Allegory of Music by Filippino Lippi. The "Allegory of Music" is a popular theme in painting; in this example, Lippi uses symbols popular during the High Renaissance, many of which refer to Greek mythology.

Allegory is a device used to present an idea, principle or meaning, which can be presented in literary form, such as a poem or novel, in musical form, such as composition or lyric, or in visual form, such as in painting or drawing. It is also seen in scriptural passage. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation. Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric; a rhetorical allegory is a demonstrative form of representation conveying meaning other than the words that are spoken.

As a literary device, an allegory in its most general sense is an extended metaphor. As an artistic device, an allegory is a visual symbolic representation. An example of a simple visual allegory is the image of the grim reaper. Viewers understand that the image of the grim reaper is a symbolic representation of death.

Etymology[link]

First attested in English 1382, the word allegory comes from Latin allegoria, the latinisation of the Greek ἀλληγορία (allegoria), "veiled language, figurative",^[1] from ἄλλος (allos), "another, different"^[2] + ἀγορεύω (agoreuo), "to harangue, to speak in the assembly"^[3] and that from ἀγορά (agora), "assembly".^[4]

Types[link]

Northrop Frye discussed what he termed a "continuum of allegory," ranging from what he termed the "naive allegory" of The Faerie Queene, to the more private allegories of modern paradox literature. In this perspective, the characters in a "naive" allegory are not fully three-dimensional, for each aspect of their individual personalities and the events that befall them embodies some moral quality or other abstraction; the allegory has been selected first, and the details merely flesh it out.

Many ancient religions are based on an astrologic allegories, that is, allegories of the movement of the Sun and the Moon as seen from the Earth. Examples include the cult of Horus/Isis.

The classical era[link]

In classical literature two of the best-known allegories are the cave in Plato's Republic (Book VII) and the story of the stomach and its members in the speech of Menenius Agrippa (Livy ii. 32). In Late Antiquity Martianus Capella organized all the information a fifth-century upper-class male needed to know into an allegory of the wedding of Mercury and Philologia, with the seven liberal arts as guests; Capella's allegory was widely read through the Middle Ages.

Other early allegories are found in the Hebrew Bible, for instance in the extended metaphor in Psalm 80 of the Vine, which is Israel^[5] and Ezekiel 16 and 17.^[6]

The medieval era[link]

Allegory of arithmetic, by Laurent de La Hyre, ca 1650

Medieval thinking accepted allegory as having a reality underlying any rhetorical or fictional uses. The allegory was as true as the facts of surface appearances. Thus, the bull Unam Sanctam (1302) presents themes of the unity of Christendom with the pope as its head in which the allegorical details of the metaphors are adduced as facts on which is based a demonstration with the vocabulary of logic: "Therefore of this one and only Church there is one body and one head—not two heads as if it were a monster... If, then, the Greeks or others say that they were not committed to the care of Peter and his successors, they necessarily confess that they are not of the sheep of Christ" (complete text).

In the late 15th century, the enigmatic Hypnerotomachia, with its elaborate woodcut illustrations, shows the influence of themed pageants and masques on contemporary allegorical representation, as humanist dialectic conveyed them.

The denial of medieval allegory as found in the 11th-century works of Hugh of St Victor and Edward Topsell's Historie of Foure-footed Beastes (London, 1607, 1653) and its replacement in the study of nature with methods of categorization and mathematics by such figures as naturalist John Ray and the astronomer Galileo is thought to mark the beginnings of early modern science.^[7]

The modern era[link]

Since meaningful stories are nearly always applicable to larger issues, allegories may be read into many stories, sometimes distorting their author's overt meaning. For instance, many people have suggested that The Lord of the Rings is an allegory for the World Wars, in spite of J. R. R. Tolkien's emphatic statement in the introduction to the second edition, "It is neither allegorical nor topical.... I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence." Where some requirements of "realism", in its flexible meanings, are set aside, allegory can come more strongly to the surface, as in the work of Bertold Brecht on one hand, or on the other in science fiction and fantasy, where an element of universal application and allegorical overtones are common, as with The Chronicles of Narnia.

Examples by genre[link]

Not every resonant work of modern fiction is an allegory. Arthur Miller's The Crucible, for instance, is character-driven historical drama with contemporary relevance, but is not an allegory in spite of its parallels with McCarthyism, linking the hunt for communists in the 1940s and 1950s to the hunt for witches in the late 17th century. L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is plot-driven fantasy narrative in an extended fable with talking animals and broadly-sketched characters. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is another example of a work sometimes seen as allegorical yet, as the author explained, is not - rather it is an example of what he referred to as applicability.

