english juvenal translations in bodleian library manuscripts

English Juvenal translations in Bodleianlibrary manuscripts

Stuart Gillespie*

The manuscript copies of Juvenal translations in the Bodleian Library, University

of Oxford, form a cross-section of English versions of Juvenal for the period

c. 1630–1760. Some manuscript translations were copied from existing printed

texts. Others were themselves the basis of printed texts. Others again have never

been printed (or investigated) at all. Taken as a group, they help to reveal how, why,in what forms, and with what emphases Juvenal was being read, reproduced, and

circulated in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such a body of

material can also help us understand, more generally, what kinds of classical

translation and imitation went on at this time, in what contexts, and for what

purposes; who composed translations; and to some extent who consumed them.

In the past, in common with a few other scholars, I have drawn attention to indi-

vidually significant English translations composed in earlier eras but not printed,

and now available only in copies found in manuscript repositories.1 The translations

I have referred to, and in some cases transcribed in whole or in part, have usually

belonged to the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and on occasion have been

translations of Juvenal.2 Below I offer a more comprehensive study of all the trans-

lations of Juvenal into English found in the University of Oxford’s Bodleian manu-

scripts of this period (c. 1630–1760). These twenty or so items have never been

addressed as a group, and are indeed in most ways an utterly random selection of

material, but their interest is not a topic only for historians of collections. My

premise is that they make up a manageable cross-section, for this period, of translat-

ing activity as now available to the view. While the cross-section goes beyond

(or below) print culture, and hence beyond most previous investigation, it also

embraces it, since some of these manuscript copies either precede or follow a printed

text of the same translation. The Bodleian Juvenal manuscripts make up a suggestive

corpus of English versions of Juvenal, helping to reveal how, why, in what forms,

and with what emphases Juvenal was being read, reproduced, and circulated in

Britain. This body of material can also help us understand, more generally, what

*Correspondence: English Literature, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK.

[email protected]

1 Some of them in Bodleian collections: see for example Gillespie 2008. I am grateful to the

Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, for electing me to a visiting fellowship, which

allowed the research for this paper to be carried out.

2 See Gillespie 2006 and most recently Gillespie 2012.

Classical Receptions Journal Vol 6. Iss. 1 (2014) pp. 22–47

� The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For Permissions, please email: [email protected]:10.1093/crj/clt007

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kinds of classical translation and imitation went on at this time, in what contexts, and

for what purposes; who composed translations; and to some extent who consumed

them. In certain ways to which I shall return, my materials are very likely to be

unrepresentative within some of these categories: for example, turning Latin verse

into English verse is a feat that would very seldom have been attempted by women

(a category of translator more active in other languages). These materials are also, it

will emerge, ‘Oxford-centric’, the reason for their presence in this collection often

being an Oxford association on the part of the writer or compiler (in several cases this

was an Oxford undergraduate). Such factors do not prevent these materials from

being illuminating.

This sample of what survives in one repository will, I hope, suggest something of

the wealth of material to which future researchers of the history of classical reception

and of translation could address themselves. Because this discussion is intended to

reach those with an interest in historical translations (or Juvenal translations) who

have never worked much on unprinted material, I have tried to take little for granted

in describing how I have proceeded, and have added references to sources of further

information. The interest of some of the previously unknown items my survey has

identified is not only historical but aesthetic, and they deserve more detailed atten-

tion than can be given them here; I hope to return to a few of the translations at a

later date.

Margaret Crum’s First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in Manuscripts of

the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Crum 1969) itself has several useful indexes. Here the

main starting point for enquiry was its ‘Index of Authors of Works Translated,

Paraphrased, or Imitated (with Index of Psalms)’. Will all the early manuscript

translations of Juvenal in Bodleian collections be found among the entries here?

Not necessarily: some may be in prose; some may have been acquired after 1961,

when the compilation of Crum’s index halted (there is a supplementary card index

available only in situ).3 In the case of pre-1800 Juvenal translations, these points

happen to make no difference. The first would obviously carry weight with texts and

authors only ever translated into prose, such as, say, ancient historians; or again,

translation of Senecan drama is indexed by Crum whereas translations from Plautus

and Terence are normally not. But she is generous in stretching to include occasional

prose versions of ancient poets. This ‘Index of Authors of Works Translated’ also

takes in some titles of ancient works, such as ‘Greek Anthology’, where that seems

more helpful. Some anonymous works, on the other hand, escape the author index

altogether, one example being the complete version of the Batrachomyomachia

3 This card index runs to some 1,500 cards (and hence first lines). Apart from being much

less fully researched than the printed volumes of 1969, there are two major limitations: it

has no index of authors translated, and it is no longer kept up to date. It is made available

to readers on request.

E N G L I S H J U V E N A L T R A N S L A T I O N S

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catalogued by first line at S630 along with its title ‘The Battail of the Froggs and the

Mice’, but apparently not recognized, and certainly not recorded, as a translation.4

There are other reasons why the Crum index will not infallibly identify all trans-

lations of ancient (or other) works in Bodleian manuscripts. That many do not

declare themselves to be translations is not usually problematic, because part of

the indexers’ brief was to build on previous information (such as that found in

the Summary Catalogue of Bodleian manuscripts) so as to provide such identifica-

tions. Some items escaped them, but Crum and her team were well equipped, and

over their thirty years’ work (1931–61) were often able to draw on the expertise of

Bodleian Library readers too. I have only infrequently caught the Index napping, in

the sense of finding an undeclared translation of any size which it did not identify as

such. On the other hand, the identification of a precise source was not considered

essential: if a manuscript describes a translation as ‘from Ausonius’, the Index may or

may not go any further. Sometimes this means the Index of Authors and Works

Translated can be misleading, in that further investigation might reveal the source is

not Ausonius but some other author.5

Crum’s undertaking was eventually recognized as a suitable model for other

printed first-line indexes of manuscript poetry, although, alas, none of them

comes close to its standards of accuracy. You will find many more translations

missing from the Beinecke’s first-line index (Parks et al. 2005), but, thanks to the

use of the Crum model, at least there is a list of authors translated at its back.6 There

is now an electronic union index of the English manuscript verse found in some

seven major world repositories, hosted by the Folger Shakespeare Library: <http://

firstlines.folger.edu>. As the URL indicates, it works on the same principle, and it

incorporates Crum, with near-complete accuracy. It is searchable in various fields

including ‘Translations’. The quality of the results depends largely on the original

data input, since nothing was added to Crum nor the other indexes absorbed (not

even the repositories’ own recorded corrections), and since not all originally made

use of all fields. A few items of information were, disappointingly, taken away: for

example, Crum’s information where applicable that the manuscript is in the author’s

hand is suppressed. One thing the union index adds to the original data it is built

from is the opportunity to search for the same first line in different repositories.

Usefully, as well as data from library catalogues and indexes like Crum, first lines

from STC (1603–1640 only) and Wing (1641–1700) records of printed texts are

included, and searchable, as also are records from Steve May and William Ringler’s

Elizabethan Poetry (manuscript sources only).7

4 One might have expected a reference to it under Homer (‘see also’) if not under its Greek

or English name.

5 Fallibility: the interleaved copy of Crum at Bod. R. Ref. 751 offers a modest amount of

correction and supplementation.

6 For reflections on first-line poetry indexes at large, see Londry 2004.

7 Pollard 1976–91; Wing 1994–8; May and Ringler 2004.

S T U A R T G I L L E S P I E

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For present purposes we may think in terms of eighteen discrete Juvenal trans-

lations found in Bodleian manuscripts, three of them available in varying forms in

different manuscripts. Having worked through the nineteen Juvenal entries in

Crum’s Index of Authors Translated, we find that one of them is not a translation,

and could only doubtfully be regarded as an ‘imitation’. This text, found in MS Eng.

poet. d. 10, is simply a handwritten version of a published satire (by Paul

Whitehead?) of 1739, The State of Rome under Nero and Domitian . . . by Messrs.

