The Poetics of Literary History in Renaissance England Christopher
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The Poetics of Literary History in Renaissance England Christopher Ross McKeen Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2017 Christopher Ross McKeen All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Poetics of Literary History in Renaissance England Christopher Ross McKeen This dissertation expands the familiar concept of literary history in order to argue for the historiographic function of literary form in early modern poetry and drama. I propose that the “literary history” of early modern England is not merely the history of literature, but also these writers’ methods of evoking history by means of the literary. For Christopher Marlowe, George Herbert, and many of their contemporaries, the formal capacities of poetry offered methods for describing relationships between events in time, interpreting those events, and mobilizing those interpretations—in short, the formal capacities of poetry become ways of doing history. In the most familiar critical sense, literary history denotes canon-formations, literary influence, and the development of genres, trends, and fashions in poetic style. I demonstrate that early modern poets themselves recognized this sense of literary history, understanding their formal decisions in light of the history of poetic form. When Tudor and Stuart writers adopted a particular style or set of conventions, I argue, they did so with an awareness of how easily these styles could become—or had become—dated. While critics have demonstrated the political valences of writers’ recourse to specific genres and styles, I also insist on the specifically temporal and historical implications of poetic form as such, arguing that poets’ formal decisions, irrespective of earlier uses of those forms, encode ways of looking at and interpreting the past. The temporalities of verse—the way its meter produces forward momentum, its rhyme recalls earlier lines, its lyric voice arrests time—become, for the poets and dramatists I study, tools for understanding historical events and periods. By attending to the inherent temporality of poetry, I uncover the historical arguments poets and dramatists make, even in texts not overtly concerned with historical topics. Indeed, I suggest that the very structure of poetry can become a way of thinking about the past and the passage of time. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………ii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….1 1. Christopher Marlowe and the History of Blank Verse………………………………………. 25 2. Michael Drayton and the History of the English Sonnet ……………………………………..71 3. Ben Jonson and the History of the Epigram ………………………………………………...118 4. George Herbert and Literary History………………………………………………………...165 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………...192 i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No one writes a dissertation alone. Thanks belong, first of all, to Molly Murray, my most demanding and generous reader, who believed in this project even when I did not. Her keen interest and insight, both in conversation and in writing, have sharpened both my ideas and my prose. Alan Stewart continually helped me see what my arguments were really about, and I always left his office with my sense of the project grounded and clarified. Jean Howard taught me how chapters work. If my writing’s rhetorical structure holds together, it is because of her. All three have read practically everything I ever wrote as a scholar. Their guidance and support over the years have made this dissertation possible. I am fortunate to have shared the day-to-day work of writing with Candace Cunard. I developed my own writing practices and habits by working alongside her, and though our methods differ, I would not have found my own without her help. Moreover, the intellectual, emotional, and physical labor she provides made this dissertation possible. I am also thankful for important conversations about Theodor Adorno. I was fortunate to have an abundance of readers while writing this dissertation thanks to the Early Modern Dissertation Seminar in the English Department at Columbia. These friends and colleagues responded to drafts of this dissertation with continual excitement, support, and critical insight, and I only hope I have offered the same to their work. Conversations with Kathryn Fore helped to clarify my Herbert chapter. Andrea Crow, Arden Hegele, and Seth Williams each offered important friendship, as well as loaning canine support. Gail Kern Paster unknowingly provided great encouragement at a crucial moment in this process. My external examiners, Rachel Eisendrath and Matt Zarnowiecki, gave me new insight into this dissertation; their comments have reinvigorated my interest in this project and spurred me to further research. ii Ana Rudin and Janet Robblee read the entire dissertation and in doing so prepared me for the defense. Thanks, finally, to Ainsley Burke, Daniel Rosell, Ross McKeen, Robert and Kristen Cunard, and the staff at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, where much of this was written. This dissertation is dedicated to David McKeen, teacher and adventurer. iii Introduction “Literary histories are supposed to be a thing of the past.”1 This dissertation examines the relationship between poetic form and historical thought in the English renaissance. In it, I argue that early modern writers used the resources of poetry not only to give form to historical narratives, but to describe relationships between events in time, interpret those events, and apply those interpretations. In short, poetics provided English renaissance writers with an alternative means of doing history. The results are what I call “literary histories”—a contested term in contemporary scholarship. As commonly understood, “literary history” can be defined as “a narrative account of either literature as a whole or of specific modes (poetry, drama, fiction), genres (epic, comedy, pastoral), or forms (complaint, sonnet, ode).”2 As an approach to criticism, this sort of literary history is usually traced to the long eighteenth century, and indeed the OED finds the phrase used in this sense only as early as 1692.3 Over the past decade, however, “literary history” has become a key concept for digital humanities and practices of “distant reading.” Franco Moretti introduces these methods in Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005), by calling them, in the subtitle of that book, Abstract Models for 1 Jonathan F. S. Post, English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1999), ix. 2 Lee Patterson, “Literary History,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd ed., Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010): 350. 3 OED, qv. “Literary history”; René Wellek, The Rise of English Literary History (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1941); Kevin Pask, “Ancients and Moderns: The Origins of Literary History,” Modern Language Quarterly 73, no. 4 (2012): 505-26. 1 Literary History.4 Subsequent studies in this field likewise use “literary history” to define their projects.5 In this dissertation, I put a different kind of pressure on the phrase “literary history” by exploring how literary forms and traditions—the subjects of traditional literary history—are themselves productive of histories in early modern England. I argue that in addition to recognizing that poetic form develops over time, certain English poets in this period mobilized this newly-recognized historicity of literary form to narrate, interpret, and theorize history itself. “Literary histories,” in this dissertation, are therefore texts that both recognize the historicity of poetic form and use poetic form as a means of thinking historically. The well-studied proliferation of staged and versified historical narratives throughout the Elizabethan and Jacobean reigns attests to poetry’s extensive use as a medium for thinking through historical problems. Texts from this period continually turn to the past in order to craft narratives, draw examples, defend arguments, and claim authority.6 Out of this deep investment with the past emerged new genres of historiography, including Tacitean political histories, non-narrative antiquarian writings, and, of course, the Elizabethan history play.7 Given the diversity and 4 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (Londonn: Verso, 2005). 5 Jockers, Matthew, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), as well as James F. English and Ted Underwood, eds., “Scale and Value: New Digial Approaches to Literary History,” Modern Language Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2016), 277-471. 6 Daniel Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 2. 7 On the proliferation of historiographic genres, see Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Studies of specific historiographic genres include on the history play: Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer, eds., English Historical Drama, 1500- 1660: Forms Outside the Canon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). On historical narrative poetry, see Anthony LaBranche, “Poetry, History, and Oratory: The Renaissance Historical Poem,” SEL 9, no. 1 (1969): 1-19; Gerald M. MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry,