[citation needed] In the early 1590s, he was invited to Spain by King Philip II, who became seriously ill. Stanyhurst worked at the great alchemical laboratory in El Escorial.
The translation is considered by the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica an unconscious burlesque of the original in a jargon arranged in what the writer called hexameters.
Thomas Nashe in his preface to Greene's Menaphon ridiculed this performance as his heroicall poetrie, infired ... with an hexameter furie a patterne whereof I will propounde to your judgements.
Of ruffe raffe roaring, with thwick thwack thurlery bouncing.This is a parody, but not a very extravagant one, of Stanyhurst's vocabulary and metrical methods.
Stanyhurst's Latin works include De rebus in Hibernia gestis (Antwerp, 1584) and a life of St Patrick (1587).