Browsing by Author "Beckwith, Sarah"

The Biblical drama that was popular in England from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries is a fruitful site for exploring the dissemination of political discourse. Unlike Fürstenspiegeln (mirrors for princes literature) or the tradition of royal civic triumphs, Biblical drama, whether presented as ambitious "history of the world" civic cycles or as individual plays put on by traveling companies or parish actors, did not attempt to define or proscribe ideals of kingly behavior. On the contrary, the superstars of the early English stage were tyrants, such as Herod, Pharoah, Pilate, and Lucifer. These figures were dressed in the most lavish costumes, assigned the longest and most elaborate speeches, and often supplied the actors who brought them to life with a substantial wage. This dissertation argues that these tyrants helped to ensure the enduring popularity of Biblical drama well into the Tudor period; their immoderation invited authors, actors, and audiences to imagine how the role of a king ought to be played, and to participate in a discourse of virtue and self-governance that was applicable to monarchs and commoners alike.

This work builds upon a growing scholarly awareness of what Theresa Coletti and Gail McMurray Gibson have called "the Tudor origins of medieval drama": namely, that our modern knowledge of "medieval" plays reflects and relies upon the sixteenth-century context in which they were preserved in manuscripts and continued to flourish in performance. The popularity of the tyrant-figures in these plays throughout the Tudor period - particularly in parts of the country that were reluctant to adapt to the ever-changing economic, judicial, and religious policies of the regime - suggests an enduring frustration with royal power that claimed to rule in the name of "the common good" yet never hesitated to achieve national obedience at the expense of economic, judicial, and religious continuity. Through an examination of surviving play-texts from the Chester Mystery Cycle and Digby MS 133 as well as documentation of performances in Cheshire and East Anglia, this dissertation chronicles Biblical drama's ability to serve as an important site of popular resistance to the Tudor dynasty, both before and after Protestantism became a matter of state policy.

Chapter One considers the Crown's surprisingly active involvement in the civic government of Chester between 1495 and 1521 in counterpoint with the early sixteenth century restructuring of the city's mystery cycle, and argues that the cycle's new opening pageant, The Fall of Lucifer, embodies Chester's fears about losing its traditional civic identity. Chapter Two examines Biblical drama's surprising ability to encourage resistance to tyranny through a reading of The Killing of the Children, which highlights the fleeting and unprofitable nature of earthly power in such a way as to resonate with audiences in the wake of Henry VIII's initial religious reforms of 1536. Chapter Three explores the capacious Mary Magdalen play, which addresses issues of succession, of national religious identity, and of female rule in ways that seem prescient of the controversial crowning of Henry VIII's eldest daughter in 1553. Chapter Four discusses the aftermath of the final performance of the Chester cycle in 1575: the city's mayor was accused of being no less of a tyrant than Herod himself for encouraging performance of a cycle seen by the Crown as "popish idolatry." The project concludes with a Shakespearean envoi: a consideration of Richard III that demonstrates that questions of tyranny and rightful governance remained as important at the end of the Tudor period as they were at the accession of Elizabeth's grandfather in 1485.

The core claims of this study are that dramatic and political practice mutually depend on rich concepts of mimesis––of exemplary images and formative imitation––for their coherence; that the seventeenth century bears witness to a gradual and intricate impoverishment of these concepts; and that this degeneration transpires reciprocally across dramatic and political theory. Accordingly, this project tracks early modern ideas of what it means to be an actor––on the stage or in the world––and of how actors’ claims to represent (a) people can make claims on (a) people’s action. It reveals in these ideas a growing inarticulacy regarding the ends of actors’ representative claims. Through close readings of Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Dryden, a story emerges: a shift from defending mimetic art as a tradition of moral and civic (trans)formation, toward exempting or abstracting mimetic art from any framework of ethical and political thought whatsoever.

Lost in this shift are the interconnectedly aesthetic and normative criteria of representation. Lost with these criteria are visions of mimetic action as a dynamic that can call a people into existence. Figuring an image of the people, in this richer sense, does not mean simulating or replicating a preexisting entity (reducing its being to a model proportional to our present understanding). It means actualizing the being of that entity (opening a path beyond our present understanding). It means revealing a horizon in which people(s) may glimpse who they are called to become. After Shakespeare, this figural concept of representation becomes circumscribed by pictures of artificial reproduction and assimilation. In the realm of politics, what results is an inability to conceive of how representative persons condition a people’s rational and participatory agency in civic life. In the realm of the theatre, what results is an inability to conceive of how dramatis personae can appear not just as static types of manners or roles, but as narrative-bearing agents––capable of accounting for their character(s) and calling audiences to account. Neither domain can articulate how images infuse and educe communal transformation.

Collectively, then, this study’s close readings attest to a collapse of authority and power in early modernity––a confusion of how auctoritas summons and binds our agency, with how potestas coerces and canalizes our behavior. Behind the waning of dramatic poetry’s authority lies a waning vision of moral and civic traditions as living and shaping matrices. For the authority of a tradition does not inhere in persons’ positions within institutional hierarchies. It flows from images of action, which reveal who persons aspire to be and why. Strictly speaking, authority is an attribute not of persons, but of the images persons bear. Persons hold authority through disclosing the source(s) and end(s) of their traditions––through making themselves exemplary. Authority thus names a normative claim on us––a call for our participation in joint undertakings that precede and surpass us. Our poetic and legal fictions can issue these calls only insofar as they figure what is at once before and beyond us, informing our mutual, conscientious commitments.

This dissertation examines the collaborative poetry and poetics of four early modern women writers: Mary Sidney Herbert (1561-1621), Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645), Katherine Philips (1631-1664) and Mary, Lady Chudleigh (1656 – 1710). It critically recovers women’s poetry and their different modes of literary collaboration at the same time as it explores their unique manuscript and print practices. The critical methods employed are primarily historicist and formal and founded on close reading of revision processes, literary source materials and formal poetics. Additionally, each chapter argues that the contexts of relationship and community are integral to understanding how women writers employed collaborative writing practices as well as the significance of collaboration as an alternative to competition. I conclude that, across the long seventeenth century, the intellectual social agency of women writers grows through their collaborative writing practices, evidenced by publication and print.

This dissertation examines the use of personae, the rhetorical artifices by which an author creates different voices, in John Gower's Confessio Amantis. I argue that the Confessio attempts to expose how discourses of sexual desire alienate subjects from their proper place in the political world, and produce artificial personae that only appear socially engaged. The first three chapters consider the creation of the personae in the context of medieval Aristotelian political thought and the Roman de la Rose tradition. The last three chapters examine the extended discourse of Gower's primary personae in the Confessio Amantis, drawing upon Gower's other works and the history of Gower criticism.

In the opening scene of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, the marquis Walter is confronted by his subjects who beg him with “meeke preyere” and “pitous chere” to marry and produce an heir. In this moment, they seek from Walter something he is reluctant to give. Walter, an avid hunter and a confirmed bachelor, exclaims, “Ye wol...myn owene peple deere, / To that I nevere erst thoughte streyne me.” Despite his lack of desire to constrain himself in marriage, however, Chaucer writes that the meek prayers and piteous appearance of Walter’s people “made the markys herte han pitee.” He subsequently vows to marry. The force of “made” is important here for it suggests that pity acts in such a way that it compels the pitier to act counter to his or her desires. In the moment of experiencing pity, traditional power structures such as those of social status temporarily reverse. Walter, who typically wields power over his people, comes under their power as his pity transforms his desires and overcomes his will.

