fable, parable, and allegory

Introduction

      any form of imaginative literature (allegory) or spoken utterance constructed in such a way that readers or listeners are encouraged to look for meanings hidden beneath the literal surface of the fiction. A story (rhetoric) is told or perhaps enacted whose details—when interpreted—are found to correspond to the details of some other system of relations (its hidden, allegorical sense). The poet, for example, may describe the ascent of a hill in such a way that each physical step corresponds to a new stage in the soul's progress toward a higher level of existence.

      Many forms of literature elicit this kind of searching interpretation, and the generic term for the cluster is allegory; under it may be grouped fables, parables, and other symbolic shapings. Allegory may involve either a creative or an interpretive process: either the act of building up the allegorical structure and giving “body” to the surface narrative or the act of breaking down this structure to see what themes or ideas run parallel to it.

Nature and objectives

Allegory and myth

      The fate of allegory, in all its many variations, is tied to the development of myth and mythology. Every culture embodies its basic assumptions in stories whose mythic structures reflect the society's prevailing attitudes toward life. If the attitudes are disengaged from the structure, then the allegorical meaning implicit in the structure is revealed. The systematic discipline of interpreting the real meaning of a text (called the hermeneutic process (exegesis)) plays a major role in the teaching and defense of sacred wisdom, since religions have traditionally preserved and handed down the old beliefs by telling exemplary stories; these sometimes appear to conflict with a system of morality that has in the meantime developed, and so their “correct” meaning can only be something other than the literal narration of events. Every culture puts pressure on its authors to assert its central beliefs, which are often reflected in literature without the author's necessarily being aware that he is an allegorist. Equally, determined critics may sometimes find allegorical meaning in texts with less than total justification—instances might include the Hebraic-Christian mystical interpretation of the Old Testament's Song of Solomon (Solomon, Song of), an erotic marriage poem, or the frequent allegorizing of classical and modern literature in the light of Freud's psychoanalytic discoveries. Some awareness of the author's intention seems necessary in order to curb unduly fanciful commentary.

The allegorical mode

      The range of allegorical literature is so wide that to consider allegory as a fixed literary (literary criticism) genre is less useful than to regard it as a dimension, or mode, of controlled indirectness and double meaning (which, in fact, all literature possesses to some degree). Critics usually reserve the term allegory itself for works of considerable length, complexity, or unique shape. Thus, the following varied works might be called allegories: the biblical parable of the sower; Everyman, the medieval morality play; The Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan; Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels; The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne; William Wordsworth's “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”; Nikolay Gogol's Dead Souls; The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde; and the plays Six Characters in Search of an Author, by Luigi Pirandello; Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett; and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee. No one genre can take in such modal range.

Fable

 Fable and parable are short, simple forms of naive allegory. The fable is usually a tale about animals (animal) who are personified (personification) and behave as though they were humans (see photograph—>). The device of personification is also extended to trees (plant), winds, streams, stones, and other natural objects. The earliest of these tales also included humans and gods as characters, but fable tends to concentrate on animating the inanimate. A feature that isolates fable from the ordinary folktale, which it resembles, is that a moral—a rule of behaviour—is woven into the story.

Parable

      Like fable, the parable also tells a simple story. But, whereas fables tend to personify animal characters—often giving the same impression as does an animated cartoon—the typical parable uses human agents. Parables generally show less interest in the storytelling and more in the analogy they draw between a particular instance of human behaviour (the true neighbourly kindness shown by the good Samaritan in the Bible story, for example) and human behaviour at large. Parable and fable have their roots in preliterate oral cultures, and both are means of handing down traditional folk wisdom. Their styles differ, however. Fables tend toward detailed, sharply observed social realism (which eventually leads to satire), while the simpler narrative surface of parables gives them a mysterious tone and makes them especially useful for teaching spiritual values.

Derivation of the terms

      The original meanings of these critical terms themselves suggest the direction of their development. Fable (from the Latin fabula, “a telling”) puts the emphasis on narrative (and in the medieval and Renaissance periods was often used when speaking of “the plot” of a narrative). Parable (from Greek parabolē, a “setting beside”) suggests a juxtaposition that compares and contrasts this story with that idea. Allegory (from Greek allos and agoreuein, an “other-speaking”) suggests a more expanded use of deceptive and oblique language. (In early Greek, though, the term allegory itself was not used. Instead, the idea of a hidden, underlying meaning is indicated by the word hyponoia—literally, “underthought”—and this term is used of the allegorical interpretation of the Greek poet Homer.)

Diverse objectives

Fable

      Fables teach a general principle of conduct by presenting a specific example of behaviour. Thus, to define the moral that “People who rush into things without using judgment run into strange and unexpected dangers,” Aesop—the traditional “father” of the fable form—told the following story:

There was a dog who was fond of eating eggs. Mistaking a shell-fish for an egg one day, he opened his mouth wide and swallowed it down in one gulp. The weight of it in his stomach caused him intense pain. “Serve me right,” he said, “for thinking that anything round must be an egg.”

      By a slight change of emphasis, the fabulist could have been able to draw a moral about the dangerous effects of gluttony.

      Because the moral is embodied in the plot of the fable, an explicit statement of the moral need not be given, though it usually is. Many of these moral tag lines have taken on the status of proverb because they so clearly express commonly held social attitudes.

      The Aesopian fables emphasize the social interactions of human beings, and the morals they draw tend to embody advice on the best way to deal with the competitive realities of life. With some irony, fables view the world in terms of its power structures. One of the shortest Aesopian fables says: “A vixen sneered at a lioness because she never bore more than one cub. ‘Only one,' she replied, ‘but a lion.' ” Foxes and wolves, which the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “Everyman's metaphor” for cunning and cruelty, appear often as characters in fables chiefly because, in the human world, such predatory cunning and cruelty are able to get around restraints of justice and authority. The mere fact that fables unmask the “beast in me,” as James Thurber, the 20th-century American humorist and fabulist, put it, suggests their satiric force. Subversive topical satire in tsarist and Soviet Russia is often called “Aesopism”; all comic strips (comic strip) that project a message (such as the Charles Schulz creation “Peanuts” and Walt Kelly's “Pogo”) have affinities with Aesop's method.

