culture. It may have seemed “new” to him, not because it had no previous advocates, but because it had: it was a modern revival of an ancient cultural practice, making Denham's translation a simulacral “Copy” of Virgil's true “Original,” rationalized with a Platonic theory of translation as the copy of a copy of the truth: “I have made it my principal care to follow him, as he made it his to follow Nature in all his proportions.” But Denham's sense of his own modernity was less philosophical than political, linked to a specific class and nation. Coming back from exile in France, he may have found his translation method “new” in the sense of foreign, in fact French. French translation in the 1640s was characterized by theories and practices advocating free translation of classical texts, and Denham, among such other exiled royalist writers as Abraham Cowley, Sir Richard Fanshawe, and Edmund Waller, were no doubt acquainted with the work of its leading French proponent, Nicolas Perrot D'Ablancourt, a prolific translator of Greek and Latin. D'Ablancourt's freedom with Tacitus set the standard. In his preface to his version of the Annals, he wrote that “la diversité qui se trouve dans les langues est si grande, tant pour la construction et la forme des periodes, que pour les figures et les autres ornemens, qu'il faut à tous coups changer d'air et de visage, si l'on ne veut faire un corps monstreux, tel que celuy des traductions ordinaires, qui sont ou mortes et languissantes, ou confuses, et embroüillées, sans aucun ordre ny agréement” (“the diversity that one finds among languages is so great, in the arrangement and shape of the periods, as in the figures and other ornaments, that it is always necessary to change the air and appearance, unless one wishes to create a monstrous body, like those in ordinary translations, which are either dead and languishing, or obscure, and muddled, without any order or gracefulness”).¹² Compare Denham's preface: “Poesie is of so subtle a spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput mortuum.” Denham echoed D'Ablancourt's body/soul metaphor, although following Stapylton's example (“wit distilled in one Language, cannot be transfused into another without losse of spirits”) he imagined translation alchemically, as a distillation in which the residue was termed a caput mortuum (OED). The alchemical image indicated that a free translation effected a radical change, in which the author who (in Stapylton's words) “was borne a Forraigner” can now be “esteeme[d] as a Native”—or, in this case, as an Englishman.

The “new spirit” that is added with the free translation method involves a process of domestication, in which the foreign text is imprinted with values specific to the culture of the target language. D'Ablancourt called it “changer d'air et de visage.” The elliptical, discontinuous discourse of Tacitus must be translated “sans choquer les delicatesses de nostre langue & la justesse du raisonnement. … Souvent on est contraint d'adjoûter quelque chose à sa pensée pour l'éclaircir; quelquefois il en faut retrancher une partie pour donner jour à tout le reste” (“without offending the delicacy of our language and the correctness of reason. … Often one is forced to add something to the thought in order to clarify it; sometimes it is necessary to delete one part so as to give birth to all the rest”). Henry Rider reverted to a clothing metaphor in the preface of his 1638 translation of Horace: “Translations of Authors from one language to another, are like old garments turn'd into new fashions; in which though the stuffe be still the same, yet the die and trimming are altered, and in the making, here something added, there something cut away.”¹³ Denham's formulation used a similar metaphor while nodding toward the classical author with whom D'Ablancourt pioneered the free method: “As speech is the apparel of our thoughts, so are there certain Garbs and Modes of speaking, which vary with the times; … and this I think Tacitus means, by that which he calls Sermonem temporis istius auribus accommodatum; … and therefore if Virgil must needs speak English, it were fit he should speak not only as a man of this Nation, but as a man of this age.” Denham's advocacy of free translation was laden with a nationalism that, even if expressed with courtly self-effacement, ultimately led to a contradictory repression of the method's parallels and influences, foreign as well as English: “If this disguise I have put upon him (I wish I could give it a better name) fit not naturally and easily on so grave a person, yet it may become him better than that Fools-Coat wherein the French and Italian have of late presented him.” Denham's translation of Virgil in fact reflects the strong resemblance between English and French translation methods during the period. But the deep nationalism of this method works to conceal its origins in another national culture—a contradiction that occurs in Denham's case because the method answers so specifically to an English problem: the need for a “new” cultural practice to regain the hegemonic status of the defeated Caroline aristocracy. In his commendatory verses “To Sir Richard Fanshawe upon his Translation of Pastor Fido” (1648), Denham calls free translation “a new and nobler way” (l. 21).

