Abstract The first translation of the pseudo-Virgilian Culex into a vernacular language, published by Spenser in 1591, was prefaced with a sonnet, which has always been read as a dedication to his deceased patron, the Earl of Leicester. It can also, however, be interpreted as a prosopopoeia, in which ‘Virgil’ is presented as addressing Octavian, in an extension of the Culex proem inspired by and modelled on the so-called ‘pre-proem’ of the Aeneid , which Spenser had already translated as the opening of The Faerie Queene . The simple shift of perspective which enables us to see this alternative in the ambiguous sonnet turns out to have surprisingly far-reaching implications, revealing striking continuities in the forms taken by Virgilian reception (involving pseudepigraphy, biofiction and allegorical interpretation) from antiquity to late sixteenth-century England. The act of translation itself, in Spenser’s conception—informed by Laurence Humphrey’s 1559 treatise, Interpretatio linguarum —emerges as an imaginative and creative literary process, in which the identities of the original poet and his translator can merge into one.
Syrithe Pugh (Wed,) studied this question.