Juvenal and Persius. The dual authorship specified suggests the tenuous relationship

to any of the Roman satirists’ works — which is the reason why this item is hence-

forth ignored. The rest of the texts/manuscripts have been given simple reference

numbers 1–18, keyed in bold Arabic numerals in discussion. The general context

formed for all items by the wider record of printed translations of Juvenal can be

referred to in Appendix A. In what follows I divide the texts/manuscripts into three

categories and work through them. These categories are:

(1) Texts in print before the Bodleian manuscript copies were made (6 texts).

(2) Texts printed after the Bodleian manuscript copies were made (?5 texts).

(3) Texts unprinted to date (7 texts).

Texts in print before the Bodleian manuscript copies were made

1. MS Rawl. D. 1171: Richard Duke, Satire 4 (4½ lines), from Dryden Juvenal, 1693

2. MS Eng. poet. c. 9: Stephen Harvey, Satire 9 (8 lines), from Dryden Juvenal, 1693

3a. MS Rawl. poet. 152: Stephen Harvey, Satire 9 (complete), from Dryden Juvenal, 1693

3b. MS Eng. poet. d. 152: Stephen Harvey, Satire 9 (24 lines), from Dryden Juvenal, 1693

4. MS Rawl. poet. 152: William Congreve, Satire 11 (complete), from Dryden Juvenal,

1693

5. MS Don. d. 58: Thomas Heywood, Satire 6 (6 lines), from Gynaikeion, 1624

6a. MS Don. e. 5: Robert Boyle, Satire 10 (8 lines), from Seraphick Love, 1659

6b. MS Rawl. D. 1372 (as 6a)

6c. MS Tanner 88 (as 6a)

It is safe to venture that for the entire period under discussion here, the most

significant ‘publishing event’ in English Juvenal translation was the appearance in

1693 of the Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, translated into uniform couplet verse

‘by Mr. Dryden and several other eminent hands’ (Dryden et al. 1693). The full title

will be useful later:

The satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis translated into English verse by Mr. Dryden and several

other eminent hands; together with the satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus, made English

by Mr. Dryden; with explanatory notes at the end of each satire; to which is prefix’d a discourse

concerning the original and progress of satire . . . by Mr. Dryden


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The ‘other hands’ were William Congreve, Thomas Creech, Charles Dryden,

Richard Duke, Stephen Harvey, Thomas Power, George Stepney, and Nahum

Tate. The ‘Dryden’ Juvenal was reprinted throughout the eighteenth century, for

most of which time it had no serious rival as a complete English rendering either

from before or after the date of its appearance. It was intended to be more attractive

than previous attempts through being freer: ‘We have follow’d our Authors’,

Dryden wrote, ‘at greater distance; tho’ not Step by Step, as they [our predecessors]

have done. For oftentimes they have gone so close, that they have trod on the Heels

of Juvenal and Persius; and hurt them by their too near approach’ (p. lii).

Five manuscripts in our collection draw upon the 1693 translation, of which three

contain short excerpts. Five lines of Richard Duke’s version of Satire 4 are quoted

within a manuscript work dating to the first decade of the eighteenth century by the

antiquary Thomas Hearne (1). Hearne’s ‘Epitome of English History’ (MS Rawl. D.

1171, fol. 21), which did not see print, at one point quotes these lines (corresponding

to 124–7 in the Latin):

See, the mighty Omen, see,

He cries, of some Illustrious Victory;

Some captive King, thee his new Lord shall own:

Or from his British Chariot headlong thrown,

The proud Arviragus come tumbling down.8

9=;

The relevance of the lines for Hearne’s purposes can easily be imagined: the Juvenal

passage is offered as support for a reference to the Britons’ rebellion against the

Romans ‘under the Conduct of Arviragus, whom Geoffry makes a king of Britaine’

(fol. 23r). The reason this manuscript is in the Bodleian Library is that Hearne lived

in Oxford and was closely associated with the library, at one point being offered the

librarianship.

A second short excerpt (2) from the ‘Dryden’ Juvenal consists of eight lines from

Stephen Harvey’s Satire 9. The copyist has excerpted lines 18–25, no doubt as being

sufficiently sententious for his taste:

At lowest ebb of fortune when you lay

(Contented then) how happy was the Day. [Printed texts: merry]

But, oh, the Curse of aiming to be Great: [Printed texts: wishing]

Dazled with Hope we cannot see the Cheat;

Where wild Ambition in the Heart we find,

Farewel Content, and Quiet of the Mind.

For Glittering Clouds we leave the solid Shoar,

8 Here and throughout, sparsely punctuated scribal text has had its punctuation supple-

mented either from a printed version or editorially, by myself. Even the major authors of

this period expected the benefit of a printer’s attentions in this regard.


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And wonted Happiness returns no more.

Harv. Juvenal

We would be hard pressed to find in the Juvenalian passage Harvey is supposedly

translating anything about ‘wild Ambition’ or ‘Content of Mind’, but the topos as

well as the lexis is very familiar in seventeenth-century verse. In this manuscript

volume the 8-line Juvenal passage is immediately followed in the same hand by a

10-line passage from Young’s Love of Fame, evidently felt to partake of a similar

vein, beginning: ‘Can Gold calm Passion, or make Reason shine?’ This substantial

manuscript volume began as a uniform collection of miscellanies copied out in 1740–

57, its materials dating back to Donne sonnets of the 1630s. It was later handed on or

handed down, however, and parts have been subsequently cut out or (as on this

page) added. The terminus a quo for the insertion of the Harvey and Young passages

is thus 1757. Unlike most of the examples we shall see below, then, this is a manu-

script with the quality of an anthology made up many years after the verse it contains

was first printed — its contents continuing to be adjusted thereafter. The two

substantive departures I have noted (above) from printed texts of Harvey’s

Juvenal suggest either carelessness, the use of an intermediary text, or both.9

Two further copies of Harvey’s work show that its more authentically Juvenalian

notes also had appeal. Another copyist (3b) transcribed his version of Juvenal

9.70–91 in which the gallant justifies cuckolding Naevolus, in 24 lines beginning:

But one thing yet, base Wretch, I must impart,

Thy self shalt own, ungrateful as thou art;

At your Intreaties, had not I obey’d;

Still your deluded Wife had been a Maid:

Little further information can be added here since the excerpt comes on its own

separate leaves within a manuscript lacking related material to contextualize it, but

an attribution at the end to Dryden rather than the little-known Harvey, not by the

copyist but in a later hand, is a reminder of a main reason for the prestige of this

translation. It is likely this copy was made from the first (1693) edition.

A third manuscript writer took the considerable time to copy out two complete

satires from the same book. MS Rawl. poet. 152 contains the complete text of

Harvey’s Satire 9 (3a), then adjacently the version of Satire 11 by Congreve (4).

One may wish to speculate about this scribe’s particular purposes, but there is

nothing unusual about large swathes of previously printed literary writing, whether

translations or otherwise, being copied out by readers in the seventeenth or indeed

eighteenth century. Books were comparatively expensive, and the procedure could

be a means of making up one’s own selection from books that came one’s way, or in

9 I have checked all editions of the Harvey up to and including the sixth (London; Dublin)

of 1735, finding no variants.


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the opposite direction a means of bestowing on a distant friend a copy of a text one

had available to oneself. In this case the two Juvenal satires appear in the midst of a

collection of Restoration poems (and some prose) in a single hand, identifying itself

intermittently as that of Nathaniel Brent, including work by miscellaneous writers

such as Prior, and continuing on with excerpts — Congreve’s commendatory poem,

then Dryden’s Satire 4 — from Dryden’s Persius (printed in the same volume as the

Juvenal). All appear to be copied from contemporary printed books. Nathaniel Brent

was a younger son, born in the 1630s, of Sir Nathaniel Brent (1573/4–1652),

Warden of Merton College. The untidiness of the collection indicates a manuscript

made for personal use, while the variations in the single hand, and spare areas of

paper eventually used up, suggest it was created over a period of years.

