Thomas Underdowne, who flourished 1566-1587 as a poet and translator,
was the son of Stephen Underdowne, to whom Sir Thomas Sackville,
afterwards first earl of Dorset, had shown kindness. He spent
some time at Oxford University, but left it without a degree.
He has been identified with Thomas Underdowne of Clare Hall, Cambridge,
B.A. 1564, M.A. 1568; he has also been identified with the Thomas
Underdowne who was ‘parson of St. Mary's in Lewes’ in
1583, when he was in trouble for nonconformity. It is not probable
that this was the translator.
The earliest extant edition of Underdowne's chief work, An Æthiopian Historie, written in Greeke by Heliodorus, no lesse wittie than pleasaunt, is undated. It doubtless appeared in 1569, when Francis Coldock was licensed to publish The ende of the xth book of Helioderus fthiopium Historye. Another edition appeared in London in 1587. The address ‘to the gentle reader’ of the 1587 edition says that the earlier issue was published by persuasion of ‘my friend’ Francis Coldock, which now ‘by riper years better advised’ the writer regrets. A third edition appeared in 1606. In 1622 William Barrett, finding Underdowne's style ‘almost obsoleted,’ revised and republished his translation ‘cleared from the barbarisms of antiquity.’ The translation is an important example of Elizabethan prose, remarkable for rhythm and poetic vigour. Warton points out that it opened out a new field of romance, and claims that it influenced and partly suggested Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Abraham Fraunce in The Countess of Pembroke's Yvy Church, 1591, turned the beginning into six pages of clumsy hexameters. Underdowne's Greek scholarship was slight and his Latin faulty. His version follows the Latin of the Pole, Stanislao Warschewiczki, published at Basle, 1551.
Underdowne's other works were The excellent historye of Theseus and Ariadne, and Ovid his invective against Ibis. The epistle dedicated to Sir Thomas Sackvile, Lord Buckhurst, contains some autobiographical details. The poem is in fourteen-syllable verse. The prose appendix is a clear and simple collection of classical stories which proved useful to dramatists and poets.