Denham's intention to enlist translation in the service of royalist cultural politics at home is visible both in his selection of the foreign text and in the discursive strategies he adopted in his version. The choice to translate Virgil's Aeneid in early modern England could easily evoke Geoffrey of Monmouth's legend that Brute, the grandson of Aeneas, founded Britain and became the first in a succession of British monarchs. Although this (like the Arthurian legends) was losing credibility among historians and antiquarians, the matter of Troy continued to be the cultural support of a strong nationalism, and it was repeatedly revised from different and often conflicting ideological standpoints in a wide range of texts—from William Camden's Britannia (1586) to Jonson's Speeches at Prince Henry's Barriers (1609) to Thomas Heywood's Life of Merlin (1641).¹⁴ The early Stuart kings were often given a Trojan genealogy. Anthony Munday's contribution to the royal progress through London, The Triumphs of Reunited Britannia (1605), referred to James I as “our second Brute.” Heywood described his narrative as “a Chronographicall History of all the Kings and memorable passages of this kingdom, from Brute to the Reigne of our Royall Soveraigne King Charles.” In the political debates during the Interregnum, a Trojan genealogy could be used to justify both representative government and absolute monarchy. In 1655, the parliamentarian polemicist William Prynne interpreted the significance of the legend as “1. A Warre to shake off Slavery, and recover publick Liberty. 2. A kinde of Generall Parliamentary Councell summoned by Brute”; whereas in a legal commentary published in 1663 Edward Waterhouse argued that Brute “by his consent to reward the valour and fidelity of his Companions” instituted laws “both touching his Royal Prerogative, and their civil Security in life, member, goods and Lawes.”¹⁵

Denham's own appropriation of the Brute legend in Coopers Hill swells with patriotic fervor, but it also possesses the awareness that the Trojan genealogy is a legend, increasingly under attack yet able to function in cultural political struggles and even, somewhat contradictorily, true. In a passage that reflects on the vista of London and its environs, Denham writes that “The Gods great Mother,” Cybele,

                                                                                                    cannot boast
Amongst that numerous, and Celestiall hoast,
More Hero's than can Windsor, nor doth Fames
Immortall booke record more noble names,
Not to look back so far, to whom this Ile
Owes the first Glory of so brave a pile,
Whether to Caesar, Albanact, or Brute,
The British Arthur, or the Danish Knute,
(Though this of old no lesse contest did move,
Than when for Homers birth seven Cities strove)
.....But whosoere it was, Nature design'd
First a brave place, and then as brave a minde.

(ll. 61-70, 73-74)

The mention of “contest” in the parenthetical remark seems at first to question the credibility of heroic genealogies for English kings, whether historical or literary: “contest” as a reference to the historiographical controversy or debate. But the couplet quickly shifts the issue from credibility to social effectivity: even if of questionable authenticity, poetic genealogies (“Homers birth”) are cultural capital and can motivate political and military conflict. In England's case, however, the heroic genealogies are metaphysically validated, by “Nature design'd.” For Denham, the Brute legend constituted a strategic move in an ideological cultural practice, poetry in the service of a specific social agenda. But, like many of his contemporaries, he was apt to mask these material conditions with providentialist claims and appeals to natural law that underwrite a notion of racial superiority.

Denham's choice of Virgil's Aeneid was uniquely suited to the nationalistic leanings of his domesticating translation method. And in line with the recurrent Trojan genealogies of English kings, his choice of an excerpt he entitled The Destruction of Troy allowed him to suggest, more directly, the defeat of the Caroline monarchy and his support for absolutism in England. Denham's political designs can be seen, first, in his decision to prepare Book 2 for publication. In 1636, he had produced a version of the Aeneid, Books 2 through 6, and in 1668, he revised and published part of Book 4 under the title The Passion of Dido for Aeneas. In 1656, he chose to issue the excerpt whose “argument,” the fall of Troy, better lent itself to topical concerns. The topical resonance of his version becomes strikingly evident when it is juxtaposed to the Latin text and to previous English versions. Book 2 had already been translated in several complete renderings of the Aeneid, and it had been singled out twice by previous translators, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Sir Thomas Wroth. Yet both of them had rendered the entire book, some eight hundred lines of Latin text. Denham, in contrast, published an abbreviated translation (some 550 lines) that ended climactically with Priam's death.

haec finis Priami fatorum, hic exitus illum
sorte tulit Troiam incensam et prolapsa uidentem
Pergama, tot quodam populis terrisque superbum
regnatorem Asiae, iacet ingens litore truncus,
auulsumque umeris caput et sine nomine corpus.(16)

(ll. 554-58)

Thus fell the King, who yet surviv'd the State,
With such a signal and peculiar Fate.
Under so vast a ruine not a Grave,
Nor in such flames a funeral fire to have:
He, whom such Titles swell'd, such Power made proud
To whom the Scepters of all Asia bow'd,
On the cold earth lies th'unregarded King,
A headless Carkass, and a nameless Thing.

By removing the character and place names in the Latin text (“Priami,” “Troiam,” “Pergama,” the citadel at Troy) and referring only to “the King,” Denham generalizes the import of the passage, enabling Priam's “headless Carkass” to metamorphose (at least for a moment) into that of a British descendant, inviting the contemporary English reader to recall the civil wars—although from a decidedly royalist point of view. Denham's translation shared the same impulse toward political allegory that characterized not only the various revisions of Coopers Hill, but also royalist writing generally during the Interregnum, including Fanshawe's translation of Guarini's Il Pastor Fido (1647) and Christopher Wase's translation of Sophocles's Electra (1649).¹⁷

