The Venerable, Essential, Classical Tradition

At a time when it seems that just about everybody in the humanities has gone global, multicultural, and postcolonial, here we have two solid new books in the field of literary studies that are unapologetically Eurocentric. Jane Brown's The Persistence of Allegory is a learned, thorough, and detailed study of how allegory, despite the rise of Aristotelian theory, with its emphasis on a more or less naturalistic notion of mimesis, persisted in the drama of the Renaissance through the Romantic periods. Robert DeMaria and Robert D. Brown have compiled an anthology of British, Irish, and Caribbean Anglophone Literature (mainly verse) that is paired with selections of Greek and Latin literature in translation.

Jane Brown's book is remarkable for the depth of its knowledge of the drama of the period, in several languages and traditions, particularly English, French, Spanish, and German. She knows the theoretical backgrounds, with particular reference to the Aristotelian tradition. And at times she ranges beyond literature into the areas of both dramatic performance practice and the visual arts. The second chapter, for example, is an interesting reading of how the paintings of the great Claude Lorrain, famous for his naturalism, are nevertheless consistently allegorical.

Anyone teaching the drama of this period—including opera—will learn a great deal from this book, which is written in an accessible style. It makes a convincing case for the persistence of allegory. For those who are not specialists in the period under consideration, however, the theoretical implications of the main argument are not articulated provocatively or forcefully enough. This is perhaps too much to ask of a literary scholar writing with other legitimate priorities in mind. The precedent for a reader's expectation of more depth on the theoretical level, however, was set by a critic of the drama of the period whose specter haunts these pages, and whom Brown mentions on the initial page of her book. I am of course referring to Walter Benjamin, who, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, makes so many provocative comments about allegory and drama written mainly in the very same period covered in Brown's book. Benjamin's analysis of dramatic allegory, despite its frequent obscurity, forces us to reflect on the nature of representation and its relation to ethics, on our responsibility to others in the dense fabric of modern society. Brown's lucid, impressively learned, and wide-ranging study does not go sufficiently beyond a purely formal analysis of the drama of the period to engage the general reader's interest.

An anthology like Robert DeMaria's and Robert Brown's Classical Literature and Its Reception is a source that today's college students deeply need. This anthology is designed mainly for students of literature written in English—i.e., for English majors or, as the British would say, for those "reading English." The majority of English majors today knows almost nothing about the poetry of ancient Greece and Rome. The question arises: how does one provide them with the rudiments of this knowledge to give them the tools for reading poetry, written in English, that clearly draws on the classical tradition, i.e., that establishes its meaning through its associations with classical texts?

This is a daunting task. We are talking here not only about allusions, or even about matters of literary form, but of sensibility. How is it possible to present, to contemporary undergraduates who know no Latin or Greek, some idea of the sensibilities of those classical authors who have so deeply influenced poets writing in English? One way is to try to give students a sense of the feel and sound of an ancient Greek or Roman text, and then to focus on how various translators have tried to capture the flavor of a particular ancient poet. We live, after all, in an era of...