Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century

Selected Papers from the Second International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (2000)

Mike Pincombe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138263642
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351877572
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In recent years the twin themes of travel and translation have come to be regarded as particularly significant to the study of early modern culture and literature. Traditional notions of 'The Renaissance' have always emphasised the importance of the influence of continental, as well as classical, literature on English writers of the period; and over the past twenty years or so this emphasis has been deepened by the use of more complicated and sophisticated theories of literary and cultural intertextuality, as well as broadened to cover areas such as religious and political relations, trade and traffic, and the larger formations of colonialism and imperialism. The essays collected here address the full range of traditional and contemporary issues, providing new light on canonical authors from More to Shakespeare, and also directing critical attention to many unfamiliar texts which need to be better known for our fuller understanding of sixteenth-century English literature. This volume makes a very particular contribution to current thinking on Anglo-continental literary relations in the sixteenth century. Maintaining a breadth and balance of concerns and approaches, Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century represents the academic throughout Europe: essays are contributed by scholars working in Hungary, Greece, Italy, and France, as well as in the UK. Arthur Kinney's introduction to the collection provides an North American overview of what is perhaps a uniquely comprehensive index to contemporary European criticism and scholarship in the area of early modern travel and translation.

PART I
Travels

Chapter 1
Travailing abroad: the poet as adventurer

Elizabeth Heale

In a poem celebrating that epitome of Elizabethan enterprise, Sir Humphrey Gilbert,¹ explorer, speculator, colonial undertaker and mercenary soldier, on the eve of a voyage in 1578, the poet Thomas Churchyard described the heroic toil of the adventurer:

The man that trauels much,

with mind and body both,

(Whose restlesse lims, & labring thoughtes,

through heapes of hazards goth).

(sig. H2r)

‘Trauels’ includes here the senses of ‘to make a journey’, ‘to labour, toil’ and ‘to weary, tire’ (OED travail v. and travel v.). Gilbert’s voyage is not a recreational excursion, but a speculative enterprise, with the straining of ‘restlesse lims, & labring thoughtes’ a sign of heroic virtue. Although the meanings of the word ‘trauel’ were becoming separated in the sixteenth century, travel (journeying) and travail (toil, pain) are still interchangeable terms with the meanings closely associated, as Churchyard’s poem to Gilbert makes clear. Gilbert’s heroic travels testify to his virtuous choice of toilsome but manly adventure rather than slothful, effeminate ease at home.² Much of the poem is built on an opposition between ‘abroad’ and ‘home’:

Abroade where seruice is,

much honor may be wonne,

At home our gay vayneglory goes,

like shadow in the Sunne.

Abroad bare robes are best,

and Manhoode makes the showe,

At home yong Maister must be fine,

or all is lost you know.

(sig. L3r)

As the poem progresses the anaphora mutates from the oppositon ‘abroade’/ ‘home’ to ‘toile’/‘rest’:

Toyle teacheth men to conquer Fame,

And flee from foule reproach.

Rest loues to dallie much,

Like whelp that waues the tayle.

(sig. L4r)

Abroad is synonymous with toil and enterprise, home with sloth. Travel abroad is a sign of manliness while resting at home is to be, in Churchyard’s scornful phrase, ‘ruld by loue of babes/[and] womens willes’ (sig. K3r).

Churchyard’s panegyric to Gilbert, and the spirit of heroic adventuring abroad that he seems to embody, is part of the euphoric discourse of Elizabethan mercantile and colonial expansion. Sir Francis Drake, contributing some prefatory verses to George Peckham’s account of Gilbert’s last and fatal voyage in 1583, challenged others to join the enterprise of overseas exploration:

Who seeks, by worthy deeds, to gain renown for hire:

Whose heart, whose head, whose purse is pressed, to purchase his desire;

If any such there be, that thirsteth after fame:

Lo, here a mean, to win himself an everlasting name.³

For the ‘young Gentleman’ who speaks in a poem in the 1585 Paradise of Dainty Devices, the toil of seeking one’s fortune abroad is far more glorious than drudging at home:

To tosse the Seas some thinke a toyle,

Some thinke it straunge abroad to rome,

Some thinke it griefe to leaue their soyle

Their parentes, kinsfolkes, and their home.

Thinke so who list, I like it not,

I must abroad to trye my Lott.

