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Forms of Consolation in Early Modern English Poetry by Leila Ruth

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Forms of Consolation in Early Modern English Poetry by Leila Ruth Forms of Consolation in Early Modern English Poetry by Leila Ruth Watkins A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Professor Michael Schoenfeldt, Chair Professor Linda Gregerson Professor Webb Keane Professor Theresa Tinkle Associate Professor Douglas Trevor Acknowledgements I could not have written this particular dissertation without the unique insight and skillful guidance of my committee members. Among their many contributions, Linda Gregerson’s uncanny ability to interpret and rephrase some of my more cumbersome thoughts lent this manuscript what elegance it possesses. Doug Trevor’s encyclopedic knowledge of Milton, early modern theology, and political theory encouraged me to keep the project grounded in its historical and cultural contexts. Theresa Tinkle’s careful reading, insistence on clarity, and experience in medieval studies aided me in making the project legible to a broader range of readers, and Webb Keane’s anthropological expertise helped me to think about its interdisciplinary implications. I would like to thank especially my wonderful chair, Mike Schoenfeldt, for six years of enthusiastic support, candid advice, and extensive conversation about early modern poetry and emotion. This dissertation is deeply informed by his scholarly work, but it is also profoundly influenced by his intellectual generosity and kind personality. I am grateful to the Rackham graduate school, the University of Michigan English department, the University of Michigan department of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, the Mellon Academy for Advanced Studies in the Renaissance, the Newberry Library, and the D’Arms Graduate Student Research Fellowship for contributing crucial financial assistance that made it possible to complete this project, conduct relevant archival research, and present portions of the dissertation at national conferences. ii Chapters of the dissertation have been presented to or workshopped by the Shakespeare Association of America, the Renaissance Society of America, the George Herbert Conference, the University of Michigan Poetry and Poetics Workshop, and the University of Michigan Premodern Colloquium. Chapter 2 benefitted from publication in Studies in Philology and the careful attention of the journal’s reviewers and editors. The spirit and substance of this dissertation owe much to the collaborative atmosphere of the University of Michigan’s graduate program. Friends within early modern studies spent countless hours reading my work and discussing the project’s central ideas with me, especially Sarah Linwick, Angela Heetderks, Cordelia Zukerman, Amrita Dhar, Stephen Spiess, Andrew Bozio, Katie Brokaw, Rebecca Wiseman, Katie Will, and Cassie Miura. The insightful questions and suggestions of many friends outside early modern studies, including Ali Chetwynd, Dave Lucas, Jessica Morton, Dashini Jeyathurai, Katherine Fisher, Bessie McAdams, Monica Fagan, Matt Oches, Nicolette Bruner, and Alex Olson, deeply enriched the project. My cat, Rosemary, tried as hard as she could to prevent this dissertation from being written by installing herself on top of all open books, computers, and paper drafts. Before I arrived in Ann Arbor, several wonderful teachers developed my interests in literature and early modern studies. While I’ve always loved to read, my high school English teacher Cayce Utley was the first to show me that an English class could be about argument, ambiguity, and tenacious close reading rather than about book reports, tests, and grammatical exercises. At the University of North Carolina, a particularly passionate graduate student, Erin Ashworth-King, introduced me to Herbert, Donne, and Milton in my first year, and I was hooked. Pam Cooper, Megan Matchinske, Larry Goldberg, and especially my brilliant and generous thesis advisor, Reid Barbour, deepened my appreciation for literature and have iii continued to be role models for me throughout my graduate career. When I think about the kind of teacher I want to be, I think of them. Most importantly, I would like to thank Stephen Norris and my family—Elizabeth Watkins, Lucie Thorsteinsson, Stuart Watkins, John Michael Watkins, and Anna Watkins— whose wit, conversation, understanding, and love have sustained and consoled me in ways that books never could. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Introduction 1 An Overview of Early Modern Prose Consolation 5 Poetry as Consolation in Early Modern England 9 Chapters 1. Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Consolation of Being Unexceptional 15 Planting Anxiety: The Birth of Consolation 18 The Emotional Power of Unexceptional Poetry 34 The Reader’s Complaint: Moving Past the Authorial Self 48 2. The Poetics of Affective Community in Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 58 Constructing Emotional Community 61 The Sonnet Form and Interpretive Community 72 Ritual Language, Communal Utterance, and Symbolic Orders 79 3. Lyric Sequence and Emotional Life in George Herbert’s The Temple 92 Theorizing the Emotional Reader 105 Metaphorical Approaches to Consolation 113 “Tempering” Emotional Instability 121 4. Consoling Dialogues in John Milton’s Paradise Lost 132 Satan and the Consolation of Philosophy 134 Angelic Consolation and the Problem of Access 152 The “More Heroic” Consolation of Human Companionship 164 Conclusion 180 Bibliography 185 v Introduction In her recent memoir, the British novelist Jeanette Winterson relates how the poetry collection in her small town’s public library helped her survive a childhood of poverty and abuse. She insists: When people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.1 Winterson’s memoir also describes the comfort she found in religion as a child. Church offered her a social community; the Bible assured her that God loved her continuously and unconditionally, even if her parents did not. Poetry, on the other hand, offered an entirely different type of consolation—“a tough language” that Winterson felt acknowledged her “tough life.” In other words, poetry’s power to console by “saying how it is” resides precisely in its difficulty and unfamiliarity. The traits that make poetry different from prose also make it a powerful tool for representing and working through one’s emotional landscape. In this spirit, my dissertation seeks to understand how poetic forms and genres offered early modern readers 1 Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (London: Random House Group, 2011), 40. 1 unique and productive forms of consolation not readily available to them in their society’s prose discourses of emotional management. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, emotions, or “passions,” such as grief, anger, and erotic infatuation were considered dangerous conditions that could have drastically debilitating consequences for an individual’s physical, mental, or spiritual health. Writers such as Timothy Bright and Robert Burton detail numerous symptoms of excessive or “melancholy” passions, ranging from constipation to hallucination to religious despair.2 Early moderns assumed that melancholy individuals were at a high risk for committing suicide but also that they could simply die from grief—bills of mortality in the period often list grief as the sole cause of a person’s death.3 In addition to endangering an individual’s health and sanity, melancholy also posed a threat to the wellbeing of the larger social community, as emotionally distressed people were thought more likely to display “disruptive political action” such as religious dissent.4 Yet while most early moderns agreed on the need to provide people with guidance for managing troubling emotions, there was little agreement on what constituted proper consolation. As literacy rose and books became increasingly cheap to produce, prose texts advertising their consolatory value poured from English presses. Philosophical, religious, and medical discourses jostled uncomfortably against each other as early modern writers negotiated the often conflicting goals of argumentative coherence and consolatory function. Forms of Consolation in Early Modern English Poetry argues that early modern poetry played a crucial role in this cultural 2 Timothy Bright, A treatise of melancholy (London, 1586) and Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1932). 3 David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 393. 4 Adam H, Kitzes, The Politics of Melancholy from Spenser to Milton (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4. 2 preoccupation with reading as means of emotional management, using the formal possibilities of verse to create unique processes for working through difficult emotions. Although recent scholarship on intellectual history and humoral theory has enlarged our understanding of early modern emotion, research on “consolation”—a common early modern term for emotional management—rarely encompasses poetic practice.5 Existing studies of consolation
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