Epic Romance: Homer to Milton.

As its title indicates, Dr. Burrow's book is ambitious not only in its chronological scope, but in its reconsideration of conventional generic terms. Rather than separating epic and romance, Burrow shows that they were to some extent interrelated even in Homer, whose heroes demonstrated the capacity for sympathy that became a dominant motive for romance heroes. For the Homeric protagonist this sympathy took the form of a recognition of the common mortality shared even with an enemy. With Vergil as a crucial mediating figure for sixteenth-century epic writers (most importantly Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser), pietas acquired divergent meanings for heroes: dutifulness to the larger claims of religious, state, and dynastic obligations on the one hand and pity for the helpless and oppressed - especially women, and sometimes the very women whose sufferings they had caused - on the other.

If pity is the dominating affective feature of romance in Burrow's narrative, digressive decenteredness is its chief formal aspect. This too is foreshadowed in some of Homer's digressive interpolations. Subsequent epic writers, starting with Vergil, gave thematic significance to digression itself, as the crucial episode of Dido showed. Renaissance "epic romances" varied in their emphases: Ariosto's erotic adventures were curbed (though not entirely, and at considerable affective cost) by Tasso's more austere project, and for Spenser, the effort to reconcile the conflicting claims of honor and love led to the representation of timeless, mythological and utopian spaces. Milton, unsurprisingly, is depicted as the epic writer who is the most self-conscious about the literary tradition to which he is indebted even as he revises it, and the last of the line. Within the epic structure of Paradise Lost, Satan can be regarded as a romance hero with a quest that he is unable to define coherently, and while the actual word "sympathy" occurs only in negative contexts (Eve as she looks at herself in the lake-mirror, or the serpents' metamorphosis in Book X), it is implicit in the relations between God and his creation.

Though Burrow's book abounds in illuminating suggestions, its argument about literary and political pressures and counterpressures on writers of Renaissance "epic romances" is by no means easy to follow. In addition to analyses of the writers mentioned above, two chapters on "inglorious Spensers" and "inglorious Miltons" consider a number of lesser writers and translators of epic (e.g., Daniel, Drayton, Chapman's translations of Homer, Fairfax's Tasso, Harington's Ariosto), each treated quite briefly, so that the lines of literary descent and response that the book traces become very confusing indeed. Perhaps the most successful section - and also one of the more expansive - is the chapter on Spenser, where the equation of literary and political pressure (one of the book's recurrent motifs) bears most fruit. The romance theme of "pity" is modified by the Faerie Queene's multiple allusions to Elizabeth and by its didactic function in demonstrating the dangers of compassion for a monarch. In rewriting Ariosto and Tasso (as well as Homer and Vergil), Spenser conflates the traditionally epic themes of honor and glory with romantic ones, so that glorious or dynastically fruitful love becomes the goal of this true "epic romance." Though these features have long been recognized (as the author acknowledges), they are illuminated by their placement in the context that he provides.

The book's argument as a whole, however, seems idiosyncratic, partly because the notion of "romance" is developed without any reference to medieval examples. While the interrelationships among Renaissance epic writers and their classical forbears were undoubtedly crucial, it seems more than odd to ignore the chivalric values, mysterious and magical landscapes, and distressed damsels of the medieval tradition, especially since so many of the Renaissance works on which Burrow focuses are filled with questing knights and their encounters with the marvelous and the pathetic. The author pays tribute (albeit somewhat coyly) to Harold Bloom's concept of the "anxiety of influence" in showing that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century epic writers were concerned in all cases to extend, revise, and fill spaces left by their classical and earlier Renaissance predecessors. Perhaps if he had omitted the chapters on minor figures which clutter his argument, he might have drawn his definition of "influence" a little more generously.

Bridget Gellert Lyons RUTGERS UNIVERSITY