Modern Philology, Feb 2002 v99 i3 p341(16)

Pirating Spain: Jonson's commendatory poetry and the translation of empire. Fuchs, Barbara.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Chicago Press

Early modern commendatory poems are not often deemed worthy of critical scrutiny in their own right. Conventional wisdom tells us they are little more than conventional flattery, somewhere between flat and flatulent. There are notable exceptions, to be sure: Ben Jonson's elegiac "To the Memory of my Beloved, the Author Mr. William Shakespeare," which prefaced the 1623 folio, is perhaps the most famous commendatory poem in the language, combining as it does euphonious praise for the "sweet swan of Avon" (line 71) with a remarkably successful attempt to delineate a canon of English literature. (1) Jonson's rich reconstruction of his literary world, in praise of writing that "neither Man, nor Muse, can praise too much" (line 4), exemplifies the possibilities of commendation for assessing standards of cultural value in a particular time and place. (2) A closer look at terms of praise may well afford us a more complete understanding of how poetic authority, literary competition, and international rivalries figure in calculating the value of a given early modern text. Beyond the dictates of convention, what contemporary poets choose to praise, and, more important, the metaphorics of their praise, provide key insights into literary value, understood not as a timeless aesthetic category but as a historical construct deeply embedded within political and social relations.

Jonson's many commendatory verses form part of his project to influence the shape and standing of English letters. (3) This essay considers two of Jonson's less famous commendatory poems in order to highlight his production of literary value within an international context. While praising translations into English of a classical Greek text and a Spanish picaresque novel, Jonson evokes imperial rivalries and economic struggles in order to portray English literary culture--original or otherwise--as a collective, national treasure. (4) Illuminating Jonson's rivalries with his English contemporaries, many of the Epigrams are accompanied by scathing comments on these writers' imitative efforts; in these two poems he locates English translators--who practice a different kind of appropriation--as part of a national project in which cultural and material value are inextricably intertwined. (5)

The two poems I focus on, "To my Worthy and Honoured Friend, Mr. George Chapman, on His Translation of Hesiod's Works and Days" (1618) and "On the Author, Worke and Translator" (1621), in praise of James Mabbe's The Rogue, evince the importance of translation as a gauge of Britain's cultural status. Both poems quite naturally focus on literary value, but do so, significantly, in terms of the nation's standing. First published alongside the works they praise, the two texts delineate quite different modes for Britain's engagement with classical literatures and contemporary vernacular works. The disjunction between these forms of engagement, I will argue, signals the contradictions attendant upon Britain's position as a literary and imperial latecomer. (6)

   I. THE ENGLISH VERSION
 
   How pedanticall and absurd an affectation it is, in the interpretation of
   any Author ... to turn him word for word; when (according to Horace and
   other best lawgivers to translators) it is the part of every knowing and
   iudiciall interpreter, not to follow the number and order of words, but the
   materiall things themselves. (GEORGE CHAPMAN, The Iliad of Homer, "Preface
   to the Reader")

Jonson's poem to Chapman, along with a longer poem by Michael Drayton, prefaced the 1618 Georgicks of Hesiod, as the translator termed the Works and Days. The intertwined questions of material value and national treasure are central to Jonson's rhetoric and are fore-grounded from the very first lines: "Whose worke could this be, Chapman, to refine / Olde Hesiods Ore, and give it us; but thine, / Who hadst before wrought in rich Homers Mine?" (lines 1-3). (7) The abundant deposits of Greek culture, Jonson suggests, can profitably be mined and refined only by this English poet, whose previous broad experience extracting Greek includes translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. (8) Yet, depending on how one interprets the "us" in line 2, the answer to Jonson's rhetorical question could be long and varied: there were various earlier humanist "refinements" of Hesiod into both Latin and several European vernaculars, and Chapman himself seems to have mined Latin translations as often as the Greek original. (9) The real novelty--and a rather delayed one at that--is rendering Hesiod (whether the original or an intermediate translation) into English in order to give it to an "us" of English speakers instead of to a European audience familiar with Latin. Jonson thus elides the first "miners" of the Greek--continental humanists of varied provenance--to praise a national achievement in the vernacular.

