Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World by Russ Leo (review)

Russ Leo's Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World is an impressive, and humbling, work of meticulous scholarship. Its general purpose is to chart the development and transformation of the genre of tragedy—and the understanding of tragedy as a genre—in Europe through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This task, the author amply demonstrates, cannot be done properly without taking into account tragedy's irreducibly religious investments, especially in a world that was dominated by the Reformation and the endless confessional disputes that attended it. More specifically and importantly, the author argues that tragedy comes to serve philosophical and theological ends—that it is itself a kind of philosophy and theology. But while tragedy comes to have new meaning in a Reformation context, Leo also does considerable work to situate 'sacred tragedy', or 'Reformation poetics', in the longer literary and theological traditions that preceded it.

A robust introduction, by itself a significant contribution to scholarship, establishes early modern 'tragedy's intellectual resources' with a detailed focus on the first half of the sixteenth century. It reveals the groundwork laid by reformers Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Martin Bucer crucial for rendering tragedy into a tool for theology. As Leo writes, 'tragoedia sacra […] enabled students to see connections between tragic form, tragic affects, and Scriptural fabulae' (p. 30). The first chapter then extends the interpretation of Scripture, specifically of the Book of Revelation, as tragic drama, with an analysis of David Pareus's Commentary on Revelation and its broader context. Of course, exegesis on Revelation is always also an interpretation of history, so readers gain insight into early modern views on the unfolding of tragic and sacred history, especially in relation to the unfolding of the drama of the Reformation. Chapter 2 delves into Italian reform movements in order to show how Lodovico Castelvetro's Poetica (1570 and 1576)—a translation and commentary of Aristotle's Poetics heretofore considered mainly from the perspective of the history of rhetoric—is in fact a work grounded in the principles of Erasmian and Melanchthonian religious reform and pedagogy. Leo's collation of two versions of the work reveals a heavily redacted posthumous version to have been shorn of references to Protestant luminaries and 'heterodox suggestions […] inextricable from his treatment of Aristotle' (p. 95), which illuminates how Castelvetro imagined poetry to be a useful tool of religious reform.

Chapter 3 considers the legacy of John Rainolds, known for his anti-theatrical position in the somewhat abstruse debates surrounding the permissibility of drama's use of mendacia officiosa in England in the 1590s. Rainolds's participation in these disputes earned him the honour, Leo argues, of being parodied as Reynaldo in Shakespeare's Hamlet, but that subtle inclusion itself reveals the importance of debates about the public role of tragedy in Reformation England. Chapter 4 examines the works of Daniel Heinsius related to tragedy and their relationship to the Dutch Arminian controversy over free will and predestination. Leo shows how Heinsius, while avoiding direct engagement with the specifics of the controversy itself, nevertheless establishes tragedy as a dialectical mode highly suited to investigate thorny philosophical issues of probability and necessity. In Chapter 5, Leo expands John Milton's 'tragic archive' to include typically neglected patristic sources, especially Clement of Alexandria, to argue that Milton's is a specifically Hebraic (as opposed to Attic) form of tragedy qua philosophy. This stems partly from an 'idiosyncratic' assumption, proffered by Clement and adopted by Milton, that the Apostle Paul quotes Euripides (not Menander, as critics from Erasmus on generally agree) at i Cor. 15.33. Leo's detailed foray into the history of attributing Paul's line to Euripides instead of to Menander (then and now the consensus), and its implications for tragedy's bearing on Pauline theology in Milton's Samson Agonistes and other works, is one of many such that makes the book richly fascinating.

Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World is a dense work...