The one place name Denham includes in his version of Priam's death, Asia, releases a recognizably Caroline intertextuality, alluding to the Orientalism in Caroline court culture. Denham had himself contributed to this trend with The Sophy (1642), a play intended for court production and set in Persia.¹⁸ But the allusiveness of the translation is more specific. “The Scepters of all Asia bow'd” to Charles in court masques where the king and queen enacted a moral conquest of foreign rulers by converting their nations to Platonic love. In Aurelian Townshend's Tempe Restor'd (1632), the royal couple presides over the reformation of Circe's sensual reign, figured in “all the Antimasques, consisting of Indians and Barbarians, who naturally are bestiall, and others which are voluntaries, but halfe transformed into beastes.”¹⁹

This allusion to the Orientalism in court culture is strengthened by Denham's curious addition to the Latin text: “Thus fell the King, who yet survived the State, / With such a signal and peculiar Fate.” Virgil's omission of any reference to the dead king's afterlife reveals Denham's own belief in the continuing vitality of the Stuart monarchy after the regicide. Although Charles I was executed, the monarchy “survived the State” instituted by Parliament, a Commonwealth in which a Council of State was created to advise a Lord Protector; this was a “signal and peculiar” survival for the king because it took the form of a court in exile and royalist conspiracy at home, because, in other words, the king lived on but not in his kingdom. In the political climate of the 1650s, with the Commonwealth resorting to oppressive measures to quell royalist insurgency, it would be difficult for a Caroline sympathizer not to see any parallel between the decapitations of Priam and Charles. But in this climate it would also be necessary for a royalist writer like Denham to use such an oblique mode of reference as an allusion in an anonymous translation. Translation was particularly useful in royalist cultural politics, Lois Potter suggests, because it was viewed as “transcendence, the healing wholeness that removes controversy and contradiction.”²⁰ In Denham's translation, the monarchy “survived” its destruction.

The fact that Denham intended his translation to serve a royalist function is borne out by a comparison with his predecessors, which highlights the subtle changes he introduced to bring the Latin text closer to his political concerns:

Of Priamus this was the fatal fine,
The wofull end that was alotted him.
When he had seen his palace all on flame,
With the ruine of his Troyan turrets eke,
That royal prince of Asie, which of late
Reignd over so many peoples and realmes,
Like a great stock now lieth on the shore:
His hed and shoulders parted ben in twaine:
A body now without renome, and fame.(21)
See here King Priams end of all the troubles he had knowne,
Behold the period of his days, which fortune did impone.
When he had seene his Citie raz'd, his Pallace, Temples fir'd,
And he who to th'Imperiall rule of Asia had aspir'd,
Proud of his Territories, and his people heeretofore,
Was then vnto the sea side brought, and headlesse in his gore:
Without respect his body lay in public view of all.(22)
This was king Priams end, this his hard fate,
To live to see Troy fir'd, quite ruinate:
Even he, who once was Asia's Keisar great,
Mightiest in men, and spacious regall seat:
A despicable trunk (now) dead on ground,
His head cut off, his carcasse no name found.(23)
So finish'd Priams Fates, and thus he dy'd,
Seeing Troy burn, whose proud commands did sway
So many powerful Realms in Asia;
Now on the strand his sacred body lyes
Headless, without a Name or Obsequies.(24)

Denham clearly exceeds his predecessors in the liberties he takes with the Latin text. His addition about the “signal and peculiar Fate” becomes more conspicuous and historically charged in such a comparison, as does his deletion of local markers, including the Latin “litore” (l. 557), a word that situates Priam's fall near the sea and is rendered as such by most of the other translators (“shore,” “sea side,” “strand”). Denham's translation not only allows the death to be shifted inland, but throughout he makes a noticeable effort to domesticate architectural terms, likening the Trojan structures to the royal buildings in England. Consider this passage where the Greeks are forcing their way into Priam's palace:

                                                                                                                        Automedon
And Periphas who drove the winged steeds,
Enter the Court; whom all the youth succeeds
Of Scyros Isle, who flaming firebrands flung
Up to the roof, Pyrrhus himself among
The foremost with an Axe an entrance hews
Through beams of solid Oak, then freely views
The Chambers, Galleries, and Rooms of State,
Where Priam and the ancient Monarchs sate.
At the first Gate an Armed Guard appears;
But th'Inner Court with horror, noise and tears
Confus'dly fill'd, the womens shrieks and cries
The Arched Vaults re-echo to the skies;
Sad Matrons wandering through the spacious Rooms
Embrace and kiss the Posts: Then Pyrrhus comes
Full of his Father, neither Men nor Walls
His force sustain, the torn Port-cullis falls,
Then from the hinge, their strokes the Gates divorce:
          …
Then they the secret Cabinets invade. …

(ll. 453-70, 491)

