Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas (1544–90) is an essential figure for understanding the diversity and strength of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poetry. His works were read, translated, and imitated more widely than any other non-biblical literary work in early modern England and Scotland, leading Scottish and French literary culture to shape the development of English epic poetry and inspire new kinds of popular devotional verse. Thanks to James VI and I’s support, Du Bartas’ scriptural poems became emblems of international Protestantism that were cherished even more highly in England and Scotland than on the continent. His creative vision helped inexperienced devotional writers to find a voice as well as providing a model that Protestant poets (like Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Anne Bradstreet, John Milton, and Lucy Hutchinson) would resist, transform, and, ultimately, reject. This long-needed book examines Du Bartas’ legacy in England and Scotland, sensitive to the different cultural situations in which his works were read, discussed, and creatively imitated. The first part shows how James VI of Scotland played a decisive role in the Huguenot poet’s reception history, culminating in Josuah Sylvester’s translation Devine Weekes and Workes (1605). The second examines seventeenth-century divine epic, religious narrative, and popular devotional verse forms that reworked Du Bartas’ poetic structures to introduce meditative and figurative components that provided new possibilities for imaginative expression.
Josephus's works were an ideal source for seventeenth-century English tragedy. Jacobean playwrights sought foreign settings for political drama at a time when censorship was heightened and national chronicle history had been exhausted of potential subject matter. The Jewish War and Antiquities offered fresh opportunities for biblical dramas of the kind that had been popular in the 1590s but did not require the same creative restraint that scriptural adaptations did. 1 Josephus was already popular in the vernacular: Thomas Lodge's version (first printed 1602) was the most frequently reprinted English translation of an ancient historian in early modern England; in addition, Peter Morwen's abridged translation of the Josippon had been reprinted thirteen times between 1558 and 1615 and was, like Lodge's translation, recommended to congregations from the pulpit. 2 Three surviving seventeenth-century English tragedies name Josephus as their main source: Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam (composed c. 1604, printed 1613), Gervase Markham and William Sampson's Herod and Antipater (composed
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