NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Quartering the Wind: Early Modern
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NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Quartering the Wind: Early Modern Nature at the Fringe of Politics A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of English By Seth Swanner EVANSTON, ILLINOIS December 2017 2 © Copyright Seth Swanner 2017 All Rights Reserved 3 ABSTRACT “Quartering the Wind” explores the unorthodox, unstable, and seditious political values that undermined early modern English arguments for what is “natural” in human governance. I examine texts that expose a politically intricate natural world that serves no single model of orthodox politics. While ecocritical treatments of political analogies drawn from early modern nature often focus on Elizabethan visions of political and natural unity, this dissertation documents a post-Elizabethan history of political fracture, read with and through the natural world’s volatility. An array of seventeenth-century ruptures in the “natural” order of things— including the Gunpowder Plot, the 1625 plague, and the English Civil War—inspired alternative visions of “nature.” These visions seemed to justify not the “natural” monarchy of conventional Elizabethan analogy but, rather, subversive political categories such as treason, tyranny, and rebellion. By tracing the history of the corrosion of old analogies, I demonstrate how an unruly nature resists convenient human political ascriptions and how no coherent vision of human authority—whether over animals, natural resources, or other humans—is “natural.” 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS 5 Introduction: Nature at the Fringe of Politics 33 Chapter One: “Hark, peace!—/ It was the owl”: Mistranslations of “borne and sworne” Natural Allegiance in Macbeth 99 Chapter Two: “The devil that rules i’th’air”: Astrometeorology and Tyranny in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi 160 Chapter Three: The “Beggar’s plague” and the Empty Throne: The Social Shapes of Death in Succession-Year Plague Literature 220 Chapter Four: The World at War: The End of Nature in Hobbes, Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” and Leonard Willan’s Orgula 279 Conclusion: Jacobean World Pictures 5 INTRODUCTION Nature at the Fringe of Politics In his 1650 compilation of essays called Paradoxes, the poet John Hall satirically reproduces the arguments of a tradition of early modern thinkers by attesting to nature’s own preference for hierarchy. Determining the best form of human governance, according to Hall, is a simple issue of extrapolating “from the course and order of nature, which in every kind formes a Supremacy, as the Eagle among Birds, the Lyon among Beasts, the Vine among the [vege]tables, and the Rubye among stones.”1 In his political recourse to hierarchies imagined in nature, Hall follows the example of countless previous thinkers who justified monarchical authority by likening it to nature itself and, by extension, the similarly monarchical God who spoke nature into creation. Citing widespread conceptions of the lion and the eagle such as those found in Paradoxes, Keith Thomas emphasizes that “there was a social hierarchy among animals no less than men, the one enforcing the other. In popular imagery the arrangement was monarchical, with the lion, the eagle, and the whale standing at the head of each respective order of being.”2 But while Hall’s readers would have been primed for a justification of human monarchy through animal “kingship” by the commonplaces that Thomas compiles, early modern readers looking for a defense of monarchy would have been shocked by Hall’s conclusion: “an absolute Tyranny is the best Government.”3 Against a conceptual tradition of defending the beneficent naturalness of human sovereignty, Hall’s satire exploits the terms of this customary analogy in order to show that “Nature” can exceed the orthodox political values that many thinkers attempted to read in it. 1 John Hall, Paradoxes (London: John Walker, 1650), 7, italics in the original. 2 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 60. 3 Hall, Paradoxes, 3. 