My dissertation, In Search of Pity: Chaucerian Poetics and the Suffering of Others, considers the development and transformation of the language of pity in medieval English literature and culture through a study of the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. I argue that Chaucer reformulated trans-European pity discourses for an English audience, and, in the process, made pity into a central ethical and aesthetic concern in English literature. The fin’amor tradition, Passion meditations, hagiographies, political treatises about common profit, all were concerned with the ways in which pity was formed and the effects it had on those who felt it, and Chaucer drew on these traditions to craft his poetry. Chaucer was one of the earliest English vernacular poets to make extensive use of the language of pity. He refers to it more than 200 times throughout his poetry and does so in a wide variety of contexts. Pity is the primary virtue of Criseyde in Troilus and Criseyde; it is one of Chaucer’s keywords for describing the sorrowful lives and deaths of female martyrs in the Legend of Good Women, and it is Walter’s response to his people in the Clerk’s Tale. In Search of Pity traces how Chaucer’s fascination with pity developed out of larger medieval conversations about the ethical and affective work of responding to the suffering of others.

In my project, I show how individual discourses offered distinctive accounts of the formation and effects of pity. A pitying woman in fin’amor might come to love her male lover as in the Roman de la Rose; a pitying ruler might offer a pardon for offenses, such as in Richard Maidstone’s Concordia. The common thread in medieval treatments of pity, however, was an understanding that it contained the possibility for suspending or obliterating traditional power structures that schematized gender and social status. This capacity is foreign to our contemporary conception of pity. Today, pity frequently suggests a contempt for its object. This association is so culturally embedded that in “Compassion: the Basic Social Emotion” Martha Nussbaum spends most of her essay discussing the historical emotion of pity, but she changes her vocabulary when writing about the contemporary. She notes that pity “...has acquired nuances of condescension and superiority to the sufferer that it did not have formerly,” and thus she “...shall switch over to the currently more appropriate term ‘compassion’ when...talking about contemporary issues.” Medieval pity with its challenge to the social order is a lost concept. In my research, I am thus interested both in rediscovering the nature of that concept and in charting the ways power was represented in early accounts of pity. Through an examination of the function of power in medieval pity, I contend that we can better understand how pity has come to suggest superiority or disdain for its object.

Chaucer is central to rediscovering the forgotten concepts attached to pity. He wrote more about pity than perhaps any other fourteenth-century English author, and the scope of his influence on English literary representations of pity can be seen in Robert Henryson, John Lydgate, and William Shakespeare. I show how Chaucer’s incorporating distinct treatments of pity from fin’amor, Passion meditation, hagiography, and political treatises brought to the fore the modes and effects of pity’s work in challenging power structures. In doing so, I argue that Chaucer is also one of the first authors to explore the limitations and dangers of pity. In my dissertation, I show that this exploration culminates with the Legend of Good Women and the Parson’s Tale in a disavowal of any pity that is not explicitly linked to acts of charity. This disavowal is unusual. Pity in works such as Maidstone’s Concordia or even the Roman de la Rose is enthusiastically embraced. But by reading Chaucer’s poetry alongside Christine de Pizan’s critique of the Roman de la Rose and Julian of Norwich’s revision of affective meditation on the Passion, I argue that Chaucer is participating in a developing critique of pity taking shape across Europe. The difference between Chaucer and Christine de Pizan or Julian of Norwich, however, is that his critique addresses pity not within one medieval discourse such as fin’amor or Passion meditation, but across many. In critiquing pity across discourses, I argue that Chaucer develops the pity discourse in England and reformulates it to include a new examination of its limited social power.

This study locates a medieval poetics of lineation in the manuscript and early print reception of fifteenth-century Middle English penitential poems. I investigate three exemplary poems of penitential devotion alongside modern theories of the poetic line, combining approaches from cultural studies, reception theory, and material poetics to show how the poetic line shaped medieval readers’ perception of reality and orientation within social networks. When played to full effect, the poetic line, I contend, is like light: both particle (complete in itself) and wave (moving toward transfer). In Lines of Relation I argue that the energetic shimmer of the poetic line presented medieval readers with a way to face their own limits as well as their ongoing responsibilities to and for others.

