Miscellaneous Prose

From Sir Thomas Hoby’s Book of the Courtier (1561) to John Florio’s Montaigne and Philemon Holland’s Plutarch (both in 1603) a massive line of translated classics extends through the Elizabethan period. 1 The august series began earlier, indeed, with Caxton and Berners, and continued, though with abated vigor, into the period of James I. Shakespeare was indebted concretely to each of the three works mentioned, and in still higher degree to Golding’s Ovid (1567) and Bartholomew Yong’s Montemayor (1598); his greatest debt is to what stylistically is the greatest translation of all, Sir Thomas North’s version of Plutarch’s Lives (1579). The series, which reached a higher level in prose than in verse, included some of the most recent as well as some of the most ancient of the world’s great books—Harington’s Ariosto 2 (1591) and Shelton’s Cervantes (1612) as well as Chapman’s Homer (1598-1616) and the various late Greek romances. 3 It brought with it an avalanche of plot material and at the same time schooled the new English prose by discipleship to what had been best thought and said in the literature of Greece, Rome, France, Italy, and Spain. Only a peculiarly vigorous national style could have kept its course under such stress of foreign influence, but the Elizabethan translations are always more Elizabethan than translated.