Russ Leo, Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. 320pp. ISBN: 9780198834212. £60 hardback.
Greek tragedy fascinated a surprising number of Protestant theologians across Europe, as this erudite, original and compelling study reveals. They sought to align aspects of tragedy, understood through the lens of Aristotle’s Poetics and the plays themselves – Euripides was especially and somewhat surprisingly preferred – with key tenets of Reformed ethics and epistemology. Their interest was aided and abetted by Erasmus, who preferred Greek tragedy to Latin because he found that the Greeks, unlike their later Roman counterparts, ‘sought to touch the spectator’s heart’. Erasmus’ writings on tragic theory as well as his translations of Greek tragedy into Latin made the philosophical challenges and rewards of tragedy more familiar to early modern intellectuals, ‘teaching generations of readers how to understand and use tragedy’ (21).
Leo plays a similar role in this study, mediating between Greek and Latin commentators on Aristotle, including a wide array of medieval and early modern Latin treatises, and modern scholars keen to learn about these theological defences of pagan tragedy written by the likes of David Pareus, Philip Melanchthon, Ludovico Castelvetro, John Rainolds and Daniel Heinsius. The chapter on Rainolds – who emerges as a complex, learned and widely-admired hero of the Reformation at Oxford, a student of poetry as well as poetic theory – provides a welcome and corrective view of a significant scholar and activist whose a reputation as an anti-theatricalist has all too often eclipsed his other accomplishments. Milton’s Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes provide the study with a culminating literary demonstration of the ways in which Reformation thought and poetics came to embrace tragedy as a form of inquiry not merely amenable but even native, in Milton’s revisionary account, to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Milton claimed to discover the roots of tragedy in Hebrew antiquity rather than fifth-century Greece. The Greeks, according to Milton, ‘ill imitated’ the lessons taught by Hebrew scripture about causality, necessity and freedom – the core concerns of tragedy that aligned it, in Leo’s understanding of its importance to Aristotle, with philosophy itself.
The study is impressive in its grasp of modern and post-modern theoretical concerns as well as classical and theological controversies. It begins with two headnotes, one from Gorgias (as reported by Plutarch) and the other from Adorno, each focused on the paradoxical nature of artistic creation and aesthetic truth. Tragedy, according to Gorgias, involves a kind of deception that is more true, and more beneficial, than no deception at all: ‘he who deceives is more honest than he who does not deceive, and he who is deceived is wiser than he who is not deceived’ (3). As Kathy Eden demonstrated in Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (1986), Aristotle embraced and refined Gorgias’ paradoxical affinity between ethics and fiction to develop a specifically forensic view of tragedy. Citing Eden’s work, Leo traces similar strands of understanding in Castelvetro’s aesthetic theory, arguing that Castelvetro’s writings on Aristotle highlight ‘the philosophical province of tragedy, the degree to which tragedy emerges in the Poetics as an exacting treatment of causality, action, and form, offering insight into definition, demonstration, and interpretation’ (4). Tragedy ‘asks audiences to think critically about what is possible, probable, and credible […] the observer who is “deceived”—that is to say, immersed in the work—is in fact “wiser” for the deception, feeling and comprehending according to nature’ (5).
This is a compelling account of Castelvetro and, in Leo’s terms, of ‘the philosophical province of tragedy’. Thus it comes as something of a surprise, immediately thereafter, when Leo remarks that Castelvetro’s understanding of theatrical performance as the necessary medium of tragedy was a fundamental misreading of the Poetics: ‘Against Aristotle, [Castelvetro] contends that spectacle and stage-playing [my italics] are integral to tragedy’ (39). In Leo’s view, it was Rainolds who ‘followed Aristotle to the letter, mobilizing the philosophical account of tragedy in the Poetics against theater in the name of the Reformation’ (39). Yet later in the book, in his chapter on Rainolds, Leo says and documents quite the opposite. One of the values of this chapter, indeed, lies in its careful explication of the language Aristotle uses for ‘enactment’ or performance – what could also be called ‘stage-playing’ – and the language he uses for the sixth element of tragedy or opsis, most commonly translated, since Roman commentators, as ‘spectacle’. Aristotle may have been ambiguous about what he meant by ‘enactment’, but not to the extent that it should be confused with opsis or spectacle; as Leo rightly notes, whatever the ambiguities involved in Aristotle’s references to enactment, he ‘marks a distinction between enactment and spectacle’ (124). And Leo makes explicitly clear in this chapter that it is Rainolds, rather than Castelvetro, who goes against Aristotle: rather than following him ‘to the letter’, Rainolds faulted Aristotle for regarding performance as essential to tragedy. According to Rainolds, ‘Aristotle errs when he assumes that stage-playing is essential to tragedy, a misguided attempt to accommodate his philosophy to the capacities of the vulgar at the expense of rigor and precision’ (124). For performance or ‘stage-playing’, Rainolds substitutes recitation.
