Find It Surprising Though Not Unusual Inexplicable Though Normal Incomprehensible Though It Is the Rule
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For several: Mother, Jolan, Percival, and Alan Examine carefully the behaviour of these people: Find it surprising though not unusual Inexplicable though normal Incomprehensible though it is the rule. Consider even the most insignificant, seemingly simple Action with distrust. Ask yourselves whether it is necessary Especially if it is usual. We ask you expressly to discover That what happens all the time is not natural. For to say that something is natural In such times of bloody confusion Of ordained disorder, of systematic arbitrariness Of inhuman inhumanity is to Regard it as unchangeable. Brecht, The Exception and the Rule This our age swims within him . The Revenger's Tragedy Radical Tragedy Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama o f Shakespeare and his Contemporaries Jonathan Dollimore Lecturer, School o f English and American Studies University of Sussex Formerly of fediorl lolle&e Universityo f London. THE HARVESTER PRESS RHBNC 1990530 7 a302140 19905307b ProQuest Number: 10098549 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10098549 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 First published in Great Britain in 1984 by THE HARVESTER PRESS LIMITED Publisher: John Spiers 16 Ship Street, Brighton, Sussex © Jonathan Dollimore, 1984 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Dollimore, Jonathan Radical tragedy. 1. English drama—Early modern and Elizabethan, 1500-1601—History and criticism 2. English drama—17th century—History and criticism 1. Title 822'.3'09 PR651 ISBN 0 7108 0307 9 Typeset in 11 point Garamond by Photobooks (Bristol) Ltd. Printed in Great Britain by The Thetford Press Ltd, Thetford, Norfolk All rights reserved THE HARVESTER PRESS PUBLISHING GROUP The Harvester Press Publishing Group comprises Harvester Press Limited (chiefly publishing literature, fiction, philosophy, psychology, and science and trade books), Harvester Press Microform Publications Limited (publishing in microform unpublished archives, scarce printed sources, and indexes to these collections) and Wheatsheaf Books Limited (a wholly independent company chiefly publishing in economics, international politics, sociology and related social sciences), whose books are distributed by The Harvester Press Limited and its agencies throughout the world. Contents PART I: RADICAL DRAMA: ITS CONTEXTS AND EMERGENCE 1 Contexts 3 i Literary Criticism: Order versus History 5 ii Ideology, Religion and Renaissance Scepticism 9 iii Ideology and the Decentring of Man 17 iv Secularism versus Nihilism 19 V Censorship 22 vi Inversion and Misrule 25 2 Emergence: Marston’s Antonio Plays (c. 1599-1601) and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (c. 1601-2) 29 i Discontinuous Identity (1) 30 ii Providence and Natural Law (1) 36 iii Discontinuous Identity (2) 40 iv Providence and Natural Law (2) 42 V Ideology and the Absolute 44 vi Social Contradiction and Discontinuous Identity 47 vii Renaissance Man versus Decentred Malcontent 49 PART II: STRUCTURE, MIMESIS, PROVIDENCE 3 Structure: From Resolution to Dislocation 53 i Bradley 53 ii Archer and Eliot 56 vi Contents iii Coherence and Discontinuity 59 iv Brecht: A Different Reality 63 4 Renaissance Literary Theory: Two Concepts of Mimesis 70 i Poetry versus History 71 ii The Fictive and the Real 73 5 The Disintegration of Providentialist Belief 83 i Atheism and Religious Scepticism 83 ii Providentialism and History 87 iii Organic Providence 90 iv From Mutability to Cosmic Decay 92 V Goodman and Elemental Chaos 99 vi Providence and Protestantism 103 vii Providence, Decay and the Drama 107 6 Dr Faustus (c. 1589-92): Subversion Through Transgression 109 i Limit and Transgression 110 ii Power and the Unitary Soul 116 7 Mustapha (c. 1594-6): Ruined Aesthetic, Ruined Theology 120 i Tragedy, Theology and Cosmic Decay 120 ii Mustapha: Tragedy as Dislocation 123 8 Sejanus (1603): History and Realpolitik 134 i History, Fate, Providence 134 9 The Revenger's Tragedy (c. 1606): Providence, Parody and Black Camp 139 i Providence and Parody 139 ii Desire and Death 143 PART III: MAN DECENTRED 10 Subjectivity and Social Process 153 i Tragedy, Humanism and the Transcendent Subject 156 Contents vii ii The Jacobean Displacement of the Subject 158 iii The Essentialist Tradition: Christianity, Stoicism and Renaissance Humanism 161 iv Internal Tensions 163 V Anti-Essentialism in Political Theory and Renaissance Scepticism 169 vi Renaissance Individualism? 