The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, volume 2, 1558–1660 . Edited by Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+788.
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 115; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/691453
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, volume 2, 1558–1660. Edited by Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv+788.William J. KennedyWilliam J. KennedyCornell University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWeighing in at nearly eight hundred pages with thirty entries by twenty-seven contributors, volume 2 in the projected five volumes of The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature covers the period from 1558 to 1660. Its capable editors Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie begin with a substantial introduction that outlines the book’s topics, aims, approaches, and divisions of labor. Its first section, consisting of ten chapters, explores the historical foundations underlying the reception of classical models in English Renaissance literature. Its second section, consisting of twelve chapters, examines various genres as frameworks for the recovery of these models. Its third section, consisting of nine chapters, focuses upon five classical authors and five English authors who notably accomplish this recovery. The last section seems especially close to the editors’ vision for the project, since they comment in their introduction upon “authorship studies” as a currently vibrant area of study in reaction against proclamations of “the death of the author” and its replacement by “the author function” four decades ago (which themselves reacted against still earlier proclamations of “authorial genius” and the like) (2–3). “Authorship” implies individual rather than group identity, self-conscious reflection upon one’s career as a writer, and participation in restoring perceived links to the past. This vision, of course, proves difficult to sustain uniformly in the lineup of contributors. What emerges from them is a varying, modulating, kaleidoscopic diversity of approach, not at all monolithic, and all the better for that.The first section addresses institutions and contexts that sustain individual authors and careers. Peter Mack offers an engagingly erudite survey of access to the classics in grammar school and university curricula. Stuart Gillespie comprehensively reviews the availability of texts, translations, private libraries, and—with a view toward the efflorescence of public theater in the period—stage performances at educational and coterie venues. Peter Mack returns with an inventory of rhetorical manuals for letter writing, preaching, pedagogy, and general usage. Gavin Alexander expertly probes the relevance of rhetoric to the development of a vernacular poetics and the shape of a literary criticism yet to come. Mark Vessey sees a bridge between classicism and Christianity in the work of Erasmus, for whom Greek and Latin philology provided an entry into both worlds. Jane Stevenson surveys the efforts of women writers from Isabella Whitney, Elizabeth I, and Mary Sidney to Aemeila Lanier, Hester Pulter, and Anne Bradstreet to reclaim classical texts through translation and imitation. Curtis Perry delves energetically into the dynamics of classical reception as a mediating factor in political thought from the use of Seneca in Gorboduc through appropriations of Lucan, Horace, and Juvenal by Marlowe, Jonson, and Marston, to borrowings from Tacitus by antiroyalist writers in the Jacobean period. Cora Fox discerns modern, urbanized attitudes toward sexuality derived from Virgilian and Ovidian archetypes in such texts as book 3 of the Faerie Queene, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and Donne’s elegies and love lyrics. Patrick Cheney expertly investigates the idea of an English Renaissance literary career underwritten by classical exemplars in the work of Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson, Chapman, Whitney, and Milton. Philip Hardie rounds out the first section with satisfying observations on the discourse of fame and poetic immortality in such texts as Spenser’s Ruines of Time, Shakespeare’s sonnets and Coriolanus, Jonson’s Poetaster and masques, and Milton’s Samson Agonistes.The second section, “Genre,” opens with Helen Cooper’s contrastive treatment of formal eclogues from Spenser to Drayton, pastoral elegies from Spenser to Milton, and the gradual emergence of georgic poetry from Jonson to Marvell. Philip Hardie returns with a trenchant account of epic that includes, in addition to Spenser and Milton, translations of Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Homer; allegorizations of Ovid, Claudian, and Ariosto; and Virgilian, Ovidian, and Lucanian elements in poems by Marlowe, Daniel, Drayton, May, Cowley, and Marvell. Lynn Enterline addresses the vogue for minor epics from Lodge to Chapman by tracing echoes from the Tudor classroom on topics that relate to pedagogy and sexual morality. William Fitzgerald investigates epistolary conventions in familiar letters and their analogues in verse epistles by Drayton, Jonson, Donne, and others. Helen Moore attentively scouts the development of prose romance