Parable

      Parables do not analyze social systems so much as they remind the listener of his beliefs. The moral and spiritual stress of the form falls upon memory rather than on the critical faculty. The audience hearing the parable is assumed to share a communal truth but perhaps to have set it aside or forgotten it. The rhetorical appeal of a parable is directed primarily toward an elite, in that a final core of its truth is known only to an inner circle, however simple its narrative may appear on the surface (a number of the parables that Christ (Christianity) used for teaching, for example, conveyed figuratively the meaning of the elusive concept Kingdom of Heaven).

Allegory

      Allegory, as the basic process of arousing in the reader or listener a response to levels of meaning, provides writers with the structure of fables, parables, and other related forms. By awakening the impulse to question appearances and by bringing order to mythological interpretation, allegory imparts cultural values. A measure of allegory is present in literature whenever it emphasizes thematic content, ideas rather than events. Generally, the allegorical mode flourishes under authoritarian conditions. Thus it found sustenance during the age of medieval Christendom, when Christian dogma sought universal sway over the mind of Western man. As such, allegory was a means of freedom under conditions of strong restraint. In general, realism, mimetic playfulness, and the resistance to authority tend to counteract the allegorical process, by loosening its stratified forms. This unbinding of symbolic hierarchies has forced allegory to seek new structures in the modern period. Nevertheless, through allegorical understanding, the great myths continue to be reread and reinterpreted, as the human significance of the new interpretations is passed down from one generation to the next. The abiding impression left by the allegorical mode is one of indirect, ambiguous, even enigmatic symbolism, which inevitably calls for interpretation.

Diversity of forms

      Since an allegorical purpose can inform works of literature in a wide range of genres, it is not surprising to find that the largest allegories are epic in scope. A quest forms the narrative thread of both the Greek epic Odyssey and the Latin, Aeneid, and it is an allegory of the quest for heroic perfection; thus, allegory is aligned with the epic form. Romances, both prose and verse, are inevitably allegorical, although their forms vary in detail with the prevailing cultural ideals of the age. By comparison, the forms of fable and parable are relatively stable—yet even they may play down the moral idea or the mysterious element and emphasize instead the narrative interest, which then results in an elaboration of the form. (Such an elaboration may be seen in a given tale, as told by successive fabulists, such as a fable of the town mouse and the country mouse; with each retelling, the story is absorbed into a new matrix of interpretation.)

      Shifts from naive to sophisticated intent are accompanied by shifts in form. The early authors of fable, following Aesop, wrote in verse; but in the 10th century there appeared collected fables, entitled Romulus, written in prose (and books such as this brought down into the medieval and modern era a rich tradition of prose fables). This collection in turn was converted back into elegiac verse. Later masters of fable wrote in verse, but modern favourites—such as Joel Chandler Harris, author of “Uncle Remus” stories, Beatrix Potter, creator of Peter Rabbit, or James Thurber in Fables for Our Time—employ their own distinctive prose. Again, while for parables prose narrative may be the norm, they have also been told in verse (as in the emblematic poetry of the 17th-century English Metaphysical poets (Metaphysical poet) such as George Herbert, Francis Quarles, and Henry Vaughan).

      Loosening the allegorical forms further, some authors have combined prose with verse. Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (c. AD 524) and Dante's The New Life (c. 1293) interrupt the prose discourse with short poems. Verse and prose then interact to give a new thematic perspective. A related mixing of elements appears in Menippean satire (those writings deriving from the 3rd-century-BC Cynic philosopher Menippus of Gadara), as exemplified in Swift's Tale of a Tub. There a relatively simple allegory of Reformation history (the Tale proper) is interrupted by a series of digressions that comment allegorically on the story into which they break.

      Even the lyric poem can be adapted to yield allegorical themes and was made to do so, for example, in the visionary and rhapsodic odes written during the high Romantic period after the late 18th century throughout Europe.

      The lesson seems to be that every literary genre is adaptable to the allegorical search for multiplicity of meaning.

Diversity of media

      In the broadest sense, allegorical procedures are linguistic. Allegory is a manipulation of the language of symbols. Verbally, this mode underwent a major shift in medium along with the shift from oral to written literature: allegories that had initially been delivered in oral form (Christ's parables, for example) were written down by scribes and then transcribed by subsequent generations. Much more remarkable transformations, however, take place when the verbal medium is replaced by nonverbal or partially verbal media.

      The drama is the chief of such replacements. The enactment of myth in the beginning had close ties with religious ritual, and in the drama of Classical Greece both comedy and tragedy, by preserving ritual forms, lean toward allegory. Old Comedy, as represented by the majority of plays by Aristophanes, contains a curious blending of elements—allusions to men of the day, stories suggesting ideas other than the obvious literal sense, religious ceremony, parodies of the graver mysteries, personified abstractions, and stock types of character. Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound uses allegory for tragic ends, while Euripides' (Euripides) tragedies make a continuous interpretive commentary on the hidden meaning of the basic myths. Allegory is simplified in Roman drama, submitting heroic deeds to the control of the fickle, often malignant goddess Fortuna. Christian symbolism is responsible for the structure of the medieval morality plays (morality play), in which human dilemmas are presented through the conflicts of personified abstractions such as the “Virtues” and their “Vice” opponents. The allegory in Renaissance drama is often more atmospheric than structural—though even Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William) writes allegorical romances, such as Cymbeline, Pericles, and The Winter's Tale (and allowed his tragedy of Coriolanus to grow out of the “fable of the belly,” which embodies a commonplace of Renaissance political wisdom and is recounted by one of the characters in the play). In 1598 Ben Jonson (Jonson, Ben) introduced the comedy of humours (humours, comedy of), which was dependent on the biological theory that the humours of the body (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile) affect personality: in Jonson's play Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman (1609), the character Morose is possessed by the demon of ill humour. Comic allegory of this kind evolved into the Restoration comedy of manners (manners, comedy of) and through that channel entered modern drama with Wilde, Shaw, and Pirandello. Ibsen, the master of realistic drama, himself used a free-style allegory in Peer Gynt, while the surrealism of modern dramatists—such as Ionesco, Genet, and Beckett in the Theatre of the Absurd—serves to reinforce the real meaning of their plays.

