Aristotle’s sixteenth-century readers were the first for a thousand years to be in a position to look beyond the reputation of the Poetics to the text itself. What they found took them far beyond the familiar ethical contexts in which poetics had long been located. Reading across the corpus aristotelicum, Francesco Patrizi advanced a detailed argument that cast the Poetics in a civic light, and Jacopo Mazzoni after him labelled it the ninth book of the Politics. Despite disagreement on technical grounds from commentators such as Paolo Beni, numerous editions of Aristotle’s Opera omnia agreed that the Poetics numbered, at very least, among the moral works. By the seventeenth century, Patrizi’s theories had travelled as far north as England, informing Theodore Goulston’s translation and commentary on the Poetics in 1623 and contributing to developing notions of a civic role for catharsis.
Roger Ascham's Greek Isocrates records two decades of tutorials at the pinnacle of Tudor politics. At the Imperial court at Augsburg in the early 1550s, Ascham and Sir Richard Morison read ancient Athens into the Reformation, as they shaped the events unfolding around them. And almost twenty years later, just six weeks before his death, Ascham was invited back to Hampton Court for one last tutorial. As Elizabeth and her tutor read Isocrates on free speech, frank counsel, and intervention in foreign wars, an anxious faction of humanist courtiers was peering over Ascham's shoulder, desperate to influence their headstrong queen.
At opposite ends of Reformation Europe, Martin Luther and the Italian
Jewish theatre director Leone de’ Sommi both declare that the Jews
invented tragedy and the Greeks took the credit. How to explain this
unlikely alliance over a still unlikelier account of literary history? De’
Sommi was asserting the value of Jewish culture; Luther was mounting a
complex argument against the Catholic canon. De’ Sommi’s sources were
Talmudic, Luther’s patristic. Across geography, chronology, and faith,
tragedy served as a contested borderland, in which to probe the
boundaries between history and fiction, scripture and apocrypha, pagan,
Jew, and Christian.
