The Householder’s Philosophy (1588)

Summary

CIRCUMSTANCES OF PUBLICATION

The Householder's Philosophy, the first complete English translation of a work by Torquato Tasso, was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 6 February 1588 as ‘the Philosophicall Discourse of the householder’. It was printed by John Charlewood for Thomas Hacket in the same year (STC 23702.5). As Kirk Melnikoff points out, Hacket had a ‘career-long penchant for publishing translations’, which ‘would have distinguished him from many other Elizabethan publishers’. ‘As a distributor of translated material’, Melnikoff adds, ‘Hacket was able to capitalize not only on the extensive resources of continental, scholastic, and classical material but also on the ever-growing numbers of middle-class readers.’ Hacket's desire to cater to this segment of readership is evident in his repeatedly issuing ‘books oriented towards the concern of the middling classes with self-improvement’, books that all ‘present thinly-veiled conduct guides for a bourgeois audience’. From 1583 onwards, Hacket worked almost exclusively with Charlewood, who, as Jason Lawrence observes, was ‘responsible at this time for the most significant body of Italian books to be printed in London which do not originate from [John] Wolfe’, the foremost London specialist in the publication of Italian books, who had also published in 1584 an incomplete translation of Tasso's epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (1581) by Scipione Gentili in three separate volumes.5 Kyd's book was therefore placed at the perfect juncture of the printer's and the publisher's interests; in addition, as Erne remarks,

Texts dealing with home and estate management were far from unusual in the sixteenth century. Anthony Fitzherbert's Book of Husbandry …, first printed in 1523, went through twenty editions by 1600; Thomas Tusser's A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (1557) … was reprinted twice, then enlarged to Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (1573) …, and reprinted eleven times before the end of the century. Barnabe Googe's translation of the work of Conrad Heresback of Cleves appeared as Four Bookes of Husbandrie in 1577 … and was reprinted four times until the turn of the century. H. S. Bennett explains that ‘many a London merchant, having made his money in trade and invested in a country place, was buying books which described methods of leading success-fully a rural life’.