Who lust at home at carte to drudge

And carcke and care for worldly trashe:

with buckled shooe let him goe trudge,

In stead of launce a whip to swash.

A minde that’s base himselfe will showe,

A carrion sweete to feede a Crowe.

(pp. 129–30).⁴

More cautiously, Sir Henry Sidney, father of Sir Philip, while paying tribute to the noble enterprise of those who travelled abroad, dwells on the terrible dangers that threatened the traveller, and perhaps betrays some relief, as a non-travelling investor, at staying at home himself:

We shall live and rest at home quietly with our friends, and acquaintance: but hee in the meane time labouring to keepe the ignorant and unruly Mariners in good order and obedience, with howe many cares shall hee trouble and vexe himselfe? … We shall keepe our owne coastes and countrey: Hee shall seeke strange and unknowen kingdomes. He shall commit his safetie to barbarous and cruell people, and shall hazard his life amongst the monstrous and terrible beastes of the Sea.

(p. 129)⁵

Sir Henry envisages the heroic traveller as one who maintains order and who is so secure in his English integrity and virtue that he seeks out what is strange and willingly braves riot, barbarity and monstrousness. Not everyone uses the euphoric discourse of adventuring abroad, however. Roger Ascham was less certain that English virtue would remain impervious to the dangers and temptations that travel might bring:

For, he shall not alwayes in his absence out of England, light vpon a ientle Alcynous, and walke in his faire gardens full of all harmelesse pleasures: but he shall sometymes, fall, either into the handes of some cruell Cyclops, or into the lappe of some wanton and dalying Dame Calypso … If Scylla drowne him not, Carybdis may fortune swalow hym. Some Circes shall make him, of a plaine English man, a right Italian.

(p. 225)

Even if the English integrity of the traveller remained untainted by being abroad, the gain to be won in adventuring did not always repay the danger, as George Turberville warned in a poem to his friend P. written before he himself travelled to Moscow in 1568–69:

In rotten ribbed Barck to passe the Seas

The foraine landes and straungie sites to see,

Doth daunger dwell: the passage breedes vnease,

Not safe the soyle, the men vnfriendly bee.

Admit thou see the straungest things of all:

When eie is turned the pleasant sight is gone:

The treasure then of trauaile is but small,

Wherefor (Friend P.) let all such toyes alone.

(fol. 41v)

According to such thinking, the enterprise of travelling abroad could be vain and dangerous, breeding unease, and exposing the English traveller to insubstantial and treacherous pleasures. What was collected and known, the very integrity of the civilized English self, could be scattered abroad. Once embarked, the familiar became strange, stabilities threatened to collapse, and national virtue became susceptible to contamination.

These competing attitudes to travel are clearly visible in the poems I study in this essay. On the one hand travel abroad as a sign of enterprise offered an attractive persona to the poets I study, but such first-person writing all too easily betrays the vulnerability of the virtuous self to ‘foreign’ contamination. The poems strive on the one hand to promote their writers as men of virtuous enterprise, on the other they betray the disconcerting instability of national differences and moral boundaries. However, for Churchyard and the three writer-travellers with whom I shall be concerned in this essay, the ‘travails’ of ‘travel’ were not confined to ordering unruly mariners or overcoming barbarous foreigners and beasts of the sea. Their ‘trauels’ are not only those of journeying, but also of writing, which is often described as being as painful and laborious as the journey itself.⁶

In Churchyard’s view, the travail of writing about adventuring abroad is akin to the heroism of travel itself. As his poem to Gilbert proceeds it becomes clear that his description of the heroic man of enterprise, ‘the man who trauels much,/with mind and body both’, refers not only to Gilbert, but also to the poet Churchyard himself, who rouses himself from rest to celebrate Gilbert’s expedition in verse:

Where is Churchyard? Doth he sleepe?

or is he crept in Clowde,

To shunne the vse of penne

and matter worthy note?

(sig. H3r)

It is the writer’s duty and his glory to painfully record and celebrate the heroic adventure of overseas expansion. In a similar vein, in the preface to the 1598 edition of his Principall Navigations, Hakluyt described his own travails among manuscripts and books during his Herculean task of gathering the writings of travellers as a labour equal to theirs: ‘what restlesse nights, what painefull dayes, what heat, what cold I have indured; how many long & chargeable journeys I have traveiled; how many famous libraries I have searched into; what varietie of ancient and moderne writers I have perused’ (1907 edn, I, p. 19).