6 Indeed, as this dissertation demonstrates, seventeenth-century conceptions of “Nature” may just as easily model a host of political unorthodoxies, from tyranny, to treason, to civil war. Those familiar with John Hall’s parliamentarian sympathies during the English Civil Wars might have been on the lookout for this satirical angle. However, perhaps the most subversive thing about Hall’s essay is not his tongue-in-cheek apology for tyranny but his almost verbatim preservation of previous defenses of kingship. Indeed, Hall’s description of hierarchies in nature precisely echoes, for example, Henry Peacham’s popular courtesy manual The Compleat Gentleman (1622), which provides an almost identical treatment of lions, eagles, and diamonds (pace Hall’s “Rubye”): [By examining] the formes of things infinitely diuers, so according to Dignity of Essence or Vertue in effect, wee must acknowledge the same to hold a Soueraigntie . as well as Rule and Place each ouer either. The Lyon we say is King of Beasts, the Eagle chiefe of Birds; the Whale and Whirle-poole [whales with blowholes] among Fishes, Iupiters Oake the Forrests King. Among Flowers, wee most admire and esteeme the Rose: Among Fruite, the Pom-roy and Queene- apple; among Stones, we value aboue all the Diamond; Mettals, Gold and Siluer: and since we know these to transferre their inward excellence and vertues to their Species successiuely, shall we not acknowledge a Nobilitie in man of greater perfection, of Nobler forme, and Prince of these?4 For Peacham as well as for Hall, the taxonomies of supremacy in nature bespeak a universal principle of “Soueraigntie” that organizes the world—animals, vegetables, and minerals alike— and ultimately justifies “Rule and Place each ouer other” not only in the natural world but in human polity as well. The fact that Hall’s and Peacham’s analogies share such similar foundations—their naturalized defense of human sovereignty as well as the taxonomic examples by which that defense is staged—yet diverge so vastly in their conclusions concretizes two fundamental 4 Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (London: Francis Constable, 1622), 1-2, italics in the original. 7 insights that this dissertation will document. First, texts like Paradoxes call attention to the ways in which nature itself complicates the totalizing political lessons that some early modern thinkers purported to read from its structures of relation. Nature, like anything that can be treated as a text, has mercurial relations to meaning and, thus, spills over any political appropriation of its structures, especially the beneficent models of human “Souereigntie” over other humans and over other creatures. That excess, I argue, complicates early modern notions of the natural world and disturbs conceptions of those aspects of human polity that conventionally signified as “natural.” For the texts that I explore throughout this project, this uncertainty regarding what is “natural” for human sociopolitical structures manifests as a fascination with alternate, but still arguably “natural,” political categories. Borrowing a colloquialism for political affiliations considered to occupy a habitat outside of the mainstream, this dissertation analyzes literary moments when natural analogies like Hall’s cease to legitimize orthodox political values and seem instead to justify the political “fringe.” As we will see, the subversive, transitional, or even dangerous properties at this fringe prompted seventeenth-century writers to reevaluate what forms of governance may be understood as “natural.” In Paradoxes, for example, nature offers a politically volatile model that not only fits monarchy and tyranny simultaneously, but also demonstrates how, especially in the years during and after the English Civil War, monarchy and tyranny were conceptually the same for many writers. Tyranny, then, emerges on the fringe of the political lessons conventionally heralded by the thinkers that Hall satirizes and, thus, disrupts orthodox readings of the natural structures from which those lessons supposedly flowed.5 The 5 On the conceptual closeness between monarchy and tyranny, see Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), III.7-8; See also Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Revolution (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2005), 7-8, and Rebecca Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 8 centrality of “fringe” political categories in texts like Paradoxes, then, subverted, complicated, and multiplied seventeenth-century understandings of nature, human society, and the linkages between them. Second, the fact that Hall’s redirection of antecedent arguments need not radically alter the grounds of those arguments demonstrates not only how nature’s “fringe” politics strained thinkers’ interpretations, but also how those strains were already present in early modern thought. For instance, Peacham’s final anthropocentric move toward human polity—“shall we not acknowledge a Nobilitie in man [who is] of greater perfection, of Nobler forme, and Prince of these [other creatures]?”—is delivered not with the grammatical confidence of a declarative sentence but on the shaky hypothetical grounds of an interrogative that solicits readerly consent. Further, Peacham’s defense of human “Souereigntie” runs through several registers