Hammond, Paul. Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Reviewed by William Warner | July 12, 2000
Paul Hammond offers an elegant and sure-footed analysis of Dryden’s use of Rome as a key reference point in conceptualizing seventeenth century England. In a wide-ranging analysis of Dryden’s use of Latin poetic models, his allusions to Latin literature, and his extensive translations, Hammond reads Dyrden’s corpus as a “textual field…[in which] there is…a vital boundary –a line running between English and Latin, between England and Rome, present and past, although each of these terms is generated and defined by its partner, and thus finds its identity by reflection, its stability by the movement between itself and its opposite” (9).