St. George’s title page claims that it was undertaken“at commaundement”
of Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk; Barclay’s English dedicatory poem,
however, states rather that Norfolk’s“desire”and“renomyd fame”spurred
him to translate it, and it also contains a Latin dedication to Nicholas West,
bishop of Ely, putting him among several who urged Barclay to carry it out.^9
The same linguistic bifurcation appears most acutely in the Sallust trans-
lation, where a prose dedication in English, again to Norfolk, runs alongside
a Latin one to John Veysey, bishop of Exeter.^10
Barclay’s double dedications serve various purposes, some of which
resonate well beyond the literal. Alongside standard excuses–that nobles
need to learn Latin, that great deeds should never die–Barclay’s dedication
to the Sallust translation draws attention once again to his own evident
unsuitability to the task at hand: a monk compelled to explain why he
should write of martial matters, he is heartened by Job’s contention that
“mans life upon yerth is but a warfare.”^11 We glimpse here, repeatedly, a
double movement of consolidation and extension. The continuities
between Latin text, Latin dedication, and clerical addressee bestow on
Latin a very specific location and sphere of cultural authority. Yet Barclay
is still the self-promoting translator, in a move borne out by the metaphoric
shifts in his own language, and by the way in which his authorial identity is
interpolated chiefly to draw attention to his own efforts. In the preface to
The Ship of Foolshe confirms this:“I haue but only drawen into our moder
tunge, in rude langage the sentences of the verses as near as the pareyte of my
wyt wyl suffer me, some tyme addynge, somtyme detractinge and takinge
away suche thinges a [sic] semeth me necessary and superflue.”^12 “[T]he
original,”Nelson comments,“appears in order that the reader may know
what changes Barclay has wrought.”^13
Barclay’s enterprise, then, already bestrides two spheres. If one revolves
around Latin and the monastic standing on which Lydgate had drawn–and,
for that matter, the fraternal identities of Mantuan and Mancini–the other,
vernacularizing, is more disseminatory, more prone to a studied kind of error.
With this in mind I would like to look especially closely at theEclogues,where
the dialogic structure of the genre makes the location of the author unusually
difficult to determine. It should be noted that these poems have a more
uncertain textual history than others by Barclay. Though their editor,
Beatrice White, assumes them to have been written between 1509 and 1514 ,
all earlier editions are lost, and we do not know in what form they circulated,
or whether they were gathered together at an early stage. Editions begin to
appear in 1518 ,thefirst known being of thefifthEclogue, and the earliest
surviving edition of allfive together is in John Cawood’s 1570 collected
90 Court Poetry in Late Medieval England and Scotland