Whereas the first stanza imagines simply localized extraction, the second introduces the conceit of transported--or translated--riches that will prove central to the poem's project: "What treasure has thou brought us! and what store / Still, still, dost thou arrive with, at our shore, / To make thy honour, and our wealth the more!" (lines 4-6). The trader, or chapman, brings the refined ore to England as mercantile wealth. (10) The image of a vernacular enriched by lingustic appropriation is familiar from Elizabethan sources: writers such as Robert Parry, Thomas Nash, George Puttenham, and John Florio all emphasize the copiousness of an English tongue that has borrowed abundantly from the classical languages for some time. (11) Yet they liken industrious borrowing to production or commerce. Florio, for example, describes the "yeerely increase" of words: "daily both new wordes are inuented; and books still found, that make a new supply of old." (12) Jonson, by contrast, imagines the same abundance as loot. As the conceit develops, his transformation of the earlier image of domestic industry into a heroic conquest of far shores becomes more pronounced:

   If all the vulgar Tongues, that speake this day,
   Were askt of thy Discoveries; They must say,
   To the Greeke coast thine onely knew the way.
   Such Passage hast thou found, such Returnes made,
   As, now, of all men, it is call'd thy Trade:
   And who make thither else, rob, or invade.
 
   (Lines 7-12)

What is most striking in these stanzas is the figuration of translation as an inaugural voyage. Britain, as represented by Chapman, actually discovers the one route to Greece and claims exclusive trading privileges based on its primacy. Translation thus becomes an imperialist act of acquisition that ensures British greatness. (13)

The "English version" depends upon a complicated rewriting of historical events that recasts national failures as cultural successes. Perhaps the clearest example of this rewriting is the emphasis on a "passage" in the last stanza, which suggests a very specific reference for the poem's patriotic claims: England's search for a sea route to Cathay. In the middle years of the sixteenth century, the English had attempted to find a Northeast passage by sailing around Muscovy. (14) The more sustained project, from Sebastian Cabot on, sought a Northwest passage to the fabled riches of the East around what is today Canada. This geographical chimera was a linchpin of the nation's imperial project in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although, like the eastward attempts, it had proved a spectacular failure in Elizabethan times, it continued to inspire merchants and seamen well into James's reign. (15)

Because the more likely routes to the riches of the Indies had already been taken, England had no choice but to search for an improbable unknown passage. (16) As Richard Willes pointed out in his 1576 "Certain arguments to prove a passage by the Northwest," Europeans had taken possession of the likelier paths both east and west: "[The Portuguese] voyage is very well understood of all men, and the Southeasterne way round about Afrike by the Cape of Good hope more spoken of, better knowen and travelled, then that it may seeme needfull to discourse thereof.... The [Southwestern] way no doubt the Spaniardes would commodiously take, for that it lyeth neere unto their dominions there, could the Easterne current and levant winds as easily suffer them to return." (17) The belatedness of English expansion thus forced tenacious explorers such as Martin Frobisher and John Davis to probe the frigid waters beyond Novaya Zemlya in search of the riches of the East. Frobisher's voyages had proved especially embarrassing, for he twice returned to England with a rich load of "gold ore" that turned out to be worthless pyrites. The only quantity of real treasure "mined" by England, or ever to make its way to England's shores, seems to have been the pillaged loot captured by Elizabethan privateers such as Francis Drake, who engaged in a curious kind of secondary extraction: from Spanish ships instead of New World mines. Needless to say, the heroic privateers were denounced as pirates by those who suffered their ravages.

The early years of the seventeenth century saw renewed efforts to find the fabled Northwest Passage. Following Henry Hudson's seemingly auspicious discovery of the huge inlet that now bears his name (and despite the disastrous fate of his expedition), a wave of optimism led to the incorporation of the Northwest Passage Company in 1612. Its directors held the hopeful title of "Governor and Company of the Merchaunts of London, Discoverers of the Northwest passage" and employed a ship named, with similar optimism, the Discovery. Nomenclature aside, the company's efforts soon came to an impasse in frozen waters: William Gibbons's voyage in 1614 was a complete failure, and William Baffin's two attempts convinced the renowned navigator that there was "no passage or hope of passage" along the routes explored by his predecessors. (18) By the time Chapman's translation was published in 1618, the existence of a passage to be discovered and exploited exclusively by Britain seemed more implausible than ever.

