©2019 William A. Tanner, Jr. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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©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. Because ii these early modern writers deployed poetry and theater as methodologies of political philosophy, this study, too, requires an analytical hermeneutic which views literature and politics as coextensive or co-constitutive, while at the same time reserving the paradoxical possibility that they might also be mutually exclusive. Therefore, the study adopts the frameworks of two philosophers, Nietzsche and Aristotle, who extensively considered the intersection of literature and political philosophy; using the parameters of these competing philosophical frameworks, this study develops interpretations of malcontent literary experiments from Philip Sidney to William Shakespeare that are in conversation with the history of Western political thought while remaining acutely attentive to their historical specificity. The purpose of this study is thus twofold: I seek to develop a deeper and more nuanced account of some of the most pessimistic literary thought of the early modern period, what we might view as a “negative politics”; and in so doing, I hope to provide the reader with reflections of our own moment of political polarization and anxiety, as well as challenges to some of our most cherished political assumptions, many of which emerged from the more optimistic writing of this period. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincerest thanks to everyone who has supported me through the long and often arduous process that has resulted in the present work. Of course, I am most grateful to my committee for all their advice, support, and (often) patience. Prof. Jackie Miller instilled in me a passion for pastoral poetry I could never have imagined, and she continues to teach me how to be a more careful critic. I tend to be attracted to the dramatic and extreme, but Prof. Ann Baynes Coiro similarly taught me to find value in poetry that at first glance seems subdued and mundane—somehow she even got me to find interest in the epigram. I especially want to thank my Chair, Prof. Henry Turner, who inspired me from my first class at Rutgers and shaped the entire way I think about theater and theatricality, who always challenged me to push my thinking further, and who also dedicated an immense amount of time and care for many years to fashioning me as a scholar and a writer. I would also like to thank Dr. Amy Cooper and Dr. Erin Kelly for the many drafts we exchanged in our little writing group over the years and the stimulating, generative conversations that ensued—I did all my best thinking in those meetings. Thank you as well to everyone in the dissertation writing seminar who critiqued early drafts of the first chapter. Writing is a group effort, and I’ve been very fortunate to have a small community to take along on this journey with me . (The metaphor is of a mobile community, perhaps of scholarly snails.) Finally, I would like to thank my partner (soon-to-be Dr.) Lauren McConnell for all her love and support (both academically and otherwise). I could not have done this without her. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ........................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iv Chapter One: A Malcontent Introduction ........................................................................... 1 i. “To the Reader” ........................................................................................................... 1 ii. To the Critics .............................................................................................................. 7 iii. The dual origins of the malcontent .......................................................................... 11 iv. From figure to character: The malcontent and social taxonomy ............................. 21 Chapter Two: Melancholy Philisides; or Trapped Between Action and Idleness ............ 32 i. The malcontent figura ................................................................................................ 32 ii. Love is politics in The Lady of May ......................................................................... 47 iii. “otiosi tam funestae tragoediae spectatores”: Idle spectators on a Protestant stage .......................................................................................................................... 53 iv. “Love to cloake Disdaine”; or, a Defense of Idleness ............................................. 63 v. “in compassion of his passion”; or, Apparel and the Peril of Performance .............. 76 vi. “feigning notable images” and other lies: An alternative theory of poesy .............. 90 Chapter Three: The Spectacle of Despair in Marlowe & Kyd ........................................ 103 i. The malcontent, the machiavel, and the atheist ....................................................... 103 ii. “totus mundus histrionem agit”: The melancholy world-stage .............................. 110 iii. Anatomy of a machiavel in The Massacre at Paris .............................................. 120 v iv. “Religion and Policy” in The Jew of Malta: Marlowe's immorality play.............. 131 v. Malcontent theatricality in The Spanish Tragedy ................................................... 144 vi. “'Twixt these two ways”; or, Revenge as divine principle .................................... 161 vii. “bugbeares and hobgoblins”: The malcontent school of atheism ......................... 168 Chapter Four: Shipwrecked on the Isle of Dogs; or a Poetics of Oblivion..................... 174 i. Archival violence & bodily inscriptions .................................................................. 174 ii. The topography of The Isle of Dogs ....................................................................... 183 iii. “May still this Iland be call’d fortunate”; or, a malcontent matter of perspective in EMO ................................................................................................................ 193 iv. Testing the limits of Jonson in the Epigrams ........................................................ 206 v. “this laughter ill becomes your grief”; or, Democritean theatricality in the Antonio plays ................................................................................................................ 219 vi. “bespurtle whom thou pleasest”; or, the antipolitics of dogs in The Malcontent .. 229 Chapter Five: To Kill a King in the Malcontent Hamlet ................................................ 248 i. A most moral malcontent: Revising the received Hamlet ....................................... 248 ii. “like gawdy Butterflies”: The metamorphosis of the malcontent in the Inns of Court ........................................................................................................................ 257 iii. “great Foelix”: Essex and the fall of politic history .............................................. 265 iv. “hic et ubique”: The spirit of melancholy in Hamlet ............................................. 275 v. “the satirical rogue”: Method, madness, and motivation ........................................ 281 vi vi. “is't not perfect conscience?”: The Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos and Hamlet's tyrannicide ...................................................................................................... 298 vii. The histoire tragique of Amleth; or, the comic sources of Shakespeare's “tragicall historie” ..........................................................................................................