Marlowe’s translation of the first book of Lucan’s Bellum Ciuile—despite being the first rendering in English of this Latin poem, a widelyread and highly significant work for early modern political debates—has long been considered, together with All Ovid’s Elegies, as an inferior production, nothing more than a juvenile exercise on the part of the future poet-playwright. 1 This was due, as Georgia Brown acknowledged, to the fact that ‘we denigrate texts […] which are translations or imitations because they supposedly lack originality, and conform to collaborative models of productions which we are only just beginning to appreciate’. 2 In early modern England, instead, translations were the means through which the...