Art[link]

Some elaborate and successful specimens of allegory are to be found in the following works, arranged in approximate chronological order:

• Ambrogio Lorenzetti – "Good Government in the City" and "Bad Government in the City"
• Sandro Botticelli – La Primavera (Allegory of Spring)
• Albrecht Dürer – Melencolia I
• Bronzino – Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time
• Artemisia Gentileschi – Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting; Allegory of Inclination
• The English School's – "Allegory of Queen Elizabeth" painted circa 1610.
• Jan Vermeer – The Allegory of Painting
• Lady Justice.^[8] – Such visual representations have raised the question why so many allegories in the history of art, representing male gendered realities, are of female sex.^[9]
• Graydon Parrish – The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy

• 

  Titian's Allegory of Age Governed by Prudence, with three human heads symbolising age and the triple-headed beast (dog, lion, wolf) standing for prudence.

• 

  Jan Vermeer's work, The Allegory of Painting.

• 

  The English School's Allegory of Queen Elizabeth with Father Time at her right and Death looking over her left shoulder. Two cherubs are removing the weighty crown from her tired head.

Literature[link]

Classical literature

• Aesop – Fables
• Plato – The Republic ("Plato's allegory of the cave")
• Plato – Phaedrus (Chariot Allegory)
• Euripides – The Trojan Women
• Qu Yuan – Encountering Trouble
• Book of Revelation (for allegory in Christian theology, see typology (theology)
• Martianus Capella – De nuptiis philologiæ et Mercurii

Mediaeval literature

• Prudentius – Psychomachia
• Christine de Pizan – The Book of the City of Ladies
• William Langland – Piers Plowman
• Pearl
• Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy
• Everyman

Modern literature

• Edmund Spenser – The Faerie Queene
• Edwin Abbott Abbott – Flatland
• Joseph Addison – Vision of Mirza
• Antoine De Saint-Exupery – The Little Prince
• Jorge Luis Borges – "The Library of Babel" and "The Babylon Lottery"
• Peter S. Beagle – The Last Unicorn
• John Bunyan – Pilgrim's Progress
• William M. Burwell – White Acre vs. Black Acre
• Albert Camus – The Plague, The Stranger, and Myth of Sisyphus
• Wu Cheng'en — The Journey to the West
• J. M. Coetzee – Waiting for the Barbarians
• Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol
• William Faulkner – A Rose for Emily (Emily symbolizes the decline of the Old South)
• William Golding – Lord of the Flies
• Daniel Handler – A Series of Unfortunate Events
• Roger Hargreaves - Mr.Happy
• Nathaniel Hawthorne – "The Great Carbuncle", "Young Goodman Brown"
• E. T. A. Hoffmann – Princess Brambilla
• John Irving – A Prayer for Owen Meany
• C. S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia (most notably in the book The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)
• David Lindsay – A Voyage to Arcturus
• Jack London- "A Piece of Steak", short story about youth vs. old age
• George MacDonald – Phantastes
• Naguib Mahfouz – Children of Gebelawi
• Bernard Malamud – The Natural
• Cormac McCarthy – The Road
• Herman Melville – The Confidence-Man
• Alan Moore – V for Vendetta
• Hualing Nieh – Mulberry and Peach
• George Orwell – Animal Farm
• Edgar Allan Poe – "The Masque of the Red Death" (though Poe did not believe in allegory, this story is generally assumed to be one)^[11]
• Theodore Francis Powys – Mr. Weston's Good Wine
• Philip Pullman – His Dark Materials
• Jose Saramago – Blindness
• Anna Sewell – Black Beauty
• John Steinbeck – Of Mice and Men
• John Steinbeck – The Pearl
• Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels (political allegory)
• Koushun Takami – Battle Royale
• Rex Warner – The Aerodrome
• Mohsin Hamid – The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Plays

• August Wilson – Fences (play) (Troy's fence is "designed" to keep the grim reaper away)

Film[link]

• James Cameron's Avatar, Native American Extermination for riches e.g. gold, mahogany, etc.
• Fritz Lang's Metropolis
• Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal
• El Topo
• Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, the Cold War
• The Matrix
• Dawn of the Dead
• The Virgin Suicides
• District 9, Apartheid
• Gojira
• Cannibal Holocaust, sensationalism
• Foodland (film)
• Ana's Playground^[12]
• The Wall (film)
• Planet of the Apes (1968 film), racism, creationism, evolution, animal rights, anti-nuclear politics, McCarthyism, and socio-economic stratification.
• Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Vietnam War, torture, Catholicism, jingoism, Mutual assured destruction.
• The Dark Knight, The War on Terror
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1, The Holocaust
• Pandorum, the degradation of the human condition in Works and Days and Paradise Lost. As well as The Divine Comedy
• The Descendants

Television[link]

• The Twilight Zone (varied themes)
• Star Trek all series, (varied themes, though frequently addressed the issues of prejudice and racism)
• Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5, Episode 2: "Darmok"
• The Prisoner
• Lost
• Fringe

Comics[link]

• Various X-Men comics (mutants as an allegory for various social and racial minorities)
• The manga Hanako and the Teller of Allegory calls a story given form from peoples' belief in it an allegory

See also[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Allegories

• Allegory in the Middle Ages
• Allegory in Renaissance literature
• Allegorical sculpture
• Cultural depictions of Philip II of Spain
• Literary technique
• Plot device
• Roman à clef
• Semiotics
• Theagenes of Rhegium

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Frye, Northrop (1957) Anatomy of Criticism.
• Foucault, Michel (1966) The Order of Things.