The prominence in the ‘Verses to Gilbert’ of Churchyard’s own name and experience suggests that his ‘trauels’ with the pen may have as much to do with self-promotion as with the glorification of English enterprise abroad. This is certainly true of the poetic ‘trauels’ of the writers with whom I am concerned in this essay. Writing verse is in fact part of the same project of self-advancement that propelled them abroad as adventurers. The early Elizabethan poets I will be discussing – George Turberville who travelled to Moscow in 1568–69, as a ‘gentleman desirous to see the world’ in the entourage of Thomas Randolph, commissioned by the queen to negotiate trading privileges;⁷ Robert Baker, a merchant’s factor on a ship trading to the Guinea coast of Africa in 1562 and 1563, and George Gascoigne, impoverished gentleman and mercenary soldier in the Netherlands from 1572 to 1574 – do not write merely in response to the muses. They use verse to make a version of themselves and their achievements known in the world, either in the hope of attracting patrons, or for self-defence, or, in the case of Baker, perhaps to publicize his plight as a prisoner of war. They situate themselves in their poems both as first-person narrators, the adventurers who travel and suffer in the narratives, but also as the poets who write, adopting, at least at the outset of their poems, conventional writerly poses: the urbane, Horatian writer of epistles (Turberville), the epic chronicler (Baker), the voice of the humanist scholar (Gascoigne). As we shall see, the conventionality of the genre within which the poet writes, and the disorder of the narratives that are presented, soon cause conflicts that destroy the coherence and predictability of the verse, producing instead extraordinarily vivid representations of disorientating confrontations between the familiar and the foreign, order and chaos.

George Turberville’s three verse epistles from Moscow were probably first printed in 1574 in Epitaphes and Sonnettes With some other broken pamphlettes and Epistles, sent to certaine his frends in England, at his being in Moscouia. Anno 1569, appended to Tragical Tales, translated by Turberville.⁸ As the title-page indicates, it is not just the epistles that refer to Russia. The collection of Epitaphes and Sonnettes opens with a poem that bids farewell both to his mother and to his mother country:

My countrey coast where I

my Nurses milke did sucke,

Would neuer yet in all my life

allowe me one good lucke

…

From thence tis time to trudge

and hire the hackney post

To shift to ship, to leaue the land

and seeke a better coast.

(fols 145r-147r)

Such enterprise differentiates him from

The slouthfull Groome that sits,

at home and tels the clocke:

And feares the floud because therein

lies hidden many a rocke.

But Russia proves a sad disappointment to his hopes of self-advancement. Its icy deserts and the speaker’s sense of isolation and of bodily imprisonment recur frequently in the ‘sonnettes’ both as contrasts to the speaker’s now rather warmer thoughts of home, and at the same time as images of his own inner sense of desolation and exile. Russia functions as a shifting signifier deployed both as the other against which the speaker measures his own and his country’s civility, and as a figure for himself; mentally and emotionally he feels himself to be like the godforsaken Russian landscape.⁹

The volume contains three verse epistles gathered under the title ‘The Author being in Moscouia, wrytes to certaine his frendes in Englande of the state of the place … ’ (fols 183v-193v). Written to male friends in London, the epistles aspire to a Horatian urbanity and detachment. They declare ‘the manners of the men’ (fol. 189v), but by now the poet/speaker feels that in leaving his native soil ‘ful like a retchlesse man’ he has emphatically moved from ‘blisse to bale’ (fol. 183v). The emphasis throughout is on the outlandishness of the country and the uncouth incivility of the Russians, even when he admires their ingenuity: their buildings of wood and moss, and their windows made of translucent slices of stone sewn together (fol. 188r). Above all he returns again and again to the bodily grossness of the Muscovites: they have fat bellies, drink vast amounts, have greasy wives smoked tawny by the stove fire, and worst of all, the Russian leads a ‘bowgards [bugger’s] life’, preferring ‘a boy within his bed’ to his greasy wife. In a word, Russia is as bad as Ireland:

Wild Irish are as ciuil as

the Russies in their kind:

Hard choice which is the best of both,

each bloodie rude, and blind.

(fol. 193r)

As the images of the ic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the text
• Introduction
• Part I Travels
• Part II Translations
• Bibliography of secondary texts
• Index