Browsing by Subject "Shakespeare"

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.

When debating the structure of the cosmos, Raphael delivers to Adam perhaps Milton's most famous line: "be lowly wise." With the promise to "justify the ways of God to men," Milton does not limit man's knowledge to base matters, but reclaims the heights of "other worlds" for the poet. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the natural philosophers' material explanations of the natural order were slowly gaining authority over other sources of knowledge, the poets prime among them. My dissertation takes up the competing early modern claims to knowledge that Milton lays down for Adam. I argue that natural philosophy, what today we call "science," emerged as the dominant authority over knowledge by appropriating the poet's imagination.

The poet's imagination had long revealed the divine hand that marked nature--a task that, as Sidney put it, merited the poet a "peerlesse" rank among other professions. For Bacon, Galileo, and Royal Society fellows, the poetic imagination revealed material explanations of nature's order that other orthodox models and methods could not. For the first decades of the seventeenth century, the imagination aligned poetry and natural philosophy as complementary pursuits of knowledge: Sidney's poet was to imagine a "golden" world that revealed the divine order, the material cause of which Bacon's natural philosopher was to discover in nature. But as the Royal Society fellows countered the claim that they peddled fancies, they severed ties with the poet. In one ingenious rhetorical move, Royal Society fellows proclaimed themselves to have perfected the poet's imaginative work, securing the imagination for natural philosophy while disavowing poetry as the product of an idle fancy. Such rhetoric proved as powerful then as it does now. For Margaret Cavendish, the poet occupies the supplemental role that "recreate[s] the mind" once it grows tired of the "serious" natural philosophical studies. After the Restoration, then, the important role of the poetic imagination would go largely unrecognized even as it set itself to work in what would become the separate disciplines of literature and science.

Seasons and Sovereigns:

Succession in the Greenworld, 1579 - 1621

Current scholarship on months, seasons, and climates in Renaissance aesthetics has developed along the two-dimensional axis of pastoral and georgic, leaving critics unable to develop an overarching theory of how or why early modern subjects charted environmental stability over time. Seasons and Sovereigns addresses this occlusion by studying the course of nature as it pertains to sudden dissolution, long periods of stability, or constant change in volatile Elizabethan and early Stuart greenworlds.

While environmental stability occupies a central role in two theories of sovereignty - the classical Golden Age, which experienced eternal Spring, and the two-bodied King, where a King's body politic transcends the vicissitude signified by seasonal change - succession crises required rapid changes. By focusing on exceptions to temperate climates, Seasons and Sovereigns argues that many writers of the English Renaissance challenged the prescriptive accounts of innocuous socio-political climates or constant natural spaces by exploring the reasons behind floods, wonders, seasonal usurpation, and other perversions of nature's course found along the fringes of literary greenworlds.

The project begins by examining Queen Elizabeth's cult of ver perpetuum to justify a more capacious interpretation of the theory of the King's Two Bodies as it pertains to the body politic's exemption from the passage of time, including seasonal change. It contextualizes these issues by delineating how genre studies have responded to the presence of calendars and months in literary texts. Chapter 2 argues that a remarkable number of late sixteenth-century texts flood (or threaten to flood) a greenworld to reflect anxiety over succession. The epic-scale dissolution evoked by sea grottos, Parnassus, and the lost city of Atlantis level social distinctions as unequivocal signs of nature's lethal heterogeneity in Lyly's Gallathea, Boboli garden, and Cymbeline.

Chapter 3 argues that Shakespeare replaces an Arcadian landscape with a theater of green wonders and Macduff's knowledge of seasonal decorum in Macbeth. The chapter begins in the "wake" of the Golden Age with Thomas Dekker's decision to revive pastoral in his account of the Queen's funeral in The Wonder-full Yeare, 1603. Chapter 4 shifts the Arcadian impulse inward by exploring resistance to constancy (a pastoral value) in The Changeling, where I juxtapose three normative views of human nature that were active in 1621. Rather than advocate one perspective on constancy, Chapter 5 suggests that Mary Wroth's heroines in the Urania dissolve contracts and engage in post-Golden Age political jurisprudence by promoting duplicity and metamorphosis.

