Bagaglio, Melissa Haickel. Sovereign Justice: Royal Prerogative and Justice in the Works of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. The University of Memphis, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2019. 13857286.
My dissertation joins a vibrant conversation in the intersection of literature and law to investigate the changing attitude towards the royal prerogative as it relates to law, mercy, and equity in the English early modern period. The royal prerogative, the sovereign’s rights and privileges under English law, has long been a contentious aspect of the British legal system with many attempts over the centuries to limit the use of these powers. During Tudor times, royal prerogative was closely associated with the courts of Chancery and Star Chamber, which were highly regarded courts of equity. However, the same courts became associated with corruption during the Stuarts’s reign, and Star Chamber was eventually abolished by the Long Parliament. Using current theoretical concepts of authority, particularly Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer series, I examine how Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Milton portrayed the societal shift in writings that appeared concurrently with major events related to the English monarchy. Specifically, I examine ideas about law, mercy, and equity and their relation to royal prerogative in Book V of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Henry V and Macbeth, and Milton’s Paradise Lost to argue that these authors use legal language in their works to characterize the shifting nature of sovereign justice. Closely examining their rhetorical moves also reveals their attempts at affecting policy and making the shift towards reduced prerogative powers and legally limited sovereignty, the powers now assigned the executive branch of government. I believe that actively engaging with these authors and their ideas about authority and justice is important for understanding and giving us perspective on our own issues of violence and legality that have surged in recent history, especially as they relate to extraordinary powers.
Bailey, Heather. “Eating the Flesh that She Herself Hath Bred:” The Female as Cannibal and Corpse Flesh in Early Modern English Literature. The Florida State University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2019. 13806735.
In this dissertation I examine the gendering of cannibalistic consumption in early modern literature by analyzing literary moments in which a woman is a cannibal or victim of cannibalistic consumption in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s The Sea Voyage and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Bloody Banquet. I show that colonial and medical discourse intersect in these moments that figure the female body as hungry cannibal or desirable flesh commodity. I argue that these texts respond to and critique what I term the “gendered hierarchies of consumption” that both the colonial and medical tradition relied on specifically through their use of the female body either as victim of cannibalistic consumption or as cannibalistic consumer. These texts are particularly interested in evoking the meanings associated with the female body as a product to be consumed for its healing properties, which was particularly relevant given the practice of corpse pharmacology, in which human flesh was ingested for medicinal purposes. As I show, men consumed the female body in this way even while women themselves also consumed the male body as participants in the corpse pharmacological market. Likewise, colonial discourse figured the land as female to justify male control and domination. Medical and colonial discourse figured the female body as target of male consumption, yet the female cannibal threatens those hierarchies of consumption to instead critique both colonial and ideology and practice.
Bloch, Elizabeth. Doubleness in English Renaissance Pastoral. The Catholic University of America, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2019. 13424499.
Doubleness in English Renaissance Pastoral considers innovations to the Greek and Latin eclogue in works by Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Andrew Marvell. I argue that these authors were attracted to the classical eclogue for its ability to give complex artistic representation to serious civic, religious, aesthetic, elegiac, and philosophical concerns. As authors incorporated the dialogue-based eclogue form into other genres such as narrative and drama, they also incorporated the traditional pastoral emphasis on thematic binaries, paradoxes, and double perspectives. Chapter 1 introduces the thematically and formally double eclogue between shepherds, derived from Theocritus’ Idylls and Virgil’s Eclogues, and examines its function within the calendrical structure in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender. Chapter 2 focuses on the hybrid world of courtiers and shepherds in the eclogue books of the narrative Old Arcadia and considers Sidney’s movement from dialogue between two speakers to dialogue within the self, a largely unexplored development that, like the humanist dialogue, prompts dialectical habits of thought in the reader. Chapter 3 studies the pastoral interlude in epic and drama and discusses Book VI of Spenser’s Faerie Queene as a pattern for Shakespeare’s use of pastoral doubleness to renew the non-pastoral world in As You Like It. Chapter 4 explores Shakespeare’s use not only of the pastoral interlude but also of the Spenserian seasonal, dialectical structure in The Winter’s Tale. Chapter 5 argues that in “Lycidas” Milton’s transformation of the conventions of pastoral elegy includes representing the eclogue series within a single lyric poem and using the pastoral opposition of cyclic nature and finite man to respond to death. Chapter 6 considers the pastoral lyric poetry of Andrew Marvell and the ways in which Marvell responds to loss in part by employing eclogue-inspired debate and the double-mindedness of the Mower, and by resolving pastoral doubleness in the single voice of “The Garden.” Through the exploration of these works, this dissertation argues for an early modern transition from pastoral as primarily a specific lyric form, the eclogue, to pastoral as a dialectical mode of representing the deep and challenging ambiguities of human experience across literary genres.
Case, Sarah. Increase of Issue: Poetry and Succession in Elizabethan England. Princeton University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2018. 10826108.
