Jonson's Virgil: Surrey and Phaer NOTES AND DOCUMENTS

apparently from the Quarto of Poetaster, in the third Middleburgh edition of the Amores (probably 1602). The charge of plagiarism, delicately alluded to by Moul, made typically by Malone ('he has merely altered a word here & there, generally for the worse') ,2 is unconsidered. Jonson cannot have expected the lines to go unrecognized, and he may not even be responsible for the changes. Bringing the English closer to the Latin, smoothing the metre - these are of a piece with changes introduced by Marlowe between the two previous editions.3 And whether or not the changes are Jonson's, they are best understood, as Moul proposes, as the 'nesting' of a specimen of translation, recognizably not Jonson's own, in a play preoccupied with issues of translation as a cultural process that involves various forms of mediation, including critically observed previous translations. In a play concerned more generally with issues of moral and stylistic transparency, Ovid's way of talking is slightly opaque. Even when he is represented dramatically, as in parting from Julia at IV.ix-x, Ovid is made to speak a version of his own Tristia 1.3, but filtered through Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Chapman's Banquet of Sensed Jonson