External links[link]

• Brief definition of Allegory
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Allegory in Literary history
• Electronic Antiquity, Richard Levis, "Allegory and the Eclogues" Roman definitions of allegoria and interpreting Vergil's Eclogues.

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Jake Morley (born 1 August 1983) is a singer/songwriter based in north London. His unusual style of lap tapping, allowing him to tap, slap, and strum his guitar, has gained him many plaudits from both fans and critics.

Early life[link]

Morley grew up in Mill Hill, London. His father, Colin Morley, was killed in the 7 July 2005 London bombings, at Edgware Road.^[1] He learned guitar at an early age and began writing songs whilst at Mill Hill County High School in north west London. After studying law at Nottingham University for three years, Morley returned to London and embarked on performing on the thriving open mic scene.

2008-2009[link]

Morley began recording in 2008, and released of his first EP, This City later the same year. A popular artist on the London circuit, Morley played to increasingly larger crowds and in the summer of 2008 played the MS Calling charity gig^[2] at the 100 Club where he met double bassist, John Parker (formerly of Nizlopi), drummer Harry Mead and sound engineer Phill Brown (Bob Marley / Talk Talk / Faithless) who recorded and co-produced Morley's debut album.^[3] Also in attendance was Calum MacColl (Rokia Traore / Ronan Keating / Eddi Reader) who played guitar on and also co-produced the album.

Throughout 2009 Morley continued to play at various venues in London and the UK. During the summer of 2009 Morley released a track a week for free download culminating in a headline show at The Underbelly, Hoxton Square where he sold hand made E.P's containing all of the tracks released that summer.

2010 - Many Fish To Fry[link]

In January 2010, Morley assembled a team of musicians and, along with Phill Brown and Calum MacColl, started recording Many Fish To Fry. With recording, mixing and over dubs continuing for a few months, Morley returned to live performances in March.

In April 2010 secured a residency at Ronnie Scott's^[4] playing once a month all the way through to December.

Towards the end of 2010, Morley joined forces with Kerry Harvey-Piper,^[5] of Red Grape Records who took on the role of being his manager.

2011[link]

2011 has been a busy year for Morley. His debut album Many Fish To Fry was released in February on his own independent label.^[6] After a short UK tour, Morley held his album launch party at London's Bush Hall, where his performance received much critical acclaim.^[7][8]

In March 2011, Morley's debut single 'Feet Don't Fail Me Now' was played on Dermot O'Leary's Saturday afternoon BBC Radio 2 show,^[9] with the DJ commenting after the track 'We like this a lot'. 'Feet Don't Fail Me Now' continued to be played throughout April on over 40 radio stations.^[10] On the 5th May Morley headlined the City Showcase after party at the 100 Club and straight after his set finished, he and his band rushed over to the BBC Radio 2 studios to perform a live set on Janice Long's show.^[11] Later that week, Janice Long recommended 'Feet Don't Fail Me Now' as the featured live track of the week on Jo Whiley's Radio 2 Live In Concert.^[12]

Most recently, 'Feet Don't Fail Me Now' was played by Chris Hawkins on his BBC 6 Music breakfast show.^[13]

YouTube[link]

Morley has had success on YouTube with his self recorded video of the track getting over 25,000 views.^[14] The video was subsequently included in a Best Guitarist on the Web video created by ITN.^[15]

Reviews[link]

He is certainly something else! Very Charismatic, warm and a fantastic singer and guitar player.

—Janice Long, Radio 2

Jake Morley and his impressive band more than have what it takes… an ambitious pop sound that is every bit as bright and sparkly as the main player himself - 4 stars

—The Independent^[16]

A sound that can’t be ignored. Morley can do no wrong, and a wealth of fans can’t get enough. 9/10

—Virgin.com^[17]

Great real life lyrics and superb virtuoso playing. That's extraordinary!

—Tom Robinson, 6 music

Jake Morley is not just your average bloke with guitar, he stuns crowds with his unique style and is always a show stealer.

—BBC Introducing

It's phenomenal to watch him but it's still more daunting to consider that he also sings up a storm and writes cracking songs. Morley is a true original

—Acoustic Magazine

This is a man to follow, not just on social media sites, but in real life whenever he plays a gig. This is music to cherish.

—Music Riot^[18]

Luke Haines Power Trio[link]

Morley plays bass guitar and Harry Mead plays drums in the live band of Luke Haines when the former leader of The Auteurs performs as "The Luke Haines Power Trio".

Discography[link]

Extended plays[link]

Albums[link]

Singles[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• MySpace
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Sandwich Emporium Records