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Coriolanus. The scribal use of “Trevisa” in Digby 233 works in the same manner. It is not the
actual proficiency of Trevisa as translator that works on an audience but the effects of his
authorial replication in culture. As such, the compilators of On the Governance sign the
translation as a “Trevisa” creation not because they owe fidelity to the text’s content but because
they owe a fidelity to the cultural image and fame of its translator.
Seeing “Trevisa”’s metonymic value as a signature helps us understand the lack of
dissemination of this English translation of a very popular Latin work. Although De Regimine
and literature of princely advice were widely popular in late medieval culture, it is doubtful that
“Trevisa” could entice a wide readership for an unfinished exemplar, with a public already used
to receiving finished “Trevisa” translations of Higden and Bartholomaeus. Particular
Shakespeare performances have a lesser following than their metonymic dispersal in culture,
even as they are responsible for how society construes the idea of “Shakespeare.” In the same
way, On the Governance, reflecting only the unfinished projection of a metonym, would have
found but a small niche on the wider dissemination of “Trevisa” within English culture.
7. Vernacular Writing: Disseminating a “Trevisa” Translation
This means that the metonymic value of “Trevisa” depended on reading practices his
work engendered and not on the content of his translations. There was more to a “Trevisa”
translation than the rendering of Latinate content in English. Digby 233’s scribes knew that the
glosses in On the Governance did not directly represent the wishes of an authoritative text or
writer as the text they possessed was but an incomplete draft. Nevertheless, they signed them
“Trevisa” because they cognized in them a habitual use of signs associated with that name: the
usurpation of vernacular language for the benefits of a Latinate-speaking culture.
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