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قراءة كتاب Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694)

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Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694)

Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694)

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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Editor’s Introduction
Preface to Terence
Preface to Plautus
Augustan Reprints
Note on Pagination

Typographical errors are shown in the text with mouse-hover popups. In the Prefaces, errors were corrected only if a later edition showed the same correction. All brackets are in the original.

The Augustan Reprint Society

 
 

LAWRENCE ECHARD

PREFACES

TO TERENCE’S
COMEDIES

AND PLAUTUS’S
COMEDIES

(1694)


Introduction by
John Barnard

PUBLICATION NUMBER 129
WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
University of California, Los Angeles
1968

 

GENERAL EDITORS

George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles

Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles

Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

 

ADVISORY EDITORS

Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan

James L. Clifford, Columbia University

Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia

Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles

Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago

Louis A. Landa, Princeton University

Earl Miner, University of California, Los Angeles

Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota

Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles

Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

James Sutherland, University College, London

H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

 

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Edna C. Davis, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

INTRODUCTION

Perhaps no higher praise can be paid a translator than posterity’s acceptance of his work. Laurence Echard’s Terence’s Comedies, first printed in 1694 in the dress and phraseology of Restoration comedy, has received this accolade through the mediation of no less a modern translator than Robert Graves. In 1963 Graves edited a translation of three of Terence’s plays. His Foreword points to the extreme difficulty of translating Terence, and admits his own failure— “It is regrettable that the very terseness of his Latin makes an accurate English rendering read drily and flatly; as I have found to my disappointment.” Graves’s answer was typically idiosyncratic. “A revival of Terence in English, must, I believe, be based on the translation made . . . . with fascinating vigour, by a young Cambridge student Laurence Echard . . . .”1

The Prefaces to Echard’s Terence’s Comedies: Made English . . . . (1694) and to his Plautus’s Comedies, Amphitryon, Epidicus, and Rudens (1694) are of interest for several reasons. Both of them outline the intentions and rationale which lie behind the translations. They also throw light upon the sense of literary rivalry with French achievements which existed in some quarters in late seventeenth-century England, make comments on the contemporary stage, and are valuable both as examples of seventeenth-century attitudes to two Classical dramatists, and as statements of neoclassical dramatic theory. Finally, they are, to some extent, polemical pieces, aiming at the instruction of contemporary dramatists.

Laurence Echard, or Eachard (1670?-1730), was a minor cleric, a prolific hack, and an historian, a typical enough confusion of functions for the time. It suggests that Echard had energy, ability, and political commitment, but lacked a generous patron or good fortune to take the place of private means. Within the Church his success was modest: he was installed prebendary

of Louth in 1697, but had to wait until 1712 before becoming Archdeacon of Stow. Echard achieved the little fame by which he is remembered as an historical writer. Perhaps he is more accurately described as a compiler rather than as an historian. His major works were The Roman History, from the Building of the City, to the Perfect Settlement of the Empire by Augustus Caesar . . . (1695-98), the equally comprehensive A General Ecclesiastical History from the Nativity of Our Blessed Saviour to the First Establishment of Christianity . . . (1702), his all-inclusive The History of England from the first Entrance of Julius Caesar . . . to the Conclusion of the Reign of King James the Second . . . (1707-18), and the more detailed but equally long work, The History of the Revolution, and the Establishment of England in . . . 1688 (1725).

Echard’s career as a publisher’s jack-of-all-trades ran concurrently with his life’s work on history, and showed a similar taste for the voluminously encyclopedic. In 1691 he graduated B.A. at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and published four works under the imprint of Thomas Salusbury: A Most Complete Compendium of Geography; General and Special; Describing all the Empires, Kingdoms, and Dominions in the Whole World, An Exact Description of Ireland . . ., A Description of Flanders . . ., and the Duke of Savoy’s Dominions most accurately described.2 These were followed in 1692 by The Gazetteer’s or Newsman’s Interpreter: being a Geographical Index . . . . Two years later the translations of Plautus and Terence were published.

All of this work was clearly irrelevant to his main interests: in 1695 he had been urged to undertake his General Ecclesiastical History, and by that time he was already at work upon his Roman History (1695-98).3 Into the bargain, he was in residence

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