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This paper seeks, firstly, to reinstate the Suffolk lawyer and MP Nathaniel Bacon (1593-1660) whose ideological as well as political importance has been neglected, and, secondly, to propose that his 1647 tract in support of the parliamentary cause may have been an additional prompt to John Milton's work on his History of Britain, which dates from this period, and which counters the elder statesman's view of the Saxons as furnishing a legimitising native model of parliamentary government. In what may, in turn, have been a response to Milton, Bacon, in a "summary Conclusion" to The Continuation of this tract (1651), counters the received view of the English/British as courageous but politically unskilled inhabitants of the cold North, which Milton reiterates, notably in the "Digression" to book 3 of his History. Asserting rather the "middle temper" of the people of England Bacon claims for them a native political wisdom like that of Aristotle's Hellenic race with whom they share a "consanguinity", while Milton urges the need to look to continental Europe for political as well as cultural models. The stakes of Bacon's claims are pointed up by their appropriation to support the opposite cause by monarchists who share his nativist ideology, which is not shared by Milton as it is not shared by the monarchist William Temple whose position with respect to the continent of Europe aligns him rather with Milton. The perceived relation of England to its continental European neighbours thus cuts across the political divide between monarchists and parliamentarians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks at three scenes of translation in order to examine the argument that the effacement of the translator coincided historically with the effacements of the actor. Scene V.ii of Ben Jonson's 'Poetaster'; Scenes in William Shakespeare's plays 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' and 'Hamlet' to which the term foreignizing may be applied; Opposed strategies in relation to the English tongue.

After a brief critique, in a first part (pp. 507-510), of previous scholars' biographical approach to the politics of translating Virgil, this paper proceeds to offer an alternative approach by looking at the "linguistic ideology" underpinning translations (especially of the Aeneid) (parts II and III [pp. 510-512 and 512-517]). What emerges is a contradictory tension between the idea of a single, unifying national vernacular and competing varieties or kinds of English. Inherent to this tension is the question of whose English (and consequently who) was to be included in the constituency of the "our" in "our English tongue"-a recurring phrase in translators' comments on their work. In a fourth and final part (pp. 517-527), these linguistic--and political--stakes are shown to have accrued around a critique, by George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), of Richard Stanyhurst's translation of the opening lines of the Aeneid. Specifically, this critique is taken up in the following decade (the 1590s), and the politics of its hierarchical and exclusive linguistic ideology opposed, on the one hand, by Richard Carew, in an important essay on the English language, and, on the other, by William Shakespeare, in two of his early plays, most importantly, The Merry Wives of Windsor, a play unique in the Shakespearean canon for its focus on "our English tongue," a focus which is here precisely placed in its intertextual relation to contemporary debate surrounding Richard Stanyhurst's translation of Virgil's Aeneid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the moral aspects of translations of the epic "The Aeneid" by Virgil in 16th-century England by Gavin Douglas into Scots, and by Thomas Phaer and Thomas Twyne in English. Texts consulted are "Virgil's Aeneid: Translated into Scottish Verse," edited by D. F. C. Codwell, and "The Nyne Fyrst Bookes of the Eneidos of Virgil Converted Into Englishe Vearse." Also discussed is the significance of Maffeo Vegio's thirteenth imitation book of the Aeneid called "Supplementum."