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Ecologies of the Passions in Early Modern English Tragedies City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 2-2017 Ecologies of the Passions in Early Modern English Tragedies Roya Biggie The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1925 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] ECOLOGIES OF THE PASSIONS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH TRAGEDIES by ROYA BIGGIE A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2017 ii © 2017 ROYA BIGGIE All Rights Reserved iii Ecologies of the Passions in Early Modern English Tragedies by Roya Biggie This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Tanya Pollard Chair of Examining Committee Date Mario DiGangi Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Mario DiGangi William Fisher Tanya Pollard THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv ABSTRACT Ecologies of the Passions in Early Modern English Tragedies by Roya Biggie Advisor: Tanya Pollard Ecologies of the Passions recovers a neglected model for understanding early modern relationality, one that turns the seemingly inward experience of emotion outward toward the environment. Drawing on early modern medical texts, I argue that the period’s dramatists imagine bodies as humorally vulnerable to other bodies, both human and nonhuman, within dynamically affective environments. As such, my project illustrates the intimate configurations of human and nonhuman life in early modern tragedies. Building upon recent work in the emerging fields of ecocriticism and affect theory, I argue that the period’s dramatic literature exposes the porous fluidity of the Galenic body—its embeddedness within ecologies composed of material objects, plant life, and other bodies. More specifically, through readings of tragedies by Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, John Webster, and John Ford, I show that early modern playwrights dramatize a bodily fragility that is simultaneously dangerous and productive. While scholars have drawn attention to the disciplinary and gendered implications of Galenic theories of embodiment, I argue that the period’s tragedies depict bodies extending beyond their contours and transforming through intimate entanglements with human and nonhuman life. As bodies open unto one another, forming affective channels through which the liquid passions move, they expose themselves to the sometimes tender and sometimes risky touches of the world and its inhabitants. Each chapter focuses on a different arrangement of bodies and examines how private v experience brings individuals into contact with larger social and ecological networks. At the same time, I argue that the period’s medical texts, including Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia and Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde, present the body as precariously and productively open to the exterior world. My first chapter orbits around questions of itinerant passions and disembodied sorrow in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. I suggest that a disembodied understanding of sorrow inspires empathetic bonds, allowing the bereaved to merge with the deceased. In my second chapter, I argue for a conception of ecological sympathy in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus through a focus on the elements, sylvan life, and interpersonal relations. Through examining the play’s interspecies relationships, I consider the possibilities and limitations of feeling for and with nonhuman life. Chapter Three explores the generative effects of mobile organs and parts in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. While the play acknowledges the risks involved in the lovers’ exchange of bodily parts, Webster illustrates the productive fertility of such openness by suggesting that moving organs culminate in the creation of hybrid flesh. My final chapter on Ford’s The Broken Heart focuses on the dangers of ecological invasion. I argue that Ford engages with theories of infection and emotional contagion by dramatizing the affective movement of melancholy and the threat of corporeal permeability. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The vitality of this project is indebted to several sprawling and occasionally entangled ecosystems. More than anyone else, my advisor, Tanya Pollard, brought energy to this project when it was lacking and insight when inspiration flagged. Her ever incisive but always generous feedback has made me a more rigorous writer, reader, and teacher. For that, I express my sincerest gratitude. I would also like to extend my thanks to the other members of my committee, Mario DiGangi and William Fisher. Their feedback will be especially helpful as I look forward to revision. My friends and colleagues at the City University of New York Graduate Center and other institutions have supported this project, both formally and informally, in crucial ways. I thank Perry Guevara and Alicia Andrzejewski for their cutting yet careful criticism. Danica Savonick and Elly Weybright have offered, without hesitation, their laughter and fierce compassion. I’ve leaned on their friendship in countless ways. I thank too Amanda Licastro for our epicurean adventures and Elizabeth Decker for her quiet wisdom. Duncan Faherty’s thoughtful questions helped me articulate the stakes of this project, and I am grateful for his advice. I’ve also relied heavily and frequently on the mentorship and guidance of my professors at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, specifically Elizabeth Charlebois, Jennifer Cognard-Black, and Ruth Feingold. Our conversations both within and beyond the classroom have stayed with me, and I strive to give my students the generosity of spirit these women have shown me. Grants and fellowships from numerous institutions, including the CUNY Graduate Center, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Shakespeare Association of America, and the Modern Language Association, allowed me to see this project to its end. I’ve also benefited from various opportunities to share my work. The SAA seminars, “Shakespeare, Performance, and the Senses” and “Early Modern Sensory Interactions,” and the MLA session, “Touching Subjects in Early Modern English Drama,” stand out as particularly productive conversations. Finally, this project would not have been possible without the support of my family. My sister, Hannah, sustains me with her humor, and my parents, Iran Mazaherian and Louis Biggie, continue to fill my life with stories. I offer them, in these words, my love and gratitude. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Affective Embodiment in Early Modern Tragedies 1 Chapter One Devastating Sympathies: Ecosystems of Suffering in The Spanish Tragedy 15 Chapter Two Inter-Elemental Sympathies and Cross-Species Compassion: Caring for the Hybrid Body in Titus Andronicus 51 Chapter Three How To Do Things With Organs: Moving Parts in The Duchess of Malfi 98 Chapter Four The Infectious, Alimentary, and Organistic Ecologies of The Broken Heart 139 Bibliography 165 1 Introduction: Affective Embodiment in Early Modern Tragedies The speaker of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 31 imagines the beloved’s chest as a grave, “endeared with all hearts,” where he encounters “all love’s loving parts / And all those friends which I thought buried.”1 As the poet discovers “trophies of my lovers gone, / Who all their parts of me to thee did give,” these companions live on beyond their deaths.2 The speaker depicts a strange transfer of bodily organs and parts. While he finds the material remnants—hearts, trophies, and parts—of previous lovers, he also locates his own body within this scene of mass internment: “Their images I loved I view in thee, / And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.”3 The speaker alludes to prior transplants, reminiscing upon having given his body to lost loves, and in doing so, he describes a corporeal ecology. Transferrable organs move between bodies and reappear within a fleshy mausoleum. In reference to this sonnet, Valerie Traub writes, “Having been absorbed into the body of the friend….the ‘lovers gone’ of a previous time, metonymized through their body parts, mingle promiscuously and with extraordinary equanimity in the beloved’s body, as well as in the poet’s mind.”4 While Traub suggests that this “fantasized erotics [defies] the bounded singularity of both self and other,” I would add that the speaker envisions a surprising interchange, composed of itinerant body parts.5 For Traub, these parts are mere metonymic devices for previous lovers, but I suggest that they reveal an early modern mode of relationality, in which the transfer of organs from one body into another creates an intimate and affectively charged ecology. 1 William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 31,” William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, eds. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), lines 1, 2-3, p. 74. 2 Ibid., lines 10-11. 3 Ibid., lines 13-14. 4 Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: U of Penn P, 2016), 250. 5 Ibid. 2 As we see in Sonnet 31, corporeal permeability compels the interpenetration of body parts. Organs crowd the beloved’s chest, and the poet not only revives lost loves, but merges flesh with flesh. The sonnet illustrates a model
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