Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) Part 1

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

by Lawrence Echard.

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 att.i.tudes to two Cla.s.sical dramatists, and as statements of neocla.s.sical 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 at Cambridge until 1695, for he did not gain his M.A. until that year. Despite the apparent success of his publisher's enterprises (_A Most Complete Compendium_ was in its eighth edition by 1713, and _The Gazetteer's or Newsman's Interpreter_ reached a twelfth in 1724), little of the profit reached the penurious Echard. In 1717 Archbishop Wake wrote to Addison that "His circ.u.mstances are so much worse than I thought, that if we cannot get somewhat pretty considerable for Him, I doubt He will sink under the weight of his debts . . . ."[4]

The sheer quant.i.ty of work which Echard accomplished in these early years is astonishing: it is no wonder that in the Preface to the _Plautus_ he explained that "business" had prevented him from translating more than three of the comedies, remarking, ". . . I have taken somewhat less time than was necessary for the translating such an extraordinary difficult Author; for this requires more than double the time of an _Historian_ or the like, which was as much as I cou'd allow my self" (sig. b3).

In all of his work Echard sought and acknowledged the help of a whole series of unnamed encouragers and authorities. For the _Plautus_ he "had the Advantage of another's doing their [i.e., "these"?] Plays before me; from whose Translation I had very considerable Helps . . ." (sig. b4).

Apart from that aid, the _Plautus_, on the evidence offered by the t.i.tle-page and the Preface, was all Echard's own. This is not the case with the _Terence_, which was translated by a symposium, with the Preface being written by Echard on the group's behalf. As a result, its Preface uses "we" throughout where the _Plautus_ uses "I." When the first edition of the _Terence_ appeared it gave the authorship as "By Several Hands," but later editions are more detailed, and specify that the work was done "By Mr. Laurence Echard, and others. Revis'd and Corrected by Dr. Echard and Sir R. L'Estrange." The fourth edition also stated firmly in 1716, "The PREFACE, Written by Mr. _Laurence Echard_"

(p. i).

The only discrepancy which might seem to deny Echard's authorship of the Preface to the _Terence_ is the fact that the two Prefaces contradict one another over the way in which scenes should be marked. The Preface to the _Terence_ simply says that exits and entrances within the acts are a sufficient indication that the scene has changed without numbering them, "for the _Ancients_ never had any other [method] that we know of"

(p. xxii). The _Plautus_ on the other hand, numbers the scenes, and the Preface comments, "I have all the way divided the _Acts_ and _Scenes_ according to the true Rules of the Stage . . ." (sig. b2v). Since this was an open question, however, in neocla.s.sical dramatic theory, the simplest explanation is that Echard was free to do as he believed in the _Plautus_, which was all his own, but was, in the Preface to the _Terence_, expressing the views of the whole group of translators.

The two volumes are a testimony to Echard's remarkable industry and abilities. They were published the year before he took his M.A., when he was only twenty-four. In the years between coming up to Cambridge in 1687 and 1695, he found time not only to satisfy his university, and to do the very considerable amount of hack work which appeared in 1691 and 1692, as well as embarking upon his large historical works, but also translated two difficult Roman authors with great verve.

It would be interesting to know why, in the years between 1691 and 1694, Echard turned his attentions to the art of translation. The venture is a curious deviation from his otherwise single-minded devotion to history and to journalistic enterprises (the only other translation he is known to have done is the brief "Auction of the Philosophers" in _The Works of Lucian_ [1710-11]). The connection of Dr. John Eachard and Sir Roger L'Estrange may offer a slight clue. Echard was closely related to Dr.

Eachard (1636?-1697), Master of Catharine Hall, Cambridge, and author of the lively dialogue, _Mr. Hobbs's State of Nature Consider'd_ (1672).[5]

With a family connection such as this, Echard might well have hoped for a successful career centered on his stay at Cambridge. The dedication of his _A Most Complete Compendium_ in 1691 to the Master of his own college, Dr. John Covel, suggests that he was looking in this direction.

L'Estrange is important not only for his intimate knowledge of the publishing trade, but also because he was a translator in his own right.

His _aesop_ appeared in 1692, and he had early put out translations of Quevedo (1673), Cicero (1680), and Erasmus (1680), and was to go on to translate Flavius Josephus (1702). Since L'Estrange had also been a student at Cambridge, there is some possibility that the translation of Terence was carried out at the instigation of a Cambridge based group.

