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CHOATE-DOCUMENT-2020.Pdf Copyright Evan Choate 2020 ABSTRACT Fictional Texts, Imaginary Performances, and Historiographic Desire in Renaissance England by Evan Choate This dissertation explores how and why we care about history. I argue that our investment in the past is inseparable from the ways we represent it. Historiographic desire both animates and is animated by a continuous performance of historical proliferation that we experience as exhaustion, frustration, boredom, paranoia, and disappointment. Far from blunting history’s appeal, these affects mark the depth of our investment in it. To understand the dynamics of history as vertiginous webs of fictional texts and imaginary performances, I look to the radical innovations in methodology that emerged from the crucible of the English Reformation, which are too often understudied in the context of literary historicism. By attending the reciprocal evolution of drama and historiography over the course of the sixteenth century, I provide a novel account of the productive tensions among history, desire, and subjectivity that persist to this day. The theater was fundamental to the way Protestant historians such as John Foxe encountered the past. For Foxe, the renewable presence of performance and the duality of theatrical representation provided the basic structure for understanding how and why the past mattered. Theater provided a means of reconciling the objectivity that Foxe wanted from history and his awareness of the inherent subjectivity of actually producing history. Foxe’s influential recentering of history as a mode of experiencing the present was iv essential to the emergence of the commercial theater in London, which produced plays with a level of characterological sophistication and depth unlike anywhere else in sixteenth-century Europe. The remarkable metatheatricality of late-Elizabethan history plays literalize the methodological gestures of Reformation historiography. They consistently stage the histories of their own production and reception in ways that frame many of the cruxes that continue to occupy scholars today. Plays were sold both as performances and as printed texts, and the dialog between these two commercial products ensured that the question of why and how we care about history is baked into the history play as a commercial genre. Each chapter takes on a different textual or critical crux that has provoked centuries of work in spite of the fact that they present problems for which a final or definitive solution seems impossible. By rereading the long histories of these critical debates in Renaissance drama through the methodological innovations of the Reformation, I articulate a notion of criticism that is never distinct from the representational dynamics it studies. Rather, I suggest how our desires are both the source for and product of endless imaginary performances scripted by the proliferation of fictional texts. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My work on this dissertation was made possible with support from the Shakespeare Association of America, Rice’s Department of English, and Rice’s Humanities Research Center. It has been improved in countless ways by my work with Becky Byron and Dr. Logan Browning at SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900; my students, who continually inspire and challenge me; and Dr. Patricia Badir, Dr. Vin Nardizzi, and Dr. Stephen Guy-Bray, who got me hooked on Renaissance drama in the first place. The insight of my committee members, Dr. Diane Wolfthal and Dr. Judith Roof, has been indispensable throughout this process. Most of all, I am lucky to have been able to rely on the mentorship of Dr. Joseph Campana, who has had a profound effect not only on this project but also on my understanding of who I am as a scholar. I am grateful for the generous comments of my peers at Rice, including Dr. Layla Seale, Dr. Mark Celeste, Dr. Joseph Carson, and Alexander McAdams. It has been a delight to be able to depend on the wit and understanding of my friends, Dr. Emily Cooley, Kees de Ridder, Joshua Sealy-Harrington, David Snyder, Dr. Pedro Correa de Sampaio, Kasha Chang, and Fannina Waubert de Puiseau. I owe a deep personal debt to my family, Gordon, Deirdre, and Sarah Choate, for being there from the beginning. I would also like to thank my dog, Ace, who came into my life exactly when I needed him. Finally, I cannot imagine doing any of this without the good humor, patience, and love of my husband, Steven Duble. This dissertation is dedicated to my brother, Jack. PREFACE This preface is adapted from the introductory remarks I made at my dissertation defense, which took place on the videoconferencing platform Zoom on 31 March 2020. It was not how I had pictured my defense, but the project itself is about the ways that reading certain texts depends on imagining various kinds of presence, so it is sort of perfect that I am asking you to imagine me delivering a version of this preface that no longer exists, about an older version of this dissertation, to a group of people who were pretending to be in a room together. For the past four years I have been trying to write a dissertation about sex and sexuality, but that is not exactly what happened. Instead, the project is much more centrally concerned with the reciprocal relationship between history and theater. Here, I am going to talk about how I wound up writing the dissertation that I wrote instead of the one I wanted to write, which will both clarify the stakes of the project and suggest where I see it developing in the future. The seeds of these ideas began with a paper I wrote about ten years ago on the relation of Marlowe’s Edward II, famously “the gay play,” and Shakespeare’s Richard II. The paper ended up landing somewhere between literary analysis and historical fan fiction. I had a sense that there was something important to my understanding of sexuality in not only how these plays represented the desires of their characters, but also how they seemed to explicitly engage the entire critical apparatus surrounding them, which repeatedly framed their significance in terms of the identities of their authors and narratives about the history of sexuality. This is especially true for Marlowe, who is notorious for allegedly saying, among other scandalous things, that Christ sodomized vii John the Baptist, and “all they that loue not Tobacco & Boies were fooles”—a quote that literally every gay graduate student has at some point used in a social media bio line.i As I explored the ways that these and other plays depicted sexuality, I discovered that is not enough to just point out gay things that you find in texts, you have to explain why anyone should care that you have found a gay thing in a text and how it informs, clarifies, or otherwise expands our understanding of sexuality, history, or both. This is a tricky thing to do, at least partially because, for me, sex is just self-evidently interesting. And I do not mean this in a trivial sense. “Sex” refers to a set of acts that are interesting in a particular way and the interest itself is what justifies their categorization as sex acts. Regardless of how you theorize this interest, sexuality is basically subjective. This irreducible subjectivity is at the heart of the past several decades of debate about how to read sexuality in literature, which is a constant tug of war between the desire to recover voices and experiences that have been marginalized or silenced and a fear that in attempting such a recovery we are just narcissistically projecting our own desires onto figures in the past. This is a problem for which there is no easy solution because sexuality is not preserved in the historical record; the people we are talking about are dead, they no longer have any desires. While sexuality seems to be a vital piece of context informing our understanding of texts, it also seems to be in tension with a conception of history as a set of real things that happened independently of what we, in the present, might want. The question of why other scholars should care about the gay stuff that I noticed in plays seemed to demand an answer to the question of why we care about history, or plays, in the first place, and how this investment both provokes and confers value on the never-ending work of producing new scholarship. I increasingly saw viii history not just as a context in which sex and sexuality existed, but as an object and engine of desire in and of itself. Questions about the independence of the past from the desires of interpreters became particularly focused for me when reading plays, because they are premised on their own incompleteness, they present roles and lines that are designed to be inhabited in the present. If there are clues about who the characters are or what they want, it is a premise of the medium that these desires and identities are only realized when they are filled out by people in the present. This dynamic is a huge obstacle for the historicist analysis of plays, because they do not in any familiar way have a date. Renaissance plays often exist in several substantively different versions among which there is no clear priority. They are both scripts for future performances and, often, records of several performances in the past for which a different text served as a script. Scholars disagree about what they are studying: is it the play as it was performed at some particular point in the past, the text that was originally printed, or some combination? For me, the difficulties of understanding how plays work began to look increasingly like the problem of understanding how historicism works.
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