The Duchess of Malfi

Science and Secularization: English Drama, the Moon, and Theological Cosmologies, 1592-1614 by Samuel Kaufman A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Samuel Kaufman 2016 Science and Secularization: English Drama, the Moon, and Theological Cosmologies, 1592-1614 Samuel Kaufman, Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2016 Abstract The theological challenges of the cosmological distortions introduced by the “new philosophy” are well-attested in the work of 17th-century poets like John Donne and John Milton. Yet despite a recent religious turn in the study of early modern drama, comparatively little attention has been paid to its theological registering of the Scientific Revolution. “Science and Secularization” examines dramatic articulations of the relationship between theological and cosmological systems at the turn of the 17th- century, a period in which both were developing under the influence of English church politics and new astronomical observations. Prefaced by a brief treatment of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (c. 1592), my study focuses on three plays, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1596) and The Tempest (c. 1611), and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1614). These plays are linked by a mutual concern not only with spiritual agents – devils, fairies, and airy spirits – but also with the moon’s traditional role as a cosmological linchpin, the boundary between the Aristotelian spheres of mutability and change, and the most obvious source of astrological influence over the tides and the humours of the body. Yet two of the plays closely follow the publication of Galileo’s ii Starry Messenger (1610), whose telescopic observations fueled Copernican speculations and presented a vivid new picture of the moon. The sequence of plays provides a historicized view of theological accommodations to this striking scientific development. “Science and Secularization” engages theories of secularization to read the plays. I read the plays’ different understandings of spiritual agents as reflecting processes of “desacralization” and “resacralization,” the shifting locii of supernatural activity in nature and the human body, including the senses and feelings. Yet the plays consider these immanent understanding of supernatural activity within quite distinct providential frameworks that ground their own social and political theories. In both immanent and providential terms, I suggest ways gender works in the plays to resist certain claims of secularization theory. I also suggest that in dramatizing both immanent and providential effects, the plays imagine and enact the theatre’s own shifting role in the theological cosmologies they articulate. iii Dedication and Acknowledgements I glimpsed these moons in indistinct phases; their tides were unpredictable, their fertile moments unforeseen. I dedicate this thesis to those who gave me new ways of tuning in. To Mom and Dad, for the vantage; to Nicky, for inspired lunacy; to Becca, for the rips and swells; to Asa, for wonder, and a new world. I acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Government of Ontario. iv Table of Contents Table of Contents iv Introduction: Theological Cosmologies and the Moon 1 1 Galileo’s observations and their English reception 1 2 Theological cosmologies and the moon 8 3 Unstructurable substance in Dr. Faustus 10 4 A Midsummer Night’s Dream: lunar influence and Hooker’s defence of ritual 23 5 The Duchess of Malfi: lunar surveying and affective antimaterialism 27 6 The Tempest’s covenantal materialism 31 7 Science and secularization? 34 Chapter 1 - Ritual and Edification in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 41 1 Introduction: marriage timing and the moon 41 2 Marriage and Elizabethan political theology 45 3 Providence and predestination: fairy nature, fairy grace, fairy ritual 52 4 Gendering ritual from sacraments to edification 57 5 Bottom’s binge, Titania’s purge 65 6 Build it up, tear it down: theatre and edification 71 7 Hermeneutics of charity and condescension 75 8 Humorous sacramentality or queer catharsis 79 Chapter 2 - Lunacy after Galileo: Gender, Secularization, and the New Philosophy in The Duchess of Malfi 86 1 On matter and vision: Kepler and Galileo between sympathy and mechanism 86 2 Introduction: constancy and change 96 3 Surveying lunar women 104 v 4 From hysterical bodies to universal melancholy: degendering madness 117 5 Passionate philosophers: women’s moral feelings 127 6 Protestantism, religious melancholy, and affective anti-materialism 140 7 Secular aporias: love, friendship, and political agency 164 8 Humanism, demonology, and metatheatre: transitioning to The Tempest 179 9 Appendix: The play’s ring structure 184 Chapter 3 - Influence, Providence, and Obligation: The Tempest’s Covenantal Materialism 191 1 Introduction: Airy fairy forms of feeling 191 2 Self-interest, authority, and the common case 197 3 Affective obligation, love, and social sympathy 202 4 Patience, providence, and the