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Elizabethan poets who might easily have been forgotten but for some
accident of history or for a brief encounter with literary success. In
the case of Robert Tofte, the popularity of French and Italian
literature in early seventeenth-century England was the happy accident
of history; the taste of the reading public for translations of
continental works is all that has kept "R. T. Gentleman" from total
anonymity.
Tofte's Works
Robert Tofte's published canon consists of four original works
CLaura, 1597; Alba, 1598; Three Elegies appended to the second edition
of Ariosto's Satires, 1611; and The Fruits of Jealousie appended to The
Blazon of Jealousie, 1615], five translations from the Italian (Two
Tales, Translated out of Ariosto, 1597; Orlando Inamorato, 1598; Of
Mariage and Wiving, 1599; Ariosto's Satyres, 1608; and The Blazon of
Jealousie, 1615), and one translation from French (Honours Academie,
1610). The canon of his unpublished works includes three manuscripts;
an original prose treatise (Discourse of the five laste Popes, 1598),
another translation from French (The Loves of Armide, 1597), and an
untitled, undated poem purportedly describing a visit to America. In
addition, The Batchelars Banquet (1603), an anonymous translation of
the French prose discourse Les Quinze Joyes de Mariage, has been attributed
to him. There is not, however, unanimous agreement on a fixed
canon, and the three most recent bibliographies of Tofte differ markedly. 7
Franklin Williams has noted the existence of three identifying
characteristics in the Tofte canon: the title page ascription