      The degree to which the cinema (motion picture) has been allegorical in its methods has never been surveyed in detail. Any such survey would certainly reveal that a number of basic techniques in film montage builds up multiple layers of meaning. (Animated cartoons, too, continue the tradition of Aesopian fable.)

      From time immemorial men have carved religious monuments and have drawn and painted sacred icons. Triumphal arches and chariots have symbolized glory and victory. Religious art makes wide use of allegory, both in its subject matter and in its imagery (such as the cross, the fish, the lamb). Even in poetry there can be an interaction of visual and verbal levels, sometimes achieved by patterning (pattern poetry) the stanza form. George Herbert (Herbert, George)'s Easter Wings, for instance, has two stanzas set out by the typographer to resemble the shape of a dove's wings. Such devices belong to the Renaissance tradition of the “emblem (emblem book),” which combines a motto with a simple symbolic picture (often a woodcut or engraving) and a concise explanation of the picture motto.

      While allegory thrives on the visual, it has also been well able to embrace the empty form of pure mathematics. Number symbolism is very old: early Christian systems of cosmology were often based on the number three, referring to the doctrine of the Trinity (and in fact recalling earlier Hebraic and even Hellenic numerology). Musical symbolism has been discovered in the compositions (musical composition) of the 18th-century Baroque composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach. The most evanescent form of allegory, musical imagery and patterns, is also the closest to pure religious vision, since it merges the physical aspects of harmony (based on number) with the sublime and metaphysical effect on its hearers. The final extension of media occurs in the combination of spectacle, drama, dance, and music that is achieved by grand opera, which is at its most allegorical in the total artwork of Richard Wagner (Wagner, Richard) in the second half of the 19th century. His Ring cycle of operas is a complete mythography and allegory, with words and music making two levels of meaning and the whole unified by a type of musical emblem, which Wagner called the leitmotif (leitmotiv).

Allegory and cosmology

      The allegorical mode has been of major importance in representing the cosmos: the earliest Greek philosophers, for example, speculated on the nature of the universe in allegorical terms; in the Old Testament's oblique interpretation of the universe, too, the world is seen as a symbolic system. The symbolic stories that explain the cosmos are ritualized to ensure that they encode a message. Held together by a system of magical causality, events in allegories are often surrounded by an occult atmosphere of charms, spells, talismans, genies, and magic rites. Science becomes science fiction or a fantastic setting blurs reality so that objects and events become metamorphically unstable. Allegorical fictions are often psychological (psychological novel) dramas whose scene is the mind; then their protagonists are personified mental drives. Symbolic climate is most prominent in romance, whose heroic quests project an aura of erotic mysticism, perfect courtesy, and moral fervour that creates a sublime heightening of tone and a picturesque sense of good order.

      The cosmic and demonic character of allegorical thinking is most fully reflected in the period of its greatest vogue, the High Middle Ages. During this period poets and priests alike were able to read with increasingly elaborate allegorical technique until their methods perhaps overgrew themselves. A belief had been inherited in the Great Chain of Being, the Platonic principle of cosmic unity and fullness, according to which the lowest forms of being were linked with the highest in an ascending order. On the basis of this ladderlike conception were built systems of rising transcendency, starting from a material basis and rising to a spiritual pinnacle. The early Church Fathers sometimes used a threefold method of interpreting texts, encompassing literal, moral, and spiritual meanings. This was refined and commonly believed to have achieved its final form in the medieval allegorist's “fourfold theory of interpretation.” This method also began every reading with a search for the literal sense of the passage. It moved up to a level of ideal interpretation in general, which was the allegorical level proper. (This was an affirmation that the true Christian believer was right to go beyond literal truth.) Still higher above the literal and the allegorical levels, the reader came to the tropological level, which told him where his moral duty lay. Finally, since Christian thought was apocalyptic and visionary, the fourfold method reached its apogee at the anagogic level, at which the reader was led to meditate on the final cosmic destiny of all Christians and of himself as a Christian hoping for eternal salvation.

      While modern scholars have shown that such thinking played its part in the poetry of the Middle Ages and while the Italian poet Dante himself discussed the theological relations between his poems and such a method of exegesis, the main arena for the extreme elaboration of this allegory was in the discussion and the teaching of sacred Scriptures. As such, the fourfold method is of highest import, and it should be observed that it did not need to be applied in a rigid four-stage way. It could be reduced, and commonly was reduced, to a two-stage method of interpretation. Then the reader sought simply a literal and a spiritual meaning. But it could also be expanded. The passion for numerology, combined with the inner drive of allegory toward infinite extension, led to a proliferation of levels. If four levels were good, then five or eight or nine might be better.

Historical development in Western culture

Fable

 The origins of fable are lost in the mists of time. Fables appear independently in ancient Indian and Mediterranean cultures. The Western tradition begins effectively with Aesop (6th century BC), of whom little or nothing is known for certain; but before him the Greek poet Hesiod (8th century BC) recounts the fable of the hawk and the nightingale, while fragments of similar tales survive in Archilochus, the 7th-century-BC warrior-poet. Within 100 years of the first Aesopian inventions, the name of Aesop was firmly identified with the genre, as if he, not a collective folk, were its originator. Like the Greek philosopher Socrates, Aesop was reputed to have been ugly but wise. Legend connected him with the island of Samos; the historian Herodotus believed him to have been a slave.

