The Augustan Art of Poetry: Augustan Translation of the Classics by Robin Sowerby (review)

59 Lewis’s The Captive,’’ a look at the masculine gothic ideology of Lewis’s briefly performed play in 1803 (Lewis pulled it when too many audience members went into convulsions of horror), are less convincing, but still helpful. Ms. Fowler seems to need first to legitimize Haywood before arguing that the author marketed her image and sought authorial equality. Mr. DeRochi attempts to counter scholars who find a feminist critique in Lewis’s gothic novels by reading Captive as it ‘‘uses brutalized femininity for aesthetic titillation’’ and thus presents the actress as ‘‘less an embodiment of social injustice and more an agent for pure aesthetic terror.’’ Though their topics are exciting and useful, Chloe Wigston Smith’s and Erin J. Smith’s essays on theatrical portraits and dance, respectively, are also not as argumentatively forceful as they could be. In ‘‘Dressing Up Character: Theatrical Paintings from the Restoration to the Mid-Eighteenth Century,’’ Ms. Wigston Smith researches over 170 paintings from 1660–1750 to piece together several claims tied loosely together: renderings of performer costumes reveal the changing social status of actors, shifting ideas about character, changing roles of visual communication and codes, and new temporal strategies of seeing the present through past fashion. Ms. Erin Smith’s ‘‘Transitional Performances: Eighteenth-Century London Theater and the Emergence of Professional Dance,’’ though on a fascinating topic—the impact of the French Revolution on dance as an art form struggling for independence from the audience—needs the focus of Mr. Ennis’s own contribution, ‘‘Invasion of the Afterpieces: Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Frederick Pilon, 1778–79,’’ a thorough and rhetorically nuanced analysis of Sheridan’s The Camp: A Musical Entertainment (1778), Frederick Pilon’s The Invasion; or, A Trip to Brighthelmstone (1778), and other ‘‘invasion’’ afterpieces of 1778 and 1779 that critique English preparedness for foreign invasion. Mr. Ennis and Ms. Bailey Slagle’s anthology is exactly the kind of study we need right now. It counters recent claims that the trendy archival frenzy, the novelty of discovering old things long ignored, will somehow harm the practice of close reading . On the contrary, textual analysis still has its place in this collection, and the essays refocus the eye so that it can read prologues, epilogues, and the other blind spots of dramatic texts more closely indeed. Mr. Ennis and Ms. Bailey Slagle modestly note in their Introduction that their collection may not be a turning point in the history of theater, but it certainly could be a turning point for teachers struggling to find fresh approaches to eighteenth-century drama. It urges pedagogues of drama to try harder, to push past student-friendly lessons only about the mainpieces students can buy in their bookstores, and think more creatively about how to account for the ‘‘complicated artistic transactions that took place on, and around the stages in that time and place.’’ Katherine E. Ellison Illinois State University ROBIN SOWERBY. The Augustan Art of Poetry: Augustan Translation of the Classics. New York: Oxford, 2006. Pp. 368. $99. The first of the four lengthy chapters comprising this detailed and well-argued study describes how Marcus Hieronymus Vida’s neo-Latin poem De Arte Poetica 60 (1527) codified the Roman Augustan poetic aesthetic so influential on Dryden and Pope. This is the ‘‘Immortal Vida! On whose honour’d Brow / The Poet’s Bays and Critick’s Ivy grow,’’ to quote Pope’s Essay on Criticism, yet how many of us have looked into Vida, even in translation? Fortunately Mr. Sowerby has, allowing us to profit from his close readings and his description of the Augustan aesthetic. He acknowledges early on that ‘‘the term ‘Augustan’ has very largely fallen out of fashion’’ when most new literary studies ‘‘are concerned with issues to do with race, gender, politics, [and] commercialization,’’ but he believes, and clearly demonstrates, that ‘‘the term is still useful in drawing attention to a dominant set of aesthetic values shared by the main poets of the time and underlying their achievement.’’ Vida’s Maronology (the cult worship of P. Virgilius Maro, better known as Virgil) was inherited from the late Romans themselves and dominated throughout the Greekchallenged Renaissance. To illustrate Mr. Sowerby’s approach...