Reviewed by:

• John Fletcher’s Rome: Questioning the Classics by Domenico Lovascio
• Gabriella Edelstein

It is a critical commonplace to declare at the beginning of a scholarly monograph about John Fletcher that despite being the most influential playwright of his era, the vast canon of John Fletcher–Francis Beaumont–Philip Massinger plays still go unexplored. Even if Fletcher has begun to receive his due attention over the last two decades, Domenico Lovascio’s monograph on the playwright’s dramatic representations of the Ancient Roman world is a welcome intervention in the field. Lovascio reads together what will now be called Fletcher’s ‘Roman plays’— Bonduca, Valentinian, The False One, and The Prophetess—as a group for the first time, arguing that their quality of disorientation evinces the playwright’s scepticism about the worthiness of Rome as an intellectual, political, and social model.

Importantly, Lovascio discusses the classical and early modern sources that inspired the plays, taking seriously Fletcher’s intellectual life as a philosopher of history and political thinker, even if the plays are often ironic and irreverent. In Fletcher’s Roman plays, there is ‘a grim depiction of a history devoid of purpose and transcendent meaning’ (p. 21), which Lovascio reads as an example of what Walter Benjamin theorised as Trauerspiel, or mourning play. The pessimistic portrayal of Rome was, as Lovascio establishes in Chapter 1, partly the result of the classical sources on which Fletcher based his plays. Unlike many of his contemporaries who depicted Ancient Rome—most notably Shakespeare— Fletcher did not rely on sources about the Republic such as Plutarch, Virgil, and Ovid, the kinds of writers that were part of a grammar school curriculum. Rather, Fletcher adapted writings about Rome’s Imperial era written during late antiquity, which he coupled with contemporary vernacular translations of ancient texts by Continental writers. These later historians tended to be more pessimistic about the Roman Empire, which led to Fletcher’s portrayal of Rome as ‘a corrupted political reality facing irreversible decay’ (p. 17).

In Chapter 2, Lovascio demonstrates how Fletcher’s plays undermine the English Renaissance’s myth of Ancient Rome as cultural exemplar. Fletcher’s Roman plays are questioning why the English Renaissance relied on the Roman Empire as a social, political, and philosophical model if Rome was destined to destroy itself. Rather than the Rome of superbia and virtus, Fletcher’s Roman world is one that lacks commendable political leadership and has been abandoned by the gods who are meant to protect the Roman citizens. Lovascio shows how Fletcher relies on a metaphor of disintegration and decay—particularly of the bodies of dead Roman emperors—to represent Rome as cruel and corrupt and, furthermore, that the Empire itself is also destined to dissolve. The only means Roman men possess to prove their virtus is on the battlefield, which is part of Fletcher’s valorisation of the military more generally. But as Lovascio [End Page 267] explains, even this is inadequate to save the Empire from the general violence and opportunism that will lead to its downfall.

Having dealt with the sources that Fletcher adapted in his Roman plays and his pessimistic depiction of the Empire, its leaders, and male subjects, in Chapter 3, Lovascio turns to Fletcher’s depiction of women. He argues that Fletcher conveys the female exemplum par excellence of the era—Lucretia’s suicide after being raped by Sextus Tarquinius—as an inadequate ideal. Lovascio compares Fletcher’s representation of Roman women to non-Roman women (most notably, Bonduca and Cleopatra), and then to the women of the Fletcher canon more broadly. He finds that Fletcher is critical of Roman women’s reputation for ‘excessive passivity’ (p. 128), as they do not display the kinds of ‘masculine’ wit and fortitude as the plays’ non-Roman women and Fletcher’s female characters at large (Maria in The Tamer Tamed perhaps being the most famous example). Rather, Roman exempla for early modern women are, for Fletcher, ‘undependable and impractical’ (p. 128...