Yet where actual voyages would not serve as models for the licit enrichment of the nation, Jonson's poem--through the alchemy of metaphor--turns pyrites into gold and mere pirates into dashing adelantados. The failure of proprietary discovery, whether imperial or cultural, is reimagined as an exclusive cultural triumph. (19) "Vulgar tongues"--those contemporary vernaculars that actually occupy the viable trading routes--must grant the primacy of the British passage to Greek culture, even though Chapman's achievement succeeds many other foreign translations. The Greek "trade," at least here, belongs to Britain; all others are interlopers who "rob, or invade." With their suggestion that it is others who are belated, and reduced to pirating culture, the last lines of the poem flaunt British ownership. They also make Britain sound suspiciously like Spain, a power the British bitterly resented for its restrictions on New World trade. (20) Thus Chapman's individual, belated project of translation, and by extension other belated British voyages, are transformed into an exceptional national achievement. Jonson's English version traduces history even as it translates empire.

II. ENGLISHING THE PICARESQUE

"On the Author, Worke, and Translator," Jonson's poem for James Mabbe's The Rogue, a translation of Mateo Aleman's picaresque Guzman de Alfarache (1599-1604), presents a very different picture of literary property. Whereas the poem to Chapman lauds a heroic English vernacular exploiting the riches of Greece, these commendatory lines on Mabbe's work must justify a translation from the Spanish. The questions of literary value and national standing are even more pressing in this poem, as Jonson negotiates the delicate question of the relative value of two vernaculars. If the worth of Greece is beyond question for the late Renaissance--a kind of gold standard for which the different national vernaculars vie--it is by no means as obvious how English is enriched by a translation from the vernacular of a contemporary rival. The tacit questions that this poem addresses include the Jacobean fascination with Spanish literature, the resultant asymmetry of Anglo-Spanish translation, and the general English unease with Spanish cultural dominance. (21) The questions become especially pressing given that the translated "work" of the title is a prime example of the picaresque, a Spanish invention that was immensely popular throughout Europe. The project here, I will argue, is both to commend and to erase the labor of translation by emphasizing the quality of the finished English product over the Spanish raw materials. Whereas the praise of Chapman's Hesiod lauds the value of Greece and Britain's exclusive right to refine its riches, the poem to Mabbe suggests that culture cannot be appropriated for a national tradition. Instead, it universalizes literary values in order to allow those who come second, such as the English translator of a Spanish original, equal claim to such poetical riches.

The poem insists on praising both author and translator, making room for praise of two, as purported equals, where we might expect praise of one. From the title itself, which frames the "worke" with the two very different kinds of labor involved, "On the Author, Worke, and Translator" rejects the notion of exclusive literary property that figures so prominently in the poem to Chapman. The opening lines focus instead on a shared worth, emphasizing the value of multiplicity: "Who tracks this Authors, or Translators Pen, / Shall finde, that either hath read Bookes, and Men: / To say but one, were single" (lines 1-3). (22) The two pairs in these initial lines--author and translator, books and men--link Aleman and Mabbe's dual labors to the literary and moral value of the work. The ambiguity of the referent in "To say but one, were single," suggests that it is impossible to disentangle one set of doubles from the other, and introduces a purely phantasmal correspondence between the two penmen and the two aspects of the text's value. The conclusion sounds like a tautology: of course, at one level, "to say but one" is "single." Yet the various early modern meanings of `single' dispel the apparent redundancy and obliquely support Jonson's argument for secondary literary labors. One meaning of `single', now obsolete, is "slight, poor, trivial" (OED, s.v. "single," 12b). Thus in Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV the Lord Chief Justice attacks Falstaff with: "Is not your voice broken, your winde short, your wit single ... ?" (1.2.182-83). (23) An OED example from Samuel Daniel suggests that `single' is also, in an apparent paradox, the opposite of `singular': "Having married a wife of singulare beautie, but (according to the common rumour) of single honestie." The notable or exceptional `singular' is here separated from its belittled etymological cousin. If we reinsert this particular contrast into Jonson's poem, lines 1-3 seem to suggest that the exceptional quality of a work need not depend on its single authorship. Yet there remains the nagging suspicion that Jonson's lines are themselves not single--in the word's more positive sense of "simple, honest, sincere, single-minded; free from duplicity or deceit" (OED, s.v. "single," 14)--but instead hypnotize us with their oscillation between singular and plural. The separation of the singular and the single validates the labors of the translator's pen but enacts a semantic violence that underscores the inherent duplicity of language and of its manipulators.

The poem seems to relish polysemy as a way to bridge the gap between "old words" and "new times," and makes The Rogue a prime example:

   Then it chimes,
   When the old words doe strike on the new times,
   As in this Spanish Proteus; who, though writ
   But in one tongue, was form'd with the worlds wit.
 
