View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository THE INVENTION OF THE CRITIC IN ENGLAND, 1570-1640 William McCullough Russell A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2009 Approved by: Jessica Wolfe Reid Barbour Mary Floyd-Wilson Darryl Gless Ritchie Kendall © 2009 William McCullough Russell ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT WILLIAM McCULLOUGH RUSSELL: The Invention of the Critic in England, 1570-1640 (Under the direction of Jessica Wolfe) This dissertation examines the social and intellectual forces that shaped the idea of the literary critic in early modern England. Histories of criticism too often neglect critical identity, fastidiously tracing the development of such concepts as imitation yet taking for granted the idea of the critic as stable and transparent. This study complicates that idea by historicizing it in the very period when the word critic first began to signify an expert in literary judgment. Revising reductive assessments of this era of criticism as the sum of its classical parts, I argue that the idea of the critic in early modern England was negotiated in a discourse equally responsive to classical precedent and to the economic, political, and religious circumstances of a rapidly changing national landscape. Such pivotal moments as the erection of public theaters in London, the Marprelate controversy, the tide of anti-intellectualism rising from what Gabriel Harvey called “the world of business,” and the English chapter of the scientific revolution forced English critics from Sidney to Jonson to reevaluate the basis and scope of critical authority. Consensus around the idea of the critic curiously arises not from compartmentalization but from dispersion, as critics open themselves up to interdisciplinary discourse and as agents outside the field of literary studies, such as it was, begin to value and appropriate its resources. As they consider the relation of criticism to politics, to private enterprise, and to the natural and social sciences, early modern English critics reveal themselves as our forebears by introducing a set of critical dilemmas that continue to resonate in our field today. iii For Lauren iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have often wryly described this project as the perfect introduction to the profession. How better to begin the work of criticism than by studying the idea of the critic itself? Writing about that idea has made me painfully self-conscious about the process of critical invention essential to any dissertation and pleasantly aware of my own good fortune in having such excellent models at hand. Over the last six years, Reid Barbour and Jessica Wolfe have taught me the meaning of scholarship. Whatever success I have achieved I owe to them, to the example they set, and to the inspiration they gave me to follow it. Mary Floyd-Wilson, Darryl Gless, and Ritchie Kendall provided incisive and intellectually generous readings and helped me to think critically about the limitations and possibilities of this project going forward. Thanks are due here to Andrew Campbell and Edward Tayler as well, my first teachers, to whom I owe an enthusiasm for literary study that not even graduate school could fade. They were with me at every turn. Two successive dissertation fellowships from the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies and the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC crucially provided me with time to research and write. The librarians at the Folger Shakespeare Library kindly helped me gain my footing as a researcher. I thank them for it and I thank the Huntington Library for allowing me to reprint a page from Pedantius. Dustin Mengelkoch, Nathan Stogdill, and Joseph Wallace have kept me sharp as well as happy and have made me feel smarter with their company. Sara Mack helped me through a few hazardous Latin passages and, what’s more, taught me to read Ovid and Virgil. v Above all, it was the love and patience of the dedicatee and, in its final stages, the new and unparalleled joys of fatherhood that saw me through this equally challenging and rewarding process. I thank Lauren and Owen for giving me a home to return to at the end of the day. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: The Idea of the Critic...................................................................................................1 Part I: The Matter of Criticism..........................................................................................................20 Chapter One: Gosson’s Common Experience.................................................................21 Chapter Two: Sidney’s Uncommon Ideas.........................................................................68 Part II: The Manner of Criticism....................................................................................................114 Chapter Three: Gabriel Harvey and the Mere Pedant...................................................115 Chapter Four: Thomas Nashe and the Vile Detractor..................................................188 Part III: Critical Connections..........................................................................................................241 Chapter Five: Jonson, Decay, and the Consociative Critic...........................................242 Epilogue: Reinventing the Critic.....................................................................................................294 Figures.................................................................................................................................................299 Bibliography.......................................................................................................................................302 vii INTRODUCTION: THE IDEA OF THE CRITIC Censurer, carper, railer, backbiter, detractor, pedant, doctor, clerk, grammarian, Momus, Zoilus, Aristarchus, Polyposus, Nasutus, judge, reader, teacher – the figure who occupies the next three-hundred odd pages assumes and is called by a variety of names, strikes and is caricatured in a variety of poses, and undertakes and is thought to fulfill a variety of obligations, some productive and some destructive, some useful and some useless, depending, in any given case, on whom we ask. In early modern England, this diffuse and often contradictory set of ideas began to coalesce around the word critic, which underwent a remarkable shift in meaning at the turn of the seventeenth century.1 Once a marker for the armchair find-fault of all spheres of experience, critic gradually came to suggest in this era a recognized authority in literary judgment, someone whom historians, natural philosophers, and others outside the field of literary studies, such as it was, could appeal to for specialized knowledge.2 In between these two not altogether discrete personae, arising from the rich 1 For an overview of this shift, see “critic, n.1,” The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989). See also Wellek, pp. 21-36, for a useful history of the term criticism, which is, however, modified and updated in important ways by the present study. 2 See Ann Blair, “Natural Philosophy and the ‘New Science’,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Vol. III: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), pp. 449-57, who warns against either strictly distinguishing between or equating natural philosophy, literature, and criticism, disciplines which all shared a basis in humanism in the early modern period. Much like criticism, the natural philosophy of the sixteenth century primarily involved “the compilation, criticism, and explication of texts” such as Aristotle’s Physics (450). This only began to change in the seventeenth century, largely as a result of developments in scientific method that ultimately led to Newton “[removing] the study of physics beyond the ken of the educated non-specialist” (456). The present study contends that attempts by critics, natural philosophers, and writers in other changing fields, such as historiography, to distinguish themselves and their authority were mutually constitutive within a network of cross-cultural discourse. It is telling that the OED cites Francis Bacon’s novel use of the word critic to distinguish and refer externally to an authority in literary judgment, a gesture that does as much for the idea of the natural philosopher as it does for the idea of the critic. By the variety of critical performances and portraits produced in England between Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (pub. 1595) and Ben Jonson’s Discoveries (pub. 1640), stands a host of divergent ideas about the limits of critical authority and what Terry Eagleton, echoing Yvor Winters and Matthew Arnold, has called “the function of criticism.” This dissertation investigates these ideas and the social and intellectual forces that shape them. I argue that the idea of the critic in early modern England was the product of a broad-based dialogue that depends equally upon internecine antagonism and interdisciplinary consensus and responds equally to classical precedent and the economic, political, and religious circumstances of a rapidly changing national landscape. Critical dilemmas thought to arise only after the Restoration, with the proliferation of periodical literature, in fact emerge nearly a century earlier