George Turberville
Woodcut of a Falconer, from George
Turberville´s
The Booke of Faulconrie or Hauking and the Noble
Arte of Venerie
(also called the Book of Hunting) (1575)
George Turberville, or Turbervile (1540? -
before 1597) was an English poet, second son of
Nicholas Turberville of Whitchurch, Dorset, who
belonged to an old Dorsetshire family, the
D'Urbervilles of Thomas Hardy's novel, Tess of
the d'Urbervilles.
Turberville became a scholar of Winchester
College in 1554, and in 1561 was made a fellow
of New College, Oxford. In 1562 he began to
study law in London, and gained a reputation,
according to Anthony ŕ Wood, as a poet and man
of affairs. He accompanied Thomas Randolph on a
special mission to Moscow to the court of Ivan
the Terrible in 1568. Of his Poems describing
the Places and Manners of the Country and People
of Russia mentioned by Wood, only three metrical
letters describing his adventures survive, and
these were reprinted in Hakluyt's Voyages
(1589).
His Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs and Sonnets
appeared "newly corrected with additions" in
1567. In the same year he published translations
of the Heroycall Epistles of Ovid, and of the
Eglogs of Mantuan (Gianbattista Spagnuoli, also
known as Mantuanus), and in 1568 A Plaine Path
to Perfect Vertue from Dominicus Mancinus. The
Book of Falconry or Hawking and the Noble Art of
Venerie (printed together in 1575) may both be
assigned to Turberville. The second of these is
a translation from the French of La Venerie de
Jaques du Fouilloux (1561). The title page of
his Tragical Tales (1587), which are
translations from Boccaccio and Bandello, says
that the book was written at the time of the
author's troubles. What these were is unknown,
but Wood says he was living and in high esteem
in 1594.
