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

Lawrence Echard

Lawrence Echard

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

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 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.]

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 attitudes to two Classical dramatists, and as statements of neoclassical 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 - 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. again