Denham's “Chambers, Galleries, and Rooms of State,” “Inner Court,” “Arched Vaults,” “secret Cabinets” render various Latin terms, but the Latin is much less defined, and it noticeably refers to a different architecture: “domus intus,” “domus interior” (“the house within”), “atria longa” (“long halls”), “penetralia” (“interior”), “cauae” (“hollow places”), “thalami” (“the women's bedrooms”) (ll. 484-87, 503). Although the renderings used by Denham's predecessors display a degree of domestication as well, they do not match the extremity of his: “the house, the court, and secret chambers eke,” “the palace within,” “the hollow halles” (Surrey, sig. ci^v); “the roomes, and all that was within,” “the spacious pallace” (Wroth, sig. E^r); “the rooms within, great halls and parlours faire,” “the rooms within” (Vicars, 45); “the house within,” “long halls,” “Priams bed-chamber,” “arched Sielings” (Ogilby, 215). And Denham is alone in using “Port-cullis” for the Latin “postes” (“doorposts”), refusing such previous and likely renderings as “pillars,” “gates,” and “posts” for a word that conjures up the architectural structure most closely associated with aristocracy and monarchy, the castle. Denham's architectural lexicon permits the description of the Greek attack to evoke other, more recently beseiged castles, such as Windsor Castle stormed by the parliamentary armies, or perhaps Farnham Castle, where in 1642 Denham was forced to surrender the royal garrison he commanded there. Denham's domesticating translation casts the destruction of Troy in a form that resonates with certain moments in English history when aristocratic rule was dominant (the medieval past) or was allied, however tenuously, with the monarchy (the absolutist experiment of the 1630s), or when it was decisively defeated and displaced (the civil wars and Interregnum).

There are other senses in which Denham's decision to translate Book 2 of the Aeneid addressed the displacement of the Caroline aristocracy. By choosing this book, he situated himself in a line of aristocratic translators that stretched back to Surrey, a courtly amateur whose literary activity was instrumental in developing the elite court cultures of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs. From Tottel's Miscellany (1557) on, Surrey was recognized as an important innovator of the sonnet and love lyric, but his work as a translator also possessed a cultural significance that would not have been lost on Denham: Surrey's translation of Virgil proved to be a key text in the emergence of blank verse as a prevalent poetic form in the period. Following Surrey's example, Denham turned to Book 2 to invent a method of poetry translation that would likewise prove culturally significant for his class. His aim was not only to reformulate the free method practiced in Caroline aristocratic culture at its height, during the 1620s and 1630s, but to devise a discursive strategy for translation that would reestablish the cultural dominance of this class; this strategy can be called fluency.

A free translation of poetry requires the cultivation of a fluent strategy in which linear syntax, univocal meaning, and varied meter produce an illusionistic effect of transparency: the translation seems as if it were not in fact a translation, but a text originally written in English.²⁵ In the preface to his 1632 Aeneid, John Vicars described “the manner, wherein I have aimed at these things, Perspicuity of the matter, Fidelity to the authour, and Facility or smoothnes to recreate thee my reader.”²⁶ In Denham's words, the translation should “fit” the foreign text “naturally and easily.” Fluency is impossible to achieve with close or “verbal” translation, which inhibits the effect of transparency, making the translator's language seem foreign: “Whosoever offers at Verbal Translation,” wrote Denham, “shall have the misfortune of that young Traveller, who lost his own language abroad, and brought home no other instead of it: for the grace of Latine will be lost by being turned into English words; and the grace of the English, by being turned into the Latin Phrase.”

Denham's privileging of fluency in his own translation practice becomes clear when his two versions of the second book of the Aeneid are compared. The 1636 version is preserved in the commonplace book of Lucy Hutchinson, wife of the parliamentary colonel John Hutchinson, with whom Denham attended Lincoln's Inn between 1636 and 1638.²⁷ The book contains Denham's translation of the Aeneid, Books 2-6: complete versions of Books 4-6, partial ones of 2 and 3. Book 2 is clearly a rough draft: not only does it omit large portions of the Latin text (which may have been translated but not copied), but some passages do not give full renderings, omitting individual Latin words. There is also a tendency to follow the Latin word order, in some cases quite closely. The example cited by Theodore Banks is the often-quoted line “timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” which Denham rendered word for word as “The Grecians most when bringing gifts I feare.”²⁸ The convoluted syntax and the pronounced metrical regularity make the line read awkwardly, without grace. In the 1656 version, Denham translated this line more freely and strove for greater fluency, following a recognizably English word order and using metrical variations to smooth out the rhythm: “Their swords less danger carry than their gifts” (l. 48).

Denham's fluent strategy is most evident in his handling of the heroic couplet. The revision of 1656 improved both the coherence and the continuity of the couplets, avoiding metrical irregularities and knotty constructions, placing the caesura to reinforce syntactical connections, using enjambment and closure to subordinate the rhyme to the meaning, sound to sense:

1636

While all intent with heedfull silence stand
æneas spake O queene by your command
My countries fate our dangers & our feares
While I repeate I must repeate my feares

1656

While all with silence & attention wait,
Thus speaks æneas from the bed of State:
Madam, when you command us to review
Our Fate, you make our old wounds bleed anew

(ll. 1-4)

1636

We gave them gon & to Micenas sayld
from her long sorrow Troy herselfe unvaild
The ports throwne open all with ioy resort
To see ye Dorick tents ye vacant port

1656

We gave them gone, and to Mycenae sail'd,
And Troy reviv'd, her mourning face unvail'd;
All through th'unguarded Gates with joy resort
To see the slighted Camp, the vacant Port

(ll. 27-30)

