Horace Made New: Horation Influences on British Writing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century.

This volume, prepared to mark the bimillennium of Horace's death, joins Virgil and his Influence (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1984) and Ovid Renewed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) as a trilogy designed to trace the influence of the three great poets of Augustan Rome. The guiding force behind this extended project, Charles Martindale, has written extensively on the application of hermeneutics and reception theory to the classical tradition, and his "Introduction" applies some of the principles developed in Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the Hermeneutics of Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) to issues that have traditionally dominated criticism of Horace. The traditional description of Horatian compromise and accommodation as "unpolitical," for example, can be reinscribed into a discourse in which categories like "politics" were negotiated according to the prevailing structures of power in Augustan Rome. In a similar way, biographical criticism like that of Fraenkel can be replaced by an approach in which Horace used his poetry as an act of self-fashioning to initiate a dialogue with the reader who is also in the process of fashioning his or her own self. The result is not one Horace but many "Horaces," constructed by a succession of readers and reading communities who appropriate the interests and values they need from the texts they read. This is Horace seen through Gadamer and Jauss, Derrida and Foucault - truly a "Horace Made New."

The twelve essays which follow are designed to show that Horace's influence was of central importance not only to the eighteenth century, but to the whole of British literature from the sixteenth century to the present. Six of the essays will be of particular interest to readers of this journal: "Horace at home and abroad: Wyatt and sixteenth-century Horatianism," by Colin Burrow; "The best master of virtue and wisdom: the Horace of Ben Jonson and his heirs," by Joanna Martindale; "Marvell and Horace: colour and translucency," by A. D. Nuttall; "Cowley's Horatian mice," by David Hopkins; "Figures of Horace in Dryden's literary criticism," by Paul Hammond; and "Horace's Ode 3.29: Dryden's 'Masterpiece in English,'" by Stuart Gillespie. The other six are necessary to establish the continuity of Horatian influence: "Pope and Horace," by Robin Sowerby; "Good humour and the agelasts: Horace, Pope and Gray," by Felicity Rosslyn; "Horace and the nineteenth century," by Norman Vance; "Horace's Kipling," by Stephen Medcalf; "Some aspects of Horace in the twentieth century," by Charles Tomlinson; and "Deniable evidence: translating Horace," by C. H. Sisson. There is also a "Postscript: images of Horace in twentieth-century scholarship," by Don Fowler.

It is customary in reviewing volumes of essays by diverse hands to note a certain inevitable unevenness in the contributions. Here this is true not in respect to quality - the editors have done unusually well in ensuring that each essay says something substantial - but in respect to theoretical approach. The "Introduction" sets out an exciting procedure for reexamining Horace, but the later essays vary widely in the extent to which they apply this approach. Burrow, for example, follows Martindale in showing how sixteenth-century courtiers constructed a "Horace" who shared their hostility to someone to whom everything is owed, and Hammond shows how even the text of "Horace" on which Dryden's literary criticism depends was made socially, by editors and commentators as well as by readers. At the other extreme are essays like Nuttall's, in which the poetry of Marvell and Horace is compared in an aesthetic and theoretical vacuum to determine who is the greater master of poetic technique. I certainly have no objection to this latter kind of criticism, but the inclusion of essays which the editors themselves acknowledge to be more "traditional" (xiii) produces a certain inconsistency, rather like that against which Horace himself warned in his prohibition against painting a dolphin in a forest or a wild boar in the waves (Ars poetica 29-30). Nevertheless this is an important volume, one which suggests (albeit inconsistently) that modern literary theory has a great deal to offer Renaissance scholars interested in the classical tradition.

Craig Kallendorf TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY