In the broadest sense, allegorical procedures are linguistic. Allegory is a manipulation of the language of symbols. Verbally, this mode underwent a major shift in medium along with the shift from oral to written literature: allegories that had initially been delivered in oral form (Christ’s parables, for example) were written down by scribes and then transcribed by subsequent generations. Much more remarkable transformations, however, take place when the verbal medium is replaced by nonverbal or partially verbal media.

The drama is the chief of such replacements. The enactment of myth in the beginning had close ties with religious ritual, and in the drama of Classical Greece both comedy and tragedy, by preserving ritual forms, lean toward allegory. Old Comedy, as represented by the majority of plays by Aristophanes, contains a curious blending of elements—allusions to men of the day, stories suggesting ideas other than the obvious literal sense, religious ceremony, parodies of the graver mysteries, personified abstractions, and stock types of character. Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound uses allegory for tragic ends, while Euripides’ tragedies make a continuous interpretive commentary on the hidden meaning of the basic myths. Allegory is simplified in Roman drama, submitting heroic deeds to the control of the fickle, often malignant goddess Fortuna. Christian symbolism is responsible for the structure of the medieval morality plays, in which human dilemmas are presented through the conflicts of personified abstractions such as the “Virtues” and their “Vice” opponents. The allegory in Renaissance drama is often more atmospheric than structural—though even Shakespeare writes allegorical romances, such as Cymbeline, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale (and allowed his tragedy of Coriolanus to grow out of the “fable of the belly,” which embodies a commonplace of Renaissance political wisdom and is recounted by one of the characters in the play). In 1598 Ben Jonson introduced the comedy of humours, which was dependent on the biological theory that the humours of the body (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile) affect personality: in Jonson’s play Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman (1609), the character Morose is possessed by the demon of ill humour. Comic allegory of this kind evolved into the Restoration comedy of manners and through that channel entered modern drama with Wilde, Shaw, and Pirandello. Ibsen, the master of realistic drama, himself used a free-style allegory in Peer Gynt, while the surrealism of modern dramatists—such as Ionesco, Genet, and Beckett in the Theatre of the Absurd—serves to reinforce the real meaning of their plays.

The degree to which the cinema has been allegorical in its methods has never been surveyed in detail. Any such survey would certainly reveal that a number of basic techniques in film montage builds up multiple layers of meaning. (Animated cartoons, too, continue the tradition of Aesopian fable.)

From time immemorial men have carved religious monuments and have drawn and painted sacred icons. Triumphal arches and chariots have symbolized glory and victory. Religious art makes wide use of allegory, both in its subject matter and in its imagery (such as the cross, the fish, the lamb). Even in poetry there can be an interaction of visual and verbal levels, sometimes achieved by patterning the stanza form. George Herbert’s “Easter Wings,” for instance, has two stanzas set out by the typographer to resemble the shape of a dove’s wings. Such devices belong to the Renaissance tradition of the “emblem,” which combines a motto with a simple symbolic picture (often a woodcut or engraving) and a concise explanation of the picture motto.

While allegory thrives on the visual, it has also been well able to embrace the empty form of pure mathematics. Number symbolism is very old: early Christian systems of cosmology were often based on the number three, referring to the doctrine of the Trinity (and in fact recalling earlier Hebraic and even Hellenic numerology). Musical symbolism has been discovered in the compositions of the 18th-century Baroque composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach. The most evanescent form of allegory, musical imagery and patterns, is also the closest to pure religious vision, since it merges the physical aspects of harmony (based on number) with the sublime and metaphysical effect on its hearers. The final extension of media occurs in the combination of spectacle, drama, dance, and music that is achieved by grand opera, which is at its most allegorical in the total artwork of Richard Wagner in the second half of the 19th century. His Ring cycle of operas is a complete mythography and allegory, with words and music making two levels of meaning and the whole unified by a type of musical emblem, which Wagner called the leitmotif.

Allegory and cosmology

The allegorical mode has been of major importance in representing the cosmos: the earliest Greek philosophers, for example, speculated on the nature of the universe in allegorical terms; in the Old Testament’s oblique interpretation of the universe, too, the world is seen as a symbolic system. The symbolic stories that explain the cosmos are ritualized to ensure that they encode a message. Held together by a system of magical causality, events in allegories are often surrounded by an occult atmosphere of charms, spells, talismans, genies, and magic rites. Science becomes science fiction or a fantastic setting blurs reality so that objects and events become metamorphically unstable. Allegorical fictions are often psychological dramas whose scene is the mind; then their protagonists are personified mental drives. Symbolic climate is most prominent in romance, whose heroic quests project an aura of erotic mysticism, perfect courtesy, and moral fervour that creates a sublime heightening of tone and a picturesque sense of good order.

The cosmic and demonic character of allegorical thinking is most fully reflected in the period of its greatest vogue, the High Middle Ages. During this period poets and priests alike were able to read with increasingly elaborate allegorical technique until their methods perhaps overgrew themselves. A belief had been inherited in the Great Chain of Being, the Platonic principle of cosmic unity and fullness, according to which the lowest forms of being were linked with the highest in an ascending order. On the basis of this ladderlike conception were built systems of rising transcendency, starting from a material basis and rising to a spiritual pinnacle. The early Church Fathers sometimes used a threefold method of interpreting texts, encompassing literal, moral, and spiritual meanings. This was refined and commonly believed to have achieved its final form in the medieval allegorist’s “fourfold theory of interpretation.” This method also began every reading with a search for the literal sense of the passage. It moved up to a level of ideal interpretation in general, which was the allegorical level proper. (This was an affirmation that the true Christian believer was right to go beyond literal truth.) Still higher above the literal and the allegorical levels, the reader came to the tropological level, which told him where his moral duty lay. Finally, since Christian thought was apocalyptic and visionary, the fourfold method reached its apogee at the anagogic level, at which the reader was led to meditate on the final cosmic destiny of all Christians and of himself as a Christian hoping for eternal salvation.

While modern scholars have shown that such thinking played its part in the poetry of the Middle Ages and while the Italian poet Dante himself discussed the theological relations between his poems and such a method of exegesis, the main arena for the extreme elaboration of this allegory was in the discussion and the teaching of sacred Scriptures. As such, the fourfold method is of highest import, and it should be observed that it did not need to be applied in a rigid four-stage way. It could be reduced, and commonly was reduced, to a two-stage method of interpretation. Then the reader sought simply a literal and a spiritual meaning. But it could also be expanded. The passion for numerology, combined with the inner drive of allegory toward infinite extension, led to a proliferation of levels. If four levels were good, then five or eight or nine might be better.