1636

Guilt lent him rage & first possesst
The credulous rout with vaine reports nor ceast
But into his designes ye prophett drew
But why doe I these thanklesse truths persue

1656

Old guilt fresh malice gives; The peoples ears
He fills with rumors, and their hearts with fears,
And them the Prophet to his party drew.
But why do I these thankless truths pursue;

(ll. 95-98)

1636

While Laocoon on Neptunes sacred day
By lot designed a mighty bull did slay
Twixt Tenedos & Troy the seas smooth face
Two serpents with their horrid folds embrace
Above the deepe they rayse their scaly crests
And stem ye flood w(th) their erected brests
Then making towards the shore their tayles they wind
In circling curles to strike ye waves behind

1656

Laocoon, Neptunes Priest, upon the day
Devoted to that God, a Bull did slay,
When two prodigious serpents were descride,
Whose circling stroaks the Seas smooth face divide;
Above the deep they raise their scaly Crests,
And stem the floud with their erected brests,
Their winding tails advance and steer their course,
And 'gainst the shore the breaking Billow force.

(ll. 196-203)

Denham's fluent strategy allowed the 1656 version to read more “naturally and easily” so as to produce the illusion that Virgil wrote in English, or that Denham succeeded in “doing him more right,” making available in the most transparent way the foreign writer's intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text. Yet what Denham made available was not so much Virgil as a translation that signified a peculiarly English meaning, and the revisions provide further evidence for this domestication. Thus, whereas the 1636 version translated “Teucri” (l. 251) and “urbs” (l. 363) as “Trojans” and “Asias empresse,” the 1656 version used just “The City” (ll. 243, 351), suggesting at once Troy and London. And whereas the 1636 version translated “sedes Priami” (l. 437) as “Priams pallace” and “domus interior” (l. 486) as “roome,” the 1656 version used “the Court” and “th'Inner Court” at these and other points (ll. 425, 438, 465, 473). Even “Apollinis infula” (l. 430), a reference to a headband worn by priests, was more localized, turned into a reference to the episcopacy: in 1636, Denham rendered the phrase as “Apollos mitre,” in 1656 simply as “consecrated Mitre” (l. 416). The increased fluency of Denham's revision may have made his translation seem “more right,” but this effect actually concealed a rewriting of the Latin text that endowed it with subtle allusions to English settings and institutions, strengthening the historical analogy between the fall of Troy and the defeat of the royalist party.

Fluency assumes a theory of language as communication that, in practice, manifests itself as a stress on immediate intelligibility and an avoidance of polysemy, or indeed any play of the signifier that erodes the coherence of the signified. Language is conceived as a transparent medium of personal expression, an individualism that construes translation as the recovery of the foreign writer's intended meaning. As Denham's preface asserted, “Speech is the apparel of our thoughts.” Now it will be worthwhile to recall the recurrent metaphors used in the translators' prefaces, the analogy of translation as clothing in which the foreign author is dressed, or the translated text as the body animated by the foreign writer's soul. The assumption is that meaning is a timeless and universal essence, easily transmittable between languages and cultures regardless of the change of signifiers, the construction of a different semantic context out of different cultural discourses, the inscription of target-language codes and values in every interpretation of the foreign text. The translator who styled himself “W.L., Gent.” noted that his versions of Virgil's eclogues involved their own violence against the foreign texts, “breaking the shell into many peeces,” but he was nonetheless “carefull to preserve the Kernell safe and whole, from the violence of a wrong, or wrested Interpretation.” Some translators gave more of a sense that they faced a welter of competing “Commentaries” (in Wroth's word) from which they selected to rationalize their translation strategy. But none was sufficiently aware of the domestication enacted by fluent translation to demystify the effect of transparency, to suspect that the translated text is irredeemably partial in its interpretation. Denham admitted that he was presenting a naturalized English Virgil, but he also insisted that “neither have I anywhere offered such violence to his sense, as to make it seem mine, and not his.”

Fluency can be seen as a discursive strategy ideally suited to domesticating translation, capable not only of executing the ethnocentric violence of domestication, but also of concealing this violence by producing the effect of transparency, the illusion that this is not a translation, but the foreign text, in fact, the living thoughts of the foreign author, there being, as Denham wrote, “certain Graces and Happinesses peculiar to every Language, which gives life and energy to the words.” Transparency results in a concealment of the cultural and social conditions of the translation—the aesthetic, class, and national ideologies linked to Denham's translation theory and practice. And this is what makes fluent translation particularly effective in Denham's bid to restore aristocratic culture to its dominant position: the effect of transparency is so powerful in domesticating cultural forms because it presents them as true, right, beautiful, natural. Denham's great achievement, in his translations as well as his poems, was to make the heroic couplet seem natural to his successors, thus developing a form that would dominate English poetry and poetry translation for more than a century.

