Reversing F. O. Matthiessen's famous description of translation as "an Elizabethan art," Elizabethan literature may well be considered "an art of translation ." Amidst a climate of intense intercultural and intertextual exchange, the cultural figure of translatio studii had become a formative concept in most European vernacular writing of the period. However, due to the comparatively marginal status of English in European literary culture, it was above all translation in the literal sense that became the dominant mode of applying this concept in late 16th-century England....