   (Lines 3-6)

The image of a Spanish Proteus marks a move from polysemy to even more complex transformations. While the picaro in Aleman's novel may be a master of disguise, he is no match for Jonson himself, who here metamorphoses character into text and "one tongue" into "the world's wit." And while the translation of the Spanish original into a lingua franca of creativity suggests a move away from proprietary national claims, these are in fact quickly reinstated. As the rest of the poem will make clear, the supranational interlude functions simply as pretext for a reinforced English claim to the text.

The poem enacts the confusion between single and double, Spanish original and English translation, in its very terms of praise. Jonson recalls a famous Spanish conceit in order to commend an extraordinary translator of Spanish:

   Such Bookes deserve Translators, of like coate
   As was the Genius wherewith they were wrote;
   And this hath met that one, that may be stil'd
   More than the Foster-father of this Child.
 
   (Lines 11-14)

The image of Mabbe as more than foster father to his translation inverts Cervantes' distancing claim, in the prologue to the first part of Don Quijote (1605), that although he might seem a father he is but a stepfather to his creation, and thus well aware of its faults. (24) Jonson probably knew the original and would certainly have been familiar with Thomas Shelton's 1612 translation of Part I. (25) Shelton's version, although not an exact translation, preserves the biting Cervantine irony on literary paternity:

  It ofttimes befalls that a father hath a child both by birth evil-favoured
  and quite devoid of all perfection, and yet the love that he bears him is
  such as it casts a mask over his eyes, which hinders his discerning of the
  faults and simplicities thereof, and makes him rather deem them discretions
  and beauty, and so tells them to his friends for witty jests and conceits.
  But I, though in show a father, yet in truth but a stepfather to Don
  Quixote, will not be borne away by the violent current of the modern custom
  nowadays, and therefore entreat thee, with the tears almost in mine eyes, as
  many others are wont to do, most dear reader, to pardon and dissemble the
  faults which thou shalt discern in this my son. (26)

Jonson's praise of Mabbe as more than foster father to his translation thus appears quite singular, if not single. In the first place, it distortedly echoes a Spanish original, simultaneously appropriating it and problematizing any notion of fidelity or originality. Jonson as translator of Cervantes is not "of like coat" but a turncoat. Mabbe, for his part, no longer stands alone: Cervantes lurks as his shadowy opposite, while Jonson adulterates the notion of exclusive literary paternity. Second, by collapsing Cervantes' critical distance and inverting the topos of humility in a poem of praise, the emphasis on unalienated fatherhood suggests that Mabbe himself, and certainly Jonson, may well be blind to the translation's faults.

In this context, it is interesting to note the pronounced contrast in tone between Jonson's poem and Mabbe's own claims in his prologue, where he deplores his lack of skills. Although Mabbe, in a flourish of virtuosity, writes his own dedication to "Don Iuan Estrangwayes" in (rather stilted) Spanish, he tentatively signs himself "Don Diego Puede-Ser," or James May-be (p. 8). And while he claims to have clothed the picaro in an English costume, he admits, "en algunos lugares, hallo mi Guzmanico escuro como la noche" [in some spots, I find my little Guzman dark as night] (p. 7). He follows this admission with a flat-footed pun that reminds us of the difficulty of his enterprise, "Pero, yo he hecho algunos Escolios, para quitar los Escollos" [I have provided some schooling (notes) to remove the shoals], and ends with a highly conventional description of his literary voyage.

In fact, and despite the Spanish flourish of the dedication, Mabbe turned often to Barezzo Barezzi's 1606 Italian translation of the Guzman, presumably as a way to shed light on the obscure picaro or skirt the perilous shoals. (27) Thus Mabbe. is far indeed from Aleman's original--a "cozen-german," perhaps, but not an unadulterated father. The discrepancy between Mabbe's own tone and practice, and Jonson's praise, may well be attributable to the difference between the humble author and the commender, and the generic conventions associated with each space of enunciation, yet the contrast is so pronounced as to suggest that Jonson's larger claims for English primacy over Spanish sources themselves motivate his project of praise, regardless of Mabbe's success.

After the internationalist interlude, the poem moves to assertions of English primacy through the metaphorics of cloth, first introduced with the reference, in line 11, to translators "of like coate." Jonson turns to the conventional sartorial image for translation to emphasize the improvement of the poem in its English version:

   For though Spaine gave him his first ayre and Vogue,
   He would be call'd, henceforth, the English-Rogue,
   But that hee's too well suted, in a cloth,
   Finer than was his Spanish.
 
