STANYHURST, RICHARD (1547-1618)

This article appears in Volume V25, Page 784 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: SOU-STE

STANYHURST, RICHARD (1547-1618) , English translator of Virgil, was born in Dublin in 1547. His father was recorder of the city, and Speaker of the Irish

House

of Commons in 1557, 1560 and 1568. Richard was sent in 1563 to University College, Oxford, and took his degree five years later. At Oxford he became intimate with Edmund Campian. After leaving the university he studied law at Furnival's Inn and Lincoln's Inn. He contributed in 1557 to

Holinshed

HOLINSHED (or HOLLINGSIIEAD), RAPHAEL (d. c. 158o)

's Chronicles " a playne and perfecte description " of Ireland, and a history of the country during the reign of Henry VIII., which were severely criticized in Barnabe Rich's New Description of Ireland (161o) as a misrepresentation of Irish affairs written from the English standpoint. After the death of his wife, Janet Barnewall, in 1579, Stanyhurst went to the Netherlands. After his second marriage, which took place before 1585, with Helen Copley, he became active in the Catholic cause. He spent some time in Spain, ostensibly practising as a physician, but his real business seems to have been to keep Philip II. informed of the state of Catholic

interest

INTEREST

in England. After his wife's death in 1602 he took holy orders, and became chaplain to the arch-duke Albert in the Netherlands. He never returned to England, and died at Brussels, according to

Wood

, in 1618. He translated into English The First Foure Bookes of Virgil his Aeneis (Leiden, 1582), to give practical proof of the feasibility of Gabriel Harvey's theory that classical rules of prosody could be successfully applied to English poetry. The translation is an unconscious

burlesque

BURLESQUE (Ital. burlesco, from burla, a joke, fun, playful
trick
- TRICK
)

of the

original

ORIGINAL

in a

jargon

JARGON

arranged in what the writer called hexameters. Thomas Nashe in his preface to

Greene

's Menaphon ridiculed this performance as his " heroicall poetrie, infired . . . with an hexameter furie ... a patterne whereof I will propounde to your judgements. ..
Then did he make heaven's vault to rebounde, with rounce robble hobble
Of ruffe raffe roaring, with thwick thwack thurlery bouncing."
This is a parody, but not a very extravagant one, of Stanyhurst's vocabulary and metrical methods.
His son, William Stanyhurst (16021663), was a voluminous writer of Latin religious works, one of which, Dei immortalis in corpore "mortali patientis historia, was widely popular, and was translated into many languages.usually rhyming, but always recurring, the idea of fixed re-petition of form being essential to it. At the close of the 16th century the word stanza began to be used with an adjective to designate a particular species, as the Spenserian stanza," because Spenser had invented that nine-lined form for his Faerie Queen; or " Ariosto's stanza " as Drayton de-scribed what is now known as ottava rima, because Ariosto had written prominently in it. By " stanzaic law" is meant the law which regulates the form and succession of stanzas. The stanza is a modern development of the strophe of the ancients, modified by the requirements of rhyme. (See VERSE; STROPHE; SPENSERIAN STANZA.)

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