Englishing the Italian Romance Epic in the Elizabethan Fin-de-Siècle

From 1590–1600 there was an unprecedented proliferation of English translations of Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. These “Englishings” include Harington’s Orlando Furioso in English Heroical Verse (1591), Carew’s Godfrey of Bulloigne (1594), Tofte’s Two Tales, translated out of Ariosto (1597) and Orlando Inamorato (1598), and Edward Fairfax’s Godfrey of Bulloigne (1600). No study has adequately accounted for this decade of Tudor transmission and appropriation of the Italian romance epic. These linguistic transformations were as important for English nationhood and selffashioning as vernacular projects. They signaled a pivotal moment in the status and influence of translation and translators, while also staging Englishness versus the foreign other. This paper will explore how these English translators converted the competing energies of romance and epic from their Italian sources into English texts that helped shape their particular historical milieu: the unstable environment of the Elizabethan fin-de-siècle.