discernment of spirits 216 4.1 Ferdinand’s paradigm 216 4.2 Neapolitan complications 225 5 Lunatic autonomy, atheistic and polytheistic 231 6 Hubris and excess: aesthetic supplementation 236 7 Aesthetic discernment and demonology: from political theology to civil religion, and back again 240 8 Innocence and anaesthesia: the varieties of spiritual experience and the sign of Jonah 253 9 Sex and apocalypse: temporal limitation 261 10 Prospero and Caliban at Gibeon: contractual accommodation and the new covenant of materialism 264 Coda: Drowning Satan’s Moon 281 Works Consulted 284 vi Introduction: Theological Cosmologies and the Moon Though I have often described it as such, this dissertation is not really a study of the reception of Galileo’s 1610 telescopic observations of the moon in English literature. The sources for such a study, if restricted to works that name Galileo, would be few in the first decade, and only one of the three plays I study here, The Duchess of Malfi, mentions Galileo by name. Of the other two, one, A Midsummer Night’s Dream was written a decade and a half before Galileo’s lunar observations; the other, The Tempest, I take to be dated to 1611. Both Shakesperean plays are packed with lunar imagery, and both are unique in Shakespeare’s canon by virtue of their extensive stagings of spiritual beings, whether Midsummer’s fairies and The Tempest’s “airy spirit” Ariel. In trying to understand the role of the moon and spirits in these three plays, this dissertation has become a study of the impact of the lunar observations on the early modern tendency towards literary systems-building, the tendency to use literature to think about the relationship between ethics, politics, physics, and theology by building literary cosmologies;1 I include in these cosmologies supernatural beings.2 But this tendency towards systems-building and the terms in which it is conceived, are themselves historically contingent. As I will argue, the lunar observations tested and almost dissolved this tendency. But first I will describe them and their initial reception in Europe and England. 1 Galileo’s observations and their English reception On March 12, 1610 the printing of Galileo’s Siderius Nuncius (usually translated at Sidereal or Starry Messenger) was completed in Venice. In it Galileo described the results of the telescopic observations of the skies he had been conducting since autumn and continuing during the book’s printing (Galilei, Siderius 19-20). The book sold out 1 I borrow this concept from Liza Blake’s ongoing project (tentatively titled “Early Modern Literary Physics”), though I am less concerned with its specifically literary dimensions. 2 cp. Kristen Poole’s study of Supernatural Environments in Shakespeare’s England. 1 2 within a week (Biagioli 30), no doubt aided by advance leaks (or publicity) of the book’s stunning revelations (Galilei, Siderius 11-12, 90). First, through a careful description of the changing patterns of light and darkness near the moon’s surprisingly irregular terminator, Galileo concluded that the lunar surface was uneven, marked by mountains and valleys like the Earth. Second, the telescope revealed a vast number of new stars in familiar constellations and resolved the blur of the Milky Way into distinct stellar bodies. Third, through a sequence of observations conducted between January 7 and March 2 exhaustively replicated in diagrams in the book, Galileo had discovered four new wandering stars – that is, planets – in orbit around Jupiter. In an eventually successful bid for patronage, and with the permission of the Tuscan court, he named these moons of Jupiter the Medicean stars (Galilei, Siderius 17-19; Westman 464-468). The book’s claims spread rapidly through Europe in the subsequent months, followed slightly more slowly by the book itself and substantially more slowly by high-quality telescopes enabling the investigation of its claims (Galilei, Siderius 87, Westman 457- 460). By April, Kepler had publicly declared his support for the findings (Westman 460- 465), and in May Galileo negotiated a position at the Tuscan court (Westman 465-8). There was immediate resistance in letters and print over the summer by the mathematician-astrologer Magini in Bologna and his secretary Horky, who, attacking the legitimacy of Galileo’s observations, attempted but failed to enlist Kepler in their cause (Westman 468-476; Galilei, Siderius 92-93, 101). Yet others soon endorsed the observations themselves, if not Galileo’s conclusions. By March 1611 in a letter to Bellarmine, Jesuit astronomers approved all the phenomena identified by Galileo in the previous year – the oval shape of Saturn (its rings, interpreted by Galileo as two satellites), and the phases of Venus – as well as the claims of the Nuncius, having themselves discerned stars in the Milky Way and other nebulas, the apparent inequality of the moon (though with reservations about its actual uneveness), and the motion of the wandering stars (Galilei, Siderius 111-12).

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