Later writers such as John Dryden and Samuel Johnson recognized that the truly “new” thing in Denham was the stylistic refinement of his verse. They were fond of quoting Denham's lines on the Thames in Coopers Hill and commenting on their beauty, always formulated as prosodic smoothness, what Dryden in his “Dedication of the Aneis” called their “sweetness” (1697).²⁹ And both Dryden and Johnson saw Denham as an innovator in translation: they were fond of quoting his commendatory verses to Fanshawe's Il Pastor Fido, singling out for praise the lines where Denham advocated the free method:

That servile path, thou nobly do'st decline,
Of tracing word by word and Line by Line;
.....A new and nobler way thou do'st pursue,
To make Translations, and Translators too:
They but preserve the Ashes, thou the Flame,
True to his Sence, but truer to his Fame.

(ll. 15-16, 21-24)

Dryden joined Denham in opposing “a servile, literal Translation” because, he noted in his preface to Ovid's Epistles (1680), such translation is not fluent: “Either perspicuity or gracefulness will frequently be wanting.”³⁰

Dryden also followed Denham, most importantly, in seeing the couplet as an appropriate vehicle for transparent discourse. In the preface to his play The Rival Ladies (1664), Dryden asserted that Coopers Hill “for the majesty of the style is and ever will be, the exact standard of good writing” and then proceeded to argue that rhyme does not necessarily inject a note of artificiality to impede transparency. Any noticeably artificial use of rhyme rather shows the writer's lack of skill:

This is that which makes them say rhyme is not natural, it being only so when the poet either makes a vicious choice of words, or places them for rhyme sake, so unnaturally as no man would in ordinary speaking; but when 'tis so judiciously ordered that the first word in the verse seems to beget the second, and that the next … it must then be granted, rhyme has all the advantages of prose besides its own. … Where the poet commonly confines his sense to his couplet, [he] must contrive that sense into such words that the rhyme shall naturally follow them, not they the rhyme.³¹

Denham's work was canonized by later writers because his use of the couplet made his poetry and poetry translations read “naturally and easily” and therefore seem “majestic,” in an appropriately royal metaphor, or “more right,” more accurate or faithful as translations—but only because the illusion of transparency concealed the process of naturalizing the foreign text in an English cultural and social situation. The ascendancy of the heroic couplet from the late seventeenth century on has frequently been explained in political terms, wherein the couplet is viewed as a cultural form whose marked sense of antithesis and closure reflects a political conservatism, support for the restored monarchy and for aristocratic domination—despite the continuing class divisions that had erupted in civil wars and fragmented the aristocracy into factions, some more accepting of bourgeois social practices than others. Robin Grove is particularly sensitive to the social implications of the discursive “flow” sought by the writers who championed the couplet: “The urbanity of the style,” he observed, “incorporates the reader as a member of the urbanely-responsive class. … Literature announces itself as a social act, even as the ‘society’ it conjures around it is an increasingly specialized/stratified fiction: a fiction which indeed relates to historical fact (provided we don't just coagulate the two), but for whose purposes the ideas of Sense, Ease, Naturalness … contained a rich alluvial deposit of aspirations and meanings largely hidden from view.”³² The fact that for us today no form better than the couplet epitomizes the artificial use of language bears witness not just to how deeply transparency was engrained in aristocratic literary culture, but also to how much it could conceal.

It is Dryden in particular who found Denham's translation of Virgil so important for the rise of this cultural discourse. In the “Dedication of the Æneis,” he stated that “'tis the utmost of my Ambition to be thought [the] Equal” of such Caroline translators as “Sir John Denham, Mr. Waller, and Mr. Cowley.”³³ He admired Denham's version of Book 2 so much that he virtually quoted some eighty lines of it in his own version of the Aeneid. A typical example is his rendering of the account of Priam's death, where, as Dryden acknowledged in a footnote, Denham's climactic line is repeated:

Thus Priam fell: and shar'd one common Fate
With Troy in Ashes, and his ruin'd State:
He, who the Scepter of all Asia sway'd,
Whom monarchs like domestick Slaves obey'd.
On the bleak Shoar now lies th'abandon'd King,
A headless Carcass, and a nameless thing.

(ll. 758-63)

Dryden's dedicatory essay makes clear his advocacy of Denham's free translation method, which he similarly asserts with nationalistic pronouncements (“I will boldly own, that this English Translation has more of Virgil's Spirit in it, than either the French, or the Italian”) while finally confessing its likeness to French models:

I may presume to say, and I hope with as much reason as the French Translator, that taking all the Materials of this divine Author, I have endeavour'd to make Virgil speak such English, as he wou'd himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age. I acknowledge, with Segrais, that I have not succeeded in this attempt, according to my desire: yet I shall not be wholly without praise, if in some sort I may be allowed to have copied the Clearness, the Purity, the Easiness and the Magnificence of his Stile.³⁴

As with Denham, the domestication of Dryden's translation method is so complete that fluency is seen to be a feature of Virgil's poetry instead of the discursive strategy implemented by the translator to make the heroic couplet seem transparent, indistinguishable from “the Clearness, the Purity, the Easiness and the Magnificence of his Stile.” And, like Denham, Dryden links his fluent, domesticating translation to aristocratic culture. Thus, he explains his avoidance of specialized terminology in his version of the Aeneid—“the proper terms of Navigation, Land-Service, or … the Cant of any Profession”—by arguing that “Virgil has avoided those properties, because he Writ not to Mariners, Souldiers, Astronomers, Gardners, Peasants, & c. but to all in general, and in particular to Men and Ladies of the first Quality: who have been better Bred than to be too nicely knowing in the Terms. In such cases, 'tis enough for a Poet to write so plainly, that he may be understood by his Readers.”³⁵

