Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity, by Prue Shaw

Prue Shaw’s aim in writing this book, she says in the introduction, is not “to save you the trouble of reading the Commedia, as handbooks to the poem sometimes seem to do. My aim is to fire you with the desire to pick up a copy and start reading now.” First-time readers of the Divine Comedy are in an enviable position; ahead of them lies one of the masterpieces of world literature, indeed one of the great endeavours of the human mind, and an incredibly rich and satisfying experience of imagination and language. However, this is an adventure fraught with cultural anxieties: the remoteness of the historical and cultural period in which Dante writes; the complexity of his language and the shortcomings of translations; and the enduring suspicion of what is commonly labelled a “theological poem”. As with any magnum opus of literature, the sheer amount of critical and cultural attention devoted to the Comedy in the past 700 years or so is enough to make anyone feel like an incompetent reader, and so, sadly, we often postpone the undertaking, or drop the book after a few cantos.

This was not, however, what Dante had in mind when he wrote it. Throughout the Comedy, he shows uncommon care for his readership, not only through the several “addresses to the reader”, in which he makes sure that we are following him and spurs us on when we are tired, but also in his painstaking attention to explanation and detail: if we are patient enough, the Comedy turns out to be a surprisingly self-explanatory text. Already an exile from Florence when he began writing it around 1308, Dante had in mind not a parochial 14th-century Florentine audience but a universal one, not only in space but also in time, when for instance he claims to write for those “che questo tempo chiameranno antico” (“those who will call this time ancient”): that is, us.

Shaw keeps us so enthralled that the only reason one would want to put down this book is to open the one she is talking about

Shaw’s sharp, brilliantly engaging book delivers masterfully on its promise to fuel love for the Comedy precisely by dispelling readers’ anxieties, and showing how the great underlying concerns of this work are not only those of every work of art but are the stuff of life itself. Moreover, she keeps us so enthralled with her compelling and fast-paced prose that the only reason one would want to put down this book is to open the one she is talking about. In eschewing a chronological or teleological approach, Shaw surprises us instead with seven beautifully quirky chapters on “Friendship”, “Power”, “Life”, “Love”, “Time”, “Numbers” and “Words”. Each engages in a clever and measured way with the entirety of the Dante experience, from cultural and historical background, to the poet’s life, his other works and the entire Comedy, without setting out any rigid distinction between phases and sections. This way, readers feel immediately empowered by the work and enter almost playfully the solemn doors of the medieval afterlife.

Shaw’s choice of “friendship” as her first topic is brilliantly judged and engagingly human. She opts to introduce Dante via his two best friends, Guido Cavalcanti and Forese Donati. The former was deeply important to Dante’s poetic apprenticeship, but also an antagonist to be annihilated within his mature work (and eerily evoked and recanted in an episode involving Cavalcanti’s father in Inferno). The latter, also a poet, was more closely connected to Dante’s personal life, and appears like a sweet and melancholic cipher in the Purgatorio. Both friendships are tightly connected to the politics and stylistics of the Comedy, and the attention Shaw pays to them offers us a gentle, personal introduction to the poem’s main themes.

As we read on, themes, figures and characters are dropped and taken up again in a very calculated manner, which keeps readers both informed and alert. Accordingly, we have the impression that we are reading not a succession of single chapters, but instead a single flowing narrative. Within such a narrative, the necessary bits of information that enable us to better understand the world of Dante and the Middle Ages (for instance, explanations of the structure of the Comedy, Florentine or papal history, the meaning of the term “allegory”, etc) are concisely given, and often intersected within very fast-flowing and captivating parts, so that they never feel tedious or overwhelming, but simply what we needed to know at that point. Refreshing references to contemporary history, literature, art and even football offer witty and productive intervals, as when Shaw compares the papal interdicts to United Nations sanctions, or, when mentioning Dante’s Quaestio de Aqua et Terra (a text fiendishly difficult to turn into anything remotely accessible), she invites us to think of “Seamus Heaney giving a lecture on tectonic plates to the British Academy”.

Every chapter of Reading Dante includes one or two precious gems: the close textual analysis of some of the most beautiful and rightfully famous passages of the Comedy, such as Inferno 5 (Francesca da Rimini) or Inferno 26 (Ulysses), to name the most famous. Shaw’s deft references to the visual arts are also useful. Perhaps my favourite part of the book is where a series of images from medieval manuscripts succeeds in explaining much better than words one of the crucial issues of the Comedy, the fact that Dante features his visit to the otherworld as a physical journey, not as a vision. Shaw frequently focuses on Botticelli’s drawings of the Comedy, not only to draw out certain of Dante’s points but also to show how two artistic geniuses illuminate each other in a direct and immediate way not seen in the efforts of more pedestrian illustrators and commentators. Likewise, frequent references to modern writers (whether they engage directly with Dante, like Byron, T. S. Eliot or Heaney, or indirectly, like Proust), help readers to recognise the familiarity and timelessness of many Dantean issues.

Reading Dante succeeds in reassuring us that no previous knowledge is required to enjoy the poem, nor does one need to agonise over complex concepts to understand it, and it is great at dispelling prejudices one might have against Dante or medieval culture. It goes out of its way to make modern readers comfortable in Dante’s world, for instance when glossing the dark wood at the beginning of the poem as indicative of a “breakdown”, or when recasting the medieval system of sin in the words of modern psychology, where “pride might…be called self-aggrandisement…envy…lack of empathy, anger…lack of impulse control”.

The firm proof that this book has achieved its aim comes at the very end. In the “Words” chapter, Shaw engages with the exciting theme of Dante’s “plurilingualism”, the incessant experimentation with language that may be the most inaccessible aspect of the poem to those who are not native speakers of Italian. She leads readers into a florilegium of verses in Italian, inducing them, gently and successfully, into engaging with Dante’s language first-hand.

In a time, especially in the UK, when there has been a marked decline in interest in medieval and modern languages, a book such as Shaw’s is invaluable in putting literature and language back into the central cultural place they deserve – and, more importantly, into the centre of our hearts as readers.