THE FIRST BOOK MARLOWE'S translation of Book I of the Pharsalia is first mentioned in an entry in the Stationers' Register, dated September 28, 1593: John Wolf Entred for his Copye vnder the handes of Master MURGETROD and bothe the wardens a booke intituled LUCANS firste booke of the famous Civill warr betwixt POMPEY and CESAR Englished by CHRISTOPHER MARLOW.' The very next entry is that of a booke intituled HERO and LEANDER beinge an amorous poem devised by CHRISTOPHER MARLOW', likewise registered by John Wolf and on the same day. There is a curious and unexplained connexion between these two poems in the circumstances of publication. The First Book of Lucan exists in a single old quarto issued in 1600 by Thomas Thorpe, who in the Epistle Dedicatory to his fellow stationer, Edward Blount, alludes to the latter's 'old right' in the work. This Edward Blount himself published in 1598 the earliest extant edition of Marlowe's portion of Hero and Leander. In 1600 another edition of the latter poem appeared with the puzzling title-page: Hero and Leander: Begunne by Christopher Marloe Whereunto is added the first booke of Lucan translated line for line by the same Author: Printed for John Flasket.' In spite of this plain statement there is no trace that the Lucan ever formed a part of the book in question or was printed during the Elizabethan age in any other edition than that of Thorpe. The most likely conjecture would seem to be that John Wolf, who registered Lucan and Hero and Leander on the same day—perhaps with the intention of bringing them out together-transferred his right in both to Blount. The latter resigned his property in Hero and Leander, and pre 1 The famous publisher of Shakespeare's sonnets (1609). It is worthy of note that Thorpe also published in 1614 a complete translation of the Pharsalia, the work of Sir Arthur Gorges. The third (?) edition, at least one other having been issued in sumably in Lucan as well, to Paul Linley on March 2, 1597-8, and Linley certainly made over both works to John Flasket on June 26, 1600.1 Flasket's 1600 edition of Hero and Leander is undoubtedly the result of the transaction last referred to, but it is not easy to account for the misleading allusion to the Lucan translation on the title page or the failure to mention Chapman. Flasket's original design may have been to produce an edition of the Marlovian part of Hero and Leander, supplemented by the Lucan. Such an intention may have preceded the arrangement with Linley, and would naturally, in that case, have been altered when the possession of Chapman's long continuation of Hero and Leander rendered it unnecessary to eke out a thin volume by the insertion of the Lucan. The latter work, being then of no immediate consequence to Flasket, would seem to have been acquired and at once printed by Thomas Thorpe. The Stationers' Register contains no record, however, of the transfer of the piece from Flasket to Thorpe or to any one else, and the question of the precise origin of this single early edition of the poem is not easily soluble. Marlowe's translation of Lucan is a work of some curious interest, as being one of the earliest English poems in blank verse. It displays greater maturity than the Elegies, both in expression and in metrical skill, but has the same general faults and must, like the other translation, be ascribed to an early period in the poet's career. In his later years Marlowe would hardly have submitted to the tyranny of a line-for-line translation. Erroneous renderings abound on every page, but it is seldom that the reader meets with what is so common in the Elegies-lines entirely destitute of sense or coherence. The work has, as a whole, a majestic rhythm, and the choice of words is always that of the born poet. In many of the finer passages we see the author practising, as it were, that peculiarly melodious blank verse of which he shows himself in Tamburlaine so complete a master. Such lines as the following have the distinct flavour of Marlowe's developed style: Figulus more seene in heauenly mysteries, For a fuller discussion of these points see Introduction to Hero and Leander, pp. 485, 486. |