   (Lines 16-19)

Whereas Elizabethan instances of the clothing metaphor generally emphasize the crudeness of English--whether to condemn it as rude attire or praise it as simple homespun--Jonson here suggests that English cloth is better than Spanish. (28) In this sartorial vein, the "single" in line 3 reads as "unlined" material (OED, s.v. "single," 10); thus the thread of imagery runs from a poor cloth associated with the misguided effort to distinguish between author and translator, to the "like coat" of a translator well suited to the material, to, finally, the fine English cloth that rehabilitates the rogue. Paradoxically, the translation improves the original to such an extent that Jonson's proposed title becomes untenable: an "English-Rogue" would be an oxymoron because English itself ennobles the work.

Thus Jonson mobilizes the cloth industry as a powerful image of national pride, in order to "English" what was originally a Spanish possession. (29) The brief moment of humanist generosity in line 6, when the poet argues that the Spanish work actually belongs to the world, quickly gives way to an emphasis on British achievements. Free trade in Spanish texts enhances Britain's stature, and the end product is so thoroughly domesticated as to disguise its status as an import.

Yet the Spanish provenance of the original is not the only thing that Jonson's poem cloaks with its powerful metaphors. The cloth industry, it turns out, is an odd choice for mobilizing national pride in 1621 since, for contemporary readers, such imagery would most likely recall the desperate straits of that industry in England. The years 1620-24 saw, as economic historian Barry Supple puts it, "perhaps the most acute breakdown of the English economy of the first half of the seventeenth century." (30) The ill-conceived project of Alderman Cockayne to restrict exports to finished English cloth, and its relative dearness as the start of the Thirty Years' War wreaked havoc with continental currencies, essentially paralyzed the cloth industry in these years, profoundly affecting domestic affairs as well as Britain's economic standing vis-a-vis its European rivals. As one M.P. put it in the somber parliamentary debates of 1621, "the kingdom is hindered even within the kingdom by a decay of the trade of cloth." (31) And, despite Jonson's claims for the excellence of English cloth, some contemporary observers complained bitterly that it was the poor quality of the material that was causing the problem. (32) Thus the cloth industry could not constitute a source of national pride in 1621; ironically, instead of the picaresque being Englished in fancy clothes, the genre was enacted everywhere in England through the impoverishment of large groups of unemployed laborers from the cloth trades, who suffered poverty and dislocation.

Just as in the poem to Chapman Jonson reimagines Britain's failure to discover a Northwest Passage as a cultural triumph, so he here recasts the grim economic realities of his time as an empowering new victory for the English language. In the poetic economy of commendation, the value of all things British can rise freely, untrammeled by the setbacks of economic history. Jonson's imagery of production and exchange is gloriously free of material constraints, and value accrues for the object of commendation regardless of the historical aptness of the poet's metaphors. Poetry that thus creates value irrespective of historical circumstance--or better yet, in absolute defiance of it--is, I would suggest, a formidable tool not simply for promoting an individual work but for constructing a literary culture as an enduring and powerful source of national worth.

III. CODA: THE EMPIRE OF POETRY

The dynamics of cultural production and exchange that Jonson imagines in the two poems I have discussed above suggest an overwhelming concern with bringing home the riches. While the classical ore of Greece is available for conquest and appropriation of (English) first comers only, the contemporary cultural productions of rival nations should be circulated freely in order to be more effectively Englished. Whether the appropriation is achieved via cultural protectionism (Greece is ours alone) or by shady expropriation (the picaresque is the world's but, ultimately, ours), the end result is to enhance Britain's cultural standing, at least in its own view.

Metaphors of empire and value are central to Jonson's project, since by the 1620s--and despite the crisis of the cloth industry--trade is Britain's preeminent source of national pride. Whether such trade be restricted or free, Jonson's poetics of acquisition provides a powerful way to reimagine cultural and material empire, in which late arrival does not preclude success. More important, the cultural currency of his images is dissociated from the specific historical circumstances of British trade and expansion--the economy of metaphor replenishes any deficit in actual British fortunes. The poetic project of these commendations is even more ambitious than the goals Jonson sets forth in his English Grammar (pub. 1640), to "free our language from the opinion of rudenesse and barbarisme, where-with it is mistaken to be diseased: we shew the copy of it, and match-ablenesse with other tongues." (33) The poems also free Britain from the limitations of historical circumstance, as they construct a literary sphere in which the national tradition--a tradition of literary predecessors, but also of powerful myths about British greatness--itself becomes a source of value.

