Pynson’s printing shop; in April 1520 he was called on to embellish the
English court’s building for the Field of Cloth of Gold with historical and
other themes. His career after 1520 betrays further oscillations: possible
connexions with reforming circles, but also militant antireform activity
before his death in 1552.^7 His shifts in vocational stance have been variously
assessed; most relevant to my purpose is that his career, as well as his work,
constitutes a series of translations. While there is a certain consistency in his
adoption of the persona of the black monk–as he appears in the frontis-
piece to Pynson’s print of his version of Sallust’sJugurthine Wars–there
is also a certain elusiveness in the identity of an author who speaks entirely
through the translated. I will be addressing this facet of Barclay’s works, and
suggesting that translation, the potential source of his cultural authority,
also renders that authority a shifting and variable quantity. I will be
especially concerned with the ways in which this manifests itself in the
Eclogues, his most popular work later in the sixteenth century.
Barclay’s work embraces every potential division offered him by the
task of translation and the institutions of patronage. Outside theEclogues,
he produced several books in unusually close collaboration with Pynson:
The Ship of Fools( 1509 ), a verseLife of St. Georgeprinted about 1515 and
translated from Mantuan,The Mirror of Good Mannersfrom the De
quattuor virtutibusof Domenico Mancini (around 1518 ) and a prose trans-
lation of Sallust’sJugurthine Wars(c. 1520 ). As David Carlson notes, these
share a distinctive bicolumnar layout, with their originals printed beside
Barclay’s English translations except in the case of theShip of Fools, where
each chapter of the English is preceded by its equivalent in his source, John
Locher’s Latin translation of Sebastian Brant’s original. What is noteworthy
here is that several also share double dedications, which are, as William
Nelson has pointed out, double in more ways than one. On the title page of
The Mirror of Good Manners, Barclay alleges that he was“commanded”to
translate Mancini’sDe quattuor virtutibusby Sir Giles Alington. His address
to Alington, however, indicates that he adopted this task of his own accord,
since Alington had in fact required him to“amende”an unknown work,“A
Lovers confession.”According to his own overt declaration, Barclay chose
to go a different way, for fear that some mightfind it
to my age and order muche inconvenient
To write of thing wanton, not sad but insolent.As Nelson indicates, however, Barclay is in part ghosting here the
Augustinian Mancini’s own prefatory statement that rather than write of
love, to which he is ill-suited, he will produce a didactic treatise.^8 TheLife of
Barclay’sEcloguesand Douglas’sPalice of Honour 89