In my introduction chapter, I excavate Middle English discourses of line and relation in the context of penitential practice and the explosive vernacularization of Latin writings in late medieval England. I then draw on my archival research of devotional poems in fifteenth-century manuscripts and early print books to analyze the linear workings of three poems for penitential introspection and ethical sensitization: John Lydgate’s Kalendare (which I discuss in chapter 2), Thomas Brampton’s Penitential Psalm paraphrase (chapter 3), and the anonymous Passion complaint “Wyth scharpe thornes,” (chapter 4). These are rhyming Middle English prayers, psalms, and meditations that were popular enough to appear, collectively, in in approximately thirty surviving late medieval English books. Rather than viewing these texts as mere scripts or instructional aids, we can understand them first and foremost as poems inviting active interpretive engagement on the part of the reader. What unites these texts under the banner of penitential labor, I show, is their use of the poetic line as a form prompting readers to explore, at once, personal limit and limitless social responsibility. As I argue in the Coda, these considerations of line, limit, and conscience continue in poems by present-day writers of color in the United States. Like the poetic forms of penance in the medieval texts I examine, poems by Lucille Clifton and Thomas Sayers Ellis entangle the reader in linear interactions that insist on literary reception as a site for moral awareness and action.

Lines of Relation aims to increase appreciation for the basic scope for conceptual, expressive, and ethical work that medieval poetic forms made available to their audiences—and as a result to enrich and refine responses to the ethical demands these forms’ continuance make in literary reception today.

This project examines the medieval practice of the sacrament of penance and the innovative ways in which medieval literature engaged with the pastoral project of the Catholic church to provide the penitent with a way to deal with sin. Drawing from medieval literature, religious writing and theological sources, this project begins by illustrating the extent to which each of these didactic texts produces a "model of confession" that reaffirms the teachings of the church. However, approaching these texts with careful attention to language and to the grammar of sin and penance, I show that each of these undeniably orthodox works departs from traditional accounts of the sacrament of penance in significant ways. I suggest that such departures point to moments of theological exploration. My dissertation thus interrogates the category of orthodoxy, showing it to be more capacious and exploratory than is generally recognized. Further, I suggest that the vernacular penitential literature of the late medieval period, motivated by pastoral considerations, actively engages with academic and clerical theological debates surrounding the heavily contested sacrament of penance.

Chapter one examines Jacob's Well, a fifteenth-century vernacular penitential treatise. I argue that the narrative exempla often work against the instruction offered within each chapter, compelling the reader to consider theological problems not addressed within the doctrinal material. These resistances, I suggest, are intentional and not only suggest certain limitations in traditional penitential manuals, but encourage a more conscientious penitential practice and a better understanding of church doctrine. In chapter two I consider the Showings of Julian of Norwich. I show how Julian critiques the church's penitential system and offers an alternative form of confession and penance that holds the sinner accountable for sins while reassuring the penitent of God's love and forgiveness. Chapter three compares two fifteenth-century morality plays, Mankind and the Castle of Perseverance. Through a reading of the treatment of mercy in both plays, I suggest that the Castle's departures from traditional accounts of sacramental confession allow the author to explore the scope of God's mercy and experiment with the idea of universal salvation while still promoting orthodox instruction. I conclude this dissertation with Thomas Hoccleve's poem "Lerne to Die," one of the earliest treatments of the Ars moriendi theme. Examining some of the differences between sacramental confession and deathbed confession, I show how the absence of the sacrament in this dramatic account of unprepared death emphasizes the power of God's grace and limitations of human effort. However, Hoccleve ultimately reaffirms the necessity of final confession by the end of the poem.