from Sidney, Lyly, and Greene to Mary Wroth with motifs of treachery, disruption, love, and reconciliation drawn from Heliodorus, Achilles Tatius, Longus, and Apuleius. Roland Greene deftly audits ways in which ancient forms (elegy, hymn, epithalamium, ode) make complex purchases upon early modern reality by such writers as Donne, Spenser, Jonson, and Marvell, who pit their received conventions against personal motives and public events. Susanna Braund positions classical forms of epigram and satire in the period as modal extensions of medieval complaint that accommodate works by Davies, Hall, Marston, and Jonson.The remaining entries in this section shift toward dramatic forms and nonfictional writing. Gordon Braden scrutinizes mimicry of Seneca’s dramatic tragedies in such plays as Gorboduc and Daniel’s Philotas that convey terrifying strains of monarchical absolutism in Tudor and Stuart England. Bruce R. Smith asks smartly how a vicarious sense of touch in comic drama might explain the imaginative power of laughter as it collaborates with intellect in Plautine- and Terentian-inspired plays by Jonson, Chapman, Heywood, and others. Tanya Pollard cogently appraises the confluence of classical forms in tragicomedy from Appius and Virginia through John Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess to Middleton’s The Witch with their corresponding impact upon Gascoigne, Lyly, Shakespeare, Massinger, and others. Bart van Es traverses historiography and biography through Jonson’s annotated copy of Sallust as his source for Catiline, leading to keen reflections upon Livy’s republicanism, Tacitus’s skepticism, and moral character in Plutarch as spurs for political consideration by Sidney, Shakespeare, and Jonson. Reid Barbour and Claire Preston close the section with thoughts upon didactic, speculative, and otherwise discursive writing indebted to Plato, Cicero, Seneca, and Plutarch by such prose writers as Bacon, Burton, and Browne, and to Lucretius, Virgil, and Columella by such georgic poets as Drayton and Cowley.The book’s third section offers essays on classical authors who especially influenced English Renaissance authors and on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors who creatively appropriated the ancients. Jessica Wolfe argues soundly that, although Homer’s poems circulated in few editions and translations before 1660, moral and allegorical interpretations of them had a strong impact upon their reception, enabling Chapman’s translations to establish a compelling paradigm of Homeric political philosophy. Elizabeth Jane Bellamy’s Plato likewise remained little read, but the Huguenot Jean de Serres produced a Latin translation of and commentary on the dialogues that impressed Sidney and Spenser, while motivating Jacobean and Caroline court poets such as Carew, Suckling, and Cowley to interrogate a Neoplatonic love ethic. Maggie Kilgour shows that Virgil’s and Ovid’s dominance over school curricula imbued major English poems with double allusions that commingled Virgilian heroism and Ovidian desire. Victoria Moul contends that Horace provoked poets as diverse as Wyatt, Jonson, Donne, Cowley, and Marvell to register ethical choices in a cohesive Horatian mode.The second half of this section takes its cues from major English authors. Richard A. McCabe demonstrates that Spenser imitates Virgil as the latter’s poems were received through Renaissance commentaries, amounting to a discordant Virgil whose radically competing models of heroism gave life to successive Spenserian texts. Charles Martindale portrays Marlowe as a poet-playwright whose affinity to an anti-imperial Lucan as well as to subversive undertones in Ovid and Virgil made him a radical and influential author in his own day. Colin Burrow positions Shakespeare’s classical learning about Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Plautus, and Terence in multidimensional relationships that bring together various poetic and dramatic genres, diverse audiences and readerships, and disparate practices initiated by his literary contemporaries. Sean Keilen illustrates how Jonson made a living by pleasing his patrons while expressing his independence from them by adopting a critical stance toward ancient authors. Thomas H. Luxton conjectures that before 1660 Milton studied the classics in order to enter a conceptual world different from his own and to converse with it in his writing. In general, the contributions in this section represent some of the best work in the volume, perhaps owing to their deeper focus upon a more limited range of texts than in the synoptic and wide-ranging efforts presented earlier. Craig Kallendorf concludes the volume with a lightly annotated bibliography of some two thousand scholarly studies, most of them already referenced in the entries but with others added to the list. In sum, the endeavor amounts to a detailed, up-to-date, and authoritative compendium of learning and insight on a topic that defines the very soul of Renaissance literature. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 115, Number 1August 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/691453HistoryPublished online March 02, 2017 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
Referência(s)