©2019 William A. Tanner, Jr. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
©2019 William A. Tanner, Jr. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE MELANCHOLY MALCONTENT IN EARLY MODERN THEATER AND CULTURE by WILLIAM AARON TANNER, JR. A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English Written under the direction of Henry S. Turner And approved by _____________________________ _____________________________ _____________________________ _____________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2019 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Melancholy Malcontent in Early Modern Theater & Culture WILLIAM AARON TANNER, JR. Dissertation Director: Henry S. Turner The following study illuminates a set of failed responses to social and political problems sedimented, personified, and explored through the “malcontent,” a politically charged word borrowed from French politics that became a key social and literary type in early modern England. Much prior criticism has approached typology as a set of static signs to be catalogued; instead, this study traces the role of the malcontent in an evolving inquiry in England at the turn of the seventeenth century into questions of injustice, participatory politics, tyranny, and political stability. The end of the Elizabethan and beginning of the Jacobean eras was a time of great fear and anxiety, forging these questions of abstract political philosophy into matters of immediate, pressing concern. Attending to the historical and literary contexts of exemplary malcontents (both historical persons and literary figures), the study demonstrates that far from being a static figure, the malcontent was a flexible hermeneutic for syncretically fusing multiple discourses: much as Drew Daniel has described “melancholy” as a Deleuzian “assemblage,” the politicized malcontent subset of melancholics acts almost as a rubics cube for early modern thinkers to examine the confluences and consequences of shifting arrangements of ideas.
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