IMMORTAL LONGINGS: TOWARDS A POETICS OF PRESERVATION ON THE EARLY MODERN STAGE Jennifer Park A dissertation submitted to the faculty at 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 2017 Approved by: Mary Floyd-Wilson David J. Baker Reid Barbour Megan Matchinske Jessica Wolfe © 2017 Jennifer Park ALL RIGHTS RESERVED !ii ABSTRACT Jennifer Park: Immortal Longings: Towards a Poetics of Preservation on the Early Modern Stage (Under the direction of Mary Floyd-Wilson) “Continually we bear about us,” John Webster asserts through Bosola, “A rotten and dead body.” In a late fifteenth-century copy of the popular medieval pharmacopia, the Livre des simples médecines, the entry for momie—or mummy, a corpse drug often in the form of a powder made from embalmed bodies—is illustrated by “an image of an open tomb displaying its grisly contents: a blackened skeletal corpse with its abdomen sliced open, its head thrust back and the hands coyly covering the genitals.”1 Ideas of decay terrified the early moderns, but preservation was no less troubling. Caught up in the powder of embalmed bodies and the search for the philosopher’s stone were worries over the inevitable decline of all physical matter. My dissertation, theoretically and physiologically attuned to such displays, locates some of the richest metaphorical manifestations of immortality and/or corruption on stage, in performance. Drawing on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, as well as advancements in medicine and natural philosophy in the seventeenth century, “Immortal Longings” examines how early modern dramatic works conceptualize material experiments in preservation: sugar melted in Cleopatra’s (dis)candying, mummy evaluated in the Duchess of Malfi’s circulation, milk curdled in Lady Macbeth’s “unsex”-ing, and alchemical solvents recreated from the alchemist’s 1 Michael Camille, “The corpse in the garden: mumia in medieval herbal illustrations,” Micrologus 7 (1999), 298. !iii menstrues. Theatre is especially resonant because it enables this recursive flexibility: it is a “laboratory” space that provides the chance to see matter revitalized, transformation enacted, and stasis secured. By connecting vitality in the material with the ephemerality of performance, performative preservation provides early moderns with a fertile site for experimenting with change and flexibility in permanence. “Immortal Longings” seeks to intervene in Renaissance debates over the viability and righteousness of extending human life; it asks us to look for the first time at the poetic interplay between preservation and alteration, permanence and vitality, drawing inferences between and across categories and opening up the possibility that constructs of life and time may very much be open to human intervention, conceivably in the Renaissance and beyond. !iv For my family !v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This preservative project was only possible by way of the extraordinary individuals in my life that preserved and revitalized my corpus mens spiritus. I am, foremost, grateful to Mary Floyd-Wilson, David J. Baker, Reid Barbour, Megan Matchinske, and Jessica Wolfe: I could not have dreamt up a more outstanding and perfect committee and group of mentors. Mary's unwavering encouragement, generous feedback, and kind support are evidence of how invaluable terrific advising and mentorship are to the fruition of a promising research project. Reid, Jess, Megan, and David continue to blow me away with their unfaltering enthusiasm for my work and my potential as a scholar, and I am grateful for their warm generosity and provocative insight every step of the way. My project owes everything to these amazing scholars and mentors. Their belief in me as a scholar and an educator has been instrumental in the formation of my belief in myself. So, too, my time in the program has been enriched by my brilliant and kind friends and colleagues in the MEMS and early modern community, who helped to ground me when I first began and beyond. For this, I extend special thanks to Nathan Stogdill, Kit Curtin, and Robert Erle Barham for their friendship and guidance throughout the formative years of my time in the program; to Rebecca Shores and Elena Casey for their invaluable friendship and support during times both difficult and celebratory, whom I am so happy to have met during my time at UNC. I am indebted, also, to the wonderful friendship and mentorship of Gitanjali Shahani who has !vi introduced me to the brilliance and kindness of my fellow early modernists as I enter into the field professionally. Tommy Nixon deserves my warmest gratitude for his amazing support of and help with my research; he is a paradigm for the remarkably