Dryden's remark is a reminder that the free translation method was modelled on poetry, that Denham was using translation to distinguish a literary elite from “them who deal in matters of Fact, or matters of Faith,” and that this valorization of the literary contributed to the concealment of the cultural and social conditions of translation, including Dryden's own. For, as Steven Zwicker has shown, Dryden also designed his Virgil to intervene into a specific political struggle: it “is a meditation on the language and culture of Virgil's poetry, but it is also a set of reflections on English politics in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution,” argued Zwicker, “a time when William III's reign was not fixed with the certainty it assumed late in the decade, a time when Stuart restoration might still be contemplated, and not wholly as fantasy.”³⁶ The triumph of the heroic couplet in late seventeenth-century poetic discourse depends to some extent on the triumph of a neoclassical translation method in aristocratic literary culture, a method whose greatest triumph is perhaps the discursive sleight of hand that masks the political interests it serves.

Notes

1. Quotations of Denham's writing follow Sir John Denham, The Poetical Works, ed. Theodore H. Banks, 2nd ed. (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon, 1969). I have also consulted the 1656 edition of Denham's The Destruction of Troy at Columbia University.

2. This relies on Richard Helgerson's treatment of the “literary system” in early modern England, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983).

3. For Denham's biography, see Brendan O'Hehir, Harmony from Discords: A Life of Sir John Denham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). David Underdown gives a full account of royalist insurgency during the Interregnum in Royalist Conspiracy in England 1649-1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960). For the ideological standpoint of Humphrey Moseley's publishing activities, see Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 20-21, 37, 162-63. Potter's book offers an important assessment of royalist writers during the Interregnum, including their fear of government reprisals (23-24).

4. Mercurius Politicus, Comprising the Sum of Foreine Intelligence, with the Affairs now on foot in the three Nations of England, Scotland, & Ireland. For information of the People. Numb. 306. From Thursday April 17: to Thursday April 24, 1656, p. 6921. Denham's translation is announced again in number 309, 8-15 May 1656, p. 6969. Joseph Frank discusses the circulation, content, and ideological standpoint of the Mercurius Politicus in The Beginnings of the English Newspaper 1620-1660 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), especially 205-10, 223-26.

5. Ben Jonson's poetry is quoted from Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925-52).

6. The Thirteene Bookes of Aeneidos. The first twelue being the worke of the Diuine Poet Virgil Maro; and the thirteenth, the Supplement of Maphaus Vegius. Translated into English Verse, to the first third part of the tenth Booke, by Thomas Phaer, Esquire: and the residue finished, and now newly set forth, for the delight of such as are studious in Poetry, by Thomas Twyne, Doctor in Physike (London: B. Alsop, 1620). The quotation is taken from “Master Phaers Conclvsion to his interpretation of the Æneidos of Virgil, by him conuerted into English Verse,” sig. V2^r. In Early Theories of Translation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1920), Flora Ross Amos offers a detailed survey of translators' prefaces during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, noting the trend toward freer methods in the Jacobean period.

7. Odes of Horace, The best of Lyrick Poets, Contayning much morality, and sweetnesse, Selected, and Translated by S:T:H: (London: W. Lee, 1625), sig. A^r-v; DNB, s.v. “Hawkins, Sir Thomas.”

8. Virgils Eclogues Translated into English: By W.L. Gent. (London: W. Jones, 1628), fol. 6^r. William Latham was identified as the translator of this volume in the Stationers' Register, although it was later misattributed to William L'Isle. Annabel Patterson reads Latham's translation as the imposition of a courtly aesthetic on the Latin text in Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 164-68.

9. Aulus Persius Flaccus His Satyres. Translated into English, By Barten Holyday, Master of Arts, and student of Christ Church in Oxford. And now newly by him reviewed and amended. The third Edition. (London: R. Higginbotham, 1635), sig. A5^r-v; DNB, s.v. “Holyday, Barten.”

10. The Destrvction of Troy, or The Acts of Æneas. Translated ovt of the Second Booke of the Æneads of Virgill That peerelesse Prince of Latine Poets. With the Latine Verse on the one side, and the English Verse on the other, that the congruence of the translation with the Originall may the better appeare. As also a Centurie of EPIGRAMS, and a Motto vpon the Creede, thereunto annexed. By S^r THOMAS WROTHE, Knight (London: N. Bourne, 1620), sig. A2^v; DNB, s.v. “Wroth, Sir Thomas.”

11. Dido and Aeneas. The Fourth Booke of Virgils Aeneis Now Englished by Robert Stapylton (London: W. Cooke, 1634), sig. A4^v; DNB, s.v. “Stapylton, Sir Robert.”

