Why wasn't Dante's Divine Comedy translated into English until the late 18th/early 19th centuries when there was a clear interest in Italian literature among Early Modern English people?

by JJVMT

The Inferno wasn't translated until 1782, and the first full translation of the Comedy didn't appear until 1802. Considering the Early Modern English interest in Italian literature that resulted in an Elizabethan translation of Orlando Furioso and a partial translation of the Decameron during the Jacobean period (not to mention Shakespeare's various plays with Italian sources or settings), one would think that the Divine Comedy would have been at least partially translated around the same time. What factors prevented this from happening?

greentea1985

I think there was a good translation of Dante's Divine Comedy already available in Latin, the language of scholarship. Also, most scholars in England preferred reading works in the original tongue, so if you could read Italian, you could read Dante.