Ranging from classical theory and drama to Renaissance English, Italian, and French drama (principally Racine), German romantic philosophy, and modern literary criticism, Blair Hoxby argues brilliantly and compellingly what we can now deduce was a different meaning drama held in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Our modern age, beginning with Bertrand Russell in 1903, was often concerned with “an unavoidable collision of ethical forces or a conflict between freedom and necessity” (3). But Renaissance authors saw tragedy quite differently. Their chief source was Aristotle’s Poetics from which they took the building blocks of recognition, reversal, and pathos as exemplified in Sophocles’s Ajax. This passion or verbal disturbance was called perturbation by Georgio Valla and Robertello, passio by Vettori, and passione by Castelvetro and Piccolomini. Such considerations displaced interest in plot. Yet “[because] every play implies a performance in space and through time,” Angelo Igregneri writes in 1598, “the poet should imagine his story in those terms before he sets his pen to paper. He is responsible for understanding the three ways that theater performances signify: through action, or the words, expressions, gestures, and movements of the actors; music, or the melody and rhythm of the singers and, dancers; and apparatus, or the lines and colors of the stage picture” (47).

Consequently, early modern authors and critics did not look for the development of character but rather for manners, habits, and customs: “When an early modern actor ‘personated’ a role, he adopted the manners appropriate to a man with a certain natural disposition occupying a particular station in life, but he did not create a radically individuated personality with a back-story as an actor might today” (49). Other works by Aristotle complemented the Poetics in early modern dramaturgical thought. Thus the Nichomachean Ethics demonstrates the formation of ethical feelings. The Rhetoric illustrated passionate reactions to affective judgments. The Politics illustrated how passions affect ethical responses. Aristotle was also the source for understanding poetic imitatio through the use of fable manners and sentiment. Language, according to Aristotle, should not be archaic or obscure even when metaphoric, ornamental, or periphrastic. Such ideas were also common to the high style as advocated by Quintilian.

Part 1, “The Philosophy of the Tragic and the Poetics of Tragedy,” supplies the theory; part 2 is given to examples. Hoxby proposes that “relying on a single, continuous action [the classically oriented play] proceeds to its catastrophe without surprises,” adding, “this tragic species foregoes recognition and unforeseen reversals of fortune in order to exercise the passions of the audience through pure displays of pathos” (111). The best surviving example is Sophocles’s Ajax. Thus Ajax “dilates the moment of death into a process of dying, a rite of passage, and in doing so he converts the audience into a community of mourners who, like the dying, occupy a liminoid space between the living and the dead” (115–16). However, some students of passion believed that affective states could become fixed; Trissimo, therefore, makes use of dreams, entrances, exits, messages, and formal disputes to force change and added discourse as an act of imitation. The greatest simple pathetic tragedy of the time was John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, in which mental anguish is less remedial than physical dolor. In a chapter given over to opera, the changing style of prefaces and prologues to Euridice (1600)—the first opera to survive—was given rival settings by Ottavio Rinuccini and Jacopo Peri, preceding work by Claudio Monteverdi; but most operas derived from classical models fall outside the parameters of this journal.

The chapter on Counter-Reformation tragedy claims that Jesuits were drawn to biblical stories that had current counterparts, so that the blinding of Oedipus is recalled at the blinding of Samson, for instance, while the Protestant authors stuck closely to biblical episodes. Such tragedy in a carnal world aroused not only pity and fear, but admiration for Christian martyrs. Jesuits, in fact, wrote some of the period’s most important treatises on poetics, perspective, dramatic music, dance, and theatrical action. The study closes with an extended comparison between Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Dryden’s All for Love in light of the classically inherited poetics. Shakespeare aims at reality, Dryden at verisimilitude. Shakespeare works from the vagaries of history, of story; he is episodic, his characters changeable and unpredictable. Dryden, conversely, wrote by design: parts work like a machine, producing a distinguishable whole. Studying classical poetics, therefore, shows us how such separate practices grew out of a common background and could find ready audiences for their time.