Thomas May

Thomas May (1594/95 – 13 November 1650) was an English poet, dramatist and historian of the Renaissance era.

May was born in Mayfield, Sussex, the son of Sir Thomas May, a minor courtier. He matriculated at Sidney Sussex, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1613. He wrote his first published poem while at Cambridge, an untitled three-stanza contribution to the University's memorial collection of poems on the death of Henry Prince of Wales in 1612. Although the majority of this volume's poems are in Latin, May's (along with a few others) is in English. It uses the trope of Pythagorean transmigration, which he re-employs in later works.

In 1615 May registered as a lawyer at Gray's Inn in London. There is no record of what he did for the next five years.

During the 1620s May was associated with dramatic circles. In 1620 his romantic comedy, The Heir, was performed by the Players of the Revels. Although this company usually performed at the rowdy, open-air Red Bull Theatre, May's play was first performed privately (according to its only published edition), and is tonally ill-suited to a plebeian city audience. During the early 1620s May befriended the courtier, poet and diplomat Thomas Carew, who contributed a poem to the published text of The Heir in 1622, and probably also Philip Massinger. Massinger wrote at least one play for the short-lived Revels company (The Virgin Martyr, with Thomas Dekker) and shared May's generally Roman interests. In 1629 May wrote a commendatory poem for Massinger's The Roman Actor, describing him as his 'very deserving friend'. May knew Ben Jonson personally by the late 1620s, if not earlier.

In 1625 May was responsible for the verse translations in Kingsmill Long's translation of William Barclay's Arcadian political allegory.

May's career-defining work was his translation of the Latin poet Lucan's Bellum Civile. Lucan's is an unfinished narrative of the downfall of the Roman republic in the civil wars between Pompey and Julius Caesar: it laments the loss of republican liberty and institutions and condemns Caesar's immoral ambition. The first three books of May's translation appeared in 1626 and the full ten a year later (with different printers); it was reprinted in 1631, 1635 and 1650, each time with minor corrections. The 1627 edition boasted dedications of Books II to IX to prominent English noblemen, many of whom were actual or suspected opponents of Charles I's ongoing attempts to tax without Parliament. The overall work was dedicated to William, 2nd Earl of Devonshire. May compares the fortitude and patriotism of these aristocrats to the patrician heroes of Lucan's doomed republic. These dedications disappear from later editions and there is some evidence they were defaced or removed, possibly by censors.

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