Translation in Love's Labour's Lost

We are used to thinking of translation as a prominent Elizabethan activity, remembering Matthiessen’s famous dictum – “A study of Elizabethan translation is a study of the means by which the Renaissance came to England” (Matthiessen 1931: 1) – but it is equally true that translation in the Elizabethan age would not have the strength and resonance we attribute to it if it hadn’t been the result of two previous centuries of translational activity. The English Renaissance did not of course invent translation, but it woke to the consciousness of the translation act and its cultural implications. Within this context, the relationship between Shakespeare and early modern translation is an area of research that can still surprise us. In his plays we can find the results of a reflection on the different modalities of translation that were being developed, and that in some cases had already reached a notable level of sophistication – from the semantic exploration into contemporary foreign vernaculars promoted by lexicographers such as John Florio to the re-creation and merging of different literary sources so obviously present in many of Shakespeare’s “Italian” plays. The very word translation, as used by the playwright, evokes different modalities of transformation and rebirth. Shakespeare thus moves away from a number of conventions on translation practices established in his time in order to explore new possibilities, whose development can be charted in the progress of his dramatic writing. In this paper I analyse Shakespeare’s exploration of the meaning of translation by looking at a number of plays, focussing especially on Love’s Labour’s Lost.