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Thomas Heywood's Art of Love: The First Complete English Translation of Ovid's Ars Amatoria
Thomas Heywood (ca 1573-1641) was a major Renaissance playwright who wrote or collaborated on over two hundred plays. Loues Schoole was one of his many nondramatic works that shows his fascination with antiquity. It was the standard English translation of the Ars in the seventeenth century, so popular that it was pirated almost as soon as he had written it--then printed, sold, reprinted, and resold in England and the Netherlands. It was not attributed to him during his lifetime, and he was not allowed to share in the profits that its (considerable) sales generated, two things that rankled him for the rest of his life. This is understandable because it is an excellent translation into English heroic verse, accurate without stuffiness, colloquial without indecorousness. Twenty years after Heywood's death, Loues Schoole was pirated yet again and went to six different editions during the Restoration (1662-84).
The present edition represents the first instance in which the translation has been edited in a scholarly manner. Besides a full Introduction that accounts for the history of Loues Schoole , Ovid in the English Renaissance, and the editorial method, each of the three books of the poem includes a Commentary that provides cross-references within the text; glosses for unusual, archaic, or regional forms peculiar to Heywood's English; annotations from sourcebooks that Heywood used to identify or understand characters from classical history, literature, and mythology; and explanations for any emendations the editor deemed necessary. In his efforts to make the Ars a seventeenth-century poem, Heywood contemporizes Ovid's references to dress, behavior, courtship, marriage, games, theater, agriculture, horsemanship, war, literature --all of which the Commentary explains at great length.
Loues Schoole will find readership in these early modern history, literature, and culture; classical studies; Renaissance drama; the history of sexuality; and translation theory.
M. L. Stapleton is Associate Professor of English and Philosophy, Stephen F. Austin State University.
The present edition represents the first instance in which the translation has been edited in a scholarly manner. Besides a full Introduction that accounts for the history of Loues Schoole , Ovid in the English Renaissance, and the editorial method, each of the three books of the poem includes a Commentary that provides cross-references within the text; glosses for unusual, archaic, or regional forms peculiar to Heywood's English; annotations from sourcebooks that Heywood used to identify or understand characters from classical history, literature, and mythology; and explanations for any emendations the editor deemed necessary. In his efforts to make the Ars a seventeenth-century poem, Heywood contemporizes Ovid's references to dress, behavior, courtship, marriage, games, theater, agriculture, horsemanship, war, literature --all of which the Commentary explains at great length.
Loues Schoole will find readership in these early modern history, literature, and culture; classical studies; Renaissance drama; the history of sexuality; and translation theory.
M. L. Stapleton is Associate Professor of English and Philosophy, Stephen F. Austin State University.
- GenresPoetry
192 pages, Hardcover
First published August 8, 2000
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May 15, 2018
Knowing the editor, I expected a well judged edition of a book that is today regarded as a relatively minor Ovid translation, and this certainly is a well judged edition, but I underestimated the editor in two ways: the introduction is a game changer for my understanding of translations in early modern England where strict fidelity to the original text was not valued as much as creating a wonderful new work even if liberties are taken, and it seems that this translation was anything but minor during the early modern and restoration periods, indeed, up until Dryden's translation superseded it.
Heywood's liberties are discussed in a general way in that introduction, but then expounded significantly in the commentary. Read the introduction, read Heywood's translation, work through the glosses and the rest of the commentary as you read the translation, and neglect not the textual notes. Prepare to have your mind blown.
Heywood's liberties are discussed in a general way in that introduction, but then expounded significantly in the commentary. Read the introduction, read Heywood's translation, work through the glosses and the rest of the commentary as you read the translation, and neglect not the textual notes. Prepare to have your mind blown.
Displaying 1 of 1 review