Edmund Spenser’s Translations of Du Bellay in Jan van der Noot’s A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings

Abstract

Edmund Spenser was a writer whose literary career began in the midst of translation. Spenser, a native of London, who probably grew up in East Smithfield, just beyond the Tower of London, would have been immersed in the polyglot culture of the capital in the middle of the late sixteenth century, and he would have been exposed to a variety of languages as a child, especially French and Dutch, spoken by exiles, refugees, and merchants in the city. Therefore, it is no accident that his first publication was a translation, that of a number of poems by the major French poets Joachim Du Bellay and Clement Marot, included as part of a larger work by a Dutch exile, Jan van der Noot, himself an important figure in the establishment of a Dutch literary tradition. Spenser’s sonnets in A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings (1569) have not often received much critical comment, but they clearly played an important role in his career, as he turned to them again as an established writer, revising the blank verse translations in The Ruines of Rome, one of the collection of Complaints published in 1591. Spenser’s early career and poetic development as a young writer were therefore shaped by contact with the exiled French and Dutch communities in London. It was a legacy that he would retain throughout his life. Although he is primarily known as an Italianate English author, and he clearly was heavily influenced by Ariosto, Tasso, and Boiardo, and, perhaps, Boccaccio and Dante, it is at least arguable that French and French writing were just as important for Spenser, and that his early translation of Du Bellay influenced what came after.