      Modern editions list approximately 200 “Aesop” fables, but there is no way of knowing who invented which tales or what their original occasions might have been. Aesop had already receded into legend when Demetrius of Phaleron, a rhetorician, compiled an edition of Aesop's fables in the 4th century BC. The poetic resources of the form developed slowly. A versified Latin collection made by Phaedrus, a freed slave in the house of the Roman emperor Augustus, included fables invented by the poet, along with the traditional favourites, which he retold with many elaborations and considerable grace. (Phaedrus may also have been the first to write topically allusive fables, satirizing Roman politics.) A similar extension of range marks the work of the Hellenized Roman Babrius, writing in the 2nd century AD. Among the Classical authors who advanced upon Aesopian formulas may be named the Roman poet Horace, the Greek biographer Plutarch, and the great satirist Lucian of Samosata.

beast epic

      In the Middle Ages, along with every other type of allegory, fable flourished. Toward the end of the 12th century, Marie De France made a collection of over 100 tales, mingling beast fables with stories of Greek and Roman worthies. In another compilation, Christine de Pisan's Othéa manuscript illuminations provide keys to the interpretation of the stories and support the appended moral tag line. Expanded, the form of the fable could grow into what is called the beast epic, a lengthy, episodic animal story, replete with hero, villain, victim, and endless epic endeavour. (One motive for thus enlarging upon fable was the desire to parody epic grandeur: the beast epic mocks its own genre.) Most famous of these works is a 12th-century collection of related satiric tales called Renard the Fox, whose hero is a fox (Reynard The Fox) symbolizing cunning man. Renard the Fox includes the story of the fox and Chantecler (Chanticleer), a cock, a tale soon afterward told in German, Dutch, and English versions (in The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer took it as the basis for his “Nun's Priest's Tale”). Soon Renard the Fox had achieved universal favour throughout Europe. The Renaissance poet Edmund Spenser (Spenser, Edmund) also made use of this kind of material; in his Mother Hubberd's Tale, published in 1591, a fox and an ape go off to visit the court, only to discover that life is no better there than in the provinces. More sage and serious, John Dryden (Dryden, John)'s poem of The Hind and Panther (1687) revived the beast epic as a framework for theological debate. Bernard de Mandeville (Mandeville, Bernard de)'s Fable of the Bees (first published 1705 as The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn'd Honest) illustrated the rapacious nature of humans in society through the age-old metaphor of the kingdom of the bees. In modern times, children's literature has made use of animal fable but often trivialized it. But the form has been taken seriously, as, for example, by the political satirist George Orwell, who, in his novel Animal Farm (1945), used it to attack Stalinist Communism.

Influence of Jean de La Fontaine (La Fontaine, Jean de)

      The fable has normally been of limited length, however, and the form reached its zenith in 17th-century France, at the court of Louis XIV, especially in the work of Jean de La Fontaine. He published his Fables in two segments: the first, his initial volume of 1668, and the second, an accretion of “Books” of fables appearing over the next 25 years. The 1668 Fables follow the Aesopian pattern, but the later ones branch out to satirize the court, the bureaucrats attending it, the church, the rising bourgeoisie—indeed the whole human scene. La Fontaine's great theme was the folly of human vanity. He was a skeptic, not unkind but full of the sense of human frailty and ambition. His satiric themes permitted him an enlargement of poetic diction; he could be eloquent in mocking eloquence or in contrast use a severely simple style. (His range of tone and style was admirably reflected in a version of his works made by a 20th-century American poet, Marianne Moore (Moore, Marianne).) La Fontaine's example gave new impetus to the genre throughout Europe, and during the Romantic period a vogue for Aesopian fable spread to Russia, where its great practitioner was Ivan Andreyevich Krylov. The 19th century saw the rise of literature written specifically for children (children's literature), in whom fable found a new audience. Among the most celebrated authors who wrote for them are Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, Rudyard Kipling, Kenneth Grahame, Hilaire Belloc, and Beatrix Potter. There is no clear division between such authors and the “adult” fabulist, such as Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Saint-Exupéry, or J.R.R. Tolkien. In the 20th century there were the outstanding Fables for Our Time, written by James Thurber and apparently directed toward an adult audience (although a sardonic parent might well read the Fables to his children).

Parable

      In the West the conventions of parable were largely established by the teachings of Christ (Jesus Christ). The New Testament records a sufficient number of his parables, with their occasions, to show that to some extent his disciples were chosen as his initiates and followers because they “had ears to hear” the true meaning of his parables. (It has already been noted that the parable can be fully understood only by an elite, made up of those who can decipher its inner core of truth.) Despite a bias toward simplicity and away from rhetorical elaboration, the parable loses little in the way of allegorical richness: the speaker can exploit an enigmatic brevity that is akin to the style of presenting a complex riddle. Parable is thus an immensely useful preaching device: while theologians in the period of the early Christian church were developing glosses (exemplum) on Christ's enigmatic stories, preachers were inventing their own to drive home straightforward lessons in good Christian conduct. For centuries, therefore, the model of parable that had been laid down by Christ flourished on Sundays in churches all over the Western world. Pious tales were collected in handbooks: the Gesta Romanorum, the Alphabet of Thales, the Book of the Knight of La Tour Landry, and many more. Infinitely varied in subject matter, these exemplary tales used a plain but lively style, presenting stories of magicians, necromancers, prophets, chivalrous knights and ladies, great emperors—a combination bound to appeal to congregations, if not to theologians. An important offshoot of the parable and exemplary tale was the saint (hagiography)'s life. Here, too, massive compilations were possible; the most celebrated was The Golden Legend of the 15th century, which included approximately 200 stories of saintly virtue and martyrdom.

      As long as preaching remained a major religious activity, the tradition of parable preserved its strong didactic strain. Its more paradoxical aspect gained renewed lustre in theological and literary spheres when the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard, Søren) began to use parables in his treatises on Christian faith and action. In Fear and Trembling he retold the story of Abraham and Isaac; in Repetition he treated episodes in his own life in the manner of parable. Such usage led to strange new literary forms of discourse, and his writing influenced, among others, the Austro-Czech novelist Franz Kafka (Kafka, Franz) and the French “absurdist” philosopher, novelist, and playwright Albert Camus. Kafka's parables, full of doubt and anxiety, mediate on the infinite chasm between man and God and on the intermediate role played by the law. His vision, powerfully expressed in parables of novel length (The Castle, The Trial, Amerika), is one of the most enigmatic in modern literature.

