Correction, Modernization, and Elaboration in a Seventeenth-Century Translation of John Lydgate's Troy Book

Medieval monastic poet John Lydgate is not an author we expect to see in seventeenth-century print. It is surprising, then, to find The Life and Death of Hector (London, 1614), (1) an anonymous modernization of Lydgate's Troy Book (1420). While not a translation of a classical source, Hector was written in a context where classical translations were increasingly discussed and printed. However, in addition to the influence of Renaissance humanist theories of translation in Hector, the anonymous poet's efforts are also in line with Lydgate's own translation techniques; indeed, Lydgate becomes a model for the Hector poet's correction of Lydgate himself. In this way, the Hector poet's additions to, modernizations of, and deviations from the Troy Book source become an exemplar of what William Kuskin has described as the "recursive" nature of literary history, a literary history that simultaneously repeats and transforms the past. Within this single early seventeenth-century book, distinct traditions stand together, supplementing rather than erasing one another in a celebration of multiplicity and multivocality.