Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages by Henry Ansgar Kelly (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER once (p. 295). All subtlety now gone, he finishes with a simple picture of Chaucer reading his poetry at court. I think that this marks the place at which Jager loses any sense of context (Chaucer's social context and the textual problematic of his work); and that sense of context, so strong in the description of Augustine, is what has frayed progressively throughout the study of vernacular works. It is a retreat from history into criticism, where both were necessary. It is a movement that makes the achievement of Jager's book more modest than it need have been. DAVID LAWTON University of Tasmania HENRY ANSGAR KELLY. Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, vol. 18. Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xvii, 257. $54.95. Kelly's book is a summa, both of his own researches and of those of nu­ merous predecessors. It ranges from Aristotle to the experiments in fifteenth-century Spain and assembles not only the loci classici but a pleth­ ora of additional instances scattered through many works of secondary literature or the results of his own collecting. The documentation is rich­ commonly original plus translation-and easily accessible through the index, because Kelly's intention is to display the variety, even disparity, of medieval ideas of tragedy. Another of his purposes is to demonstrate that medieval comments on tragedy were usually far removed from grand phi­ losophizing about the nature of tragedy and the tragic spirit. The sheer scope and the overwhelming number of instances necessitate, however, some concentration of quotation and analysis, and Kelly exercises this primarily with regard to the extended treatments and experiments. Thus he deals with Aristotle, Horace, Dante, Chaucer, and others only summarily and does not quite meet the expectations raised by blurb and title. With a view to the impact on medieval notions, it may indeed be appropriate to assign less space to Aristotle and Horace than to the reduc­ tive staging practices in imperial Rome, and for Dante and Chaucer, Kelly refers his readers to an earlier and a future monograph of his. Still, it might have been possible to mention further, more complex problems and rele­ vant literature in the notes if a few instances had been sacrificed which 220 REVIEWS represent little more than another turning of the prayer wheel. But Kelly understands his book very much as a history of the word "tragedy," and such a focus certainly fits the bulk of medieval transmitters: lexicography, glosses, scholia, metaphorical use, vernacular renderings of the Latin or Greek word, etc. Another of Kelly's emphases is that he shows less interest in "the accu­ rate recovery of ancient ideas by the Middle Ages than in the new combi­ nations of ideas that were produced by confused traditions." Accordingly, concerning Seneca, Kelly's purpose is not "to trace the recovery ofhis plays so much as to see how peculiarly medieval notions prevented an accurate understanding of them" (p. 220). Such a focus is legitimate, even though many readers might also have appreciated a more detailed presentation of the correct insights, which were to bear fruit in the future. The focus causes, however, severe distortions, because far-reaching conclusions are drawn without due acknowledgment ofthe omissions, and also because an imbalance results from the fact that otherwise very much attention is given to dependences. On page 143, for instance, Kelly summarizes for the fourteenth century that "the impact of the rediscovery ofSeneca's tragedies was less than could have been expected in Italy, and was virtually nonexistent elsewhere." Yet he has not only given insufficient treatment to lesser figures like Mussato and Salutati but almost completely excluded Petrarch and Boccaccio. And he has disregarded the contacts between the international elite, for, on the whole, he neglects the broader contexts in which the various authors devel­ oped their interest in tragedy, including the specific character of their clas­ sicizing. For fear of overinterpretation, Kelly shuns philosophical ques­ tions. But to a good Christian it was not unproblematic to concern himself with, and even experiment with, a genre which church fathers had strongly...