Allegory

      The early history of Western allegory is intricate and encompasses an interplay between the two prevailing world views—the Hellenic and the Hebraic (Judaism)-Christian (Christianity)—as theologians and philosophers attempted to extract a higher meaning from these two bodies of traditional myth.

      In terms of allegory, the Greco-Roman and Hebraic-Christian cultures both have a common starting point: a creation myth. The Old Testament's book of Genesis roughly parallels the story of the creation as told by the Greek poet Hesiod in his Theogony (and the later Roman version of the same event given in Ovid's Metamorphoses). The two traditions thus start with an adequate source of cosmic imagery, and both envisage a universe full of mysterious signs and symbolic strata. But thereafter the two cultures diverge. This is most apparent in the way that the style of the body of poetry attributed to Homer—the ancient Greek “Bible”—differs from the Old Testament narrative. The Greek poet presented his heroes against an articulated narrative scene, a context full enough for the listener (and, later, the reader) to ignore secondary levels of significance. By contrast, the Jewish authors of the Old Testament generally emptied the narrative foreground, leaving the reader to fill the scenic vacuum with a deepening, thickening allegorical interpretation.

Old Testament

      The Old Testament, including its prophetic books, has a core of historical record (history, philosophy of) focusing on the trials of the tribes of Israel. In their own view an elect nation, the Israelites believe their history spells out a providential (providence) design. The Prophets understand the earliest texts, Genesis and Exodus, in terms of this providential scheme. Hebraic texts are interpreted as typological: that is, they view serious myth as a theoretical history in which all events are types—portents, foreshadowing the destiny of the chosen people. Christian exegesis (the critical interpretation of Scripture) inherits the same approach.

      Typological allegory looks for hidden meaning in the lives of actual men who, as types or figures of later historical persons, serve a prophetic function by prefiguring those later persons. Adam (Adam and Eve), for example (regarded as a historical person), is thought to prefigure Christ in his human aspect, Joshua to prefigure the victorious militant Christ. This critical approach to Scripture is helped by the fact of monotheism, which makes it easier to detect the workings of a divine plan. The splendours of nature hymned in the Psalms provide a gloss upon the “glory of God.” The Law (the Torah) structures the social aspect of sacred history and, as reformulated by Christ, provides the chief link between Old and New Testaments. Christ appeals to the authority of “the Law and the Prophets” but assumes the ultimate prophetic role himself, creating the New Law and the New Covenant—or Testament—with the same one God of old.

The Greeks

      Hellenic tradition after Homer stands in sharp contrast to this concentration on the fulfilling of a divine plan. The analytic, essentially scientific histories of Herodotus and Thucydides precluded much confident belief in visionary providence. The Greeks rather believed history to be structured in cycles, as distinct from the more purposive linearity of Hebraic historicism.

      Nevertheless, allegory did find a place in the Hellenic world. Its main arena was in philosophic speculation, centring on the interpretation of Homer. Some philosophers attacked and others defended the Homeric mythology. A pious defense argued that the stories—about the monstrous love affairs of the supreme god Zeus, quarrels of the other Olympian gods, scurrility of the heroes, and the like—implied something beyond their literal sense. The defense sometimes took a scientific, physical form; in this case, Homeric turmoil was seen as reflecting the conflict between the elements. Or Homer was moralized; the goddess Pallas Athene (Athena), for example, who in physical allegory stood for the ether, in moral allegory was taken to represent reflective wisdom because she was born out of the forehead of her father, Zeus. Moral and physical interpretation is often intermingled.

       Plato, the Idealist philosopher, occupies a central position with regard to Greek allegory. His own myths imply that our world is a mere shadow of the ideal and eternal world of forms (the Platonic ideas), which has real, independent existence, and that the true philosopher must therefore be an allegorist in reverse. He must regard phenomena—things and events—as a text to be interpreted upward, giving them final value only insofar as they reveal, however obscurely, their ideal reality in the world of forms. Using this inverted allegorical mode, Plato attacked Homeric narrative, whose beauty beguiles men into looking away from the truly philosophic life. Plato went further. He attacked other fashionable philosophic allegorists because they did not lead up to the reality but limited speculation to the sphere of moral and physical necessity. Platonic allegory envisaged the system of the universe as an ascending ladder of forms, a Great Chain of Being, and was summed up in terms of myth in his Timaeus. Plato and Platonic thought became, through the influence of this and other texts on Plotinus (died 269/270) and through him on Porphyry (died c. 304), a pagan mainstay of later Christian allegory. Medieval translations of Dionysius the Areopagite (Pseudo-Dionysius The Areopagite) (before 6th century AD) were equally influential descendants of Platonic vision.

      A second and equally influential Hellenic tradition of allegory was created by the Stoic (Stoicism) philosophers, who held that the local gods of the Mediterranean peoples were signs of a divinely ordered natural destiny. Stoic allegory thus emphasized the role of fate, which, because all men were subject to it, could become a common bond between peoples of different nations. A later aspect of moral exegesis in the Stoic manner was the notion that myths of the gods really represent, in elevated form, the actions of great men. In the 2nd century BC, under Stoic influence, the Sicilian writer Euhemerus argued that theology had an earthly source. His allegory of history was the converse of Hebraic typology—which found the origin of the divine in the omnipotence of the one God—for Euhemerus found the origin of mythological gods in human kings and heroes, divinized by their peoples. His theories enjoyed at least an aesthetic revival during the Renaissance.

Blending of rival systems: the Middle Ages

      At the time of the birth of Christ, ideological conditions within the Mediterranean world accelerated the mingling of Hellenic and Hebraic traditions. Philo Judaeus laid the groundwork; Clement of Alexandria and Origen followed him. The craft of allegorical syncretism (religious syncretism)—that is, making rival systems accommodate one another through the transformation of their disparate elements—was already a developed art by the time St. Paul and the author of The Gospel According to John wove the complex strands of the Hebraic-Christian synthesis. Over centuries of quarrelling, the timeless philosophy of the Greek allegorists was accommodated to the time-laden typology of the Hebrew Prophets and their Christian successors and at length achieved a hybrid unity that permitted great allegories of Western Christendom to be written.

