Realigning English Vernacular Poetics Through Metrical Experiment: Sixteenth‐Century Translation and the Elizabethan Quantitative Verse Movement

This article examines one of the crucial links between the flourishing activity of Elizabethan translators and 16th‐century vernacular poetics: the controversy about a possible reform of English metre according to classical precedent, later known as the Elizabethan quantitative verse movement. Far from subordinating critical concerns to the demands of translational practice or political decorum, Elizabethan translations, such as Richard Stanyhurst’s version of the first four books of Virgil’s Aeneid , were often a privileged site for literary experiment, thus provoking controversy and stimulating a more self‐conscious reflection on vernacular poetic practice. Re‐examining the allegedly futile and eccentric discussions about a quantitative reform of English metre from the point of view of translation studies demonstrates how even a supposed dead end in literary history was in fact part of the complex process in which 16th‐century English literary identity was slowly being developed and redefined through interlingual dialogue.