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54 The Translator’s Invisibility(1647) and Christopher Wase’s translation of Sophocles’ Electra(1649). 4The one place name Denham includes in his version of Priam’sdeath, “Asia,” may be taken as an allusion to the Orientalism inCaroline court culture. Denham had himself contributed to thistrend with The Sophy (1642), a play intended for court productionand set in Persia. But the allusiveness of the translation is morespecific. “The Scepters of all Asia bow’d” to Charles in courtmasques where the king and queen enacted a moral conquest offoreign rulers by converting their nations to Platonic love. InAurelian Townshend’s Tempe Restor’d (1632), the royal couplepreside over the reformation of Circe’s sensual reign, figured in “allthe Antimasques, consisting of Indians and Barbarians, whonaturally are bestiall, and others which are voluntaries, but halfetransformed into beastes” (Townshend 1983:97).Yet more striking is Denham’s curious addition to the Latin text:“Thus fell the King, who yet survived the State,/With such a signaland peculiar Fate.” Virgil’s omission of any reference to the deadking’s afterlife reveals Denham’s own belief in the continuing vitalityof the Stuart monarchy after the regicide. Although Charles I wasexecuted, the monarchy “survived the State” instituted by Parliament,initially a Commonwealth governed by a Council of State, which waslater redefined to function as an advisor to a Lord Protector; this wasa “signal and peculiar” survival for the king because it took the formof a court in exile and royalist conspiracy at home, because, in otherwords, the king lived on but not in his kingdom. In the politicalclimate of the 1650s, with the Protectorate resorting to oppressivemeasures to quell royalist insurgency, it would be difficult for aCaroline sympathizer not to see any parallel between thedecapitations of Priam and Charles. But in this climate it would alsobe necessary for a royalist writer like Denham to use such an obliquemode of reference as an allusion in an anonymous translation.Translation was particularly useful in royalist cultural politics, LoisPotter suggests, because it was viewed as “transcendence, the healingwholeness that removes controversy and contradiction” (Potter1989:52–53). In Denham’s translation, the monarchy “survived” itsdestruction.The fact that Denham intended his translation to serve a royalistfunction is borne out by a comparison with his predecessors, whichhighlights the subtle changes he introduced to bring the Latin textcloser to his political concerns: