The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner (review)

The central thesis of this wide-ranging study is that "the history of European drama is a unity, and it is necessary to read it across the boundaries of languages and sub-genres" (x), a task made difficult because "the people who study its different parts don't talk much to one another" (ix). The author draws upon her extensive reading in four centuries of English and European drama and her familiarity with major works in the visual arts. Her goal is "to rewrite the history of neoclassicism" (ix), which she sees "not as a single movement, but as a wave of interrelated movements that sometimes further and sometimes retard one another" (x). Her study provides some valuable insights into allegory, mimesis, and neoclassicism in chapters that deal with Claude Lorrain; sixteenth-century Italian pastorals and Shakespeare's history plays; Senecan tragic forms (with a focus on Racine, Vondel, and Shakespeare); the illusionist stages of Jonson's masques and the plays of Calderón, Bidermann, and Gryphius; the emergence of opera; the eighteenth-century Greek Revival; and Wagner's Ring cycle. Readers of this journal will find much of interest in chapter 1 and will encounter familiar territory in chapters 3 and 4, which include (sometimes less than satisfying) readings of King John, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Troilus and Cressida.

For Shakespeareans, the most valuable part of the book is the first chapter. At the outset the author observes that "dramatic practice is learned at least as much from plays seen and read as from treatises" because "a mode of representation is like a language: European dramatists had not only to learn to represent mimetically, but also not to carry over vocabulary and syntax from their older allegorical 'language'" (1–2). She argues that "in the natural inertia of things, rhetorics of representation, like other cultural practices, persist—often in the popular arena—long after they cease to be current and have lost their original meaning" (opera is a good example), so that she proposes a "gradualist narrative," especially in England, "where the emergence of Shakespeare from the clumsiness of the preceding generation left so much to explain" (2). For several reasons the label allegorical has been rejected by most scholars who deal with Shakespeare, Calderón, Corneille, and Racine, playwrights treated "as if they were only important for their psychological realism," so that "there is little space left for those who see a plurality of discourses operating in the plays" (3). Her gradualist account will therefore focus "on the eddies of literary history: not where it flows forward smoothly but the places where it stubbornly holds back or even seems to reverse itself" (4).

To set up her analysis, Brown draws upon Erich Auerbach and particularly Angus Fletcher in their opposition of mimesis and allegory, two "notoriously shifty terms," in part "because they are historically conditioned, for allegory operates differently at different times" (5, 9)—here is a major advantage of a study that spans four centuries. For her, "Mimesis is 'realistic,' it 'imitates' what is natural and materially real," while allegory "represents something other than what it appears to claim," so that "[i]n mimetic representation one knows what one is looking at" as opposed to allegory, where "either the name or the ontological level must always be changed" (5). Allegory is therefore "a mode of representation which renders the supernatural visible," as opposed to mimesis, "a mode which imitates the natural, what is already visible" (5). Objects represented by allegorists "are normally invisible, either because they are abstract (for example, Faith or the soul), because they are supernatural and invisible in the world (angels, the devil), or because they are politically too dangerous to represent directly" (6). Brown notes shrewdly that "allegory is characterized not by its abstraction but by its concreteness, by making ideas material in sometimes disturbing ways" (6). She points out that in the...