Politics and Aesthetics in European Baroque and Classicist Tragedy. Jan Bloemendal and Nigel Smith, eds. Drama and Theatre in Early Modern Europe 5. Leiden: Brill, 2016. xii + 442 pp. $215.
modates a wide range of metaphors and contextual frameworks for representing the French poet’s agonistic relationship to antiquity. According to Hui, Du Bellay imagines ancient culture as virtually pulverized, reduced to burning ashes, to powdery dust, or to language’s constituent alphabetical and sonic elements. Ruin, for this poet, provides “license to dismember classical texts, transpose them, and reconstitute them . . . into a uniquely French body” (172). Spenser’s imitations and translations of Du Bellay figure in the chapter devoted to the keyword moniment. Throughout the Spenserian corpus, ruins are preferred over monuments, just as allegory is privileged over antiquarianism, and word over matter. The incomplete or ruined state of The Faerie Queene, according to Hui, represents Spenser’s iconoclastic commitment to an “allegory of ruins” (211); the poem’s fragmentation “demands an allegorical method of reading that is by necessity unfinished and unfinishable” (215). The book’s keyword framework occasionally proves constraining and distracting. At these moments, the prospect of contemplating ruins as historical and architectural objects fades into the background, eclipsed by a preoccupation with semantic complexities and issues of literary genealogy. This does not, however, detract from the significant contributions of this study, excavating as it does, with an impressive range of erudition, the generative influence of ruins on Renaissance poetry.