This dissertation argues that the 'realist' ontology implicit in Renaissance allegory is both Aristotelian and neoplatonic, stemming from the need to talk about transcendence in material terms in order to make it comprehensible to fallen human intelligence. At the same time dramatists at the turn of the seventeenth century undermine 'realism' altogether, contributing to the emergence of a new meaning of 'realism' as mimesis, and with it a materialism without immanent forms. My theoretical framework is provided by Aristotle's Metaphysics, Physics and Categories rather than his Poetics, because these provide a better way of translating the concerns of postmodern critics back into premodern terms. I thus avoid reducing the religious culture of premodernity to 'ideology' or 'power' and show how premodern religion can be taken seriously as a critique of secular modernity. My conclusion from readings of Aristotle, Augustine, Hooker, Perkins, Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson and Tourneur is that Hell is conflated with History during the transition to modernity, that sin is revalorized as individualism, and that the translatability of terms argues for the continuing need for a concept of 'substance' in this post-Aristotelian age. I end with a reading of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous contemplative work from the fourteenth century that was still being read in the sixteenth century, which offers an alternative model of the sovereign individual, and helps me to argue against the view that philosophical idealism is inherently totalitarian.

My dissertation explores literature’s participation in these cross-disciplinary debates over nothingness; I argue that literary forms create the possibilities of scientific discourse later in the century. To fully understand the complex network of relationships that formed early modern science as well as, in consequence, our own experimental philosophy requires examining the challenges that literature issues to science. To demonstrate the mutually productive relationship between the literature and science of the period, my dissertation charts the seventeenth century's different literary conceptions of nothingness, and the contribution of writers such as John Donne, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Margaret Cavendish to these debates over both the nature of nothingness and, more broadly, how we come to know anything at all. Literary texts – in the form of sonnets, tragicomedies, and even proto-science fiction – produce knowledge in ways that anticipate and subtly revise scientific processes.

The first chapter, “Encompassing Nothingness in Donne’s Poetry” evaluates two of John Donne’s poems from Songs and Sonnets alongside the introduction of the symbol of zero into Western systems of calculation and the invention of the microscope. I argue for a re-reading of poems such as “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” and “The Flea” that accounts for their seemingly paradoxical representation of absence and presence by considering Donne’s thought in terms of mathematical developments as well as developing literary technologies. The culmination in the poem’s well-known image of the compass, drawing a circle centered on a point inscribes the Arabic symbol for zero; the poem thus participates in the broader project of transforming nothingness into an appropriate object for scientific inquiry. Donne’s poetry also anticipates scientific method by forming imagined communities of observers whom he addresses and leads through a process of witnessing nothingness, thus revealing its status as an object of scientific inquiry, and consequently, as something after all.

Chapter 2, “Playing at Nothing in The Winter’s Tale,” looks at the treatment of nothingness in this play as a model for literature’s production of experimental science in the seventeenth century. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes’s solipsistic assurance of his wife’s infidelity and the infallibility of his own senses gives way to knowledge formed collectively by a performance that reforms and reconciles the community. This performance suggests that the community, rather than the solitary individual, is the basis for building knowledge. Through analyzing Leontes’s method of knowledge production versus the communal models that close the play, I argue that The Winter’s Tale preemptively figures the shift from a patronage-based court philosophy to an experimental philosophy. In doing so, The Winter’s Tale helps to revise the dominant narrative about when the idea of communal witnessing begins by emphasizing the importance of literary contributions to conceptualizing the history of science.

Chapter 3, “Experience in Paradise Lost” pays particular attention to the shift from observation to experience as represented in Milton’s poetry. Engaging with critical debates over Milton’s materialism, I read Milton’s epic as it rejects the idea of creation ex nihilo and instead focuses on creation out of Chaos. Just as Boyle justified his explorations into atomistic philosophy and rejected the idea of a universe created by random atomic interactions, Milton’s universe, too, is established and ordered by a divine Creator. Unlike Boyle, however, Milton rejects the experiment, which he identifies with a fallen world, in favor of experience – described in Paradise Lost as wisely used, individually mediated reason.

Chapter 4, “‘To Make Your World of Nothing’: Nothingness in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World” examines Cavendish’s 1666 utopian proto-science fiction romance in conjunction with Robert Hooke’s 1665 Micrographia, a text that explores the minute worlds opened to human observation with the microscope’s invention. Cavendish’s text envisions a world-building that is entirely the result of individual human invention – in her words, one made of “Nothing but Wit.” Cavendish focuses on the imaginative possibilities opened by a creation focused on seeming nothingness; her text fantasizes about a world in which this act of creation forces multiple boundaries to break down (human / animal, scientist / experiment). The Blazing World challenges the rules for scientific practice enshrined by the Royal Society by imagining experiments that create hybrids that challenge the seemingly objective stance of the scientific observer as well as the facts produced in the laboratory itself.

“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.