Abstract: Chapter 2 treats Jane Lumley's translation into English of Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis. With a date in the 1550s, this is the first known translation of a Greek play by an English writer. Lumley was the daughter of Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, and this chapter argues that the translation should be read within the context of the family's commitment to education and literary arts and their participation in gifting and kinship networks. Fitzalan was centrally involved in political upheavals of the mid-1500s in England, and this chapter traces the way that Jane Lumley's translation, likely intended for her father as first reader, comments on the events of this turbulent period of English politics.

Keywords: Euripides; Grey, Lady Jane; Iphigenia at Aulis; Lumley family; performance; translation

Jane Lumley's translation of Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis does not have an accompanying dedicatory letter that marks it out as ‘my booke’, in the way that Mary Bassett's work so clearly does. In fact, Lumley's name does not appear on the pages of the translation itself. The work is bound with two other translations that bear dedicatory letters to Lumley's father, one of which is signed by her. The first page of the play bears only its title: ‘The Tragedie of Euripides called Iphigenia translated out of Greake into Englishe’ and responsibility for the work is attributed to Lumley by another hand at the front of the manuscript book that reads ‘The doinge of my Lady Lumley doghter to my L. Therle of Arundell’. Scholars of the first Greek play translated into English have found traces of the authorial self in the situation and characters of the play Lumley translated and, of course, in her translatorial choices in reworking the play for a wholly new set of social and political circumstances. In this chapter, I will argue for a reading of the play that comprehends the specific political situation of Lumley's family and suggests a different familial allegory than those proposed by other critics who have seen early modern historical figures as counterparts of the characters in Lumley's version of the play.