I would like to turn now to a much later poem, by a later poet, that replicates the elisions and deliberate historical misreadings central to Jonson's project of elevating Britian, in order to suggest how the metaphorics of empire create value beyond the specific genre of the commendatory poem. The trope of translation as glorious imperial achievement, which Jonson applies to Chapman's rendering of Works and Days, is central to a far more famous poem on Chapman's translations: John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816). Keats's sonnet, which I cite here in full, figures literary exploration as a voyage of discovery:

   Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
   And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
   Round many western islands have I been
   Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
   Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
   That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
   Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
   Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
   Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
   When a new planet swims into his ken;
   Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
   He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
   Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
   Silent, upon a peak in Darien. (34)

The qualitative change in the speaker as he experiences other places--from a restless traveler in the opening lines, to the dauntless conquistador of the last ones--is achieved by means of a reading of Chapman's translation, which speaks "loud and bold." The English version of Homer domesticates the "wide expanse" of Greek letters, subjecting the newly discovered realm to the proprietary glance of the adventurer. Strikingly, the sonnet's last lines link the English translation of a Greek original to a glorious moment of Spanish discovery and feature Hernan Cortes, the leader of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, perhaps the ultimate "realm of gold," instead of the historically correct but less prestigious figure of Vasco Nunez de Balboa. (35) While Keats does mention the English discovery of the planet Uranus, (36) the metaphoric voyage out culminates in a return home from "western Islands"--that is, the West Indies of the Spanish Main--to an English translation, with a pirating of Spanish discovery along the way. Thus the vision of literary exploration as imperial adventure rests upon the replacement of the lackluster history of British discoveries with a more prestigious narrative of Spanish imperial exploits. The poem constructs its own authority by successfully traducing history: it maps the far reach of the literary not by avoiding the historical but by appropriating a Spanish past for Britain, just as it appropriates a Greek original. Moreover, by reprising Jonson's poem to Chapman, the sonnet inscribes itself within a preexisting tradition of such appropriations, which prospectively authorize its imperial vagaries.

Praise for Chapman is secondary here; Keats's sonnet is not really commendatory verse in the strict sense of prefacing a newly published work with acclaim. Instead, it constructs a larger sense of cultural and poetic authority in imperial terms, tying the project of poetic enunciation and self-creation to the rewriting of British imperial history. In this symbiosis, literary value depends on the imperial analogy, while the imperial myth is itself nourished by poetic revision. As in Jonson's poems to Chapman and Mabbe, the nexus between poetic authority and imperial conquest appears singularly charged. As these poems suggest, the British empire of poetry comprises far more than the explicit poetry of empire: it includes, too, the insistent figuration of cultural authority as the conquest of poetic and material terrain, whether through translation, silent appropriation, or rewriting. The peculiar force of this piratical poetry--as opposed to more heavy-handed paeans to empire--lies in its versatility, its reaching for what is beyond the nation's experience, and its ability to yoke together the projects of poetry and of empire.

I wish to thank Deborah Dale and Andrea Partels for their help with research for this essay.

(1.) Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford University Press, 1925-52), 8:890-92. Further citations of Jonson are from this edition.

(2.) Franklin Williams's Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books before 1641 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1962) is one exception to the general critical neglect of the genre. Even Williams, however, dismisses commendatory verses as "metrical puffs" (p. xi). See also his "Commendatory Verses: The Rise of the Art of Puffing," in Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, vol. 19, ed. Fredson Bowers (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1966), pp. 1-14.

(3.) Jonson leads the way, by Williams's count, with thirty commendatory poems to his name ("Commendatory Verses," p. 6). Jonson's habitual participation is obliquely recognized in William Cartwright's defense of John Fletcher in his own verses for the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, which Williams cites: "Nor hadst thou the sly trick, thy selfe to praise / Under thy friends names, or to purchase Bayes / Didst write stale commendations to thy Booke, / Which we for Beaumonts or Ben. Johnsons tooke" (p. 9).

(4.) In this respect, Jonson's canonization of Shakespeare is more intriguing for its concern with an international stage--"Triumph, my Britain, though hast one to show, / to whom all scenes of Europe homage owe" (lines 41-42)--than for the English literary history it puts forth. As Heather James points out in her Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1997), "When Shakespeare bests the great dramatists of Greece and Rome, not to mention Elizabethan England, his credit wondrously affects England as an emergent nation" (p. 7).

(5.) For Jonson's denunciation of the would-be poet who "makes each man's wit his own; see Epigrams LVI, "On Poet-Ape" (8:44-45), LXXIII, "To Fine Grand" (8:51), LXXXI, "To Prowl the Plagiary" (8.54), C, "On Playwright" (8:64), and CXII, "To a Weak Gamester in Poetry" (8:72-73).

