A Missing Distich in Thomas Drant

Abstract

THOMAS DRANT (c.1540–78) is best remembered today, if at all, for an audacious metaphor. Drant was the first to translate all of Horace’s Satires into English, and in the preface to this translation, included in his volume A Medicinable Morall (1566), he writes: First, I have done as the people of God were commanded to do1 with their captive women that were handsome and beautiful: I have shaved off his [Horace’s] hair and pared off his nails, that is, I have wiped away all his vanity and superfluity of matter … I have Englished things not according to the vein of the Latin propriety, but of our own vulgar tongue. I have interfarced (to remove his obscurity and sometimes to better his matter) much of my own devising. I have pieced his reason, eked and mended his similitudes, mollified his hardness, prolonged his curtal kind of speeches, changed and much altered his words, but not his sentence; or at least, I dare say, not his purpose.2