Arthur Golding

In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Golding family had prospered in the cloth trade, and by marrying heiresses had become fairly wealthy and respectable by the time of Arthur's birth, probably in London.

But Oxford died in August 1562, and his son Edward, the 17th earl, became a ward in the house of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, in The Strand.

In his Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (1565), Thomas Peend says that he had already started on his own version when he heard that another gentleman -- Golding -- was engaged on the same task, and so he gave up.

[6] Golding's translation, however, was read by Shakespeare and Spenser and "conveys a spirited Ovid with all his range of emotion and diversity of plot".

[7] His translations are clear, faithful and fluent, as seen in this excerpt where Ovid compares blood gushing from Pyramus' wound to water bursting from a pipe:[8] And when he had bewept and kist the garment which he knew, Receyve thou my bloud too (quoth he) and therewithal he drew His sworde, the which among his guttes he thrust, and by and by Did draw it from the bleeding wound beginning for to die, And cast himself upon his backe, the bloud did spin on hie As when a Conduite pipe is crackt, the water bursting out Doth shote it selfe a great way off and pierce the Ayre about.

Its influence has been detected in Spenser's Faerie Queene, in John Studley's translations of Seneca, in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Edward II, and many more.

[3] In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound reproduced passages of the translation, noting: "Though it is the most beautiful book in the English language, I am not citing it for its decorative purposes but its narrative quality.

A Calvinist, he translated contemporary Protestant leaders: Heinrich Bullinger, William, Prince of Orange, Theodore Beza, and Philippe de Mornay.

[11] He translated also Leonardo Bruni's History of the War Against the Goths, Froissart's Chronicles in Sleidan's epitome, and Aesop's fables.

[11] Further translations were: the Commentaries of Caesar (1563, 1565, 1590), the history of Junianus Justinus (1564), the theological writings of Niels Hemmingsen (1569) and David Chytraeus (1570), Theodore Beza's Tragedie of Abrahams Sacrifice (1575), the De Beneficiis of Seneca the Younger (1578), the geography of Pomponius Mela (1585), the Polyhistor of Gaius Julius Solinus (1587), Calvin's commentaries on the Psalms (1571), his sermons on the Galatians and Ephesians, on Deuteronomy and the Book of Job.

Sir William Cecil passed the manuscript to Golding for completion sometime between Brende's death in 1560 or 1561 (the exact year he died is not certain) and 1564.

He completed a translation begun by Philip Sidney from Philippe de Mornay, A Worke concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion (1587).