The translation might also be connected with the resurgence of interest in translation and in "correctness" which can be discerned in the 1690's.[6]

The two Prefaces differ somewhat in character. It seems clear from remarks made in the Preface to the _Plautus_ that it was written after the _Terence_ had already reached the public and after Echard's copy for the text of Plautus's three comedies was in the printer's hands. Not surprisingly the later Preface is hurried, and at times almost casual.

The Preface to the _Terence_ is more ambitious, more carefully written, and more wide-ranging, though giving fewer examples of the kinds of translations made by Echard. Both Prefaces lay claim to substantially the same audience. That to the _Terence_ explains that the translation was undertaken in the first place because of the literary value of Terence's comedy. In consequence, its benefits would apply to "most sorts of People, but especially for the Service it may do our _Dramatick Poets_." Secondly, the work was undertaken for "the Honour of our own _Language_, into which all good Books ought to be Translated, since _'tis now become so Elegant, Sweet and Copious_ . . . ." Thirdly, it might rival the translations done in other countries, particularly those in France. The audience envisaged ranged from schoolboys, who would find the translation less Latinate and the notes more pointed than those of Bernard or Hoole, to "Men of Sense and Learning," who ought to be pleased to see Terence in "modern Dress." As for the dramatists, Terence might serve as an exemplar, especially since the translation could "be read with less Trouble than the Original . . ." (pp. xvii-xix). The _Plautus_ Preface is far less detailed, but refers back to these reasons, while stressing the function of the translation for the schoolboy. Judging by the number of editions, the _Terence_ found its market, for where the _Plautus_ ran to only two editions, the first and that of 1716, the _Terence_ appeared in a seventh edition in 1729. Nor was Echard's audience merely made up of students. If one of his main targets was contemporary dramatists, he would have been elated to learn that William Congreve owned a copy of the first edition of both translations.[7]

The Prefaces are perhaps a little disingenuous in acknowledging Echard's and his collaborators' debt to the contemporary French cla.s.sical scholar and translator, Anne Dacier. On both occasions Echard paid her some tribute. What he does not mention is that the two volumes seem to be modelled on her example. The _Terence_ translates the plays which had appeared in her _Les comedies de Terence_ (Paris, 1688), and it is significant that despite his claims that he wished to translate more than three of Plautus' comedies, he in fact translated only those three which Mme. Dacier had already done in her _Les comedies de Plaute_ (Paris, 1683). Moreover, the notes and to some extent the Prefaces, are modelled on the French scholar's work: Echard's notes are often directly dependent upon Mme. Dacier's and are exactly described by her account of her own volume as being "avec de remarques et un examen de chaque comedie selon les regles du theatre."

The views on translation put forward by the Prefaces are an intelligent exposition of progressive contemporary notions of the art. The belief in literal translation which characterizes Jonson and Marvell in the earlier years of the century had been displaced by the more liberal concept of "imitation." Roscommon is a representative of this freer att.i.tude, while Dryden's more severe theory of "paraphrase," whatever his practice may have been, stands somewhere between the two positions.

Like Ozell and Gildon, and later Pope, Echard's aim, whether translating by himself or collectively, was to imitate the spirit of his author in English. "A meer _Verbal Translation_ is not to be expected, that wou'd sound so horribly, and be more obscure than the Original . . . . We couldn't have kept closer . . . without too much treading upon the Author's Heels, and destroying our Design of giving it an easie, _Comick Style_, most agreeable to our present Times" (_Terence's Comedies_, p. xx). To this end it was necessary to tone down the "familiarity and bluntness in [Terence's] Discourse" which were "not so agreeable with the Manners and Gallantry of our Times." This was intended to bring Terence up to the level of gentility for which he was credited by compensating for the barbarity of Roman social manners. But the translation was willing to go further than this: it added to the Roman comedy what Echard thought English comedy excelled in, "humour"-- "In some places we have had somewhat more of _Humour_ than the Original, to make it still more agreeable to our Age . . . ." (_ibid._, p. xxii).