Another Juvenal translation drawn from a printed book is by the earlier figure

of Thomas Heywood, poet and dramatist. MS Don. d. 58 (5) is a 65-leaf copy of

verses titled ‘Elegies, Exequies, Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs Satires and other

Poems’ and dated 1647. It opens with Henry King’s Exequy, an extremely popular

poem in the middle seventeenth century, though not printed until 1657. A few other

author names are attached, such as E[dward?] Radcliffe, Thomas Roe, and Sir

Henry Franckland. But the majority of the poems are unattributed, so perhaps

the compiler felt he usually needed no reminder of who wrote them. The

Bodleian Summary Catalogue notes that most of the pieces had a wide circulation

in manuscript and are also to be found in contemporary miscellanies; and that

authors and subjects suggest a connection with Oxford, in particular with Christ

Church. The inclusion of King’s Exequy, long unprinted but in wide circulation

following its composition in 1624, indeed indicates that the compiler copied from

other manuscripts as well as printed books. In the same year Henry King became a

Canon of Christ Church.

The six lines from Juvenal fall within a section headed ‘Satires and poems of

divers subiects’, individual ‘subjects’ then determining the arrangement. This com-

pilation as a whole is an example of a ‘thematic’ anthology. The Juvenal passage

translated (6.268–74, beginning ‘Semper habet lites alternaque dormitur in illo’) is

sententious enough, and the translation, headed ‘On Marriage’, is set within a group

of short passages on this subject. It is followed by three further short (6- to 12-line)

extracts on the same theme, all translations: from Hesiod, Terence’s Adelphus, and

Ausonius. All four items, though unascribed by Crum, are short translations by

Thomas Heywood, all of them taken from his large compendium Gynaikeion: or,Nine Books of Various History. Concerning Women (London, 1624). Heywood’s book

deals in stories and myths of many kinds, with curiosity about, and celebration of,

women in history and fable; his Juvenal quotation/translation comes apropos of the

story of Pandora.

This manuscript shows the use of Juvenal in translation as a voice contributing to

a theme. Elsewhere in the manuscript are found translations from one or two other

ancient poets, such as Martial, but there is much more original verse than transla-

tion, and the compiler was evidently not much interested in the ancient sources as


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long as he found (in Heywood or another) something that interested him. Such

thematic collections were common at a time when readers often preferred to select

what verse they wished to keep to hand, and they could be created in various ways:

by copying down verse within a notebook or commonplace book, by binding a

collection of papers made up over time, or by paying for a professional collection

made up to order, perhaps from a scriptorium.10 In this case the hand is not pro-

fessional, and the taste in verse often dubious.

A final translation of which our manuscript copies, a total of three in this case,

would have been made from a printed book is a reminder of the interest that a

well-known writer’s use of a classical text or passage could create among readers.

Robert Boyle had quoted the Latin lines (347–53) from the climax of Satire 10 about

allowing the gods to choose on our behalf in his Seraphick Love (more formally titled

Some Motives and Incentives to the Love of God), 1659. These are accompanied (p. 32)

by what seems to be his own translation in four rather awkward couplets: its appeal,

it is plain, derived not from its beauty but its moral message. It is to be doubted what

effect readings of it would have had on perceptions of Juvenal, because Boyle attri-

butes it only to ‘An Heathen Satyrist’, and evidently none of the manuscript com-

pilers (6a, b, c) was in a position to add an ascription to Juvenal. This translation was

copied out within three manuscripts in Bodleian collections alone. It is true that

Boyle became an Oxford figure during the Interregnum, but a further copy can be

found in the British Library, to go no further.

This concludes a group of six texts with versions in nine manuscripts copied from

printed books.

Texts printed after the Bodleian manuscript copies were made

7. MS *Rawl. poet. 123: John Oldham, Satire 3 (35 lines, autogr.)

8. MS *Rawl. poet. 123: John Oldham, Satire 10 (4 lines, autogr.)

9. MS Douce 201: William Popple, Satire 2 (complete)

10. MS Douce 201: William Popple, Satire 10 (complete)

11a. MS Don. b. 8: ?John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Satire 1 (36 lines)

11b. MS Don. e. 24 (as 11a)

11c. MS Douce 357 (as 11a)

Next come two pairs of translations or imitations resting on a different footing. The

two manuscripts stand in close proximity to their authors, who prepared them or

had them prepared. MS Rawlinson poet. 123 is an autograph manuscript of poems

by John Oldham, the Restoration satirist — indeed it is the only autograph manu-

script of his work, containing some draft material and his own exemplary fair copies

of eight poems, as well as copies of other works like Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe in his

hand. It probably began with a notebook, loose leaves later being added. What

10 For scriptoria see Love 1993.


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remains is mainly those poems already in print by the time of Oldham’s death in

1683, at which point, we may guess, other papers were taken away to supply the copy

for his printed Remains, 1684. The manuscript thus contains the beginning of the

complete version of Satire 3 (7) which was printed in his Poems, and Translations

(1683). Also in the Rawlinson manuscript is found a translation, again in heroic

couplets, of the first four lines of the Tenth Satire (8). This went unprinted until

collected in modern editions of Oldham’s poems. Oldham was responsible, too, for a

complete translation of Satire 13, also published in the 1683 volume, and identified

himself sufficiently with Juvenal for the first thing the reader encounters in the

manuscript to be the epigraph ‘Aude aliquid brevibus Gyaris et carcere dignum, j

si vis esse aliquid’ (1.73–4).

Commentary on all these works can be found in Harold F. Brooks’ 1987 edition of

The Poems of John Oldham, and discussion of their wider context in Paul

Hammond’s John Oldham and the Renewal of Classical Culture (Cambridge,

1983).11 Oldham’s Juvenal translations (or imitations), together with his versions

of Horatian satires, are of a literary-historical significance poorly recognized until

the later twentieth century: they are an early contribution to the English Augustan

phase of the attempt to reintroduce the ‘classical’ into native verse, imitations with a

pressing sense of contemporary events and vivid presentation of modern particulars.

Dryden, an admirer and elegist of Oldham, consulted his Juvenal satires and echoes

them in his own versions. Oldham’s Juvenal 3 is regarded as one of the three peaks of

his poetic achievement by his editor Brooks, who also notes of his fragmentary

attempt on Satire 10: ‘Had Oldham pursued his design, he would have furnished

a precedent for Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes, as he did [in Satire 13] for

London’ (Brooks 1987: lxvii, 530). I give this four-line fragment, which the syntax

would suggest leaves off in mid-sentence, and the rest of whose leaf (fol. 278v) has

been left blank:

Search thro the world, from London to Japan

From thence round to Peru, and back again,

You’l find at last but few, a very few,

Who can discern ’twixt good that’s truely so

Our second pair of translations, whose fair copies are in a professional rather than

authorial hand, are William Popple’s complete heroic couplet versions of Satires 2

and 10 (9, 10) in MS Douce 201. These were first prepared for printing by myself,

appearing in 2006 (Gillespie 2006). This publication includes fuller discussion of

their context and their author. Popple’s Juvenal work probably belongs to the 1750s.

Unlike the copies of Dryden 1693, these four manuscript works have attached to

them the names of somewhat marginal figures. Neither Oldham nor Popple was a

11 The manuscript is calendared in Brooks’ unpublished D.Phil. thesis (University of

Oxford, 1939), an earlier version of his edition of Oldham.


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widely read writer in his day. The dates of their Juvenalian work, the 1680s and the

1750s respectively, attach them to very different generations: Oldham is within sight

of the earliest English attempts on Juvenal in the first half of the seventeenth cen-

tury, while Popple’s work is contemporary with the high-water-mark Vanity of

Human Wishes of Samuel Johnson, 1749. Both Oldham and Popple in their different

ways were on the edges of the literary scene: Oldham (1653–1683) was a young

schoolmaster while Popple (1700–1764), having had a comedy or two played on the

London stage in his earlier days, was a serving Governor of the Bermudas. Both,

however, were exploring the modalities of formal verse satire through translation;

both were, for example, responsible in the same years as their Juvenalian experi-

ments for imitations of Horatian satires too.