Why then does Leo so frequently deploy the phrase ‘spectacle and stage-playing’ in reference to theatrical performance, as he does in the above reference to Castelvetro’s misunderstanding of Aristotle, as though these were neutral and essentially synonymous terms? Leo’s contradiction in his incompatible references to Rainolds’s fidelity to Aristotle is a remarkable one, but my purpose is not simply to find fault or to point out an unseemly seam in a book from which I have otherwise learned so much. The contradiction sheds some light on what are, to my mind, unresolved questions raised by the book’s central claim. What does it mean, after all, to describe tragedy as philosophy? Leo is careful to assert that Tragedy as Philosophy is ‘a history of tragedy, not drama or performance’ (6), and cautions further that neither he nor his authors will be concerned with ‘vernacular tragedy’ of the sort performed in Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. All perfectly fine. However, to regard the study as ‘a history of tragedy’ or even a history of ‘tragedy as philosophy’ hardly renders moot the question of tragedy as theatre, that is to say, tragedy as performance, whether in relation to Aristotle’s Poetics and his discussion of ‘enactment’ or in the more general sense that a play written to be performed is a work whose principal medium is, by definition, that of performance. How Pareus or Heinsius or Rainolds interpreted Aristotle is one issue. But for Leo’s argument, the question of whether ‘philosophy’ in his own terms is fully compatible with, or rather, realisable as theatre, may be another. What would change if we shifted our sense of his larger, overarching project from ‘a history of tragedy’ to something like ‘a history and critical genealogy of “the tragic”’? It would be a history and genealogy that locates the emergence of the latter in Reformation debates about Aristotle and problematic issues of Protestant agency rather than German Idealism of the nineteenth century; it would be capable of highlighting the significant, and otherwise obscured, political and ideological stakes involved in divorcing tragedy from the tragic, at this specific and climacteric juncture of history.
At one point, Leo considers precisely such a genealogy as one way to conceive of his purpose. He notes that some might regard his study as a challenge to Peter Szondi’s confident assertion that ‘only since Schilling has there been a philosophy of the tragic’ (7). Although Leo describes such a challenge as ‘beyond the scope of this book’, the rhetorical move is not as modest as it might otherwise seem, since he goes on to note that ‘Tragedy as Philosophy in the Reformation World discovers continuities that [Szondi] tacitly denies and obscures’ (7). My point is not to quibble over semantics or to suggest that Leo should have written a different book; rather, it is to suggest that his work speaks more fully if implicitly to the project that he gestures toward at this moment than he may realise. I must confess that I was never sure what Leo meant by the phrase ‘tragedy as philosophy’ in and of itself, as opposed to Szondi’s own ‘philosophy of the tragic’. A fuller discussion of the difference between ‘philosophy’ per se and something that might instead be described as ‘philosophical’, between ‘tragedy’ and ‘the tragic’, might have clarified Leo’s project and perhaps altered some of its terms, including its evocative title. Nonetheless, what Leo does analyse with remarkable acuity and detail could accurately be described as Protestantism’s failed effort to accommodate tragedy-as-theater to philosophy-as-Protestant theology. Neither Heinsius nor Pareus were anti-theatricalists in the sense that Rainolds was, but they could be described as non-theatricalists in their own, pointedly selective accommodations of a strictly non-performative view of tragedy. The ‘philosophy of the tragic’ that emerges from Protestantism’s fascination with tragedy would be quite different from that articulated by German Idealists, needless to say, with political and social dimensions that later evolutions of ‘the tragic’ did not possess.
In summary, this is an important and significant study that is thought-provoking and immensely stimulating even when it is, like any worthy intellectual endeavour, less than perfect. At its best, whether explicating theatrical or anti-theatrical views, Tragedy as Philosophy provides a compelling account of the complex and counter-intuitive epistemology of the Real that Reformation theology encountered in tragedy – an understanding of the paradoxical relation between actuality and virtuality in dramatic (if not theatrical) fiction that even Rainolds found valuable for Protestant thought. What I find most appealing in Leo’s study, whether he is explicating a performative or more strictly literary view of tragedy, is his capacity to capture the dialectical relationship, at once affective and cognitive, between tragedy and its audience or reader. It is a relationship in which both feeling and comprehension are engaged in a critical fashion – one conducive, that is to say, to the development of a capacity for critical social thought.
Steven Mullaney
University of Michigan
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The study is impressive in its grasp of modern and post-modern theoretical concerns as well as classical and theological controversies.
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Link / ReplyThe study is impressive in its grasp of modern and post-modern theoretical concerns as well as classical and theological controversies.
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