Throughout her distinguished career, Jane Brown has evolved a theory of allegory derived in no small part from the persistent prominence of Goethe's literary works in her critical imagination. From her consideration of allegory as an essentially pictorial trope to her extended analysis of the imperative to rethink the place of allegory, in a relationship of productive tension with mimesis, Brown identifies allegory as a dominant mode in the European tradition of cultural representation, which encompasses the general argument of her 1992 study, The Persistence of Allegory. In contrast to the emergence of theoretical models of allegory derived from early German Romanticism, Paul de Man's Allegories of Reading and Timothy Bahti's Allegories of History foremost among them, Brown reads allegory as the foundational trope of European drama, determined by a transhistorical negotiation with neoclassicism. Allegory, both in its most technical rhetorical and popularized definitions, refracts the central question of cultural representation through the lens of referentiality: How can the unrepresentable be represented? As Brown demonstrates in her morphological (in Goethe's sense) approach to more than three centuries of European drama and some forms of visual culture, the answer to that question must be differentiated with attention to national, cultural, and temporal specificity, though the same problem underwrites the attempts.