ABSTRACT
Translating the King Richard Lanham has observed that the Metamorphoses is a terrifying world with anger and violence everywhere.2 In telling how the nation state of Rome was formed, Ovid intersperses his epic with scenes which focus on the plight of figures such as Actaeon, Philomela and Marsyas who are subjected to terrifying effects of power. In spite of this interest in physical repression, the narrative voice Ovid’s poem, a ‘diffuse authorial self’,3 does not offer these violent episodes in a didactic mode of address; ‘the point is not to hierarchise – there are no hierarchies here, and no perspectives either’.4 This is not the case in early modern English translations of the text. The translator’s voice, most apparent in the paratextual material that often accompanies the work, considerably alters the political agenda of the Metamorphoses. In Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, as we saw in the Introduction, Stephen Greenblatt refers to the physical violence inherent in early modern translation practices. Lawrence Venuti contends, however, that ‘violence resides in its very purpose and activity’ and is ‘always configured in hierarchies of dominance and marginality’.5 With these foregoing remarks in mind, this chapter will argue that these violent translation practices are apparent in the 1632 edition of George Sandys’s Metamorphosis Englished: a text inscribed with an acute awareness of the domestic political and cultural issues at stake for fashioning and sustaining Caroline subjectivity. Sandys’s own personal and textual lineage distinctly frames his translation of the Metamorphoses. The son of Archbishop Edwin Sandys, one of the translators of the Bishops’ Bible, Sandys is most commonly associated with translation of
Christian texts,6 and the 1632 edition of Sandys’s Ovid, produced within a context of intellectual and religious sobriety, is the epitome of a conservative text. Now complete with commentary and illustration, this revision of the 1626 translation was printed by John Lichfield of Oxford, who is ‘generally associated with Protestant theology of a Calvinist or near Calvinist kind’.7 The inclusion of the Metamorphoses in Lichfield’s list of pious publications emphasizes the degree to which this version of Ovid’s poem is aligned with the moralized Christian tradition of the vernacular Ovid but, markedly, Sandys’s text presents an even more tempered translation than many of his predecessors. Although Sandys’s contemporaries, such as George Chapman, used a liberal form of prosody for their translations, the syntax of the Metamorphosis Englished is additionally restrained.8 Compared with Arthur Golding’s Metamorphosis (1567), for example, Sandys’s Ovid has been defined as one which is ‘urbane, elliptical, in controlled iambic pentameter’ against Golding’s ‘unsophisticated metaphrase, in trundling fourteeners’.9 However, the most noteworthy aspect of Sandys’s translation is that it was published under the patronage of Charles; the title page announces: Cum privilegio ad imprimendam hanc Ovidii TRANSLATIONEM10 Clearly, Sandys’s Ovid sets out to conform to, and confirm, the King’s political agenda. In his discussion of this ideologically mindful translation, Anthony Brian Taylor suggests that Sandys’s translation plays down the dramatic tendencies of Golding’s Metamorphosis.11 Nevertheless, implicitly drawing on ‘Ovid’s own theatrical metaphor, “the gods play their roles (1. 245)”’,12 Marie A. Powles considers the dramatic aspects of Sandys’s Ovid that lay beyond the poem. She argues that the material provided by ‘Sandys the poet, [Francis] Clein the artist, and [Bernard Salomon] Savery the engraver, contrived together to present Sandys’s version of the Metamorphoses in a unique way, namely, as a play to be staged and interpreted by the gods’.13 In the light of this observation, Powles confines her exploration of Sandys’s Ovid to the first Plate (Illustration 3.1),which she likens to the ‘architectural layout’ of an elaborate early modern stage.14 Yet, this dramatic analogy may be developed further. The 1632 edition, with its elaborate frontispiece, prefatory poem, dedication to the King, panegyrics to the King and Queen, address to the reader, two sections on Ovid, illustrations, annotations and commentaries, can stand comparisons with the opulence of a literary genre in favour at the Caroline court: the masque. With each frame of text sliding back until the reader reaches the centre stage of the poem, the structure of Sandys’s Ovid resembles the scena ductilis of the masque. In turn, the translation and the commentary are aligned with the iconographic conventions of the 1630s which assist in fashioning and promoting the King’s public image. At the outset, as in the court masque, Sandys’s Metamorphosis Englished upholds the mythic embodiment of Charles and Henrietta Maria. In Aurelian Townshend’s masque Albion’s Triumph (1632), for instance, Charles as the Emperor Albanctus ‘was a noble compliment to Henrietta
Maria as Divine Beauty in Tempe Restored (1632)’.15 In the prefatory material of Sandys’s Ovid, Henrietta Maria is similarly lauded as the ‘Faire Queene’ on whom ‘The Graces will rejoyce, [to] sue’ (p. 3v n. p.), whilst Charles is praised as: Jove, whose transcendent Acts the Poets sing, By Men made more than Man, is found a King: Whose Thunder and inevitable Flame, His justice and magestick Awe proclaime: His chearfull Influence, and refreshing Showers, Mercy and Bounty; Marks of heavenly Powers. These, free from Joves disorders, blesse thy Raigne; And might restore the golden Age againe, (p. 2vn. p.) Although the King is likened to the mighty Jove, it would not be felicitous to proclaim the English monarch as the type of Jove who, we are soon to be reminded in Ovid’s poem, is the aggressive abductor of both women and men.16 In which case, it is necessary for Sandys’s panegyric to announce that Charles is a monarch ‘free from Jove’s disorders’ (p. 2v n. p.). Distinctions of this kind are made throughout these dedicatory verses, hence it is ‘Not Cupid’s wild-fiers, but thise Beames which dart| From Venus purer Sphere inflame thy heart’ (p. 2v n. p.) and Charles is said to be ‘Like Bacchus’ in his ‘fresh Youth and free delights| Not as disguised in his frantick Rites’ (p. 2v n. p.). The outworks of the Metamorphosis Englished are thus hard-working in their revision of classical mythologies which comply with the dominant discourses of the period. The ancient gods required Mercury and Iris to act as mediators between them and the mortals over whom they exerted power;17 as translator cum privilegio, Sandys significantly functions as a mediator of the political ideologies of Charles. In sum, Sandys’s Ovid embodies a complex translation of the court by the court, upholding and promoting an ideology of subjection and rule through notions of harmony and moderation. The prevailing image of the royal couple in circulation was one of familial and nuptial unification. ‘Never’, wrote Lord Goring in 1633, ‘was there a private family more at full peace and tranquillity than in this glorious kingdom’.18 Primarily expressed in terms of the Neoplatonic philosophy brought into the court by the French Queen, the representation of the royal nucleus was a further indication of a Golden Age restored:19
Charles and Henrietta Maria, one the son of the pacifist James, the other the daughter of the warlike Henri IV, have come together in a perfect union that is indissoluble; it is the perfect union Plato described in Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium that the gods feared lest its power should prove greater than their own; it is a manifestation of the love that will restore us to our ancient nature and heal us and make us blessed and happy. The platonic hermaphrodite has reappeared as the controlling spirit of the blessed islands of Great Britain and its name is CarloMaria.20
