Elizabeth I’s Translation of Tacitus: Lambeth Palace Library, MS 683

Preserved at Lambeth Palace Library is a manuscript translation of Tacitus’s Annales, completed in the late sixteenth century. The translation was undertaken, this essay argues, by Elizabeth I. The article makes the case for the queen’s authorship with an appeal to paper stock, provenance, style of translation, and, above all, to the handwriting preserved in the manuscript. The queen’s late hand was strikingly idiosyncratic and the same features which characterize her autograph works are also to be found in the Lambeth translation of Tacitus. The manuscript’s transmission is traced from the Elizabethan court to Lambeth via the collection of Archbishop Thomas Tenison (1636–1715), whose acquisition of Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) manuscripts helped to make Lambeth Palace Library one of the largest collections of State Papers from the Elizabethan era. The article then compares the authorial corrections made to the Lambeth Tacitus with those which Elizabeth made to her other translations with a special focus on the idiosyncrasies of the queen’s late hand. Finally, Elizabeth’s translation is compared with Richard Greenway’s translation of the Annales (1598), highlighting the methods of translation adopted by either translator. While Greenway expands for the sake of clarity, reworking Tacitus’s remarkably terse prose, Elizabeth preserves something of the historian’s celebrated brevity, closely reproducing the syntax of the original. By examining both the material aspects of the manuscript and the stylistic qualities of the translation itself, this article offers the first study of Elizabeth I’s translation of Tacitus.