By removing the character and place names in the Latin text (“Priami,” “Troiam,” and “Pergama,” the citadel at Troy) and referring only to “the King,” Denham generalizes the import of the passage, enabling Priam’s “headless Carkass” to metamorphose into a British descendant’s, at least for a moment, inviting the contemporary English reader to recall the civil wars—although from a decidedly royalist point of view. Denham’s translation shared the same impulse toward political allegory that characterized, not only the various revisions of Coopers Hill, but also royalist writing generally during the years after Charles’s defeat, including Fanshawe’s translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido {54} (1647) and Christopher Wase’s translation of Sophocles’ Electra (1649).[4]
The one place name Denham includes in his version of Priam’s death, “Asia,” may be taken as an allusion to the Orientalism in Caroline court culture. Denham had himself contributed to this trend with The Sophy (1642), a play intended for court production and set in Persia. But the allusiveness of the translation is more specific. “The Scepters of all Asia bow’d” to Charles in court masques where the king and queen enacted a moral conquest of foreign rulers by converting their nations to Platonic love. In Aurelian Townshend’s Tempe Restor’d (1632), the royal couple preside over the reformation of Circe’s sensual reign, figured in “all the Antimasques, consisting of Indians and Barbarians, who naturally are bestiall, and others which are voluntaries, but halfe transformed into beastes” (Townshend 1983:97).
Yet more striking is Denham’s curious addition to the Latin text: “Thus fell the King, who yet survived the State, / With such a signal and peculiar Fate.” Virgil’s omission of any reference to the dead king’s afterlife reveals Denham’s own belief in the continuing vitality of the Stuart monarchy after the regicide. Although Charles I was executed, the monarchy “survived the State” instituted by Parliament, initially a Commonwealth governed by a Council of State, which was later redefined to function as an advisor to a Lord Protector; this was a “signal and peculiar” survival for the king because it took the form of a court in exile and royalist conspiracy at home, because, in other words, the king lived on but not in his kingdom. In the political climate of the 1650s, with the Protectorate resorting to oppressive measures to quell royalist insurgency, it would be difficult for a Caroline sympathizer not to see any parallel between the decapitations of Priam and Charles. But in this climate it would also be necessary for a royalist writer like Denham to use such an oblique mode of reference as an allusion in an anonymous translation. Translation was particularly useful in royalist cultural politics, Lois Potter suggests, because it was viewed as “transcendence, the healing wholeness that removes controversy and contradiction” (Potter 1989:52–53). In Denham’s translation, the monarchy “survived” its destruction.
The fact that Denham intended his translation to serve a royalist function is borne out by a comparison with his predecessors, which highlights the subtle changes he introduced to bring the Latin text closer to his political concerns:
Denham clearly exceeds his predecessors in the liberties he takes with the Latin text. His addition about the “signal and peculiar Fate” becomes more conspicuous and historically charged in such a comparison, as does his deletion of local markers, including the Latin “litore” (1.557), a word that situates Priam’s fall near the sea and is {56} rendered by most of the other translators (“shore,” “sea side,” “strand”). Denham’s translation not only allows the death to be shifted inland, but throughout he makes a noticeable effort to domesticate architectural terms, likening the Trojan structures to the royal buildings in England. Consider this passage where the Greeks are forcing their way into Priam’s palace:
[4]
The historical allegory in
[5]
Ogilby’s version of these lines, in referring to the king’s “sacred body” and to the absence of “obsequies,” shares the royalism of Denham’s. For the politics of Ogilby’s Virgil, see Patterson 1987:169–185.