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Sidney's Sister as Translator of Garnier

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Virginia Walcott Beauchamp
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Extract

In the major study concerning the relationship between the French dramatist, Robert Garnier, and the Elizabethan drama, the author, A. M. Witherspoon, tends to see literary choice as primarily motivated by casual personal considerations. He claims, for example, that Garnier, living in a period of civil strife in France, chose Roman themes for several of his tragedies because he admired ‘the Roman genius for organization’. Likewise he explains the Countess of Pembroke's attraction to Garnier's tragedies in that they centered around strong-minded women like Portia and Cornelia.

Although one cannot, of course, discount the importance of congeniality of theme in a dramatist's selection of a subject to portray or of a translator's choice of a work to render, one must not at the same time overlook certain other influences which govern these choices. And, in fact, since both Garnier and the Countess of Pembroke wrote as members of learned and circumscribed coteries, we might expect external influences to assume more than usual importance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance News , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 1957 , pp. 8 - 13
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1957

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References

1 Influence of Robert Garnier on Elizabethan Drama (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1924).

2 Influence, p. 7.

3 Influence, pp. 68-72. But the Countess selected for translation a play featuring not these noble women, but Cleopatra—a weeping, defeated Cleopatra!

4 See Gustave Lanson, ‘Etudes sur les origines de la tragédie classique en France’, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, x (1903), 413-436, and Charlton, H. B., The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy, English Series, xxiv (Manchester: University Press, 1946), cx-cxxvi.Google Scholar

5 Aristotle, , ‘Poetics’, The Basic Works, ed. McKeon, Richard (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 1464.Google Scholar

6 Select Translations from Scaliger's Poetics, trans. Frederick Padelford, Yale Studies in English, ed. Albert S. Cook (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1905), p. 69.

7 SirSidney, Philip, ‘An Apology for Poetry’, English Critical Essays (Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries), ed. Jones, Edmund D. (Oxford: Humphrey Milford, 1924), p. 51.Google Scholar

8 ‘Apology’, p. 53.

9 His request to Hubert Languet for the volumes of Amyot—even for ‘five times their value’—is often quoted.

10 This intention to reform is explicitly stated in the dedicatory address to the Countess in Samuel Daniel's Tragedie of Cleopatra, a companion piece to the Countess' Antonie.