SOURCE: Wortham, James. “Arthur Golding and the Translation of Prose.” Huntington Library Quarterly 12, no. 4 (August 1949): 339-67.

In the following essay, Wortham focuses on Golding's translations of Calvin and his translations of histories, highlighting Golding's place in the history of English translations. Wortham admires Golding as a restrained and accurate translator, and suggests the Calvinist influence on his method of translation.

Arthur Golding, for some forty years of his life translator to Englishmen, is best known for his version in heptameter couplets of Ovid's Metamorphoses (1565, 1567). Esteemed for its own moderate worth, the translation is perhaps chiefly remembered for the circumstance of Shakespeare's use of it. The main body of Golding's work, however, is an astonishing bulk of prose translations from Latin and French originals.¹ Study of it suggests real importance for Golding among the translators who were helping to shape English prose to usefulness and beauty in the sixteenth...