      As a hybrid method, allegory could draw on two archetypal story lines: the war and the quest of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, which was paralleled by the struggles and wanderings of the children of Israel. Throughout the Middle Ages the figure of the wandering Aeneas (who, in the second half of Virgil's Latin epic, Aeneid, fought bloody battles) was seen as a type in a system of hidden Christianity. Virgil's fourth Eclogue, a prophetic vision of the birth of a child who would usher in the “golden age,” was read as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. Seen by many Christian commentators as the ideal allegorist, Virgil himself was hailed as a proto-Christian prophet. The blending of rival systems of allegory from widely assorted cultures became the rule for later allegory. Adapting the Latin writer Apuleius's fable of Cupid and Psyche, Edmund Spenser (Spenser, Edmund) combined its elements with ancient Middle Eastern lore, Egyptian wisdom, and dashes of Old Testament critical interpretation to convert the enclosed garden of the biblical Song of Solomon (Solomon, Song of) into the gardens of Adonis in The Faerie Queene (Faerie Queene, The), Book III. The pagan gods survived unharmed throughout the Middle Ages if wearing Christian costumes, because Christians were taught that pagan worthies could be read as figures of Christian rulers. The labours of Hercules (Heracles), for instance, stood for the wanderings and trials of all Christian men; the Hellenic theme of heroic warfare took a Christianized form, available to allegory, when in the 4th century the poet and hymn writer Prudentius internalized war as the inner struggle of Christian man, suspended between virtue and vice. For complete triumph in explaining the significance of the world, Christianity needed one further element: a world-historical theory large enough to contain all other theories of meaning. This it found in the belief that God was the author of the world. His creation wrote the world. The world, read as a text, provided a platform for transforming the piecemeal, post-Classical syncretism into some semblance of order. Firmly established in the West, Christianity, for all its strains of discord, slowly achieved a measure of coherence. St. Thomas Aquinas could write its Summa. Theocentric, authoritarian, spiritualist, and word-oriented, the medieval model of allegory lent itself to the creation of the most wonderful of all allegorical poems, Dante's Divine Comedy, completed shortly before his death in 1321.

      Before this could happen, however, the Christian worldview was subjected to an important pressure during the 12th century. It may be called the pressure to externalize. Alain de Lille, Bernard of Sylvestris, John of Salisbury, and other forerunners of the movement known as European humanism “discovered” nature. Delighting in the wonders of God's cosmic text, they brought theological speculation down to earth. Romances (romance) of love and chivalry placed heroes and heroines against the freshness of spring. Everywhere nature shone, sparkling with the beauty of earthly life. The externalization and naturalizing of Christian belief flowers most obviously in The Romance of the Rose (Roman de la rose), begun in the 13th century by Guillaume de Lorris and completed, in vastly complicated form, by Jean de Meun. The Romance personifies the experiences of courtly love, recounting the pursuit of an ideal lady by an ideal knight, set in an enclosed garden and castle, which permits Guillaume to dwell on the beauty of nature. With Jean de Meun the interest in nature is made explicit, and the poem ends in a series of lengthy digressive discourses, several of them spoken by Dame Nature herself. In medieval English poetry this same love of spring and seasonal pleasures is apparent everywhere—certainly in the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer (Chaucer, Geoffrey), who, besides creating several allegories of his own, translated The Romance of the Rose into English.

      Dante's Divine Comedy (Divine Comedy, The) has physical immediacy and contains an immense amount of historical detail. He anchors his poem in a real world, accepting Christian typology as historical fact and adopting an ordered system of cosmology (based on the number three, proceeding from the Trinity). Dante's passion for numerology does not, however, block a closeness to nature that had perhaps not been equalled in poetry since Homer. He enfolds Classical thought into his epic by making Virgil one of its main protagonists—again to prefigure Christian heroism. Perhaps only William Langland (Langland, William), the author of The Vision of Piers Plowman, could be said to rival Dante's cosmic range. Piers Plowman is a simpler apocalyptic vision than the Comedy, but it has an existential immediacy, arising from its concern for the poor, which gives it great natural power.

Renaissance

      Romance and romantic forms provide the main vehicle for the entrance of allegory into the literature of the Renaissance period. The old Arthurian legends (Arthurian legend) carry a new sophistication and polish in the epics of the Italians Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso and in the work of Edmund Spenser. By interlacing several simultaneous stories in one larger narrative, the literary technique known as entrelacement allowed digression—yet kept an ebbing, flowing kind of unity—while presenting opportunities for moral and ironic commentary. But although the forms and themes of romance were medieval in origin, the new age was forced to accommodate altered values. The Middle Ages had externalized the Christian (Christianity) model; the Renaissance now internalized it, largely by emphasizing the centrality of human understanding. This process of internalization had begun slowly. In rough outline it can be discerned in the belief that biological humours affected personality, in the adaptations of Platonic Idealism from which arose a new emphasis on imagination, in the rise of an introspective, soliloquizing drama in England. It can further be discerned in the gradual adoption of more self-conscious theories of being: Shakespeare's Hamlet, finding himself by thinking out his situation, prefigures the first modern philosopher, René Descartes, whose starting point for argument was “I think, therefore I am.” Christopher Marlowe's characterization of Dr. Faustus (Faust) epitomizes the new age. Pursuing power in the form of knowledge, he is led to discover the demons of allegory within himself. He is an essential figure for later European literature, archetypal in Germany for both Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Thomas Mann and influential everywhere.

