Reading Dante is an experience of a lifetime. You never come to the end of it. But, like Dante himself, at large in the frightening wood, you need a companion for the journey, and it is difficult to imagine one more enlightening than Prue Shaw.
The Emeritus Reader in Italian at the University of London, she has been lighting up the genius of Dante for us all her professional life, especially his politics. But this book is just as accessible to a general reader as it would be a source of wonder and envy to scholars. It is mainly concerned with the Comedy, but it expounds much of Dante’s other work. On page after page, it makes us — if we are first-time readers — blink in wonder, or — if we are old hands who thought we knew Dante — feel as though we are understanding him for the first time.
She quotes Seamus Heaney: ‘Poetry is language in orbit… it runs on its own energy circuit.’ I have read many books on Dante, but never one in English which more tellingly caught this ‘energy circuit’. Shaw’s book grows in momentum, as does The Divine Comedy itself, and the finest chapter — to be read and re-read many times alongside the poem — is the final one on Dante’s language. It is a commonplace that Dante chose to write his Comedy in Italian, rather than Latin and thereby — sort of — invented modern Italian. But here, in about 60 pages, you have the most masterly analysis. Firstly of medieval language theory, and of Dante’s highly distinctive ‘takes’ on this in his unfinished treatise De vulgari eloquentia. Then — and this is really interesting — there is an exploration of Dante’s linguistic relationship with Virgil.
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