So much they have in common with Rochester. A 36-line poem headed (in some

mss) ‘Semper Ego. &c’ and beginning (in all cases) ‘Must I with patience ever silent

sit’ is ascribed to ‘The Lord R—r’ in State-poems, 1697, and sometimes taken by

editors to be Rochester’s work (11). It is only debatably a version of the opening of

Satire 1: it begins with a recognizably Juvenalian couplet, then Juvenal’s poem is

used as a point of departure or pretext for attacks on contemporary figures, political

and literary. Its appearance in some manuscripts is accompanied by other Rochester

material and by the work of other court poets of Charles II’s day. The compiler of

11a (MS Don. b. 8), an extensive formal miscellany of prose and verse built up over

a period of up to fifteen years, was a court figure, Sir William Hayward or Haward of

Tandridge Hall, Surrey, whose interest in Juvenal would have been negligible

compared to his interest in Rochester and the court wits. It is unclear whether

this or one of the other manuscripts in which they appear (11b, 11c) predates the

first print publication of ?Rochester’s verses.12 In 11b there is no explicit indication

of any Juvenal connection whereas in 11a and 11c Juvenal 1.1 is quoted at the

opening. In 11b the composition continues for 54 lines, in 11a and 11c, for 36.13

All three manuscripts are scribal collections of poems, often satires, composed by

several hands; 11a includes another dozen items by Rochester or in the Rochester

apocrypha.14

As manuscripts, the sixteen items (containing eleven texts) discussed so far have

widely varying purposes. Oldham’s and Popple’s were made by or for the translator

(Popple’s within a set of presentation volumes of his poetical works),15 the rest by

12 But see Hammond 1982.

13 For some other manuscript versions and variants, see further Danielsson and Vieth 1967:

371–2.

14 Here should be mentioned a major source of information on manuscripts of more major

individual authors (hence not anonymous works) of the period from 1450 to 1700: Beal

1980–93. A searchable online version of this resource is awaited. For 11a see Vol. 2, Pt 2,

pp. 230–1.

15 The Bodleian volume is uniform with two others found in the British Library and at the

Beinecke Library respectively. See Gillespie 2006.


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‘consumers’ of one kind or another. Some of the latter were probably not at all

interested in Juvenal, only in the lines they copied as pieces of English verse, as

‘anthology’ items (subject-wise), or as the work of a celebrated English writer (such

as Rochester).

The Boyle and Rochester texts exist in more than one Bodleian copy as well as in

copies in other repositories. The Harvey and Congreve translations, like other items

from the widely read and oft-reprinted Dryden’s Juvenal, will be regularly encoun-

tered in copies elsewhere. The texts in the Oldham and the Popple manuscripts are

unique. This applies to all the manuscript texts now remaining to be addressed.

Texts unprinted to date

12. MS Rawl. poet. 194: L.F., Satire 15 (14 lines)

13. MS Rawl. poet. 147: Oliver Isaack, Satire 10 (2 lines)

14. MS Eng. poet. c. 5: Richard Gough, Satire 10 (28 lines)

15. MS Don. c. 55: Anon., Satire 10 (complete)

16. MS Rawl. poet. 91: Anon., Satire 13 (complete)



Thus far, all translation texts discussed have been items available in print to the

twenty-first-century reader, albeit in some cases having only very lately become so.

We now turn to altogether unprinted items, to those translations of Juvenal which

have never been retrieved from obscurity. Four of the seven items in this category

are complete satires, but let us take the three shorter excerpts first.

In the first case (12) the surrounding manuscript content suggests a youthful

writer practising his skills on a range of self-chosen Latin texts for translation, of

progressively greater length. Fols 29r-56r constitute a distinct manuscript in a single

hand (designated ‘C’ in the Bodleian Summary Catalogue). The contents include two

poems to his father, two other poems written (he notes) respectively ‘before’ and

‘after’ two of his ‘moots’ (hence a law student), and a poem in praise of his young

cousin at the end of which he signs himself ‘L.F.’ (fol. 42r). This signature appears at

the top of a page containing a 14-line couplet translation of Juvenal. As well as the

Juvenal there is considerable further translation interest: a commendable version of

the first half of Ovid’s Remedia Amoris follows,16 then a somewhat less fluent ren-

dering of Persius Satire 2. This concludes a manuscript previously including trans-

lations of arguments (summaries) from Lucian and of two Martial epigrams. The

Juvenal text itself is only 14 lines long, but it is one of the more unusual choices of

source in our corpus: the opening 13 lines of Satire 15, on the superstitious

16 A 1600 London printing of a translation of this Ovidian poem signed ‘F.L.’ seems to be a

coincidence of (reversed) initials: the translations have little in common, 12 being in

couplets whereas F.L.’s is in stanza form.


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veneration of animals in different parts of Egypt. Why the passage has been singled

out here I cannot guess, but the translation, belonging to the early eighteenth cen-

tury if we are to credit the Summary Catalogue, is in competent rhyming couplets

(first nine lines given):

Who, Volucus Bithinicus, not knowes

To what strange things fond Egipt Honor shewes?

This part Ador’s the Crocodile; that Dreads

A Bird call’d Ibis, which on Serpents feeds.

An Ape of gold is worshipped, where part

Of Memnon’s Statue sounds, by Magick Art.

Where Thebes with hundred Gates stood formerly,

Heere River fishes, there fish of the sea.

Whole Townes Adore a Dogg, Diana none.

Nahum Tate’s performance on these lines in the 1693 Dryden is more fluent, and

also — in line with Dryden’s introductory comments quoted above (p. 5) — much

more paraphrastic:

How Egypt, mad with Superstition grown,

Makes Gods of Monsters, but too well is known:

One Sect, Devotion to Niles’ Serpent pays;

Others to Ibis that on Serpents preys.

Where, Thebes, thy Hundred Gates lie unrepair’d,

And where maim’d Memnon’s Magick Harp is heard,

Where These are Mouldering left, the Sots combine

With Pious Care a Monkey to Enshrine!

Fish-Gods you’ll meet with Fins and Scales o’re grown;

Diana’s Dogs ador’d in ev’ry Town

Another possible description of Tate’s version might be ‘misleading’: compare with

the alternative last lines Juvenal’s ‘tota canem venerantur, nemo Dianem’.

Where the second unprinted excerpt is concerned, Crum’s short title T2915 leads

to the following first-last line entry in her Index (on 13):

To Ceres son in law few kings do go

With a dry death, thy name’s thy overthrow

O[liver] I[saack], on Edward King, 1637

Translating Juvenal ‘Ad generum cereris’, etc.

MS Rawl. poet. 147, p. 13

This manuscript, from its cramped layout and overwritten pages evidently intended

for private use rather than for circulation, collects together a large number of shorter


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poems largely by named but little-known figures, most of whom would be found in

Oxbridge records of the time. The author names are sometimes followed by the

name of a college; the verses are often on Cambridge events of about 1630–58; some

are elegies or epitaphs on university men. A few poems belong or are addressed to

much better-known figures: Herrick, Jonson, Denham. The compiler was a

Cambridge man, H[enry] S[ome], and a date of 1647 for the bulk of the compilation

is supplied in a rudimentary table of contents on the first page, which is also suf-

ficient to identify our translator: Isaack Oliver. Five or six other compositions

attributed to the same author are contained in the manuscript; none are translations

or related to ancient authors.

Isaack Oliver — a spelling attested from contemporary documents — was the

grandson of Isaac Oliver the miniature painter. He was born in 1610, making him an

exact contemporary of Edward King’s (1611/12–1637), and Crum (Vol. II, p. 1211,

s.v. ‘Ollivier’) has him matriculating at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1630. Oliver’s

two-line Juvenal translation was presumably written at the time of King’s death,

when he would have been sixteen or seventeen years old. It uses Satire 10.112–13,

about how few kings go to the underworld without carnage, to play on Edward

King’s name; the two Latin lines precede it in the manuscript. This brief translation

is an example of Juvenal being used as shared cultural capital: for full appreciation it

is necessary for a reader to be conversant with the Latin lines. The English couplet

seems never to have been printed, and nor, it would appear, were any other writings

by Oliver. The compiler of the manuscript was probably another Oxbridge man,

either friendly with Oliver or able to access his verses through an intermediary in

possession of a copy.