Modern period

      With the Baroque and Neoclassical periods, allegory began to turn away from cosmology and toward rhetorical ambiguity. John Milton (Milton, John) allegorized sin and death in his epic poem Paradise Lost, but allegory for him seems chiefly to lie in the ambiguous diction and syntax employed in the poem. Instead of flashing allegorical emblems before the reader, Milton generates a questioning attitude that searches out allegory more as a mysterious form than a visible content. His central allegorical theme is perhaps the analogy he draws between poetry, music, and ideas of cosmic order. This theme, which generates allegory at once, recurs in later English poetry right up to modern times with T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets.

      The social and religious attitudes of the Enlightenment in the 18th century could be expressed coolly and without ambiguity—and thus there was little need for spiritual allegory in the period's literature. Oblique symbolism was used mainly for satiric purposes. John Dryden and Alexander Pope were masters of verse satire, Jonathan Swift of prose satire. Voltaire and the French writers of the Enlightenment similarly employed a wit whose aim was to cast doubt on inherited pieties and attitudes. A new vogue for the encyclopaedia (Encyclopédie) allowed a close, critical commentary on the ancient myths, but the criticism was rationalist and opposed to demonology.

      Under such conditions the allegorical mode might have dried up entirely. Yet the new Romantic (Romanticism) age of the late 18th and early 19th centuries revived the old cosmologies once more, and poetic forms quickly reflected the change, with the Romantic poets and their precursors (Blake, William Collins, Edward Young, Thomas Gray, and others) managing to reinstate the high destiny of the allegorical imagination. The Romantics went back to nature. Poets took note of exactly what they saw when they went out walking, and their awareness of nature and its manifestations found its way into their poetry. Appropriate poetic forms for expressing this sensibility tended to be open, rhapsodic, and autobiographical—qualities notably present in William Wordsworth and in Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example. Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley, Percy Bysshe) is the most strikingly allegorical of English Romantics; he not only followed the Platonic tradition of Spenser and the Renaissance—with ode, elegy, and brief romance—but he also invented forms of his own, such as Epipsychidion, a rhapsodic meditation, and he was working on a great Dantesque vision, The Triumph of Life, when he died. Visionary masterpieces came from Germany (German literature), where Novalis and Friedrich Hölderlin hymned the powers of nature in odes of mythic overtone and resonance. French Romanticism, merging gradually with the theory and practice of the Symbolist movement (dealing in impressions and intuitions rather than in descriptions), in turn followed the same path. The pantheist cosmology of Victor Hugo (Hugo, Victor), the central writer of the somewhat delayed French Romantic movement, created an allegory of occult forces and demonic hero worship. It is fair to say that, in its most flexible and visionary forms, allegory flourished throughout the Romantic period.

      There also developed a novelistic (novel) mode of allegory by which prose authors brought fate, necessity, the demonic, and the cosmological into their narratives. Émile Zola (Zola, Émile) used a theory of genetics, Charles Dickens (Dickens, Charles) the idea of ecological doom, Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy, Leo) the belief in historical destiny, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor) the fatalism of madness and neurosis. Nikolay Gogol (Gogol, Nikolay) revived the art of the grotesque, picturing absurdities in the scene of tsarist Russia. Even the arch-naturalist playwright, Anton Chekhov (Chekhov, Anton), made an emblem of the cherry orchard and the sea gull in his plays of those titles.

      However its dates are established, the modern period is exceedingly complex in its mythmaking. Psychoanalytic theory has been both a critical and a creative resource; modern allegory has remained internalized in the Renaissance tradition. But Marxist Social Realism has kept to the externals of dialectical materialism, though without notable aesthetic success. In the free play of American (American literature) letters, where Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry James (particularly in his later novels) had essayed an allegorical mode, the future of its use is uncertain. T.S. Eliot (Eliot, T.S.)'s enigmatic style in a long poem, “Ash Wednesday,” may be related to his search for a Dantesque dramatic style, for which he also tried in plays, most obviously Murder in the Cathedral (a morality play) and The Cocktail Party (a philosophic farce). More clearly popular authors such as George Orwell and William Golding used the most familiar allegorical conventions. D.H. Lawrence (Lawrence, D.H.) shaped novels such as The Plumed Serpent to project a thematic, cultural polemic. W.H. Auden (Auden, W H)'s operatic librettos reflect once more the allegorical potential of this mixture of media.

      Modern allegory has in fact no set pattern or model, although Surrealism has provided a dominant style of discontinuous fragmentary expression. The only rule seems to be that there is no rule. science fiction, an ancient field dating back at least to the earliest philosophers of Greece, has set no limits on the speculations it will entertain. The allegorical author now even questions the allegorical process itself, criticizing the very notions of cosmos, demon, and magic. It may be that modern allegory has completed a vast circle begun by the first conflict between ways of interpreting myth, as revealed in Homer and the Hebraic prophets.

Angus Stewart Fletcher

Allegorical literature in the East

India (Indian literature)

      Fables appeared early in India, but it is impossible to determine whether they are older or later than the Greek. Undoubtedly there was mutual influence from very early times, for indirect contacts between Greece and India (by trade routes) had existed long before the time of Alexander the Great. In the form in which they are now known, the Greek fables are the older, but this may be an accident of transmission.

      The fable was apparently first used in India as a vehicle of Buddhist (Buddhism) instruction. Some of the Jataka (Jātaka)s, birth stories of the Buddha, which relate some of his experiences in previous animal incarnations, resemble Greek fables and are used to point a moral. They may date from as far back as the 5th century BC, though the written records are much later.

      The most important compilation is The Fables of Bidpai, or the Panca-tantra (Panchatantra) (“Five Chapters”), a Sanskrit (Sanskrit literature) collection of beast fables. The original has not survived, but it has been transmitted (via a lost Pahlavi version) as the mid-8th-century Arabic (Arabic literature) Kalīlah wa Dimnah. Kalīlah and Dimnah are two jackals, counselors to the lion king, and the work is a frame story containing numerous fables designed to teach political wisdom or cunning. From the Arabic this was translated into many languages, including Hebrew, which rendition John of Capua used to make a Latin version in the 13th century. This, the Directorium humanae vitae (“Guide for Human Life”), was the chief means by which Oriental fables became current in Europe. In The Fables of Bidpai, animals act as men in animal form, and little attention is paid to their supposed animal characteristics. It is in this respect that they differ most from the fables of Aesop, in which animals behave as animals.