When speaking for himself alone in the Preface to the _Plautus_, Echard's claims were less grandiose. Here the translation seems much more specifically aimed at schoolboys, and Echard made firm claims for his literalness (sig. b1-2v). On the other hand, he went out of his way to praise Dryden's _Amphitryon_ (1690) for the freedom it had taken with the original, which, said Echard, "may serve for one Instance of what Improvements our Modern Poets have made on the Ancients, when they built upon their Foundations" (sig. b3v-4).

The praise of Dryden is to some extent double-edged since it is an implicit a.s.sertion of the point made in both Prefaces, that English writers had much to learn from the Roman dramatists. Echard uses the Prefaces to a.s.sess and compare Plautus and Terence, but he also uses them as a springboard for a critique of the state of English comedy.

Like much neocla.s.sical criticism it is, of course, derivative. The stock comparison of Plautus and Terence comes from Anne Dacier,[8] and Echard's footprints can be tracked in the snows of Cicero, Scaliger, Rapin, Andre Dacier, the Abbe D'Aubignac, and Dryden. Having set the Ancients against the Moderns, Echard is able to attack the looseness of English double plots by pointing to Terence's success within a similar structure. He is also able to praise Terence's genteel style. Against this, Echard admits, along with his precursors, Plautus' superiority in point of _vis comica_, which he defines, interestingly, as "_Liveliness of Intreague_" (sig. a8). Echard is thus able to claim, with considerable conviction, the superiority of English comedy in several areas, especially in its variety, its humour, "in some Delicacies of _Conversation_," and "above all in _Repartee_" (_Terence's Comedies_, p. xi).

What the English had to learn, in Echard's view, was "regularity," that is, the discipline imposed upon a dramatist by observing the Unities, and obeying the other "rules of the drama" (such as the _liaisons_), in pursuit of verisimilitude and tautness of structure. Echard's main hope was that his translation and notes would correct his contemporaries'

habit of ignoring the Roman dramatists' "_essential_ Beauties," and "contenting themselves with considering the _superficial_ ones, such as the _Stile_, _Language_, _Expression_, and the like, without taking much notice of the Contrivance and Management, of the _Plots, Characters, etc._" (_Plautus_, sig. a1). The remarkable fact about Echard's discussion of these matters, despite his dependence at times upon that arch-pedant, the Abbe D'Aubignac,[9] is the critical intelligence with which he puts forward his argument. Unlike many neocla.s.sical critics, Echard keeps his eyes fixed firmly on the strengths and weaknesses of Restoration comedy within the context of previous English comedy and the Restoration stage itself. A sign of this is his attention to practical details, which take the form of one or two valuable notes on the theatre of his day. We learn, for instance, that actors were in the "custom of looking . . . full upon the Spectators," and that some members of the Restoration audience took printed copies into the playhouse in order to be able to follow the play on the stage.[10] It is a real loss to the historian of drama and to the critic that these two volumes were Laurence Echard's solitary adventure into the criticism and translation of drama.

University of Leeds

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. _The Comedies of Terence: Echard's Translations Edited with a Foreword by Robert Graves_ (London, 1963), pp. viii-ix. Graves (p. ix) says that Echard's translation of Terence was made in 1689, when he was only nineteen. I have been unable to find any evidence in support of this statement.

2. No copy of the _Duke of Savoy's Dominions_ appears to be extant. It is not recorded in Wing, but appears in _The Term Catalogues, 1688-1709_ . . ., ed. Edward Arber (1903-1906), II, 380. This must have been much smaller than Echard's other publications in this year: it cost only 3d. against the first two's 1s. 6d.

3. _A General Ecclesiastical History_ . . . . (London, 1702), sig. b1.

4. _The Letters of Joseph Addison_, ed. Walter Graham (Oxford, 1941), p. 504.

5. Recently republished with an introduction by Peter Ure as No.

XIV (1958) in the University of Liverpool Reprints.

6. "Dryden, Tonson, and Subscriptions for the 1697 _Virgil_,"

_PBSA_, LVII (1963), 147-48. Raymond Havens makes a rather different emphasis in his "Changing Taste in the Eighteenth Century," _PMLA_, XLIV (1929), 501-18.

7. Items 450 and 595 in _The Library of William Congreve_, ed.

John C. Hodges (New York, 1955). [[Project Gutenberg e-text 27606]]

8. _Les comedies de Plaute_, ed. and trans. Anne Dacier (Paris, 1683). For a further statement of her views, see _Les comedies de Terence_ (Paris, 1688).

