Dryden and the World of Neoclassicism ed. by Wolfgang Görtschacher and Holger Klein (review)

70 just one of the conditions in the novel that indirectly promote order, life and meaning . At first digressions contribute to the development of more nonlinearity, more chaos, which is iterated, reread, by the reader; then meaning can emerge out of chaos though [sic]self-organization.’’Put in less chaologistic jargon, literature is often a combination of randomness and design, although the more we read, the more randomness seems to turn into design —a not unpredictable phenomenon. I believe it is called reading—both good and bad reading. Melvyn New University of Florida Dryden and the World of Neoclassicism, ed. Wolfgang Görtschacher and Holger Klein. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2001. Pp. 299. £45.50. In 1999, the University of Salzburg hosted a Dryden tercentenaryconference, starting what was to be a string of conferences , and a steady supply of tercentenary volumes: John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays, edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (2000), ‘‘Enchanted Ground’’: Reimagining John Dryden, edited by Jayne Lewis and MaximillianNovak (forthcoming), and John Dryden: A TercentenaryMiscellany,editedbySusan Green and Steven N. Zwicker (2001). In contrast to these collections solicited from leading scholars, the Salzburg conference , which led to this anthology, seems to have been open to any interested party. The results are, predictably, uneven . Of the twenty-two papers in this anthology , several are ‘‘discovery essays,’’ intelligent accounts of Dryden by people who are newcomers to Dryden. Thus, Wolfgang Görtschacher compares Dryden ’s Troilus and Cressida to the Shakespearean original, scene by scene, character by character, and Rama Kundu does something similar with All for Love and Antony and Cleopatra; this is the sort of thing editors did fifty years ago. Dimiter Daphinoff, in ‘‘Heroic Bodies–Feeble Minds? An Aspect of Dryden’s Drama,’’ surveys several of Dryden’s heroic plays, distinguishing between earlier and later heroes, but he basically repeats what Derek Hughes argued back in 1981. Two essays on Dryden’snotionsofkingship,one by Rolf Lessenich, the other by Annette Pankratz, sensibly summarize the well known; Mr. Lessenich’s, in particular, reads like headnote material to Absalom and Achitophel from an undergraduate anthology. James Hogg’s account of the literary controversy between Shadwell and Dryden quotes thevariousthrustsand parries of both, but nothing is here that is not already noted in the Longman edition of Dryden. Some essays rely on outdated scholarship: one author engages in a spirited debate with Louis Bredvold (1934) and Hoyt Trowbridge (1946), another uses Walter Scott’s 1808 edition for his Dryden texts, and so forth. About a third of the essays fall well below this level and thud. I will not discuss all the contenders for bathos, but it would be a shame not to mention Albert Poyet’s account of The Medall, which seamlessly blends forced readings with an analysis of irrelevant technical details, such as anaphora, anacoluthon, antonomasia , epanalepsis, and antimetabole, or Simon Edwards’s paper on ‘‘The Monument of a Fair Maiden Lady,’’ which combines enthusiastic over-reading with breathless over-writing, for instance, ‘‘the rich pattern of repeated consonants floats hauntingly above the sequence of long and open vowels. . . .’’ This should not be encouraged. Luckily, five essays sail hauntingly 71 above the rest. Yvonne Noble, for example , traces Dryden’s use of bee imagery in Annus Mirabilis (1667), expanding on the Virgilian motif of bees, both suggesting renewal and prefiguring the building of the Roman empire from swarms of wandering Trojans. While these are familiar ideas, duly noted in the California Dryden, and while a few of Ms. Noble’s supposed allusions seem to me a bit far-fetched, she provides context and explanation, and she adds intriguing information about beekeepers and naturalists , none of whom seemed capable of writing about bees without ‘‘being overwhelmed with political consciousness.’’ Derek Hughes returns to Dryden’s heroic dramas with a fine reading of The Indian Emperour, beginning with an exploration of exchange systems in classical culture , and then studying the patterns of exchange in the play, the giving, receiving , offering, granting, denying, taking, seizing, avenging, and so on. Mr. Hughes shows how Dryden uses such patterns to distinguish between the apparently advanced European economy and ‘‘precommercial man,’’ yet also to reveal that both cultures ‘‘reach the same consummation...