Jane K. Brown's The Persistence of Allegory: Drama and Neoclassicism from Shakespeare to Wagner establishes how a consistent engagement with allegorical forms unites European drama across national and historical boundaries as well as between different arts, and how it animates neoclassicist efforts to regenerate itself in classical antiquity.
With seven main chapters each focusing on a different classical revival, from the paintings of Claude Lorrain through the death of the Gesamtkunstwerk in Wagner, Brown establishes that neoclassicism encompasses comedy, clowning, the imitation of Greek tragedy, Senecanism, perspectivist and spectacular approaches to stage sets, court masque, and opera; she explains why extraordinary innovations in psychological realism—typically accorded priority in studies of neoclassicism—remain bound up with concurrent allegorical modalities. Brown makes the case that we should consider neoclassicism a flexible, synthetic form, or a “wave” of interrelated movements that by turns extend and impede each other. While the movements of the wave vary, they do so recurrently and distinctively: for in their shifting appropriation of allegory, they draw the tide of secularization and its consequences, including the composition of modern subjectivity.
In her extensive coordination of works, or what she, following Goethe, calls their morphological analysis, Brown orients her study with conscientious scholarly scrutiny. Indeed, in the current context of escalating partition between and professionalization of academic disciplines, this is an almost unthinkable book; those of us who still hold the idea of a necessary connection between thorough scholarly labor and comprehensive structural interpretation must fear that it will be among the last of its kind. In order to make the rigorous argument, rather than the sweeping claim, for the subterranean unity of European drama, Brown works with texts from a remarkable number of languages; she acknowledges in the preface that she learned several of them to write this book. Before concluding that dramatic forms retain a common set of concerns, Brown investigates competing and incompatible practices within neoclassicism from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, offering incisive accounts of Neoaristotelianism, Renaissance Neoplatonism, and indigenous morality plays. Thus she can make plain both how they combine and how they continue to compete, as in Shakespeare and Italian pastoral, to present an approach that comes to be integral for aesthetic and epistemological modernity. In so doing, Brown undercuts earlier explanations of domestic tragedy that rest upon the assumption of its simplistically mimetic, Aristotelian nature. Likewise, Brown's readings ultimately make clear that a more systematic grasp of the exercise of allegory and its long‐term rapport with symbol provide a fuller, more faithful understanding of Shakespeare's and Goethe's practices than scholars, including recent followers of Walter Benjamin, have been able to offer. Against Fletcher's comprehensive phenomenology of allegory as well as Shakespeare scholarship almost in toto, Brown demonstrates both that allegorical practice varies widely and historically and that allegory is a robust, enduring mode at work also in Shakespeare's plays. Brown argues that our ability to come to terms with works such as Goethe's Faust and Mozart's Die Zauberflöte depends upon our recovery of their allegorical modalities.
One of this work's finest achievements is its elucidation of how the recognition of secularism emerges, confronts its historical foundations, and begins to pursue its consequences, precisely by challenging the representational forms used to signify divine Logos and its amenability to human understanding. Traditional morality plays rely upon allegorical representations to make religious ideas about an essentially fixed, divinely ordered cosmos concrete. But if the original charge of allegory is to render the supernatural visible, then the record of allegory's development is one of translations of that very religious framework into a form of representation that might still bear meaning in a world anxious about the absence or inscrutability of divinity. In the juxtaposition of morality play and Senecan formula, the admixture of mimetic and allegorical representations, and the combination of Aristotelianism and Renaissance Neoplatonism, works do not so much suppress the supernatural as labor to decode it for a world both mistrustful of religious rigidity and unnerved by its own uncertainty. Yet as Brown presents in detail, the translation of the sacrosanct is neither one‐directional nor rarefied; rather, it is as if painting and various modes of performance present the general anxiety by becoming its mode of expression. Works express the danger of secularization by recording distress, loss, and the collapse of divine order; moreover, they pursue the creative ramifications of these vacillations. By closely analyzing Shakespeare, Vondel, Racine, Jonson, Vitruvian Revival, Mozart, and Wagner, Brown establishes that the application of allegory is a decisive aspect of secularization, rather than (as the standard reading goes) a defense against it. Surveying first the pervasive historical apprehension, within allegorical forms, that an incongruity between material world and invisible spirit cannot be surmounted by aesthetic creations, Brown shows the tension cresting in the seventeenth century. Bidermann's Cenodoxus and Shakespeare's Hamlet stage the way that allegory becomes the very exemplar of theater's art of rendering visible, which thereby forces a confrontation with allegory's own theatricality or worldliness. The ensuing turn from allegory entails both recognition of its hitherto paradoxical character no less than its distillation into emblem and symbol.
Yet well before critics judge allegory to be a remnant of artistic adolescence, it is already combining with mimetic forms to introduce the very possibility of modern character. Brown uncovers the emergence of character out of negotiations among allegorical and ostensibly opposing forms, ranging from the Mantegna painting of Minerva Chasing the Vices from the Garden of Virtue that graces the book's cover, to the music with which Wagner narrates the drama of interiority. Following a close study of Calderón, Brown can demonstrate how Calderón's incorporation of kingly into divine authority as well as the Counter‐Reformation's praise of the institution of the church, rather than God, produce, in effect, both secular works and works that rely on spectacle, lavish costuming, and personification allegories to bring the issue of individual character to the surface. Rendering a meticulous lineage of the notion of selfhood, Brown concludes that in mimetic drama, as in the Latinate tragedies, the self is presented first as a host of qualities, each externally extant. “They are not yet represented as a single human body. …[T]he first function of these elaborated languages of allegory is not to deny but to adapt to a more complex notion of the self” (p. 126).
