Thomas Drant's Rewriting of Horace

Abstract

This essay will look at a little-known figure in the English Renaissance and attempt to situate his most important literary production in the religious politics of the early years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, focusing on ideological strategies that are brought to bear on the translation of a classical text. The figure in question is Thomas Drant, and the text, A Medicinable Morall, the first English translation of Horace's satires, published in 1566. Literary history has not been kind to Drant: with the possible exceptions of A Medicinable Morall and another translation of Horace the very next year--in 1567--entitled Horace his arte of Poetrie, pistles, and Satyrs Englished, which are mentioned cursorily in studies of English receptions of Horace (if at all), almost all his other published works--a poetic paraphrase of Ecclesiastes, three sermons, a book of Latin epigrams by Richard Shacklock with Drant's commentary in Latin and English, and a collection of Latin and (some) Greek verse dedicated to Archbishop Edmund Grindal--have made the slide to oblivion. 1 It is not my job to write an extended apologia for Drant but to read the first English translation of Horace's satires in greater detail than has been done so far. I hope to offer insights into the politics of reading methods which also become the politics of writing and how understandings of genre both condition and limit such strategies; this creates room for appropriation and the intriguing afterlives of a classical text.