Dictionary of Literary Biography on Edward Sherburne

Edward Sherburne exemplifies both the seventeenth-century mingling of humanistic and scientific disciplines and the changing practice of the poetics of translation. As a Royalist civil servant, scholar, and poet, he was at the center of the group of Cavalier poets surrounding Thomas Stanley, counting among his acquaintances Thomas Carew, Thomas May, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, John Denham, and James Shirley; he also corresponded with a wide variety of scientists, scholars, and antiquarians, ranging from Isaac Vossius to Anthony Wood. In his own time Sherburne was respected not only for his learning but also for his poetic ability; in his dedication to Theatrum Poetarum (1675) Edward Phillips praises Sherburne's translations as discovering "a more pure Poetical Spirit and Fancy, then many others can justly pretend to in their original Works," and his Senecan translations were praised by Gerald Langbaine in An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691) as "the best Versions we have extant, of any of Seneca's; and show the Translator a Gentleman of Learning, and Judgment." As an exact poetic translator Sherburne has a significant place in the changing discourse of translation at the time, in which translation was increasingly seen as an original poetic effort comparable to imitation.

Edward Sherburne biography

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