(6.) In writing about translations into English in the period immediately following the union of England and Scotland, the question of whether to speak of "British" or "English" is a vexed one. I have opted to use "Britain" and "British" for the nation praised in these poems, since Jonson's project seems at least in part connected to the cultural anxieties of the new realm. I consciously use "English" for the language and culture to mark its dominance over the other languages and cultures of Britain, occluded in the literary history Jonson constructs here. For the representation of linguistic differences in early modern English literature, see Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, 1996).

(7.) Ben Jonson, 8:388-89. Jonson's poem, generally grouped with the "miscellaneous poems" in modern editions, appears in The Georgicks of Hesiod, trans. George Chapman (London, 1618), sig. A4v.

(8.) Chapman's translation of the Iliad was completed in 1611; the first half of the Odyssey appeared in 1614 and the second in 1615.

(9.) As Millar MacLure underscores in his George Chapman: A Critical Study (University of Toronto Press, 1966), "however [Chapman] might inveigh against detractors who claimed that he turned his Greek `out of the Latine onely,' he always availed himself of the ease of a bilingual edition" (p. 212).

(10.) In his Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), Richard S. Peterson notes that "even the name `Chapman,' or peddler, contributes to the mercantile metaphor here" (p. 14). Peterson reads the imagery of discovery as one of Jonson's "central, classically inspired metaphors for the process of imitation in writing," stressing Chapman's individual "monopoly excluding competition with potential rivals" rather than imperial rivalries between emerging powers (p. 14). It is precisely the imbrication of the discourses of imperial discovery and of cultural value that interests me here. While other poets--including Chapman himself, in his own earlier commendatory poem to Jonson--use the imagery of the voyage and discovery of classical culture, Jonson seems particularly intent on the enrichment of Britain through such excursions.

(11.) On the praise of the vernacular in the late sixteenth century, see Richard Foster Jones, "The Eloquent Language," in his Triumph of the English Language (Stanford University Press, 1953).

(12.) John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, Or Most copious and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English (London, 1598), "To the Reader," cited in Jones (p. 198).

(13.) Compare Drayton's commendatory poem: "Chapman; We finde by thy past-prized fraught, / What wealth thou dost upon this land conferre; / Th'olde Grecian Prophets hither that hast brought, / Of their full words the true Interpreter: / And by thy travell, strongly hast exprest / The large dimensions of the English tongue; / Delivering them so well, the first and best, / That to the world in Numbers ever sung. / Thou hast unlock'd the Treasury, wherein / All Art, all Knowledge have so long been hidden: / Which, till the gracefull Muses did begin / Here to inhabite, was to us forbidden" (The Georgicks, sig. A4r-v [lines 1-12]). Like Jonson, Drayton describes Greek culture as treasure and celebrates the expansive possibilities of an English language of "large dimensions." Note, however, that Drayton emphasizes the art-less past of Britain, a land where the Muses have only recently alighted.

(14.) For the English voyages "Made to the North and North-east quarters of the World, with the directions, letters, privileges, discourses, and observations incident to the same," see Richard Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 vols. (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1903-5), vols. 2 and 3. The OED cites Richard Eden on the fabled Northeast passage in one definition of the term: "Into the frosen sea ... and so forth to Cathay (yf any suche passage may be found)" (OED, s.v. "passage," 11a). The parenthetical conditional is highly revealing.

(15.) See, for example, the ambivalent, hypothetical "Certain arguments to prove a passage by the Northwest" (1580), or the "Second voyage of John Davis for the Northwest Passage" (1586), collected in Hakluyt, 7:191-203, and 393-407. For the history of exploration "North and Northwest 1602-32," see the chapter of that title in Kenneth Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire: 1480-1630 (Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 341-55.

(16.) On the English rivalry with Spain, and its implications for England's construction of its national identity, see Richard Helgerson, "The Voyages of a Nation," in his Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 149-91.

(17.) Hakluyt, 7:191.

(18.) The Voyages of William Baffin, 1612-1622, ed. C. R. Markham (London, 1881), p. 150, cited in Andrews, p. 352.

