Hindsight as Foresight: Virgilian Retrospective Prophecy in Coopers Hill and The Destruction of Troy

Ian Calvert

doi:10.1007/s12138-017-0456-4

Abstract

This article discusses how the Virgilian intertexts of the stag hunt in the 1642 edition of Coopers Hill support the interpretation of the passage as a commentary on the trial and execution of the Earl of Strafford, and how they allow Denham to criticize Charles I’s involvement in Strafford’s death. Despite this criticism, other texts, including Denham’s revised (1653/5) edition of the poem, subsequently adapted the stag-hunt episode to commemorate Charles’s own trial and execution. The false presentation of the 1653/5 Coopers Hill as an edition that prints an original, authentic version of the poem from 1640 draws on the Virgilian technique of retrospective prophecy to make its status as a commentary on Charles’s execution more explicit. Denham repeated this technique in The Destruction of Troy (1656), which heavily revised an excerpt from his 1630s manuscript translation of Aeneid II–VI, and asserts the composition date of this earlier version in order to ‘foretell’ Charles’s execution. Analysing these Virgilian post eventum prophecies shows how both texts simultaneously censure and mourn Charles I, and also identifies increasingly self-recriminatory elements to Denham’s own royalism.

Highlights

John Denham’s two most significant literary projects, Coopers Hill and his translations from Virgil, exist in multiple manuscript and published versions that he Hindsight as Foresight: Virgilian Retrospective Prophecy in...revised periodically throughout his career.[1]
The false presentation of the 1653/5 Coopers Hill as an edition that prints an original, authentic version of the poem from 1640 draws on the Virgilian technique of retrospective prophecy to make its status as a commentary on Charles’s execution more explicit. Denham repeated this technique in The Destruction of Troy (1656), which heavily revised an excerpt from his 1630s manuscript translation of Aeneid II–VI, and asserts the composition date of this earlier version in order to ‘foretell’ Charles’s execution
Coopers Hill and Denham’s first published Virgil translation, The Destruction of Troy (1656, but deriving from the manuscript rendering of Aeneid II–VI that Denham produced in the 1630s),[5] have, in addition, attracted considerable attention for the commentary they offer on contemporary politics

Summary

Introduction

John Denham’s two most significant literary projects, Coopers Hill and his translations from Virgil, exist in multiple manuscript and published versions that he. Revised periodically throughout his career.[1] They both helped to popularize an aesthetic Augustanism: the attempt ‘to find an equivalent in English of those ideal properties of style’ that writers in the early modern period found in Virgil’s versification and clarity of expression, Robert Herrick’s account of Denham’s ‘brave, bold, and sweet Maronian [Virgilian] Muse’ in his commendatory poem on Coopers Hill and John Dryden’s claim that Denham’s poetry provided ‘the exact Standard of good Writing’.2. The Augustan Art of Poetry: Augustan Translation of the Classics, Oxford, 2006, p. Translation and the Poet’s Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646–1726, Oxford, 2008, pp. 19–39; Sowerby, Augustan Art (n. 2 above), pp. 94–113; EAV, pp. 11–13, 23–30, 118–30, 145–60

Calvert

Findings

Conclusion