Time to Begin Anew: Dryden’s Georgics and Aeneis by Tanya Caldwell

Abstract

63 5 Page 4. Many early biographies of Brown have him born at Shifnal. Benjamin Boyce, citing the parish register and Anthony Wood, prefers Newport: Tom Brown of Facetious Memory (Cambridge , Mass., 1939), p. 5. Either way, Brown was a Shropshireman. 6 Entitled ‘‘The General Lover,’’ and divorced from its epistolary context, the poem appears among Brown’s miscellaneous verse in vol. I of his Works (1707, p. 154), which suggests that it may have enjoyed wider currency, in printed or MS collections. 7 These and other attacks by Brown and Boyer are cited in Works, I:390, 393, 481; II: 288– 291. Formerly Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London BOOKS BRIEFLY NOTED* TANYA CALDWELL. Time to Begin Anew: Dryden’s Georgics and Aeneis. Lewisburg , PA: Bucknell, 2000. Pp. 263. $44. This is the first critical study to take a serious and sustained look at the two centerpieces of Dryden’s Virgil: theGeorgics and the Aeneis (1697). Ms. Caldwell rightly assumesthatDryden’sGeorgicvision was just as central and crucial to his literary imagination as was the epic story of Aeneas. She argues that both works betray the same underlying tension; in effect , Dryden is caught between two different worlds—the heroic past of Virgil and the unheroic present ofcontemporary England. How did Dryden mediate this conflict? Through ‘‘emphasis on the poet’s rather than history’s redeeming powers, uncertainty about the future or the importance of political and historical issues, and concern ultimately with the individual. These are the building blocks, too, of course of the Aeneis, where the obviousfailureoftheheroicismanifested in the poem’s emphasis on moral truth and individual survival and virtue over the cultivation of national history and a national hero.’’ *Unsigned reviews are by the editors. Ms. Caldwell elaborates this insight with great subtlety and ingenuity, enriching her readings by constant reference to the decade in which Dryden composed his Virgilian translations. Althoughmany commentators have pointed out Williamite and Jacobite allusions in Dryden’sVirgil , Ms. Caldwell uncovers a new trove of topical meaning. Discussing the relevant works (plays, poems, translations, essays) which Dryden wrote before and after the Glorious Revolution, her book is a well-informed and far-reaching treatment of thiswatershedperiodinDryden’s life and this transitional phase in English cultural history. Unlike previous translators of Virgil, Dryden was poised (however precariously ) to give a ‘‘novelistic’’ rendering of epic themes, epic struggles, and epic characters. He achieved this effect by modulating back and forth, often within the same passage or episode, between Virgilian grandeur and pathos and Drydenesque irony and mock-heroic satire. Departing from other commentators, Ms. Caldwell finds coherence and continuity in these tonal displacements and disparities . For her, Dryden is a Modernist, and his Virgil a sort of Hugh Selwyn Maub- 64 erley; in short, Dryden gave his contemporaries the kind of classic which ‘‘the age demanded.’’ No one has produced a more comprehensive and balanced assessment of Dryden’s Virgil than Ms. Caldwell. Taylor Corse Arizona State University RICHARD MORTON. John Dryden’s Aeneas : A Hero in Enlightenment Mode. Victoria: Victoria, 2000. Pp. 136. $15.50. In selective meticulous detail, this monograph demonstrates the important truth that Dryden’sAeneidembodies‘‘the different social assumptions and moral values of a different time and place.’’Virgil (Mr. Morton spells his name Vergil) ‘‘becomes a contemporary of the translator . Not only does he seem to allude to the Glorious Revolution and the key political squabbles of the time; more centrally and viscerally he is an Englishman, his habits of mind formed by Christianity, Toryism, Lockean philosophy, and Restoration sentimentality.’’ Mr. Morton comments shrewdly and judiciously on the many ways, large and small, in which Dryden manipulates the text of Virgil to presentanAeneas‘‘whoisarecognizably post-RenaissanceEuropeanhero—aman continuing his education, through occasional backslidings and embarrassments, to an ultimate epic status which is itself ambiguous.’’ In chapters on memory and identity (the wanderings of Aeneas), on social status (Aeneas and hisfellowTrojans),on romantic love (Aeneas and Dido), on the underworld (Aeneas and Anchises), on epic combat (Aeneas and Turnus), Mr. Morton shows how Dryden produces a robust and vigorous translation, which loses much of Virgil’s pathos, ambiguity, and subtlety: ‘‘If Vergil is suggestive, he will make the...