[1] He is known for his translations of Ariosto's Satires and his sonnet sequences Alba, The Months Minde of a Melancholy Lover (1598) and Laura, The Toyes of a Traveller: Or, The Feast of Fancie (1597).
He also authored a partial translation of Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato and was possibly responsible for the popular and anonymous Batchelar's Banquet (1603) as well.
Tofte is perhaps most famous for his incidental reference to Love's Labour's Lost in Alba, the first mention of that Shakespeare play in print.
Born the son of a fishmonger, Tofte eventually moved in aristocratic and literary circles and invariably presented himself as "R. T. Gentleman" on the title pages of his published works.
He studied at Oxford beginning in 1582[2] and travelled in France and Italy between 1591 and 1594, where he perfected his Italian and French and possibly met Samuel Daniel and Giovanni Battista Guarini.
[5] Generations of critics have repeatedly characterised Tofte as a "minor Elizabethan," but he added productively to the cultures of literary translation and continental interest in Renaissance England.
Rather than literally conveying the content of the text or imposing a moralistic interpretation of his own, he often enhances and enriches it in a way that qualifies his misogynistic reputation.
Tofte's efforts to "English" works from both French and Italian also demonstrate a critical and undervalued aspect of literary translation: exercise in language-learning.
[6] Dedicated Lady Lucy Percy, this book consists of a collection of short poems "most parte conceiued in Italie, and some of them brought foorth in England."
It is dedicated to Mistress Anne Herne, but the true "Laura" or "Alba" (Tofte's muse) appears to have been a lady of the name Caryll.
[12] Though the title page of this book indicates Gervase Markham as author, Tofte would later claim it three times in his translation of The Blazon of Jealousie.
An interminable romance, it is nevertheless faithful to Montreux's original Cinquiesme et Dernier Liure des Bergeries de Iulliette (Paris, 1598).
[20] Strangely, the manuscript was dedicated to Richard Bancroft, the church authority who would burn Tofte's Of Mariage and Wiuing a year later.