9. In particular, see his discussion of the _liaisons_ which is derived from Francois Hedelin, Abbe D'Aubignac, _La practique du theatre_ . . . . (Paris, 1669), pp. 117-19, 315-20. D'Aubignac's work was translated into English as _The Whole Art of the Stage_ . . . . (1684).

10. _Plautus's Comedies_, sig. a8v; _Terence's Comedies_, p. xiii.

THE

PREFACE.

Since long +Prefaces+ are lately much in Fashion upon this and the like Occasions, why may not we be allow'd some tolerable Liberty in this kind; provided we keep close to our Author, and our own Translation of him. As for our Author, wherever Learning, Wit or Judgment have flourish'd, this Poet has always had an extraordinary Reputation. To mention all his Excellencies and Perfections were a Task too difficult for us, and perhaps for the greatest Criticks alive; so very few there are that perfectly understand all of 'em; yet we shall venture at some of the most Remarkable.

To begin with him in general. He was certainly the most Exact, the most Elaborate, and withal the most Natural of all +Dramatick+ Poets; His +Stile+ so neat and pure, his +Characters+ so true and perfect, his +Plots+ so regular and probable, and almost every thing so absolutely just and agreeable, that he may well seem to merit that Praise which several have given him, +That he was the most correct Author in the World.+ To compare him with +Plautus+, the other great +Latin Comedian+, we may observe that +Plautus+ had more Wit and Spirit, but +Terence+ more Sense and Judgment; the former's Stile was rich and glaring, the latter's more close and even: +Plautus+ had the most dazelling out-side, and the most lively Colours, but +Terence+ drew the finest Figures and Postures, and had the best Design; the one pleas'd the Vulgar, but our Author the Better sort of people; the former wou'd usually set his Spectators into a loud Laughter, but the latter steal 'em into a sweet Smile that shou'd continue from the beginning to the end of the Representation: in short, +Plautus+ was more lively and vigorous, and so fitter for +Action+; and +Terence+ more grave and serious, and so fitter for +Reading+. Tho' +Plautus+'s Beauties were very extraordinary, yet he had his Faults and Indecorums very frequent; but +Terence+'s Excellencies (tho' possibly inferior to some of the others) were more general, better dispers'd, and closer continu'd; and his Faults so inconsiderable, and so very few, that +Scaliger+ said, +There were not three to be found throughout the Six Plays.+ So that our Author seems to want nothing to make him absolutely compleat, but only that same +Vis Comica+ that +Caesar+ wishes he had, and which +Plautus+ was Master of in such a high degree. We shall determine nothing between 'em, but leave 'em good Friends as we found 'em.

This may be sufficient for our Author's Excellencies in general; for his particular ones, we shall begin with his Stile, a thing he has been admir'd for in all Ages, and truly he deserves it; for certainly no one was ever more accurate, natural, and clear in his Expressions than he. But to be a little more particular in this Matter, we shall give you some few of our Author's Excellencies in this kind under three or four different Heads.

And first, We may observe of his +Words+, that they are generally nicely chosen, extreamly proper and significant; and many of 'em carry so much Life and Force in 'em, that they can hardly be express'd in any other Language without great disadvantage to the Original. To instance in these following. +Qui c.u.m ingeniis _conflictatur_ ejusmodi.+ +Ut animus in spe atque in timore usque ante hac _attentus_ fuit.+ +Nisi me lacta.s.ses amantem, & falsa spe _produceres_.+ +_Pam._ Mi Pater. _Si._ Quid mi Pater? Quasi tu _hujus indigeas_ Patris.+ +Tandem ego non illa caream, si sit opus, vel totum triduum. _Par._ Hui? _Universum triduum._+ +Quam _elegans_ formarum spectator siem.+ +Hunc comedendum & deridendum vobis _propino_.+

We shall next take notice of one or two Instances of the Shortness and Clearness of his Narrations; as that which +Tully+ mentions.

+Funus interim procedit sequimur, ad Sepulchrum venimus, in ignem posita est, Fletur.+ Another may be that in +Phormio+. +Persuasum est homini, factum est, ventum est, vincimur, duxit.+