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Abraham Fraunce’s Amintas Dale (1591) is a generic hybrid, half mythography and half mythological poetry. The mythographical elements likely date back to a draft mythography that Fraunce had begun at some point before 1588, and which he later drew on to create a work celebrating the fifth anniversary of Sir Philip Sidney’s death. Drawing on symbol theory, France conceives of fables as free-ranging poetic metaphors, which thinly veil their meaning, but are accessible to any intelligent reader. As part of a living tradition of poetry, fables are a form of communication that contemporary writers can draw on and contribute to. In Amintas Dale, Fraunce does just that, by extending Ovid’s Metamorphoses to the late sixteenth century, and weaving Sir Philip Sidney into the mythological narrative.

In the sixteenth century, the word ‘paraphrase’ came into English to describe texts that ‘expounded’ their sources and were therefore not really translations. But the distinction collapsed as ‘paraphrase’ was at once adopted to describe translations too: ‘paraphrase’ meant both ‘translation’ and ‘not‐translation’. I trace this ambivalence from the mid‐sixteenth century up to Dryden, discussing Erasmus's paraphrases together with poem‐translations by Abraham Fraunce, Thomas Middleton, George Sandys, Obadiah Walker, Richard Baker, Matthew Stevenson and others.

The first chapter focuses on the literary impact of the enchantress Armida’s arrival in the Italian poem, examining how the poets Abraham Fraunce and Samuel Daniel respond directly to canto 4 of Tasso’s epic. In The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), the earliest example of English engagement with Gerusalemme liberata, Fraunce draws most heavily on this canto of the Italian poem, and particularly the descriptions of Armida, for his abundant rhetorical illustrations from Tasso’s work. The Complaint of Rosamond (1592) was the first English poem to engage with the figure of Armida herself, demonstrated in Daniel’s frequent allusions to Tasso’s enchantress in relation to his own spectral narrator, many of which have not been previously detected. The first chapter also examines the numerous English poetic responses in the first half of the 1590s to the celebrated song from a later amorous episode, the canto della rosa heard in Armida’s garden in canto 16, in translations and imitations by Robert Southwell, Spenser and Daniel, as well as allusions in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593), to illustrate how swift and pervasive the impact of Tasso’s epic on late Elizabethan verse was.

This chapter surveys translations of comedy in the 1550–1660 period. Thomas Randolph, for instance, turned Aristophanes' Plutus into a full-scale English play, the sole thoroughgoing attempt in the period to recast one of Aristophanes' comedies for the contemporary stage. Translated Roman comedies include Vulgaria Quaedam ex Terencio and Floures for Latine spekynge. Scripted Italian comedy has an intermittent presence in translation or fairly close adaptation throughout the period. About half the instances are in Latin, most if not all of them for performance at Cambridge. These include Abraham Fraunce's Victoria (c.1582; Luigi Pasqualigo's Il Fedele), Walter Hawkesworth's Leander (1599; Sforza 'Oddi's Erofi lomachia) and Labyrinthus (1603; Giambattista della Porta's La Cintia).