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  • The Other Virgil: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture
  • Scott McGill
Craig Kallendorf . The Other Virgil: Pessimistic Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture. Classical Presences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii, 252. $90.00. ISBN 978-0-19-921236-1.

One of the ways opponents of the so-called "pessimistic" readers of Virgil's Aeneid have sought to discredit them is through the charge of presentism. In this argument, interpreters who emphasize the poem's "further voices" drown out Virgil's own and foist a modern distrust of war and empire onto a staunchly pro-Augustan epic. As Craig Kallendorf demonstrates, however, any attempt to portray "pessimistic" responses to the Aeneid as strictly contemporary critical constructs finds itself belied by history. For throughout the early modern period, readers show themselves to be attuned to the attention Virgil gives to the human cost of the Roman mission, and to the ambivalence in his portrayal of Aeneas. This successful attempt at historicizing the Harvard School (to echo the title of one of Kallendorf's articles; see p. x, n.8) breathes new life into the story of Virgil's reception. Along the way, Kallendorf provides a model of how to avoid presentism while still applying current thinking to the past, as he turns to literary theory and cultural studies to illuminate themes that, he convincingly relates, lie within the early modern texts, and to deepen our understanding of how those works operated in their historical settings.

Along with a preface, introduction, and conclusion, The Other Virgil contains three sections, each of which contains three parts. The first section (17–66), "Marginalization," centers upon Francesco Filelfo's fifteenth-century Sphortias, written for Francesco Sforza. Kallendorf argues that we should not read this epic as a univocal panegyric of its namesake, but rather should recognize that it expresses reservations about the protagonist and his martial achievements, even as it also praises them. By imitating the Aeneid, Kallendorf continues, Filelfo gives a darker hue to Sforza's ascent to power (see esp. 50–61). For Kallendorf, this stands as an instance where imitation reveals interpretation: Filelfo saw ambiguity in Virgil's treatment of Aeneas and the Romans, and activated it in his own poem via intertextual borrowing. This stimulating reading is only one of several fine aspects of the section. Notable are Kallendorf's survey of Renaissance approaches to the Aeneid, with an illuminating catalogue of "pessimistic" responses (30–50), and his strong Foucauldian analysis of the relationship between literature and power (63–66).

Section Two, "Colonization," which treats how early modern poems "pick up on the colonial theme in the Aeneid . . . [and] on the complexities with which [End Page 507] Virgil treated this theme (76)," is more diffuse and uneven than its predecessor. In it, Kallendorf examines Ercilla's sixteenth-century Spanish epic La Araucana (77–102), Shakespeare's The Tempest (102–26), and the seventeenth-century Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's lyric poetry (126–37). Kallendorf's inquiry strains to unite under one thematic rubric very different texts that reuse Virgil quite differently. So too the analysis of Sor Juana is a bit abrupt. Still, the section has many things to recommend it. These include remarks on constructions of the Other that seem all the more intelligent for being free of jargon (see esp. 68–73), and an overview, with good theoretical observations, of the portrayal of colonization and difference in the Aeneid (73–76). In his excellent reading of The Tempest, Kallendorf also provides fresh insights into how Shakespeare and Virgil speak to postcolonial concerns from the European canon.

The final section of The Other Virgil opens with Kallendorf examining another canonical heavyweight, Milton's Paradise Lost (138–69), before moving to Joel Barlow's Vision of Columbus and Columbiad (169–95) and Le Plat's travesty Virgile en France (196–212). As the title "Revolution" indicates, all the poems arise in revolutionary contexts (English, American, and French, respectively); and Kallendorf explores how each uses the Aeneid to criticize monarchy and to support republicanism. Like its immediate predecessor, the section does not entirely cohere into a unity. Yet it is only...

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