审阅者：

• 约翰·弗莱彻的罗马：质疑经典多梅尼科·洛瓦西奥
• 加布里埃拉·埃德尔斯坦

在一本关于约翰·弗莱彻的学术专着的开头声明，尽管约翰·弗莱彻是他那个时代最有影响力的剧作家，但约翰·弗莱彻-弗朗西斯·博蒙特-菲利普·马辛格的戏剧经典仍然未被探索，这是一个至关重要的常识。即使弗莱彻在过去二十年里开始受到应有的关注，多梅尼科·洛瓦西奥关于这位剧作家对古罗马世界的戏剧性表现的专着仍然是该领域值得欢迎的介入。洛瓦西奥一起朗读了现在被称为弗莱彻的“罗马戏剧”—— 《邦杜卡》、《瓦伦蒂尼安》、《假人》和《女先知》——第一次作为一个群体，认为他们迷失方向的品质表明了剧作家对罗马作为知识、政治和社会模式的价值的怀疑。

重要的是，洛瓦西奥讨论了启发这些戏剧的古典和早期现代来源，认真对待弗莱彻作为历史哲学家和政治思想家的知识生活，即使这些戏剧常常具有讽刺意味和不敬。在弗莱彻的罗马戏剧中，“对一段没有目的和超验意义的历史进行了残酷的描述”（第 21 页），洛瓦西奥将其视为沃尔特·本雅明理论中的 Trauerspiel 的一个例子，或哀悼剧。正如洛瓦西奥在第一章中所阐述的那样，对罗马的悲观描绘部分是弗莱彻戏剧所依据的古典资料的结果。与许多描绘古罗马的同时代人（尤其是莎士比亚）不同，弗莱彻并不依赖普鲁塔克、维吉尔和奥维德等有关共和国的资料，这些作家是文法学校课程的一部分。相反，弗莱彻改编了古代晚期有关罗马帝国时代的著作，并将其与大陆作家对古代文本的当代白话翻译结合起来。这些后来的历史学家往往对罗马帝国更加悲观，这导致弗莱彻将罗马描绘成“一个面临不可逆转衰退的腐败政治现实”（第17页）。

在第二章中，洛瓦西奥展示了弗莱彻的戏剧如何破坏英国文艺复兴时期古罗马作为文化典范的神话。弗莱彻的罗马戏剧质疑，如果罗马注定要毁灭自己，为什么英国文艺复兴要依赖罗马帝国作为社会、政治和哲学模式。而不是崇尚卓越和美德的罗马弗莱彻笔下的罗马世界缺乏值得称道的政治领导，并被本应保护罗马公民的诸神所抛弃。洛瓦西奥展示了弗莱彻如何依靠瓦解和腐烂的隐喻——尤其是死去的罗马皇帝的尸体——来表现罗马的残酷和腐败，此外，帝国本身也注定要解体。罗马人证明自己美德的唯一手段是在战场上，这是弗莱彻对军队更普遍的评价的一部分。但正如 Lovascio [完第 267 页]所解释的，即使这样也不足以将帝国从普遍的暴力和机会主义中拯救出来，而这些暴力和机会主义将导致其垮台。

在讨论了弗莱彻在他的罗马戏剧中改编的资料以及他对帝国、帝国领导人和男性臣民的悲观描述之后，洛瓦西奥在第三章转向弗莱彻对女性的描述。他认为弗莱彻传达了那个时代最杰出的女性典范——卢克丽霞在被塞克斯图斯·塔奎尼乌斯强奸后自杀——作为一个不充分的理想。洛瓦西奥将弗莱彻对罗马女性的描绘与非罗马女性（最著名的是邦杜卡和克利奥帕特拉）进行比较，然后与弗莱彻经典中的女性进行更广泛的比较。他发现弗莱彻对罗马女性“过度被动”的名声持批评态度（第 128 页），因为她们没有像剧中的非罗马女性和弗莱彻笔下的女性角色那样表现出“男性”的智慧和毅力（《驯服者》中的玛丽亚也许是最著名的例子）。相反，对于弗莱彻来说，早期现代女性的罗马典范是“不可靠且不切实际的”（第 128 页...