neo-classicism

neo-classicism, in literature, the habit of imitating the great authors of antiquity as a matter of aesthetic principle. Medieval writers had often used classical works for models, but Petrarch in the 14th cent. was the first to do so because he considered it the only way to produce great literature. The epic, eclogue, elegy, ode, satire, tragedy, comedy, and epigram of ancient times all found imitators, first in Latin, then in the vernaculars. At the beginning of the 16th cent. the recovery of the previously neglected Poetics of Aristotle provoked an attempt to establish rules for the use of the ancient genres. The Poetics itself was repeatedly edited, translated, and supplied with commentaries, notably by Castelvetro (1570), and a number of treatises on poetry appeared, culminating in J. C. Scaliger's controversial Poëtice (1561). These theoreticians imprisoned imitation within a rigid framework of rules. The most famous of their inventions was the observance of the dramatic unities of time, place, and action, which won great support in France in the 1620s where a new generation was eager to attract a more educated public. A noisy battle over Corneille's popular tragi-comedy Le Cid (1637), which was blamed for breaking the rules, ended in an acceptance of the unities, and during the next 30 years a succession of critics, the best-known of whom was Boileau, extended the scope of their prescriptions from drama to all other major genres.

Up to the last quarter of the 17th cent. neoclassicism had little influence in England and, except for Jonson, no important writer paid strict attention to the rules. But at that point playwrights responded to the urgings of Rymer and began to take neo-classical theories more seriously. Dryden produced All for Love (1677) and Addison his Cato (1713), which has been called the only correct neo-classical tragedy in English; but the fashion was not to last.

The usual excuse for the rules was that they helped writers to be true to nature. Pope wrote: ‘Those rules of old discover'd not devis'd, | Are Nature still, but Nature methodiz'd’, and implicit in his view was the assumption that ‘nature’ consisted in what was generally true. Cervantes in the early 17th cent. had argued for the representation of true facts of an exceptional nature, and a hundred years later it had become clear to everybody that extraordinary phenomena furnished literary material of considerable value. The scope of what could be regarded as natural was steadily growing, and simultaneously the difficulty Homer's readers experienced in appreciating his poems made them aware of the fact that behaviour usual in one age could prove unacceptable in another. What undermined neo-classicism most decisively in the 18th cent. was the changing view of the goal of literary creation provoked by Boileau's translation (1674) of the pseudo-Longinian treatise of the sublime. A cult of sublimity replaced the wish to produce a just representation of general reality, and the way to Romanticism lay open.