Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction: the critical landscape
- 1 Virgil and Augustus
- 2 Virgil and the poets: Horace, Ovid and Lucan
- 3 Other voices in Servius: schooldust of the ages
- 4 Dryden's Virgil and the politics of translation
- 5 Dido and her translators
- 6 Philology and textual cleansing
- 7 Virgil in a cold climate: fascist reception
- 8 Beyond the borders of Eboli: anti-fascist reception
- 9 Critical end games
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Dido and her translators
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction: the critical landscape
- 1 Virgil and Augustus
- 2 Virgil and the poets: Horace, Ovid and Lucan
- 3 Other voices in Servius: schooldust of the ages
- 4 Dryden's Virgil and the politics of translation
- 5 Dido and her translators
- 6 Philology and textual cleansing
- 7 Virgil in a cold climate: fascist reception
- 8 Beyond the borders of Eboli: anti-fascist reception
- 9 Critical end games
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The wife of one who is to gain his livelihood by poetry, or by any labour (if any there be) equally exhausting, must either have taste enough to relish her husband's performances, or good-nature sufficient to pardon his infirmities. It was Dryden's misfortune, that Lady Elizabeth had neither the one nor the other; and I dismiss the disagreeable subject by observing, that on no one occasion, when a sarcasm against matrimony could be introduced, has our author failed to season it with such bitterness, as spoke an inward consciousness of domestic misery … When his wife wished to be a book, that she might enjoy more of his company, “Be an almanack, then, my dear,” said the poet, “that I may change you once a-year.”
SIR WALTER SCOTT, Life of DrydenNovember 17 (1878). Sunday. Today, am so delighted to be at home, with my wife and babies and my fire and my Virgil, and to go to church, and to go to bed.
Journal of JOHN D. LONGThe reception of Dido is the richest aspect of Virgilian reception, and the one around which the Augustan battle has perhaps been fought most intensely.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Virgil and the Augustan Reception , pp. 154 - 189Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001