The final short Juvenalian excerpt in this corpus (14) is from an equally youthful

hand, but one belonging to a later era: that of Richard Gough (1735–1809), the

celebrated antiquary and reviewer for The Gentleman’s Magazine. It is found in a

manuscript titled ‘Poems, and other interesting memorials of Richard Gough Esq

FRS: FSA from his early boyhood . . . collected by J. B. Nichols’. Here are brought

together original verses, mostly signed or initialled by Gough, some later printed

and some not. Other translations come nearby: of Moschus’ elegy on Bion (‘written

at college in 1752’); from Horace; from the French. The positioning thus suggests

the Juvenal is an early piece of work, from Gough’s teenage years. It consists of 28

lines in autograph, with corrections, translating the close of Satire 10 — the second

translation of this passage we have encountered. This then looks like another ex-

ample of the translation of Juvenal as prentice work, in this case in blank verse which

is none too well controlled:

What then petition we? Or shall we silent stand?

Leave all to God, whose Wisdom only knows

What best befitts our wants, and will bestow

In Pleasure’s stead the truly sovreign Good.

To him is man much dearer than t’himself.


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By Impulse urg’d, & blind Desire, we crave

The Bands of Hymen & the Bliss of Heirs:

He only sees how proves the future Race,

How loves the Wife, with Tempers what endow’d.

And still we ask: the fatal something still

Employs our Thoughts, for this the Entrails pant,

And Sow, to marriage sacred, guiltless dies.

On his death, Gough left his topographical collection to the Bodleian Library, and

his printed books and manuscripts on Saxon and northern literature for the use of

the Saxon professor. J. B. Nichols, the collector of the papers forming this manu-

script, was Gough’s printer or publisher, also an antiquary.

Remaining to be individually addressed now are in some ways the most striking

items among the Bodleian Juvenal translations: four unknown translations of

complete satires across three manuscripts. Of four different satires the most con-

ventional choice (in MS Don. c. 55) is Satire 10, which as we have seen is found in

nine other manuscripts in the Bodleian ‘corpus’, and which as Appendix A shows

was the most frequently translated Juvenalian satire in terms of printed works in the

150 years to 1800. The Bodleian manuscript (15) dates this particular attempt to

‘ffebr. 168g’ — a few months after Oldham’s Juvenal imitations (not including the

fragment of Satire 10) were published, though they made little splash and are un-

likely to have inspired this one. The manuscript is organized into two sections: ‘Love

Verses’ and ‘Miscellanys’. Most of the items are unsigned, and are presumably by

the compiler, who has made some major autograph corrections. They include epis-

tolary addresses to the well-known figures of Thomas Rymer and Nahum Tate

respectively, neither implying personal acquaintance. There are signs of Whig

and Low Church sympathies. The individually dated works are not in chronological

order of writing and ‘The tenth Satyr of Juvenal, Englished’ is held back to be placed

at the end, much the longest single item here. This organization is one of several

reasons for thinking the compilation may be, as the Summary Catalogue suggests,

‘intended for the printer’.

This is a writer experimenting with Pindarics; who composes verse for immediate

occasions (such as the building of ‘The new Mercate House at B[edford]’); and who

is interested in translation: one poem welcomes Roscommon’s Essay on TranslatedVerse, 1684, exploring his ‘rules’, while another registers a reading of L’Estrange’s

translation of Aesop, 1692. Indeed, this author’s translations are arguably superior to

his original work, which tends towards doggerel. But both operate at relatively low

pressure. His somewhat over-ambitious choice of Juvenal 10 can be syntactically

awkward, and redundancy is not unusual:

Ev’n Power its self (which one would think should be

The most invincible Securitye),

When undermin’d by Envy, headlong throws

To ruine the great man, and all his house.


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Honours, and Auncestors are vilify’d,

And every Action of renown bely’d:

The Rabble pulls, and down his statues go,

The Axes cut his chariot wheels in two,

His harmless horse’s Leggs are broke, and now

9=;

The great Sejanus in the fornace lyes;

How the fire crackles, and his image frys!

Behold that noble Head, so late Ador’d,

Of all the Universe the second Lord,

New run – do’s but brass pots, and pans produce,

And other utensils of meanest use.

(fol. 28r)

Three remaining complete unprinted satires are of high quality as English

verse. Two of the translations (16, 17), of Satires 13 and 16, are found in

MS Rawl. poet. 91, and are both by the same translator, even if in 13 the hand

switches after 26 lines to a less certain one not found elsewhere in this otherwise

uniform manuscript.17 These are poems by an Oxford man in English and Latin

over thirty-eight leaves of a notebook, rectos only used, consisting of the following

items:

To Sir Roger L’Estrange, Occasion’d by the perusal of his Mythology

Upon a Barrell of Oysters, whereof Clarinda was to partake

To his much esteem’d Friend, the Reverend and most Ingenious Mr Jeremy

Collier, upon his Censure of the English Stage

The Lamentation of Evander over his Son Pallas [from Aeneid 11]

To Urania just leaving the Countrey.

In natalem Beatissimi D: N: JESU CHRISTI Hymnus [in Latin]

The Thirteenth Satyr of Juvenal

The Sixteenth Satyr of Juvenal

Pindaricks to my much esteem’d Friend P.C. of Oxford, upon himselfe

Academiae tum Oxon: tum Cantabrig: Encœnium Pastorale

From this list may be suggested a date for the translations in the late 1690s or soon

after. L’Estrange’s Fables of Aesop and other Eminent Mythologists was first issued in

1692, Collier’s puritanical Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English

Stage in 1698. Incidentally, the poem here written in response to Collier ends:

‘Collier must be admir’d, must be obey’d.’

17 There are many small corrections in this secondary hand’s work, but they are in spelling

and presentation, suggestive of scribal not authorial revision. The work of the principal

hand is a fair copy.


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Both translations are unique selections from Juvenal among the Bodleian manu-

scripts, and both display lively wit. Satire 13 (16) felicitously mixes abstraction with

homely language and images:

And only that great Soul is truly blest

Whome no disastrous Accidents molest,

And who by long apprentiseship has learn’d

To trot beneath his panniers unconcern’d:

(fol.19r; Juv. 13.14–15)

The voice of the perjurer is a real voice, in the cadences of spoken language and not

the elaborate syntax of formal rhetoric:

For where’s the Pride of having all outrun?

The Prize how mean, a Trifle when ’tis done!

The wrath of Heav’n falls terrible, wee knowe,

But Casuists observe it falls as slowe.

If all bad men must fool’t as well as I,

My turn, I’m certain, cannot yet be nigh.

Besides, I may with ease my peace obtaine;

One sacrifice sets all to rights againe.

I’m but a Villain as I misse or hit:

One Miscreant crowns his head, another looses it.

(fols 24r-25r; Juv. 13.98–105)

— as can be appreciated by comparison with the more rhetorical mode adopted

by Thomas Creech in the corresponding passage of the Dryden Juvenal, with

different merits of its own, but also perhaps with a less successful move into the

impersonal:

The Gods take Aim before they strike their blow,

Tho’ sure their Vengeance, yet the Stroak is slow;

And shou’d at every Sin their Thunder fly,

I’m yet secure, nor is my Danger nigh:

But they are Gracious, but their Hands are free,

And who can tell but they may reach to Me?

Some they forgive, and every Age relates

That equal Crimes have met unequal Fates;

That Sins alike, unlike Rewards have found,

And whilst This Villain’s Crucifi’d, The other’s Crown’d.

(Dryden et al. 1693: 262)

Perhaps a slightly more extensive sample will convey more of the flavour of this

highly successful translation. The comedy in this penultimate section comes partly

from the theatricality, while the nimble verse lends variety and depth, eventually


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with a suggestion that we are hearing the voice of the conscience and not just that of

the satirist:

He sins that only to designe descends;

But should the Varlet compasse once his ends,

Dire plagues disturb his meals, a frothy glow

His palat gumms, and hardly lets him chew.