The controversy over who would take the throne after Elizabeth I’s death arose from her refusal to do what was expected of her as both a monarch and a woman: namely, marry and produce an heir. The great uncertainty over what would come next for the Elizabethans after the death of their monarch, a subject of debate from the time of Elizabeth’s accession in 1558 to her death in 1603, provided an opportunity for poets to explore uncertainty as it related to ideas of continuity in verse. Coupled with an enduring national anxiety about the possibility of civil war after Elizabeth’s death was the Parliamentary gag order, in the form of the 1571 Treasons Act, which banned discussion of the succession. Increase of Issue: Poetry and Succession in Elizabethan England explores the relationship between monarchical succession and poetic innovation during the reign of Elizabeth I, arguing that a scepticism of the ability of the past to make secure the future emerged in English poetry during this period.
The first chapter explores the relationship between gender, rhetoric, and debates about the succession in the works of George Puttenham. Analyzing his lesser-known writings, this chapter argues that the succession debates shaped Puttenham’s poetics manual, The Arte of English Poesy. Chapter Two examines how Elizabeth’s demand for silence on the matter of the succession led Sir Philip Sidney to imagine alternate forms of counsel in the pastoral eclogues of his Arcadia. The third chapter focuses on the genealogical cantos of The Faerie Queene, arguing that Edmund Spenser used the stanza and canto structures of this poem to imagine a version of order in reaction to the disrupted succession. Chapter Four concludes the project by considering the implications of the succession debate on Shakespeare’s sonnets. In tracing the multiple chronologies of these poems, this chapter focuses in particular on the fact that reproduction could no longer provide an answer to the uncertain succession in the late period of Elizabeth’s reign. Shakespeare’s sonnet speaker debates how forms of reproduction and increase operate in relation to the desire for political, personal, and poetic continuity.
Griswold, Jeffrey B. The Political Animal: Early Modern Literature and Human Exceptionalism. University of Maryland, College Park, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2019. 13859183.
Early modern English thinkers increasingly understood human exceptionalism in terms of rationality and self-interest, ideas that were central to the development of political thought in the seventeenth century. This dissertation returns to accounts of “the human” circa 1600 in order to recover the instability and uncertainty of the category prior to the development of Liberalism. In this moment of ideological flux and political volatility, the human is frequently defined in terms of its weaknesses rather than in terms of its strengths. Drawing on the resources of posthumanism and animal studies, this dissertation argues that the exceptional vulnerability of the human animal was central to a previously unexamined mode of early modern political thought. Our individual insufficiency was understood to underpin our communal nature. I reassess early modern representations of vulnerability, which have been important for biopolitical readings of Renaissance literature. Rather than portraying the subjection of human life to sovereign power, this dissertation demonstrates that the frailty of the human provided an ethical framework for political community. By reading literary texts in conjunction with early modern Aristotelian philosophy, I show that thinkers of the English Renaissance reimagined arguments from the Politics about human insufficiency by depicting our species as the frailest of all creatures. I trace this style of thought through William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. My argument extends recent scholarship on “human negative exceptionalism” by demonstrating that tropes of human frailty were not only used as critique. Species difference was also central to theorizing our uniquely political nature. Whereas contemporary posthumanism has sought to decenter the human from our critical inquiry, this project suggests the ethical importance of understanding humans to be distinct from other creatures.
Lo, Melanie Catherine. Affective History, Felt Time, and Embodied Pasts in Early Modern England. University of Colorado at Boulder, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2018. 10792032.
This dissertation takes as its subject early modern England’s enduring fascination with its national past. I argue that accounts of English history in plays, poetry, and prose treatises were designed not only to represent history, but to make readers and viewers experience the past in emotional and embodied ways. In chapters covering Edward Hall’s Union of the Houses of Lancaster and York, A Mirror For Magistrates, Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, William Shakespeare’s English history plays, and Milton’s History of Britain, I analyze how these various works enable readers and spectators to feel and thus experience the past in an interactive fashion. In this way, the texts I address craft experiences of felt temporality in which the past seemingly unfolds in the present.
This project intervenes in two subfields of early modern studies that have previously been quite distinct. First, while the “affective turn” has shown how discourses of emotion play a constitutive role in aesthetics, this approach has often elided historiography and history writing; meanwhile, scholarship on the Renaissance fascination with history has overemphasized the period’s relation to the past as solely an experience of loss. My argument builds on and emends these approaches to show that the longstanding appeal of historical genres in England lay in this ability to represent the past as happening again and felt in the here and now. The texts I examine represent history as a mode of being-in-time in which distinctions between past and present are blurred. Therefore, my project advances a larger argument for how emotion can structure a subject’s experience of time in ways that defy linear models of temporality.
Lynch, Matthew Thomas. A Native Antiquity: Early Modern Poetry and the Anglo-Saxon Past. Indiana University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2018. 10976876.