174 11 Bussy D'Ambois (c. 1604): A Hero at Court 182 i Shadows and Substance 182 ii Court Power and Native Noblesse 185 12 King Lear (c. 1605-6) and Essentialist Humanism 189 i Redemption and Endurance: Two Sides of Essentialist Humanism 191 ii King Lear: A Materialist Reading 195 iii The Refusal of Closure 202 13 Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1607): Virtus under Erasure 204 i Virtus and History 206 ii Virtus and Realpolitik (1) 207 iii Honour and Policy 213 iv Sexuality and Power 215 14 Coriolanus (c. 1608): The Chariot Wheel and its Dust 218 i Virtus and Realpolitik (2) 218 ii Essentialism and Class War 222 15 The White Devil (1612): Transgression Without Virtue 231 i Religion and State Power 231 ii The Virtuous and the Vicious 232 iii Sexual and Social Exploitation 235 iv The Assertive Woman 239 V The Dispossessed Intellectual 242 vi Living Contradictions 244 viii Contents PARTùV: SUBJECTIVITY: IDEALISM VERSUS MATERIALISM 16 Beyond Essentialist Humanism 249 i Origins of the Transcendent Subject 250 ii Essence and Universal: Enlightenment Transitions 253 iii Discrimination and Subjectivity 256 iv Formative Literary Influences: Pope to Eliot 258 V Existentialism 262 vi Lawrence, Leavis and Individualism 264 vii The Decentred Subject 269 Notes 272 Bibliography of Work Cited 290 Acknowledgements 306 Index of Names and Texts 307 Index of Subjects 311 PART I RADICAL DRAMA: ITS CONTEXTS AND EMERGENCE CHAPTER 1 Contexts Writing of Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht— major exponents of what he calls ‘critical theatre’—Jean-Paul Sartre declares: ‘these authors . far from being afraid of creating a scandal, want to provoke one as strongly as possible, because scandal must bring with it a certain disarray’. Theirs, adds Sartre, is a theatre of refusal {Politics and Literature, pp. 39, 65, 66). The disarray generated in and by Jacobean tragedy has likewise scandalised, then and subsequently. Few writers have provoked as much critical disagreement as, say, John Webster, who has been acutely problematic for a critical tradition which has wanted to keep alive all the conservative imperatives associated with ‘order’, ‘tradition’, the ‘human condition’ and ‘character’.^ It is no accident that Artaud and, to a much greater extent, Brecht, were indebted to Jacobean drama. Brecht in fact figures prominently in my argument to the effect that a significant sequence of Jacobean tragedies,^ including the majority of Shakespeare’s, were more radical than has hitherto been allowed. Subsequent chapters will show how the radicalism of these plays needs to be seen in the wider context of that diverse body of writing which has been called ‘the greatest intellectual revolution the Western world has ever seen’^ and also identified as ‘the intellectual origins’ of that actual revolution in the English state in 1642.“* Some forty years before this event, as Raymond Williams has reminded us, we find in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama ‘a form of total crisis’: in the ‘formal qualities of the dramatic mode . real social relations were specifically disclosed’ {Culture, pp. 159, 158). Is it too ambitious to see such a relationship between the drama and the 4 Radical Drama: its Contexts and Emergence English revolution? Analysing the causes of the latter, Lawrence Stone insists that the crucial question is not war breaking out in 1642 but why ‘most of the established institutions of State and Church—Crown, Court, central administration, army, and episcopacy—collapsed so ignomini- ously two years before’ (The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642, p. 4 8 )/ If the causes of that collapse can be discerned in the previous decades then, at the very least, we might postulate a connection in the early seventeenth century between the undermining of these institutions and a theatre in which they and their ideological legitimation were subjected to sceptical, interrogative and subversive representations. In the hundred years up to 1629, Stone identifies the four most salient elements in the manifold preconditions of the war: first, the failure of the Crown to acquire two key instruments of power—a standing army and a paid, reliable local bureauc racy; second, a decline of the aristocracy and a corresponding rise of the gentry; third, a puritanism which generated a sense of the need for change in church and state; fourth, a crisis of confidence in the integrity of those in power, whether courtiers, nobles, bishops, judges or kings {Causes, p. 116). Each precondition constitutes a social and political reality addressed by Jacobean drama. The lack of such things as a