Ed.

China (Chinese literature)

      Chinese philosophers from the Qin dynasty (221–206 BC) onward often used extended metaphors (from which fable is the logical development) to make their points. This is believed to reflect the fact that, as “realistic” thinkers, the Chinese generally did not favour more abstract argument. Thus simple allegory helped to stimulate audience interest and to increase the force of an argument. A century earlier, Mencius, a Confucian philosopher, had used the following little allegory in illustrating his theory that an effort has to be made if man's natural goodness is to be recovered:

A man will begin searching when his dog or chicken is missing; but he does not go searching for the good character he was born with after it is lost. Is this not regrettable?

      The same writer also used a parable to bring home his point that mental training could not be hurried, but was a gradual process:

A man in Sung sowed seeds in a field. The seedlings grew so slowly, however, that one day he took a walk through the field pulling at each one of the seedlings. On returning home he announced that he was exhausted, but that he had helped the seedlings' growth. His son, hurrying to the field, found the seedlings dead.

      Tales such as this were often borrowed from folklore, but others were probably original creations, including a striking story that opens the Zhuangzi, a summa of Daoist thought. It makes the point that ordinary people frequently deplore the actions of a man of genius because they are unable to understand his vision, which is not answerable to the laws of “common sense”:

A giant fish, living at the northern end of the world, transformed itself into a bird so that it could make the arduous flight to the southernmost sea. Smaller birds, measuring his ambition against their own capabilities, laughed at the impossibility of it.

      But the full development of fable, as it is understood in the West, was hindered by the fact that Chinese ways of thinking prohibited them from accepting the notion of animals that thought and behaved as humans. Actual events from the past were thought to be more instructive than fictitious stories, and this led to the development of a large body of legendary tales and supernatural stories. Between the 4th and 6th centuries, however, Chinese Buddhists adapted fables from Buddhist India in a work known as Bore jing, and they also began to make use of traditional Chinese stories that could further understanding of Buddhist doctrines.

Naoaki Maeno

Japan (Japanese literature)

      In Japan the Koji-ki (Kojiki) (712; “Records of Ancient Matters”) and the Nihon-shoki (Nihon shoki) (8th century; “Chronicles of Japan”), both of them official histories of Japan, were studded with fables, many of them on the theme of a small intelligent animal getting the better of a large stupid one. The same is true of the fudoki (local gazetteers dating from 713 and later). The form reached its height in the Kamakura period (1192–1333). Toward the end of the Muromachi period (1338–1573), Jesuit missionaries introduced the fables of Aesop to Japan, and the influence of these can be traced in stories written between then and the 19th century.

Teiji Ichiko

Additional Reading

Fable

E. Chambry, Fables (1927), in Greek and French; S.A. Handford, Fables of Aesop (1956); B. Pares, Krylov's Fables (1926); Marianne Moore, Fables of La Fontaine (1954). For commentary on fables, see P. Clarac, La Fontaine, l'homme et l'oeuvre (1947); B.E. Perry, Aesopica (1952).

Parable

A.M. Hunter, The Parables: Then and Now (1971); Eta Linnemann, Gleichnisse Jesu, 3rd ed. (1964; Eng. trans., The Parables of Jesus, 1966); T.W. Manson (ed.), The Sayings of Jesus as Recorded in the Gospels According to St. Matthew and St. Luke (1949); D.C. Allen, The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science and Letters (1963); Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (1962).

Allegory

General theory and history

D.C. Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (1970); C.H. Dodd, The Authority of the Bible (1958); A.S. Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964); R.M. Grant, The Letter and the Spirit (1958); Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1959); C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (1936); Jean Pepin, Mythe et allégorie (1958); Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (1966); Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (1979).

Pagan and Christian interpretation

Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion (1961); Henry Chadwick, Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition (1966); C.H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (1968); A.O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936); H. de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sens de l'Écriture (1959–64); A. Momigliano (ed.), The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (1963); G. von Rad, Theologie des Alten Testaments, 2nd ed. (1958; Eng. trans., Old Testament Theology, 2 vol., 1962–65); Rene Roques, L'Univers dionysien (1954); B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (1952); H.A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, vol. 1, Faith, Trinity, Incarnation (1956); Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, 2 vol. (1947).

Typology and typological symbolism

Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (1959); A.C. Charity, Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante (1966); Jean Danielou, Sacramentum futuri: études sur les origines de la typologie biblique (1950; Eng. trans., From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers, 1960); Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St. John's Apocalypse (1949); R.P.C. Hanson, Allegory and Event (1959); W.G. Madsen, From Shadowy Types to Truth: Studies in Milton's Symbolism (1968).

Medieval allegory

Erich Auerbach, Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (1929; Eng. trans., Dante: Poet of the Secular World, 1961); M.W. Bloomfield, “Symbolism in Medieval Literature,” Modern Philology, 56:73–81 (1958), and Piers Plowman As a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (1962); Edgar de Bruyne, Études d'esthétique médiévale, 3 vol. (1946); M.D. Chenu, La Théologie au douzième siècle (1957; Eng. trans. of nine selected essays, Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, 1968); E.R. Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948; Eng. trans., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 1953); Raymond Klibansky, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition During the Middle Ages (1939); C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964); Joseph A. Mazzeo, Medieval Cultural Tradition in Dante's Comedy (1960); D.W. Robertson and B.F. Huppe, Piers Plowman and Scriptural Tradition (1951); Charles Singleton, Dante Studies, vol. 1, Commedia (1954).

Renaissance and modern allegory

Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, rev. ed. (1963); Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928); Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company (1961); A.S. Fletcher, The Prophetic Moment: An Essay on Spenser (1971); Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (1970); Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947); U.M. Kaufman, The Pilgrim's Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (1966); Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Toward a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (1969); Jean Seznec, La Survivance des dieux antiques (1939; Eng. trans., The Survival of the Pagan Gods, rev. ed., 1953); E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (1943); Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, new ed. (1968).

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