generous research librarians that make intensive, scholarly research in the humanities possible at all. My project was made possible by the generous funding of dissertation funding, research fellowships, travel grants, and grants-in-aid from the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, the UNC Graduate School, and the Folger Shakespeare Library which enabled me to dedicate time to research and writing and to travel to archives in Washington, D.C., Providence, New Haven, London, Oxford, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. I am grateful to the staff at UNC's Wilson Library, the Folger, Beinecke, John Carter Brown, British, Bodleian, and Wellcome Libraries for their help, as well as at the National Library of Scotland and the special collections at the University of Glasgow and the University of St. Andrews. This dissertation is dedicated to my family: to my parents, Chung and Anthony, who have invested and continue to invest everything to ensure that their children will have the remarkable opportunities for education that they believed in when they first immigrated to the United States; to my sisters, Caroline and Cynthia, whom I love dearly and who have kept me going all these years with our gnoming and nomming. This project has witnessed the traumas of becoming unpreserved, and the triumph of finding new life. I owe a debt of gratitude to Emily and Charleen for all of their support and guidance. Above all, I am and always will be deeply grateful to Care and to Dan for their daily support and the daily renewal of love, life, and laughter that has lifted me up in these final years. !vii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: MATERIALS OF PERMANENCE AND PRESERVATIVE PERFORMANCE…………………………………………………………………………………1 “Eternal Lines”: Poetry and Immortality………………………………………………….4 Immortal Longings in Theatre…………………………………………………………...10 Performative Preservation and Preservative Performance: Four Chapters………………16 CHAPTER 1: DISCANDYING CLEOPATRA: PRESERVING CLEOPATRA’S INFINITE VARIETY IN SHAKESPEARE’S ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA…………………...23 Cleopatra’s Ancient Medical Authority………………………………………………….27 Ancient Legacy and Early Modern Domestic Practices…………………………………35 Preserving and Unpreserving Shakespeare’s Cleopatra…………………………………43 CHAPTER 2: LINGERING VITALITY: MUMMY AS PHARMAKON AND STRATEGIES OF (MIS)READING PRESERVATION IN JOHN WEBSTER’S THE DUCHESS OF MALFI……………………………………………………………………..73 Mummy as Pharmakon…………………………………………………………………..76 Lingering Life in the Early Modern Corpse……………………………………………..89 The Preservative Duchess………………………………………………………………..94 Conclusion: Ruins and Breath…………………………………………………………..110 CHAPTER 3: ABORTIVE LEGACIES: CURDLED MILK IN THE BREAST AND PRESERVING THE BODY POLITIC IN SHAKESPEARE’S MACBETH……………116 Ancient Curdled Milk, Part I: Curds and Conception………………………………….119 The Milky Scots………………………………………………………………………..124 !viii Milksop Macbeth……………………………………………………………………….126 Mother’s Milk…………………………………………………………………………..129 Ancient Curdled Milk, Part II: Curds and Cancer……………………………………...135 Witchcraft and the Curdled Milk of Morality…………………………………………..138 Curdled Visions…………………………………………………………………………142 The Sweet Milk of Concord…………………………………………………………….152 Conclusion: Curdled Milk and Rethinking Gendered Corruption in Macbeth…………161 CHAPTER 4: JONSON’S MENSTRUES: REPRODUCTIVE FLUIDS, ALCHEMICAL SOLVENTS, AND PRESERVATIVE ANXIETIES IN BEN JONSON’S THE ALCHEMIST…………………………………………………………...165 Menstrual Blood in Natural Philosophy and Medicine…………………………………167 Womb Envy in Literary and Alchemical Production…………………………………...182 The Alchemist’s Menstrues……………………………………………………………..192 Conclusion: Waste and Legacy…………………………………………………………208 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………213 !ix INTRODUCTION: MATERIALS OF PERMANENCE AND PRESERVATIVE PERFORMANCE I begin with stones and corpses, the nonliving and the dead, as divergent models for preservation. By pitting two dramatic episodes against each other, I introduce the context and the stakes for my exploration of the poetics of preservation on the early modern stage. The first is Shakespeare’s famous statue scene from The Winter’s Tale, in which the “statue” of Hermione stirs and comes to life; the second is the simultaneous staging of the corpse and the ghost of the Lady in Thomas Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy, each in their own right momentous.1 If we take the definition of preservation to mean, primarily, “The action of preserving from damage, decay, or destruction; the fact of being preserved,”2 these two performative moments depict attempts to embody that state. In the first, the statue of Hermione represents the embodiment of a lasting