Between Surrey and Marot: Nicolas Bourbon and the Artful Translation of the Epigram

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In many accounts of the early Tudor period, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Sir Thomas Wyatt are paired as exponents of those Renaissance poetics which mature in the later sixteenth century. Wyatt’s reputation has waned and waxed depending heavily on interpretation of his metres; more recently the value of his work has been located in the poised reticence and artful equivocation sustained by his subtly developed poetic personae which articulate the experience of writing under the tyrannical conditions of the Henrician court during religiopolitical crisis. Surrey palpably differs from Wyatt in his experimentation in unrhymed hexameter, in the signal achievement of his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid II and IV in unrhymed iambics, and more generally in the smoother rhythms and mannered diction of his lyric poetry. Surrey’s engagement with classical sources constitutes an attempt to domesticate in the vernacular some of the poetic forms and qualities prized by humanist taste. This essay begins with identification of the source of Surrey’s ‘Yf he that erst the fourme so livelye drewe’ before discussing the implications for our understanding of the transmission of humanist poetry from continental Europe. It is an assumption too easily made that Henrician vernacular poets of humanistic bent like Wyatt and Surrey relied completely upon Continental vernacular counterparts, relishing, as Puttenham has it, ‘the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian’ (and sometimes French) poetry.1 Although humanism has its origins in neo-Latin writing, in poetry there was no straightforward subordination of the vernacular to the learned languages. Yet for English poetry of the early Tudor period, the habitual search for anterior texts has been undertaken among Italian and French poets whose assimilation of humanistic influences into the vernacular was already well under way. In Surrey’s