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<bold><p>Seasons and Sovereigns:<br></p><p>Succession in the Greenworld, 1579 - 1621<br></p></bold><p><p></p><p> 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. <bold>Seasons and Sovereigns</bold> 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.</p><p><p> </p><p>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, <bold>Seasons
and Sovereigns </bold> 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. </p><p><p> </p><p>The
project begins by examining Queen Elizabeth's cult of <i>ver perpetuum</i> 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 <italic>Gallathea,</italic> Boboli
garden, and <italic>Cymbeline.</italic> </p><p> <p>Chapter 3 argues that Shakespeare
replaces an Arcadian landscape with a theater of green wonders and Macduff's knowledge
of seasonal decorum in <italic>Macbeth.</italic> 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 <italic>The Wonder-full Yeare,</italic> 1603. Chapter 4
shifts the Arcadian impulse inward by exploring resistance to constancy (a pastoral
value) in <italic>The Changeling</italic>, 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 <i>Urania</i> dissolve
contracts and engage in post-Golden Age political jurisprudence by promoting duplicity
and metamorphosis.</p>
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