Jonson's Virgil: Surrey and Phaer

Abstract

In a recent issue of this journal Victoria Moul has drawn attention to the symmetry in Ovid's recitation of Amoves 1.15 at the beginning of Poetaster and Virgil's recitation from Aeneid TV at the beginning of Act V.1 The Ovidian passage is, as she notes (p. 24), 'something akin to the filching of a translation: it varies only slightly from Marlowe's version of these lines in his edition of the Elegies one form of nested within another'. The relevant lines were reprinted, apparently from the Quarto of Poetaster, in the third Middleburgh edition of the Amores (probably 1602). The charge of plagiarism, delicately alluded to by Moul, made typically by Malone ('he has merely altered a word here & there, generally for the worse') ,2 is unconsidered. Jonson cannot have expected the lines to go unrecognized, and he may not even be responsible for the changes. Bringing the English closer to the Latin, smoothing the metre these are of a piece with changes introduced by Marlowe between the two previous editions.3 And whether or not the changes are Jonson's, they are best understood, as Moul proposes, as the 'nesting' of a specimen of translation, recognizably not Jonson's own, in a play preoccupied with issues of translation as a cultural process that involves various forms of mediation, including critically observed previous translations. In a play concerned more generally with issues of moral and stylistic transparency, Ovid's way of talking is slightly opaque. Even when he is represented dramatically, as in parting from Julia at IV.ix-x, Ovid is made to speak a version of his own Tristia 1.3, but filtered through Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Chapman's Banquet of Sensed Jonson