Dante: The Essential Commedia

Prue Shaw’s absorbing, highly accessible introduction to the Commedia promises to be the essential edition for years to come

Dante’s epic story of a man’s journey from darkness to the revelation of divine light is one of the greatest works of Western literature. Because of its length and its language, it is viewed as forbidding. Undergraduate courses often cherry-pick from the Inferno and barely glance at Purgatorio and Paradiso. In The Essential Commedia, Prue Shaw fillets the epic to create an absorbing tour of all three realms of the afterlife. Extensive passages, astutely excerpted, are offered in translation alongside the original, making it easy to read Dante in English, Italian or both. The translation into modern, idiomatic English avoids archaisms, padding and syntactic contortions. With no loss of rigour, a complex text is rendered accessible by a teacher whose decades of experience enable her to highlight those aspects of the poem readers will appreciate. Prue Shaw’s, Reading Dante, was praised as:"[an] experience of a lifetime[...]"—The Spectator"Writing an introduction [to The Divine Comedy] for the general reader is not an easy task. Prue Shaw has done this in a way that manages to be at the same time scholarly, compelling and original."—The Times Literary Supplement[Shaw] 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."—Times Higher Education