Complexity of character is not merely the end of a development out of allegory, for the marriage of allegory and mimesis produces the requirement of character development. In Vondel's Lucifer, a chorus represents Lucifer's divided inner life; in Racine's Iphigénie en Aulide, traditional allegorical structures are utilized to portray the pressure between self and other (p. 107). After examining a number of parallel examples, Brown is able to argue that in “a certain rough sense, all the allegorical structures of European drama have been psychological. The discussion began with … the battle of the vices and virtues for the human soul. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under the pressure of Aristotelianism what had been vices and virtues within a widely acknowledged moral system turned into feelings, expressions of the individual” (p. 217). Yet once cosmos is sublimated irrevocably into subject, human emotions supplant the salvation still available, for example, in Calderón. Salvation, that is, becomes a matter of immanent, personal recovery or inward triumph, and as music is tied ever more to human emotion, opera emerges as a primary medium for the exploration of neoclassicism's capacity for emotive expression. By the 1770s, Brown shows, music has become the cornerstone of mimetic drama.
Voltaire, too, comes to rely upon “operatic moments.” While he rejects the institution of the church, Voltaire co‐opts more traditional forms of morality and tragedy in order to attack the system that initially authorized them (p. 170). Voltaire's Olympie utilizes the opening of doors earlier associated with revelation in ancient tragedy, yet here the revelation is “not the Truth per se, but the truth about the kind of play Olympie really is” (p. 171). Just as Olympie replaces religion with love, Voltaire's Alzire replaces blatant apotheosis with human admiration, while uniting moral tradition and classical tragedy. Goethe, who writes appreciatively of tragedy's kinship with opera, likewise humanizes allegorical vision. In his Clavigo, the symmetry of natural and supernatural is balanced and terrifying—“spirits” that stare at Clavigo turn out to be living human beings, in the funeral cortege of his beloved. These ghosts represent no cosmic order; however terrible, they are undeniably “metaphors of interiority” (p. 181).
The eddies of form and content associated with neoclassicism are intermixed, then, through a common concentration on the issue of truthful representation; they establish the representation of modern subjectivity in their association and create the context for the deeper dilemma whereby representation is seen to demand the exclusion of the interior subject in favor of the presentation of the natural. If this is so, then it is also true that neither the unearthing of inwardness nor the translation of fixed supernatural markers to affective if ambiguous forces is possible without their aesthetic expression. Theater, in particular, does not just record an emergent subjectivity and secularism; changing values and modes of knowledge depend on theater for their articulation. The “theater of the world” both discloses the world and helps to constitute it. Brown claims that a crisis of representation is brought on by the conflict of allegorical and mimetic styles; she treats the synthesis of allegory and mimesis in Shakespeare, Mozart, and Goethe as achievements of perfect, if momentary, balance between them, even while tracking how these achievements thematize the struggle they momentarily steady. By the time that Goethe is elaborating on Mozart to play with ever more abstract forms, his Faust no longer advances allegories of the cosmos, but of its aesthetic representation (p. 214). For Shakespeare too, the sublimation of allegory and the incorporation of the work itself into the theatrum mundi produce ostensibly superficial forms to convey fundamental truths. In The Tempest, Ariel's spirits actually tell the truth; the “insubstantial pageant” makes present the reality it would first seem to have dissolved. Likewise, Hamlet attempts to use theater, as in his staging of “The Mousetrap,” to shed light on a reality still beyond his mastery. His fraught efforts to perform an effective action of his own—to become an actor or agent in the world—are permeated with the problem of whether a play itself can be made meaningful (p. 150). Brown's book reveals the inheritance through which the theme of painting or theater in particular, and representation in general, are increasingly treated as the manifestation of a severe epistemological problem and its acknowledgment, as well as of the paradigmatically modern attempts to solve it. It is in this genealogical line that allegory is preliminary as well as persistent. Both Vondel and Racine, for example, answer a problem raised by Senecanism by enfolding allegorical content into mimetic form. They present spectators with onstage characters who find themselves seated before still another stage, whereon the allegorical representation of their own feelings take form. While we watch the mimetic representation of their response, they passionately undergo it. Mimesis envelops allegory, and literally delivers its lessons. This is how Racine, for one, unites psychology as well as ethical content with allegorical elements. With similar initiative, Jonson's masques, Calderón's autos sacramentales, and Bidermann's miracle plays use stage spectacle to make the cause of characters' affects evident. In Bidermann's Cenodoxus, people onstage honor the corpse of Cenodoxus as that of a saint, expressing confusion as the dead body cries out. The audience, however, experiences divine revelation: for via spectacular visual effects, we also see the soul of the hypocrite Cenodoxus, extended from the body onstage, crying out as it is condemned by Christ. We learn both that sin ultimately is punished in a still‐stable cosmos, and that our contemporaries may fail to see this background or grasp its deeper truth.
The ability of aesthetic representation to present itself, rather than religious content, becomes central as practitioners grow increasingly critical of spectacle and increasingly curious about its source and scope of meaning. Since this is also a central concern of modern aesthetic theory and practice, and since postmodern theory has more recently arrived at the judgment of language's deep “allegorical condition,” Brown's precisely documented, astutely argued book provides not only historical grounding, but also conceptual orientation in the complex passage we seem still to be managing. Brown's book is too fastidious, too unpretentious to harp upon such a claim. Compelling connections to Shaw, Ibsen, and Strindberg are flagged toward the work's end, and attention is given early on to the preemption of allegorical forms in Cézanne and Monet, but the bulk of this book is devoted to rigorous analysis of works that appear in the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, ending with those of Wagner. Its fundamental case for the dynamism and depth of allegorical representation and for the profound relationship of drama to modern self‐consciousness is judiciously developed and thoroughly convincing.
