John Studley was an English academic, known as a translator of Seneca

Seneca the Younger

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero...

. He contributed to the Seneca his tenne tragedies translated into English (1581), compiled by Thomas Newton

Thomas Newton (poet)

Thomas Newton was an English physician, clergyman, poet, author and translator.-Life:The eldest son of Edward Newton of Park House, in Butley, a part of the parish of Prestbury, Cheshire, he was educated first at the Macclesfield grammar school by John Brownsword, a much-praised schoolmaster...

 and the sole printed translations of Seneca available in Elizabethan England; some echoes of his work have been detected in Shakespeare.

Life

Born about 1545, he was one of the original scholars of Westminster School

Westminster School

The Royal College of St. Peter in Westminster, almost always known as Westminster School, is one of Britain's leading independent schools, with the highest Oxford and Cambridge acceptance rate of any secondary school or college in Britain...

, and the earliest to be elected to Cambridge. He matriculated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1561; his translations were made as an undergraduate. He graduated B. A. in 1566 and M.A. in 1570, being elected a fellow of the college in the interval.

Studley's religious opinions were strongly Calvinistic. On 1 February 1573 he was summoned before the heads of colleges at Cambridge on a charge of nonconformity. A few months later he vacated his fellowship. Nothing further is definitely known of his life.

Works

He made translations of four of Seneca's tragedies: Agamemnon, Medea, Hippolytus, and Hercules Oeteus. He employed the common ballad metre for the dialogue, and rhyming decasyllabics for the choruses, but freely paraphrased his text. He also made deliberate changes. To the Agamemnon he added an unnecessary scene at the close, in which he re-narrated the death of Cassandra, the imprisonment of Electra, and the flight of Orestes. To the Medea he prefixed an original prologue and amplified the choruses. The Agamemnon and the Medea were both licensed for publication to Thomas Colwell in 1566, and the Hippolytus to Henry Denham

Henry Denham

Henry Denham was one of the outstanding English printers of the sixteenth century.He was apprenticed to Richard Tottel and took up the freedom of the Stationers' Company on August 30, 1560. In 1564 he set up his own printing house in White Cross Street, Cripplegate, but in the following year he...

 in 1567. The Agamemnon was published in 1566 with a dedication to Sir William Cecil.

Studley wrote Latin elegies on the death of Nicholas Carr

Nicholas Carr (professor)

Nicholas Carr, M.D. was an English classical scholar, regius professor of Greek at Cambridge in 1547, and a physician.-Life:He was born at Newcastle, and at an early age was sent to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he studied under Cuthbert Scot. He subsequently migrated to Pembroke Hall, where...

, the Greek professor at Cambridge, which were printed with the professor's Latin translation of Demosthenes in 1571. In 1574 he published with additions a translation of John Bale

John Bale

John Bale was an English churchman, historian and controversialist, and Bishop of Ossory. He wrote the oldest known historical verse drama in English , and developed and published a very extensive list of the works of British authors down to his own time, just as the monastic libraries were being...

's Acta Pontificum Romanorum under the title of The Pageant of the Popes, conteyning the lyves of all the Bishops of Rome from the beginninge of them to the yeare 1555, London, 1574. It was dedicated to Thomas Radcliffe, 3rd Earl of Sussex.