Thomas Watson (poet) - Latin Poetry

Latin Poetry

As his reputation grew, Watson's name hecame associated with such literary powers as Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Matthew Roydon and Thomas Achelley. He also gained a following of younger writers like Barnfield and Thomas Nashe, who regarded him as the best Latin poet in England. In 1585 he published his first Latin epic 'Amyntas', eleven days of a shepherd's mourning for the death of his lover, Phyllis. Watson's epic was afterwards translated into English by Abraham Fraunce, without permission of the author (1587). Fraunce's translation was highly criticized. "His sins of translation result generally from an excess of zeal rather than a failure to understand his author's intention." Although a relationship to Torquato Tasso's "Aminta' is often supposed, in fact there is none. In the fourth reprint of his English version in 1591 Fraunce also printed his own translation of the Tasso work, and it is this that has given rise to the confusion. In 1590 he published, in English and Latin verse, his Meliboeus, an elegy on the death of Sir Francis Walsingham.