Scarce drunk, the Wine’s return’d: he loaths the tast

Of his old Hock. Some Muscudine, make hast:

At this, too, he contracts as bad a frowne

As he had swallowed sowre Falernian downe.

At night, if for an hour he chance to doze,

If, after long debate, his eyelids close -

Black dreams, of Heav’n’s and your abuse begot;

Such panick dread as drowns him in a Sweat.

Your growing shape breaks his uneasy rest,

Nay, haunts him, night and day, till all’s confest.

If Thunder rowls, to’s Sellar he retires,

Nor can Heav’n murmur, but the Wretch expires.

O, ’tis not casualtie, nor angry wind,

No: ’tis Heav’n’s Vengeance, for my head design’d.

All’s past – but still, next clap he’s more afraid,

Convinc’t ’twill now no longer be delay’d.

Afflicted with Convulsion, Stone and Gout,

He knows ’em due, and ten times more to boot,

Nor dares propose a salutary Vowe,

Remembering where he got the Gift, and how.

What hope for him, who thus distress’d shall lie?

What Victim fitter than himselfe to die?

Strange Levitie of Rogues! All resolute

Upon a crime e’r yet they’re quite come to’t,

But when ’tis done – O that they could undo’t!

9=;

(fols 31r – 32r; Juv. 13.210–39)

Like Satire 13, the short Satire 16 in this same manuscript (17; sixty lines in Latin,

seventy-six in English) is here provided with a prose argument. Such starting points

are common enough components of a formal attempt on a complete satire as found in

manuscript examples, normally working as a warm-up piece of translation from the

Latin edition which is being used in each case:

The Poet having had a Captain’s Commission forc’d upon him sometime before by a

Person in power whome he had formerly lash’d in one of his Satyrs, compos’d this

Satyr for a kind of Disappointment to the malice of his Oppressour, wherein wee find

enumerated the many Priviledges and Advantages which peculiarly belong’d to the

Roman Souldiery.

(fol. 33r)


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)

)

Satire 16 then gets under way, perhaps a little ponderously at first, but loosening up

nicely:

What martial Muse must do Campaigning right,

And just encomiums of that Trade endite,

Whose rich Acquists are next to infinite?

Ev’n Cow’rds are often bound to blesse the day,

When their kind Starrs first brought ’em into pay;

And ’tis the wisest course to try your Starrs,

Before you tempt the fortune of the Warrs.

Not Venus’ selfe can more your cause promote,

Though softest Billetdoux to Mars she wrote;

Not more can Mother Juno stand your Friend,

Than if concurring Starrs successe portend.

First in the Van of Fifty more appears

This Priviledge of all brave Volunteers:

They keep your ’Squires and Cittizens in awe,

Draw at their pleasure, and can make none draw,

May kick the Scoundrels that refuse t’obey,

And cane a Courtier ’till he cringe like Tray.

(fol. 33r)

(‘Draw’ refers to swords; ‘Tray’ was a common name for a dog.) As with Satire 13,

an idiomatic turn of phrase is attractive; at the close, deft word placement joins with

an Alexandrine triplet a la Dryden to complete the sophistication:

Thus oft we’ve known a Plunder-fatten’d Lad

Coax’d and caress’d by avaricious Dad:

Besides, if Worth and Vigour recommend,

Preferments still the Champion’s beck attend;

And that Commander’s only brave and wise,

Who so promotes his Men of Enterprize,

That all at last contend, and all deserve, to rise.

(fol. 36v)

But who was the translator? Not, it would seem, a young man, given his friend-

ship with Collier, who turned 48 in the year his Short View was published. We can

come one step closer to him by identifying the addressee of his Pindarics, ‘P.C.’ of

Oxford. These verses show that this name was Peter Cox. Foster’s Alumni

Oxonienses (Foster 1982) offers three individuals of this name, easily the best date

match being with a Wiltshireman who matriculated at Magdalen College on 14

March 1672/3 aged 16, proceeded BA 1678, and died in 1716. He was, as Bedell

of Arts, a University figure.

Our final manuscript, Rawl. poet. 195, is a well-known one (there is a repro-

graphic copy in the Library of Congress), despite which little can be provided by


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way of context or dating for its Juvenal 6 (18) because the compilation is made up of

various papers or manuscripts bound together, with no other paper or hand a match

for this item. ‘The sixth Satyr of Juvenall made English’ appears on fols 136r–153v.

It is a presentation copy in a professional hand, carefully designed with ruled borders

within which appear explanatory marginal notes, at least for a few pages; these have

an amateur cast and contain errors, so will likely be the translator’s own. Marginal

line numbers relate, unusually, to the (unprovided) Latin text rather than the

English — perhaps because the translation is very expansive, with a proportion of

roughly three English lines to each Latin one.

This disproportion is partly but by no means wholly explained by another fun-

damental departure from contemporary norms in this version, in respect of metre.

Octosyllabics do service here in place of the pentameters found in every other

English response to Juvenal seen so far. Our period can show eccentricities like

the ‘Pindaric’ version of Satire 10 printed in 1675 (perhaps by Edward Wetenhall;

see Appendix A), and Richard Gough tried blank verse (14, above), but octosyllabic

couplets seem only once in this era to have been used for Juvenal within the printed

record: in Henry Higden’s Restoration versions of Satires 10 and 13 (see Appendix

A). Although Dryden has been shown (by Hopkins 1996) to have used Higden’s in

composing his own versions of Juvenal, he remained unconvinced about the verse

form, discussing it in the ‘Discourse of Satire’ prefixed to his Juvenal and Persiusvolume. In English satire the leading exponent of octosyllabics had been Samuel

Butler, and Dryden, though expressing admiration of Butler for being able to put

‘thought’ into his verses, strongly disapproves his choice of metre, writing: ‘in any

other Hand, the shortness of his Verse, and the quick returns of Rhyme, had debas’d

the Dignity of Style. Besides, the double Rhyme (a necessary Companion of

Burlesque Writing) is not so proper for Manly Satire, for it turns Earnest too

much to Jest, and gives us a Boyish kind of Pleasure. It tickles aukwardly with a

kind of pain, to the best sort of Readers; we are pleas’d ungratefully, and, if I may say

so, against our liking’ (Dryden et al. 1693: xlviii).

Dryden was at least partly right, and the effect here is partly that the satire is

played for laughs, almost parodied. Yet for much of the time this translator keeps

close enough quarter with the Latin text: additions, which I have emboldened here,

are expansions and exaggerations, not alien material:

Perhaps dull Chastity remained

I’th’ infant world while Saturne reign’d;

When household Gods, beasts, man and woman,

Liv’d by one fire, tenants in Common.

And, in one cold Cave’s gloomy shelter,

Shuffl’d and pigg’d in, helter-skelter.

Rushes and moss compos’d their bed,

Which Skins of Comerade beast o’respread,

Wherewith the mountaine wife did cover

Her Savage Lord and only Lover . . .


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Large Infants on their mothers laugh’d,

While from swolne breasts they Nectar quaff’d;

More hideous visage had Queene Blouse

Than her grim, acorne-belching Spouse.

For while the Earth and Sky were new,

Long temperate life no sicknesse knew;

From yawning trunks of trees men broke,

Sound as their teeming Parent Oake;

Or of red Clay were formed and made

Without the clubbing sexe’s aid.

(fol. 136r)

Henry Higden wrote, in the Preface to his octosyllabic version of Satire 13, that he

had ‘aimed to abate something of [Juvenal’s] serious Rigour, and expressed his sense

in a sort of Verse more apt for Raillery, without debasing the dignity of the

Author’.18 Perhaps something similar would have been claimed by this translator.

Juvenal’s lines 136–41 point the finger at mercenary marriages:

Optima sed quere Caesennia teste marito?

bis quingena dedit. tanti vocat ille pudicam,

nec pharetris Veneris macer est aut lampade fervet:

inde faces ardent, veniunt a dote sagittae.

libertas emitur. coram licet innuat atque

rescribat: vidua est, locuples quae nupsit avaro.

