Exit Pursued by Aeschylus: A Classical Archaeology of Shakespeare's Bear
(2018) Institute for Classical Studies (ICS), University of London, Invited Lecturer — Location: London, UK
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- Abstract
- Though Nicolas Boileau’s L’art poétique (1674) and Marco Girolamo Vida’s De arte poetica (1527) adapt Horace’s Ars Poetica (c. 10’s BCE), both eschew the mad-cap poet turned bear turned leech with which Horace’s poem, its third wall broken, ends. Their classicizing artes poeticae end in polite aspiration, Horace’s in chaos. Modern classical scholarship has tended to share their reticence. This paper, by contrast, aims puts the bear back in Horace, and put the "chaos" it emblematizes back into the classical tradition of drama and poetics from Aeschylus down to the Renaissance. The first section examines the role of bears in classical poetics, and in the context of Horace's corpus. The second shows what the bear’s starring Horatian role owes to and inspires in Greek and Latin drama and epic, proposing a link between the ends of Virgil's Aeneid, Horace's Ars Poetica, and several Senecan tragedies. The third and final section turns to the bear’s fate in post-Horatian drama and, consequently, in Renaissance artes poeticae, culminating in the bear’s starring role as unstable genre-crossing centre of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1611). This paper shows this bear’s poetological filiation with Horace’s bear and its Renaissance avatars, and suggests a possible common descent for both Shakespeare and Horace’s bear from Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers. In addition to increasing our sense of the monstrous qualities of Augustan literature and Latin drama, this paper clarifies how classical poetics functioned, in its own time and thereafter, as both an analytic field and a literary genre in its own right. For later published version, see “Exit Pursued by Horace: A Classical Archaeology of Shakespeare’s Bear”, accepted in Artes Poeticae: Formations and Transformations 1500–1650, Special Issue of Classical Receptions Journal (11 June, 2021), pp. 86–106.
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Trinity Cambridge
Citations
Kachuck, A. (2018). Exit Pursued by Aeschylus: A Classical Archaeology of Shakespeare’s Bear. Institute for Classical Studies (ICS), University of London, Invited Lecturer, London, UK. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100985