Line Cottegnies, Sorbonne Université

“The role of translation and the rise of ‘Secret History’ in England: The Case of The Secret History of the Most Renowned Q. Elizabeth, and the E. of Essex (1680)”

In recent accounts of the history of English literature in the seventeenth century, critics have increasingly moved away from the traditional narratives of the rise of national literature as a mainly domestic phenomenon. Warren Boutcher, for instance, has written eloquently about the need to contextualize English literature in a transnational context, both European and global. This means giving its full due to translation. From the Restoration, England looked towards Continental Europe for new forms, where short fiction had been thriving two decades before it took England by storm (see Helen McMurran, The Spread of Fiction, 2010; Leah Orr, Novel Ventures, 2017). According to Leah Orr in particular, in 1690 alone, the number of translated works of fiction published in London was almost twice that of new works (Novel Ventures). In the second half of the seventeenth century, translations of contemporary fiction from the French thus came in high demand, and some bestsellers led to fierce competitions among booksellers. As revealed by Mish’s bibliography of early novels, French literature, as an alternative and fashionable canon, formed an endlessly renewable material to be freely tapped, digested, and eventually adapted or rejected. To better understand how French fiction was read and contributed to shaping English fiction, this paper focusses on a case study, a French novella with an English subject-matter that was first published anonymously in Paris in 1678, Le Comte d’Essex, histoire angloise, and was translated as early as 1680 as The Secret History of the Most Renowned Q. Elizabeth, and the E. of Essex. This text, situated at the beginning of the craze for French short fiction in England, was agglomerated to a particularly popular subgenre in England, the ‘secret history’, which has recently been the focus of a collection of essays edited by Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell, The Secret History in Literature 1660-1820 (2017). This valuable study fails, however, to acknowledge the role played by translation (and especially translation from the French) in the rise of this variant of historical short fiction in England and it is little concerned with the wider context of the explosion of the novella of sentiment in the period. The appeal of Le Comte d’Essex was such that it was translated twice (in 1680 and 1700), each version going through a great many successive editions. It also led in 1691 to an analogue or imitation, The Secret History of the Duke of Alançon and Queen Elizabeth. This overwhelming success in itself justifies a study like this one. By comparing the two translations, my paper intends to show how the different strategies of translation manifest different forms of reception, and how French texts were seen as constituting a particularly pliable material that could be tailored to answer differing agendas.

Professor Line Cottegnies teaches English early modern literature at Sorbonne Université. She has published a monograph on wonder in Caroline poetry, L’Éclipse du regard (1997), and has co-edited several collections, including Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish with Nancy Weitz (2003) and Women and Curiosity in Early Modern England and France with Sandrine Parageau (2016). She has also edited half of William Shakespeare’s plays for the Gallimard Complete Works (2002-2018) and co-edited two Elizabethan translations of Robert Garnier with Marie-Alice Belle for the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translation Series (2017). She is currently editing three of Aphra Behn’s translations from the French, The Watch, Agnes de Castro and The Discovery of New Worlds for the Cambridge Edition of her Complete Works, while working on a digital edition of the Douai Shakespeare manuscript MS 787.