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Body As Text: Physiognomy on the Early English Stage Curtis Le Van University of South Florida, [email protected]

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Body As Text: Physiognomy on the Early English Stage Curtis Le Van University of South Florida, Clevan@Mail.Usf.Edu University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School July 2017 Body as Text: Physiognomy on the Early English Stage Curtis Le Van University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Scholar Commons Citation Le Van, Curtis, "Body as Text: Physiognomy on the Early English Stage" (2017). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6886 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Body as Text: Physiognomy on the Early English Stage by Curtis Le Van A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Co-Major Professor: Laura Runge, Ph.D. Co-Major Professor: Sara Munson Deats, Ph.D. Nicole Guenther Discenza, Ph.D. Christine McCall Probes, Ph.D. Date of Approval: July 3, 2017 Keywords: medieval drama, Renaissance drama, Restoration drama, Shakespeare, internality Copyright © 2017, Curtis Le Van Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: “a figure in your fals face ” ; or “Wepygne, sythynge, and sobbynge were my suffycyens”: Humoral and Affective Physiognomy in Medieval English Drama .....................8 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................8 Humoral Physiognomy ......................................................................................................17 The Conspiracy ......................................................................................................20 Affective Physiognomy .....................................................................................................33 Mankind .................................................................................................................39 Conclusion .........................................................................................................................51 Chapter Two: “What pale again?”—or “Where is thy blush?”: Physiognomy in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays All’s Well that Ends Well and Hamlet ...........................................53 Introduction ........................................................................................................................53 Early Modern Physiognomy ..............................................................................................58 The Problem Play ...............................................................................................................67 All’s Well that Ends Well ...................................................................................................74 Hamlet ................................................................................................................................87 Physiognomy at Large in Hamlet ..........................................................................94 Misreadings of Claudius and Gerturde ..................................................................99 Physiognomy and its Accuracy in the Second Act ..............................................104 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................112 Chapter Three: “For though there may / Be made a rule for colour or for feature / There can be none for liking”; Or “’tis inconsistent with the punch bowl”: Physiognomy and Love Intrigues in Dryden and Behn’s Tragicomedies Marriage a-la-Mode and The Widow Ranter ........................................................................................................................116 Introduction ......................................................................................................................116 Restoration Physiognomy ................................................................................................120 Marriage a-la-Mode ........................................................................................................137 The Widow Ranter ............................................................................................................151 Bacon and Semernia ............................................................................................158 Hazard and Surelove ............................................................................................161 Ranter and Daring ................................................................................................163 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................167 i Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................173 Works Cited .................................................................................................................................178 ii Abstract My dissertation explores the presence of physiognomy, which is the reading of faces and bodily affects to determine a person’s character. I investigate plays originally produced for the early English stage, ranging from the late Middle Ages to the Restoration. In this work I argue that the bodies within the selected plays exist as texts that are to be interpreted by readers and audience members alike. While embodiment theory has done excellent work in explaining the corporeality of the pre-modern body, it does not consider the body as a textual construction. My work aims to fill such a gap. My main methodology is historicist, both old and new. I employ the former insofar as I incorporate primary texts relevant to understanding physiognomy and its workings on the early English stage. I also use New Historicism since I cover many influences on physiognomy, including theology, politics, and philosophy of the mind. The first chapter probes the York Cycle’s biblical play The Conspiracy, as well as the morality play Mankind. I claim that physiognomy highlights the participatory aspects of both plays, as each contains bodies that help audiences learn of true piety. In the second chapter, I discuss Shakespeare’s problem plays All’s Well that Ends Well and Hamlet. I posit that the genre of problem play can best be understood as including works that contain incomplete or inaccurate physiognomic readings. For my final chapter, I analyze the tragicomedies Marriage a-la-Mode, by John Dryden, and The Widow Ranter, by Aphra Behn. I insist that examining the physiognomic readings can help us unite the dialectics between and among the multiple plots within each play. Over the course of these three chapters, I conclude that the body-as-text, understood through iii physiognomy, allows modern readers to better grasp pre-modern understandings of internality as it evolved from the Middle Ages to the Restoration. In addition, I contend that genre often dictates the ways in which bodies are constructed textually. In summary, the contributions of my work can be listed as the following: (1) I provide examples of how physiognomy can be used to support a variety of methodologies, including Marxism, feminism, and deconstruction. (2) I offer a more thorough history of physiognomy, ranging from the late Middle Ages to the Restoration. (3) My work with genre is unique among current scholarship that engages with physiognomy. In my conclusion, I suggest paths forward with this project, such as the use of other methods for interpreting the body as a text, consisting of anatomy, physiology, and allegory. iv Introduction This is a dissertation about understanding the body as a text in early English drama. In it, I argue that the plays discussed represent bodies not only as material entities made of flesh, blood, and bones but as texts that require interpretation by characters within the plays as well as by audience members and readers outside them. While embodiment has, for the past three decades, been fresh on the mind of critics in medieval, early modern, and Restoration literature, critics in all three fields have focused on the physical conditions of corporeality, namely humors and passions; anatomical dissection; environmental and ecological interactions; and race, gender, and sexuality. While such studies have gone a long way to historicize these issues in terms of a pre-Cartesian or pre-modern epistemology, they skirt the important question of how the body is represented and interpreted in both language and performance. Thus, my dissertation provides a hermeneutical framework that enables readers of early English drama to appreciate the body as a textual construct through the rich history of physiognomy, or the reading of the inner nature of a person through both facial features (known as humoral physiognomy) and bodily affects (referred to as affective physiognomy). As such, internality remains central to conceiving the body as a text: the face and
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