Performing the Protestant State: Preaching and Playing from Marprelate to Miltonchallenges the prevailing literary-historical account of London’s theaters as an overwhelmingly secular force in England’s political discourse. I demonstrate that this secularizing narrative misses the importance of the stage’s productive dialogue with the city’s other great locus of live rhetorical performance, the public sermon. From Elizabethan professional drama to the court masques and theatrical pamphlets of the brewing Civil War, England’s leading playwrights were deeply engaged in responding to London’s prestigious preaching venues. Elite churchmen and rising stars would ascend the great outdoor pulpits at Paul’s Cross or Whitehall Palace and harangue audiences of four or five thousand on topics from the best way to spend their money to the latest news in international dynastic conflicts. London’s most talented dramatists were often among those audiences, enjoying the rhetoric and keeping their finger on the pulse of the latest religio-political conversations. In a culture with almost no line between sacred and secular, where citizenship and church membership were nearly coterminous, the work of playwrights like William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton often ventured into sermonic territory, at once borrowing from the pulpit and competing with it for market share in the London and national discourse. Skirting censorship intended to keep the plays from overtly commenting on national and ecclesial politics, the dramatists weighed in on everything from the dangers of domestic Catholic agents to the proper perspective on the latest theological disputes in the Netherlands. I demonstrate that these conceptual overlaps between stage and pulpit were intensified by the fact that they often shared physical locations and were responded to by shared audiences. Together, preachers and dramatists reflected, interrogated, and defined these audiences as a nationalist Protestant public on an international stage.

“Works of Mercy: Literature, Compassion, and Devotion in Early Modern England,” argues for the crucial role of literature in shaping, expanding, and contesting the limits of compassion in early seventeenth century England. Reading Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Herbert’s The Temple—texts which hold affliction at their very core—alongside contemporary prayer books, sermons, and devotional manuals, I show how compassion occupies a vital and under-explored space at the nexus of early modern understandings of body, religion, and community. Saturated in the visceral vocabulary of roiling bowels and melting hearts, early modern compassion—literally “to suffer with”—is the means through which literary and devotional writers work through questions of how to respond to human suffering, and to whose suffering one should respond. Literary explorations of compassion, I argue, are thus uniquely situated as spaces in which vital questions of belonging and relationship can be articulated outside of the emerging discourse of nationhood and across the fraught divides of confessional identity. Taking seriously both the bodily and spiritual rhetoric of compassion, I show how shared practices and communal rituals surrounding the experience of human suffering are reimagined through literary texts that work to both theorize compassion, and to arouse compassion within their readers. In so doing, these early modern attempts to write compassion are always attempts to work compassion: to reduce the self to make room for the suffering of the other, to acknowledge affliction as the common tissue of humanity.

Each chapter takes up a different author, genre, and work of mercy to demonstrate how these writers approach the ethical work their texts can do, in the reader and in the world. The introduction, “Writing Compassion in Early Modern England,” explores the vocabulary of early modern compassion, which relies on vividly visceral terms of roiling bowels and melting hearts, and which connects implicitly with the topos of the Christian community imagined as the mystical body of Christ. Chapter 1, “Executing Mercy: Measure for Measure and the Impossibility of Compassion,” focuses on the most critically ignored characters in the play—Mistress Overdone, Pompey, Kate Keepdown—and on the play’s little-discussed obsession with the traditional merciful work of visiting prisoners, to argue that Shakespeare appropriates familiar cultural touchstones of compassionate action to explore how compassionate identification is both stirred and stymied through dramatic form. Chapter 2, “Curing Mercy: John Donne’s Pedagogy of Compassion,” takes up questions of the edificatory value of suffering by reading Donne’s paradoxical treatment of affliction as compassion in his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) and in two closely contemporary sermons. Suffused with the language of the Book of Common Prayer’s “Order for the Visitation of the Sick,” I argue that Donne’s text implicitly argues against a theology of suffering (articulated in the early modern ars moriendi tradition) which attempts to convert worldly pain into spiritual joy, and to understand the suffering of others as beneficial to the self. Chapter 3, “Consuming Mercy: George Herbert and the Poetics of Compassion” reads devotional lyrics from The Temple (1633) alongside the pastoral manual A Priest to the Temple (pub. 1652) to argue that Herbert’s poetry—and specifically his frequent deployment of clusters of related images surrounding food, hunger, and thinness—becomes a site of compassionate engagement which demands that we understand these bodily references as always both literal (referring to the corporeal body) and metaphorical (referring to the corporate and mystical Body of Christ). The Coda, “Considering Compassion,” reflects on the nature of compassion as shared suffering, and as worthy work.