A Native Antiquity focuses on the influence that Anglo-Saxon antiquarianism, particularly in the areas of topography and law, had on the poetry of Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton. It looks at antiquarian studies of England to ask larger questions about how the past is applied to the present at a time of rapid change and rapid loss. My dissertation attempts to break down periodization between the medieval and the early modern, and it also adopts an interdisciplinary approach between legal theory and literary criticism in order to explore how early modern poetry was informed by antiquarians’ views. My study focuses on a period of roughly one hundred years, from the dawn of Tudor antiquarian research in the 1530s to the decade after the Restoration in 1660. The bookends of the dissolution of the monasteries and the Civil War and Restoration mark a curious trajectory not in the nature of antiquarian studies themselves, but in their practical purposes and applications. Antiquarian studies, once used to buttress the power of the monarch and link religion to the state, were used by Stuart theorists and parliamentarians to diminish and eventually overthrow the monarch. In applying antiquarian research to their present, both the early modern antiquarians and the poets who read their works viewed the Anglo-Saxon period as a time of constructed antiquity rather than a time of constructed “dark ages.” Nevertheless, my study examines how early modern poetry looked to antiquarian studies to reveal areas of ambiguity that cannot be explained by views that the English past was a place of pure origins. The Anglo-Saxon past was a dark matter of sorts: early modern thinkers were sure that it was a time of great learning, but were unable to recover it.
Mellor, Hollyann Kaye. Gender, Power and Disguise: Cross-Dressing Women Within Shakespeare and Spenser. Sheffield Hallam University (United Kingdom), ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2018. 13850291.
By engaging with Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield’s (1994) consolidation, subversion and containment theory this dissertation explores how Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare incorporated female crossdressers within their works to present fictional women as threatening to established Elizabethan gender codes. Transgressive female characters in these works demand particular attention given the insecure variant of patriarchy that had emerged out of Elizabeth I’s reign, and the insistent iconography of female power and constancy that was encouraged throughout the final decades of her rule. This dissertation argues that Spenser and Shakespeare presented crossdressing women as figures who had the potential to subvert established notions of patriarchy during the final decade of the sixteenth-century. Shakespeare and Spenser chose to present these female protagonists, during the latter portion of Elizabeth I’s reign, as threatening in three distinguishable ways. First, crossdressers conceal their female form beneath male attire, proving both fraudulent in nature and capable of usurping male authority by falsifying their female subordinated gender. Secondly, they evidence a disobedience to masculine authority by using marriage vows and rings to gain advantage over prospective romantic partners while disguised. Thirdly, Elizabethans would have regarded the depiction of women who incorporated a combatant temperament, by wearing weaponry or physically fighting with men, as distinctly provocative. This dissertation examines these figures of transgressive femininity within both the poetic and staged genres. In Spenser’s epic poem, The Faerie Queene, the warrior maiden Britomart consistently reinforces accepted gender stereotypes, wilfully containing her own transgressions. Contrastingly, Shakespeare’s crossdressing women display an array of subversive potential in both their original intentions to defy male authority and their varied abilities to follow through with their intended deceit.
Mennella, Vincent. Spenser’s Twin Pillars of the Kingdom: Arthur, Elizabeth, and the Medieval Tradition of Translatio Studii Et Imperii. Sam Houston State University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2018. 13819681.
Translatio studii et imperii stood as the governing metaphor and principal method of medieval authors to explain changes in political power and romanticize the past. In this project, I examine medieval and early-modern conceptions of political power in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and the medieval Arthuriana. Ultimately, I argue that Spenser’s careful selection of medieval tropes from Arthurian romances and Chaucer’s poetry expresses a skepticism about the myth of Tudor origins the poet is often credited with popularizing.
Park, Kyungran. Beyond Us and Them: Empathy, Justice, and Gender in Early Modern Allegory. State University of New York at Buffalo, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2019. 13427744.
My dissertation investigates empathy, or the brain’s registration of the bodily response of sympathy, in early modern allegory. Departing from the binary oppositions between the modern novelistic character and the pre-modern allegorical agent, I propose that a narrative technique of empathy configures a mode of interconnected interiority, particularly in the genre of allegory. As opposed to a stereotypical model in which an author imposes meanings through agents within the text, I propose an empathetic model in which she regularly interacts with the characters. An empathetic alignment between character and author thereby revises previous judgments of good and evil as she writes. With its bodily counterpart sympathy, empathy is often interpreted as a feminized category in the genre of allegory, as fellow feelings between characters may seem an extraneous or superfluous voice. However, scholars like Paul de Man argue that allegory’s double structure of tenor and vehicle inherently entails incoherence or even a violent tension between meaning and surface. As yet to be conscious yet still registered in brain, empathy is located in an in-between place between bodily sympathy and conscious judgment, mobilizing change in the latter through feeling the former. Approaching the works of Edmund Spenser to Phineas Fletcher to John Milton to John Bunyan, this dissertation investigates these authors’ diverse narrative techniques of empathy, which I argue generates a debate about correct attitudes about free will, agency and obedience, which become framed through discussions of good and evil. This embedding of empathy appears as a reflection of the debates surrounding the Reformation, the English Civil War and individuality in the early modern period.
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