The Rawlinson version stays in touch with the Latin but again develops and expands

it: to Venus’ arrows and torch are added the stars, and for Juvenal’s ironical but

laconic ‘ardent’ (139) we have ‘pierc’d through all his bones and marrow’:

Lucinda’s by her husband grac’d,

Cry’d up, and vouch’d as Vestall chast.

Thinkst thou he praises her for nought?

Her thousands that opinion bought;

Nor Venus’ quiver, nor love’s dart,

Or flaming flambeaux, fir’d his heart,

But ’twas by starres prædestinate

To fall in love with her estate;

From her possessions flew the arrow

That pierc’d through all his bones and marrow,

And made him barter, for her riches,

His inclinations with the breeches.

Her freedom’s settled by Indentures;

18 A Modern Essay on the Thirteenth Satyr of Juvenal (see Appendix A), sig. b2v.


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On all intrigues she safely ventures:

When a wretch marries an estate,

His wife lives sole and separate.

(fol. 140v)

There is no external way of dating this manuscript. The Summary

Catalogue suggests about 1700, which will not be very far off. A note

(fol. 127r) alluding to ‘Ben: Johnson’s Comedy of the Fox’, i.e. Volpone, is mislead-

ing if it suggests a work of Jonson’s time, in the early seventeenth century; the

domestic backdrops (as well as the accomplished couplets) feel much more like

Pope’s:

But while her eyes shine bright and quick,

She holds him fast as in cleft stick,

While, uncontrould, his Tyrant reignes,

Leading her captive Lord in chaines;

Buyes useless Toyes, at any cost,

To shew her will shall rule the rost;

Builds palaces, but will not fix;

Rich coaches, costly setts with six;

Surveys her Stables fill’d with Racers,

Hunters, Pads, Amblers, and Pacers;

Where’re she visits, what she sees

Must strait be brought, or match’d to please;

Or, if some Toy, or maggott, bite,

The Yatch and Crew must saile this night.

Her will admitts of no delay,

Tho’ Ice and Snow block up the way:

To sea they must, tho’ Tempest roare,

To shun a rougher Storme on Shore.

For monkeys, China, or a stand,

Chest, glass, or escritore Japan’d,

To France dispatch with expedition

For garniture of last edition.

(fol. 141r-v; Juv. 6.148–54)

Transposing Juvenal’s appurtenances to the luxury goods produced by Britain’s

maritime trade (monkeys, China, lacquered escritoire) is only the most obvious

form this writer’s boldly imitative approach takes here. Teeming with contemporary

life (whenever exactly ‘contemporary’ is), this version has the capacity to

make Dryden’s Juvenal seem too buttoned up. One might compare his couplet

covering the ground of the last eight lines here: ‘When Winter shuts the

Seas, and fleecy Snows j Make Houses white, she to the Merchant goes’ (Dryden

et al. 1693: 97).


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Conclusions

These are some possible ways of classifying the manuscripts/texts described above:

Among 23 manuscripts involved:

Text available in >1 Bodleian ms: 3 (twice: 1; thrice: 2)

Juvenal satires appearing (completeþexcerpts):

One each of: 2, 3, 4, 11, 13, 15, 16

Two of: 6

Three of: 1, 9

Eight of: 10

Juvenal Satires appearing complete: 2, 3, 6, 9, 10 (twice), 11, 13, 16

Among 18 distinct translations of Juvenal:

Probable date of composition:

1630s: 1

1640s: 1

1650s: 1

1680s: 4

1690s: 6

c. 1700: 2

1750s: 3

Text first printed before 1800: 8

Text printed to date: 11

Text unprinted to date: 7

Text printed before manuscript copy/ies made: 4 (þ1 unknown)

Text printed after manuscript copy/ies made: 6 (þ1 unknown)

Translator identified or identifiable: 13

Complete satires: 8

Excerpts: 10

Complete translations unprinted to date: 4

The last line alone suggests why further exploration of this material is justified:

half of the complete translations of Juvenal satires here have not to this day reached

print or been investigated.19 The strongest of these unprinted translations (say, 16,

17, and 18), at least, have all the reception interest normally offered by responses to a

classical poet taking the form of translations, adaptations, and imitations. To invoke

a recent discussion of English responses to ancient satire in this era, Daniel Hooley

has written: ‘A classical poet’s reception might be perceived as much in the detailed

19 The number of complete Juvenal translations still unprinted would be higher still but for

my own 2006 publication of two eighteenth-century manuscript works (Gillespie 2006).

Moreover, these results come from a single repository, which, even if it is the world’s

richest for this type of material, is far from being the only one whose holdings will

augment the printed record.


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texture of later adaptations as in what was explicitly said about him in literary-

polemical discourses’ (Hooley 2012: 229). This being so, serious study of

Juvenal’s reception needs to concern itself with all available adaptations, and not

arbitrarily confine itself to printed ones.

It is not possible to analyse these adaptations further here, but we have seen

enough to realize that a seriously incomplete idea of the historical course of

English translation of Juvenal (and English classical translation more widely too)

results from confining our attention to what was printed in its time — or even what

has been printed down to the present. To do so is not simply to look away from the

more amateur efforts, since, as has been suggested, unprinted work can be as in-

novative, sophisticated, and convincing, not only as the average printed production,

but as the best print productions. The more amateur efforts themselves, including

prentice work, uncompleted drafts, and excerpts never otherwise glimpsed hun-

dreds of years after the channels of transmission have sifted literary history for us,

provide insight into what must be thought of as the full culture of translation in this

era — a phenomenon by no means of a predominantly professional character. In any

case, ‘professional’ is a word easily misused for this era: although Dryden lived by

his pen, several of the other contributors to his Juvenal did not. If we think of the

career of a writer such as Oldham, it is easily realized that some of the most exciting

translation of this period went financially unsupported — and might not reach print.

The Oxford/Oxbridge associations of the manuscripts scrutinized above must

mean, it is true, that non-elite translators of Juvenal are seldom represented in

this sample, and a different kind of repository might give more purchase here,

though it must be remembered, of course, that advanced training in Latin and

Greek was normally acquired at university, and a large proportion of Latin verse

translation taking place will (in any event) have been carried out by the

university-educated.

What can this material tell us of Juvenal’s historical reception? Overall, it is a

strong reminder of the diversity of the forms this reception took and the diversity of

the individuals involved. This can be put more pointedly: this material will relate

much more closely to the tastes and purposes of actual readers than anything we

might derive from the classical scholarship of the day (embracing learned discus-

sions in editions and commentaries, or pedagogical material in lectures and the like).

Translations were of course the only means the Latinless had of gaining any insight

into Roman satire at all, and Dryden, for one, was highly conscious of the existence

of such a market, writing in the Dedication to his Juvenal volume that his team of

translators has worked ‘only for the Pleasure and Entertainment, of those

Gentlemen and Ladies, who tho they are not Scholars are not Ignorant: Persons

of Understanding and good Sense; who not having been conversant in the Original,

or at least not having made Latine Verse so much their business, as to be Critiques in

it, wou’d be glad to find, if the Wit of [Juvenal and Persius] be answerable to their

Fame, and Reputation in the World’ (Dryden et al. 1693: lii). In some of the

Bodleian manuscript copies of Dryden’s Juvenal, the hands of precisely such


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‘persons’ are found. But not only are we able to read their hands: something of their

tastes and their thought-processes can be discerned too, as we see what Juvenal texts

they choose to copy, and (to at least some degree) why: with what other texts, for

example, they associate them.

