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 classical 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 comédies de Térence (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 comédies 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 comédie selon les règles 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 attitude, 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 assertion of the point made in both Prefaces, that English writers had much to learn from the Roman dramatists. Echard uses the Prefaces to assess and compare Plautus and Terence, but he also uses them as a springboard for a critique of the state of English comedy. Like much neoclassical 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, André Dacier, the Abbé 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 Repartée” (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 Abbé D’Aubignac,[9] is the critical intelligence with which he puts forward his argument. Unlike many neoclassical 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.