Présentation de l'éditeur
Combat of the Tongue and Five Senses for Superiority, published in London in 1607; in 1658 Sir Thomas Herbert s Travels into Divers Parts of Africa and Asia Minor,- first published in 163-1; in 1661 John Dauncey s History of his Sacred Majesty Charles II; and in 1678 the anonymous treatise The True and Historical Relation of the Poisoning of Sir Thomas Overbury, published first in 1651. A man who made a business of miscellaneous translation as did van den Bos was obviously not a trained dramatist. A play bearing his name is perhaps, then, even more certain to be a translation than his other admitted adaptations. The method which he used when working with a foreign play can be learned from reading his introduction to the translation of Lingua: Gracious Friend: Considerable time has elapsed since you gave me some English comedies, requesting that I look them over to see whether there was any worth translating. Accepting this proposal, I have chosen the morality Lingua and have, as you requested, translated it into Dutch. I have not followed the words so much as the sense, and have here and there omitted things which, to be sure, would have made the play somewhat longer but certainly not more attractive. These free principles of translation applied to the play under discussion would obscure and ultimately obliterate verbal similarities between the Dutch work and its source. At any rate, a drama written in rhymed couplets, as is the Roode en Witte Roos, could not be a word for word translation. Furthermore in developing the Red Rose and the White from an English source, van den Bos would have felt as free to omit and to condense as he did in translating Lingua. From the above document we are able to glean an even more significant fact. In 1648, three years before the appearance of this tragedy, van den Bos had in his possession a number of English plays, comedie
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
Présentation de l'éditeur
The Roode en Witte Roos, an English translation of which is here presented, was published in Amsterdam in 1651. It is a tragedy of five acts written in rhymed iambic hexameters, consisting of 1856 lines and treating the popular story of King Richard III of England. Although the author, Lambert van den Bos (spelt also Bosch), 1610-1698, does not suggest that the drama is not original, he must have had ultimately an English source, if not a play that he translated or adapted, at least one of the comprehensive English Chronicles. Facts which will be presented in the course of this study make it clear that this Dutch tragedy belongs definitely to the English dramatic tradition of Richard III. I ndeed, a careful examination of the evidence warrants the belief that this play is a version of an English drama, now lost, which in certain features was more like Shakespeare s Richard III than is any extant version of the play. The other literary work of van den Bos makes it probable that he followed his source, whatever it was, with some fidelity. This author owes his position in Dutch literature to his skillful translation and adaptation of foreign works. His translation of Bon Quixote, for example, remained for two centuries the classical Dutch version of this immortal romance. In particular, he made enough translations from the English to demonstrate his understanding of the language and his peculiar interest in the literature. In 1648 he rendered into Dutch the masque-like morality Lingua, or the This translation was announced in Shakespeare Studies of the University of Wisconsin (pp. 231-252) and some of the descriptive facts given there are here restated. The fundamental indebtedness of my study to the unpublished work of Dr. H. de W. Fuller, I take pleasure in acknowledging again here.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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