(19.) Hakluyt himself, of course, contributed to the textual inflation of English accomplishments. As T. E. Armstrong has pointed out, many of the Arctic sea routes for which Hakluyt claimed English primacy were well established in Russian and German sources ("The Arctic," in The Hakluyt Handbook, ed. D. B. Quinn, 2 vols. [London: Hakluyt Society, 1974], 1:254-60). For Hakluyt's larger role in promoting England's early imperial expansion and recuperating failures, see Mary Fuller, Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576-1624 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

(20.) See, for example, the account of the "Second voyage made by Sir John Hawkins to the Coast of Guinie" in Hakluyt's collection (10:9-63), which describes how the English force the Spaniards to trade with them in the West Indies.

(21.) Jonson's own satirical response to the fashion for all things Spanish pervades The Alchemist (1610), a play in which even pretending to be a Spaniard guarantees success. For a general account of English translations of Spanish texts in the period, see Dale Randall, The Golden Tapestry: A Critical Survey of Non-chivalric Spanish Fiction in English Translation, 1543-1657 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963).

(22.) All citations of Jonson or Mabbe's text are from The Rogue, or the Life of Guzman de Alfarache, Written in Spanish by Mateo Aleman and Done into English by James Mabbe (London, 1623), ed. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly (New York: Knopf, 1924). Jonson's poem appears on p. 31. Translations of Mabbe's Spanish dedication are my own.

(23.) This is also the scene in which Falstaff states, "Well, I cannot last forever, but it was alway yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common" (lines 213-16).

(24.) "Pero yo que, aunque parezco padre, soy padrastro de Don Quijote," Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Martin de Riquer (Barcelona: Planeta, 1997), p. 12.

(25.) Williams (see n. 2 above) suggests that the mock-commendations that preface Don Quijote are the model for the "fantastic anthology" of commendatory poems in Thomas Coryate's Crudities (1611), including Jonson's ("Commendatory Verses," p. 11). Given that the publication of the Crudities predates Shelton's translation, Jonson may well have known the original Spanish text, although Shelton's translation may of course have circulated in manuscript form. Jonson refers to Don Quijote and the Spanish craze for chivalric romances as he mourns his own books in "An Execration upon Vulcan" (Ben Jonson [see n. 1 above], 8:202-12): "Had I compiled from Amadis de Gaul, / The Esplandians, Arthurs, Palmerins, and all / The learned library of Don Quixote, / And so some goodlier monster had begot" (lines 29-32).

(26.) Thomas Shelton, The First Part of the Delightful History of the Most Ingenious Knight Don Quixote of the Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes (New York: Collier, 1909), p. 7.

(27.) For a detailed analysis of Mabbe's frequent reliance on the Italian translation in part 2, see Fitzmaurice-Kelly's introduction, pp. xxxii-xxxvi.

(28.) Jones (see n. 11 above), p. 21.

(29.) For a fascinating vision of the role of clothiers in the making of the English nation, see Thomas Deloney's Elizabethan prose fictions, Jacke of Newberie (registered 1597-98) and Thomas of Reading (written between 1597-1600). In the latter, Deloney emphasizes that "Among all crafts this was the onely chiefe, for that it was the greatest merchandize, by the which our Countrey became famous through all nations" (The Works of Thomas Deloney, ed. Francis Oscar Mann [Oxford: Clarendon, 1912], p. 213). In the same text, the clothiers are instrumental in establishing uniform measures and regularizing the coin of the realm.

(30.) Barry Supple, Commercial Crisis and Change in England, 1600-1642 (Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 52. For an overview of the causes of the crisis, see also J. D. Gould, "The Trade Depression of the Early 1620's," Economic History Review, 2d ser., 8 (1954): 81-90.

(31.) Cited in Supple, p. 54.

(32.) Gould, p. 83; Supple, p. 58.

(33.) Ben Jonson, 8:465.

(34.) The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). For a reading of Keats's sonnet as a "display of bad access and misappropriation" in relation to the literary tradition, see Marjorie Levinson, Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 11-15. I am grateful to Benjamin Balthazar for suggesting the echo of Jonson in Keats.

(35.) In his Evolution of Keats's Poetry, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), Claude Lee Finney identifies Keats's source for this episode as William Robertson's History of America (Edinburgh, 1777), which correctly features Balboa and not Cortes. Robertson also describes Peril, which Francisco Pizarro would conquer, as a "realm of gold" (Finney, 1:123).

(36.) Finney traces Keats's interest in the 1781 discovery, made by Sir William Herschel, Astronomer to his Majesty, to John Bonnycastle's popularizing Introduction to Astronomy (London, 1786), presented to Keats as a school prize in 1811 (Finney, 1:125).

BARBARA FUCHS
University of Washington