ABSTRACT
This chapter reexamines the evidence for dating Jane Lumley’s translation of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, the first known ancient tragedy turned into English. Two hypotheses have dominated the discussion, an older one where Lumley worked as a naive schoolgirl, and a more recent one, now approaching orthodoxy, where she was a mature allegorist of mid-Tudor politics, specifically of the fate of her cousin, Jane Grey. Crucial to the latter argument has been a claim that Lumley used copies of Euripides in Greek and of the Latin version of Erasmus that she could only have had access to after 1553. However, a detailed examination of the Lumley MS, now in the British Library, shows this claim to be improbable.
