Of spices and spies: Paradise lost, Os Lusíadas, and Richard Fanshawe’s Lusiad (1655)

• Main Author: SOON, Emily
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Cultural History; Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3605
• Institution: Singapore Management University

It has long been thought that John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) engages with Os Lusíadas (1572), the Portuguese epic written by Luís Vaz de Camões about Vasco da Gama’s 1497–99 voyage from Lisbon to India, and that Milton probably did so using the English Lusiad (1655) produced by the royalist, diplomat, and translator Richard Fanshawe. However, scant attention has been paid to exploring Fanshawe’s treatment of the material Milton is believed to have referenced. This essay illuminates how Fanshawe subtly yet significantly reworked Camões’s poetry, suggesting that the allusions Milton is thought to have made to Os Lusíadas should be viewed as existing—intentionally or otherwise—in conversation with the opinions Fanshawe imbued his translation with too. This essay complicates the established critical perception that Milton was hostile to his Portuguese counterpart by revealing surprising similarities between Milton’s and Camões’s presentation of the spices traded across the early modern world, contending that it is the English Lusiad, not the Iberian original, that exists in opposition to Paradise Lost. This essay further posits that Satan’s address to Chaos in Paradise Lost, an incident that has previously been as read as parodying Camões’s portrayal of global commerce, can profitably also be read in connection with a domestic issue that Fanshawe introduced and that Camões had little to do with—namely, royalist espionage. Overall, this essay extends our understanding of the relationships among Milton, Camões, and Fanshawe, and contributes to the burgeoning fields of study on early modern translation and globalization.