©2012 Ellorashree Maitra ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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©2012 Ellorashree Maitra ALL RIGHTS RESERVED FORMS OF SERVICE: THE POETICS OF COMMUNITY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND by ELLORASHREE MAITRA A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English Written under the direction of Ann Baynes Coiro And approved by _______________________________________ _______________________________________ ________________________________________ __________________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey MAY, 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Forms of Service: The Poetics of Community in Early Modern England By ELLORASHREE MAITRA Dissertation Director: Ann Baynes Coiro This dissertation examines how the concept of service shapes representations of community in texts drawn from four key early modern genres: tragedy, court-masque, travel journal, and epic poem. As a condition of bondage central to early modern social experience, service crucially mediated agency and communal identity in both domestic and cross-cultural contexts. Generically varied as they are, early modern tragedy, masque, travel-journal, and epic all share a profound concern with the founding imperatives of communal life. In the texts I study, this concern manifests itself through an exploration of service as an inherently social, but not necessarily sociable concept. Thus, juxtaposing dystopian social critique with utopian idealism, Shakespeare and Middleton’s tragedy, Timon of Athens (1607), presents the break-down of service-relationships as symptomatic of a general ethical crisis affecting the Athenian civic body. Ben Jonson’s royal masque, Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621), also mines the discourse of service to explore competing visions of national community. Service mediated the representation of communal identities in cross-cultural contexts too, as I find in my work on Sir Thomas ii Roe’s journal account of his trading embassy to the Mughal court in India in 1615-19, and in my reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a critique of English imperial ambition. Subscribing to a specifically Anglo-European ideology of service helped expatriate Englishmen like Roe distinguish themselves from the native cultures of service they encountered abroad. Contrarily, Milton’s complex treatment of the trope of Oriental despotism in Paradise Lost troubled such rigid distinctions between English service and alien slavery, even as it foregrounded godly service in the Edenic “new world” as key to just magisterial labor and Christian community. In tracing connections between various literary genres’ treatments of service as a social ethic, I find that these genres do not simply mediate but actively shape the meaning of service, based on their own aesthetic and ideological preoccupations. At once unifying and exclusionary, establishmentarian and utopian, service emerges in my study as a highly contested category, and as such, a perfect vector for diverse constructions of community in the cultural ferment of the early modern era. iii Acknowledgments What drew me to write a dissertation about service in the early modern era was a long- standing desire to find a vocabulary for exploring the ways in which lives intersected with other lives in times and places other than my own, and what such intersections meant. As I complete this dissertation, I am reminded of all the ways in which my own life—and the life of this project—has been shaped by those many others whose paths have crossed mine over the years: for all those joyful, surprising intersections I am—and will always be—grateful. My curiosity about Renaissance literature and thought was sparked and nourished by the brilliant Renaissance faculty in the English Department at Jadavpur University, including Sukanta Chaudhuri, Swapan Chakraborty, and Paromita Chatterjee. Supriya Chaudhuri and Amlan Dasgupta nurtured my growing intellectual interest in the period as only fine teachers and mentors can. At Rutgers, I owe much to my dissertation advisor, Ann Baynes Coiro, and my readers, Ronald Levao and Emily Bartels, for their guidance and support in shepherding this project to its completion. Many thanks also to my external reader, Jonathan Gil Harris, for his enthusiastic engagement with my project, and for providing valuable feedback on where I can take it next. Over the years, Ann has been a valuable source of sound professional advice and guidance. I have greatly benefited from Emily’s astute and engaged comments on my work both in dissertation committee meetings and in a dissertation writing seminar that she offered. Ron’s brilliance as a writer and a thinker never fails to amaze and inspire me, and his encouragement at critical moments helped keep me going. I am also grateful to Jacqueline Miller for her advice and iv support. I owe many thanks to the Rutgers English Department for its generous academic and financial support, including the award of grants and fellowships to support research travel, conference presentations, and writing. Thanks are due to the South Asia Studies Program at Rutgers for a grant that helped to support a visit to the British Library. Many thanks to Cheryl Robinson, Eileen Faherty, and now Courtney Borack in the English Department Graduate Office for making life as a graduate student so much easier. I will forever be grateful for their support, their graciousness, and their unfailingly efficient dispatch of all the googlies I’ve bowled their way over the years. I learned much about the craft of research and writing from participating in dissertation seminars offered by Myra Jehlen and Meredith McGill, Michael McKeon’s Mellon seminar, “Problems in Historical Interpretation,” and the Rutgers Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium. I especially want to thank Trinyan Paulson, Paul Benzon, Devin Griffiths, John Rogers, Ameer Sohrawardy, Angela Florscheutz, Susan Nakley, Colleen Rosenfeld, Scott Trudell, and Alison Shonkwiler for their astute feedback on my work, and for sharing their own works-in-progress. Reading these colleagues’ works has made me a better writer and thinker. Many dear friends have helped me weather the vicissitudes of the writing life with their unstinting hospitality, warmth and generosity. For sharing her home with me these many years, for her kindness, and for all those long conversations at the kitchen table about everything under the sun, I want to thank Michele Naples. Dana Chesney and Ana Monica Nunez were as caring and considerate housemates as ever a graduate student could want. Veneeta Dayal supplied an open door, wonderful food, and even more v wonderful company on many occasions. My life would have been considerably poorer if I had not crossed paths with Sonali Barua, Bijita Majumdar, Arpita Chakraborty (who helped me navigate the mysteries of life in a foreign land), Indrani Chatterjee, Sumati Sundaram, Brinda Govindan, Bhaskar Ghosh, and Nikhil Ghosh. For making it easy to pick up where we left off, many thanks to Kajori Aikat, friend across continents. And finally, there are those whose lives have touched mine in ways beyond words. Anannya Dasgupta has played so many parts in my life: fellow-traveler, co-conspirator, sister of my heart and mind; her friendship has brought joy to work and life alike. Arani Sinha, who joined me midway through my journey, did all that without which this could not have been done. My parents, Dilip and Krishna Maitra, and my brother, Probal Maitra, have been the compass of my nomadic life. This dissertation is for them. vi Table of Contents Abstract of the Dissertation ii Acknowledgements iv Introduction 1 I. Between Idealism and Idolatry: Service and the Tragic 13 Community in Timon of Athens II. Player Servants and The Royal National Imaginary in 52 The Gypsies Metamorphosed III. The Discontents of Service in Sir Thomas Roe’s Embassy 94 IV. Undoing Empire: Magistracy, Work, and Service in 131 Paradise Lost V. Conclusion 176 Bibliography 178 vii 1 INTRODUCTION This dissertation examines how the concept of service shaped relations between individuals and the communities they inhabited in texts drawn from four key early modern genres: tragedy, court-masque, travel journal, and epic poem. Varied as they are, all these genres share a concern with the founding imperatives of communal life. My work considers early modern writers’ use of service as a conceptual tool for exploring the ethical and political problems and possibilities raised by their era’s increasingly diverse modes of communal association. While recent scholarship has done much to theorize and historicize early modern service, literary critics have primarily focused on its relevance to representations of institutional and interpersonal relations in the drama of the time. I argue that the ethic of service, while in many ways rooted in theatrical discourse, was also seminal to representations of the relations between individuals and communities in other genres of writing. Considered together, the texts I examine show how the language of service played a critical role in formulating individuals’ responses to civic, political, mercantile, and religious communities in the early modern public sphere. In these arenas, service functioned not only as a unifying social ethic but also as an agent of division and discord. Whether invoked as ideal concept or as lived practice, service fore-grounded the conflicts and discontinuities as well as utopian hopefulness that characterized early modern