12. Les Annales de Tacite. Premiere Partie. Contenant la vie de Tibere (Paris: veuve J. Camusat, 1640). The unpaginated preface dedicates the translation to Cardinal Richelieu and is signed “Perrot D'Ablancourt.” The French influence on exiled royalist translators is considered by T. R. Steiner in the introduction to his anthology of theoretical statements, English Translation Theory 1650-1800 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975), 13-25. The cultural activities of exiled royalist writers are discussed in P. H. Hardacre, “The Royalists in Exile during the Puritan Revolution, 1642-1660” Huntington Library Quarterly 16 (1953): 353-70. Hardacre observes that “the first impression is one of tremendous activity on the part of the exiles in translating foreign classics into English, Drama, poetry, histories, devotional works—every variety found its English translators among the exiles” (363).

13. All the Odes and Epodes of Horace. Translated into English Verse: By Henry Rider, Master of Arts of Emanuel Colledge in Cambridge (London: H. Rider, 1638), sig. A3^r.

14. For the Brute legend in English historiography, see A. E. Parsons, “The Trojan Legend in England: Some Instances of its Application to the Politics of the Times,” Modern Language Review 24 (1929): 253-64, 394-408; Ernest Jones, Geoffrey of Monmouth 1640-1680, University of California Publications in English, vol. 5, no. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944), 357-442; and Hugh A. MacDougall, Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1982). Douglas Bush offers a useful précis in English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century 1600-1660, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 222-23. The quotations from Munday and Heywood cited below are taken from Parsons, “The Trojan Legend,” 403, 407.

15. William Prynne, The Second Part of a Seasonable, Legal, and Historicall Vindication, and Chronological Collection of the Good, Old, Fundamental Liberties … of All English Freemen (1655), and Edward Waterhouse, Fortescue Illustratus; or, A Commentary of That Nervous Treatise De Laudibus Legum Anglie (1663), both cited by Jones, Geoffrey of Monmouth, 401, 403.

16. The Aeneid is quoted from Virgil, Opera, ed. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969). Alan Hager notes the domesticating impulse in Denham's translation when discussing another passage in “British Virgil: Four Renaissance Disguises of the Laocoon Passage of Book 2 of the Aeneid,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 22 (1982): 21-38.

17. The historical allegory in Coopers Hill has been discussed by Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), chap. 3, especially pp. 72-76, and Brendan O'Hehir, Expans'd Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham's Coopers Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 227-56. For the ideological significance of Fanshawe's and Wase's translations, see Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing, 52-53, 89-90, and Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 172-76. Potter recognizes that a domesticating translation method, what she calls “modernisation,” is extremely important in the ideological use of translation: “In making Sophocles up-to-date,” she says of Wase's version, “the translator also makes him highly political” (53).

18. O'Hehir gives an account of the circumstances surrounding The Sophy in Harmony from Discords, 38-43.

19. The Poems and Masques of Aurelian Townshend, ed. Cedric C. Brown (Reading, England: Whiteknights Press, 1983).

20. Secret Rites and Secret Writing, 52-53.

21. Certain Bokes of Virgiles Aenaeis turned into English meter by the right honorable lorde, Henry Earle of Surrey (London: R. Tottel, 1557), sig. cii^v.

22. The Destrvction of Troy, trans. Sir Thomas Wroth, sig. E3^r.

23. The XII Aeneids of Virgil, the most renowned Laureat Prince of Latine-Poets: Translated into English deca-syllables, By John Vicars (London: N. Alsop, 1632), 48.

24. The Works of Publius Virgilius Maro. Translated, adorn'd with Sculpture, and illustrated with Annotations, By John Ogilby (London: T. Warren, 1654), 217, 219.

25. This relies on Antony Easthope's account of transparent discourse in poetry and its rise during the early modern period: Poetry as Discourse (London: Methuen, 1983), especially chap. 7.

26. Sig. A3^r.

27. O'Hehir discusses Denham's relationship to the Hutchinsons in Harmony from Discords, 12-13.

28. Poetical Works, ed. Banks, 41-44.

29. John Dryden, “Dedication of the Æneis,” in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), 3:1047. Samuel Johnson discusses Denham in The Lives of the English Poets, particularly in the chapters on Denham and Dryden.

30. John Dryden, “Preface to Ovid's Epistles,” in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Edward Niles Hooker and H. T. Swedenberg, Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 1:116.

31. John Dryden, “Preface to The Rival Ladies,” in Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson (London: Dent, 1962), 1:7, 8.

32. Robin Grove, “Nature Methodiz'd,” The Critical Review 26 (1984): 52-68; Grove cites Pope's Essay on Criticism for the ideas of “Sense, Ease, Naturalness.” Historical explanations of the heroic couplet that stress its political function are offered, for example, by Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1937; reprint New York: International Publishers, 1973), 99, 135; Paul J. Korshin, From Concord to Dissent: Major Themes in English Poetic Theory 1640-1700 (Menston: The Scolar Press, 1973); and Easthope, Poetry as Discourse, 119. John Milton may have set forth the first political reading of the heroic couplet when, in a prefatory statement to Paradise Lost (1667), he opposed the “ancient liberty” of blank verse to “the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.”

33. “Dedication of the Æneis,” 1051.

34. Ibid., 1051, 1055.

35. Ibid., 1061.

36. Steven N. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 177.