To prevent an already long discussion from becoming unwieldy I will for the

present confine further remarks to one aspect of Juvenal’s reception, suggesting a

methodology applicable to other authors too. Analysis of which satires, and which

parts of which satires, prove most popular among translators, as well as their readers

(where they are not amateurs working only for their own satisfaction), has the po-

tential to be very informative. But the Bodleian collections alone are too small to help

much here. They are not very representative of the preferences of readers and

translators at large in this period; that is, these Juvenalian choices give little hint

of what would be found in a larger sample of English translations (in manuscript and

print). One way of obtaining a larger sample is to use the Folger-hosted union index

of first lines, bearing in mind that we can choose to include in the search printed

items 1603–1700 from STC and Wing. Fuller analysis of this index could form the

subject of a separate study, but for brief comparison I have counted the 640 Juvenal

satires and excerpts in the union index whose source the translator, scribe, or printer

specified (ignoring the 274 translations from an unspecified Juvenal satire), with

these results:20

Specified Juvenal satires in translation in Union First-Line Index

15–30 translations of/from: Satires 1, 4, 5, 9, 12, 16

31–55 translations of/from: Satires 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, 15

55–100 translations of/from: Satires 6, 10

Within the Bodleian manuscripts only the popularity of Satire 10 seems strongly to

reflect the results this larger sample produces. Contrary to what we might be led to

expect by the print record in my Appendix, however, it is in fact Satire 6 and not

Satire 10 that attracts most copyists and translators in the Union Index, involving 94as against 81 versions and excerpts — a result which may better reflect the real tastes

of the period than modern notions of an incipiently English-Augustan high culture.

I would expect fuller analysis of these figures to show changing preferences among

the satires over time.

20 Figures correct as at 27.9.12 for items classed as ‘Translations’ containing keyword

‘Juvenal’. Over 90% of these satires and excerpts in translation are printed items, and

the seventeenth century is the period the Index predominantly covers. While such factors

do not prevent the Union Index from providing an impression of readers’ and translators’

preferences within the Juvenal corpus for the period, it should be pointed out that it

includes, among printed items, such ‘secondary’ or ‘indirectly’ translated material as the

Juvenal quotations in Florio’s Montaigne.


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Appendix A: Principal Printed English Translations and mitations of Juvenal 1644–1800

Note: Stapleton’s were the first complete translations into English, the work of his few

predecessors remaining obscure in their own times. Place of publication is London except

where otherwise stated; translations are in verse except where stated.

Sir Robert Stapleton, The first six bookes of Juvenal, Oxford, 1644.

Sir Robert Stapleton, Juvenal’s sixteen satyrs: or a survey of the manners and actions of

mankind, with arguments, marginall notes and annotations, 1647, 1660, 1673.

Henry Vaughan, The tenth satyre of Iuvenal englished, in Poems, 1646.

Barten Holyday and William Dewey, D. J. Juvenal and A. Persius Flaccus translated,

Oxford 1673 (Juvenal by Holyday).

Edward Wetenhall?, The wish, being the tenth satyr of Juvenal peraphrastically ren-

dered in pindarick verse, Dublin 1675.

Thomas Wood, Juvenalis redivivus: or, the first satyr of Juvenal, 1683 (a parody).

John Oldham, Satires 3 and 13 ‘imitated’, in Poems and translations, 1683.

Thomas Shadwell, The tenth satyr of Juvenal, English and Latin, 1686, 1687.

Henry Higden, A modern essay on the thirteenth satyr of Juvenal, 1686.

Henry Higden, A modern essay on the tenth satyr of Juvenal, 1687.

Charles Goodall, Part of the 14th Satyr of Juvenal, against covetousness, in Poems

and translations, 1689.

J[ohn] H[arvey], The tenth satyr of Juvenal done into English verse, 1693.

John Dryden, William Congreve, Nahum Tate, et al., The satires, together with the

satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus, 1693, 1697, 1702, 1711, 1713, 1726, Dublin 1732–

3, London 1735, etc.

John Dennis, Selections in Miscellany Poems, 1697.

John Glanvill, The latter part of the tenth satyr, in Poems, 1725.

Anon., The merchants advocate, a poem, in imitation of Juvenal’s XIII satire, [1708].

Samuel Johnson, London: a poem in imitation of the third satire of Juvenal, 1738, 1738,

1738, [Edinburgh] 1738, [Dublin] 1738; 1739 (‘4th edn’), etc.

Thomas Sheridan, The satires, 1739, Dublin 1741, London 1745, Dublin 1769,

Dublin 1777, Cambridge 1777. Prose, with Latin.

Thomas Gilbert, The first satire imitated, 1740.

Henry Fielding, Part of Juvenal’s sixth satire, modernized in burlesque verse, in

Miscellanies, 1743.

Anon., The thirteenth satyre of Juvenal imitated, 1745.

Samuel Johnson, The vanity of human wishes: the tenth satire imitated, 1749 etc.

Samuel Derrick, The third satire translated into English verse, 1755.

John Stirling, The satires of Juvenal, 1760, 1760 (prose, with Latin).

Edward Burnaby Greene, The satires paraphrastically imitated, 1763, 1764, 1779.

Thomas Amory, Satire 10, abridged in The life of John Buncle, esq, vol. 2, 1766 etc.

Thomas Nevile, Imitations of Juvenal and Persius, 1769.

Samuel Rogers, Selections in Poems on various occasions, 2 vols Bath 1782.


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Edward Owen, A translation of Juvenal and Persius, 2 vols 1785, 1786.

John Pearson, The thirteenth satire translated into English verse, 1788.

Martin Madan, A new translation of Juvenal and Persius, 2 vols 1789, Dublin 1795,

Oxford 1805, Dublin 1813.

Thomas Morris, Satires 4, 14, in Miscellanies in prose and verse, 1791.

Gilbert Wakefield, Satire 10, in Poetical translations from the ancients, 1795.

Matthew Gregory Lewis, The love of gain: a poem. Imitated from the thirteenth satire,1799.

References

P. Beal (ed.), Index of English Literary Manuscripts, 4 vols (London: Mansell, 1980–93).H. F. Brooks (ed.), The Poems of John Oldham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).M. Crum, First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2

vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).B. Danielsson and D. M. Vieth (eds), The Gyldenstolpe Manuscript Miscellany of Poems by John Wilmot,

Earl of Rochester, and other Restoration Authors (Stockholm: Kungliga Biblioteket, 1967).J. Dryden, et al., The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis Translated into English Verse by Mr. Dryden and

Several other Eminent Hands (London, 1693).J. Foster, Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1500–1714 (Oxford, London:

Parker, 1982).S. Gillespie, ‘A New Eighteenth-Century Juvenal Translator: William Popple’s Satires VI and X’,

Translation and Literature, 15 (2006), pp. 47–96.——, ‘Hesiod goes Augustan: An Early English Translation of the Theogony’, Translation and

Literature, 17 (2008), pp. 197–209.——, ‘Two Seventeenth-Century Translations of Two Dark Roman Satires: John Knyvett’s Juvenal 1

and J.H.’s In Eutropium’, Translation and Literature, 21 (2012), pp. 43–66.P. Hammond, ‘The Dating of Three Poems by Rochester from the Evidence of Bodleian MS. Don. b.

8’, Bodleian Library Record, 11 (1982), 58–9.D. Hooley, ‘Roman Satire and Epigram’, in D. Hopkins and C. Martindale (eds), The Oxford History of

Classical Reception in English, vol. 3: 1660–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),pp. 217–54.

D. Hopkins, ‘Dryden and the Tenth Satire of Juvenal’, Translation and Literature, 4 (1996), pp. 31–60.M. Londry, ‘On the Use of First-Line Indices for Researching English Poetry of the Long Eighteenth

Century, c. 1660–1830, with Special Reference to Women Poets’, The Library, 5 (2004), pp. 12–38.H. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).S. W. May and W. A. Ringler Jr, Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English

Verse, 1559–1603 (London: Continuum, 2004).S. Parks, et al., First-Line Index of English Poetry, 1500–1800, in Manuscripts of the James M. and

Marie-Louise Osborn Collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University,edited by many hands under the direction of Stephen Parks (New Haven, CT: Beinecke Rare Bookand Manuscript Library, Yale University, 2005).

A. W. Pollard, A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland and of Englishbooks printed abroad, 1475–1640, 2nd edn., 3 vols (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–91).

D. G. Wing, Short-title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and BritishAmerica, and of English books printed in other countries, 1641–1700, 3 vols (New York: ModernLanguage Association of America, 1994–8).


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english juvenal translations in bodleian library manuscripts

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