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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Georgic Reformations of the Vita Activa: The Nature of Work in Early Modern English Literature A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctorate of Philosophy in English by Alexandra Kathryn Zobel 2016 © Copyright by Alexandra Kathryn Zobel 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS Georgic Reformations of the Vita Activa: The Nature of Work in Early Modern English Literature by Alexandra Kathryn Zobel Doctorate of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2016 Professor Robert N. Watson, Chair This dissertation is an archaeology of a neglected literary mode in England’s post- Reformation literature. The georgic mode takes its name from Virgil’s poem about agriculture. Unlike pastoral and other forms of nature writing that emphasize otium, recreation, and the distinction between nature and culture (a binary that appears in alternative forms such as country/city, science/politics, and wilderness/civilization), the georgic mode emphasizes the necessity of work in nature, and the mutual imbrication of the human and non-human world. The Protestant Reformation affirmed and worried over the value of labor, work, and action — the hierarchy of human activity that Hannah Arendt calls the vita activa. The troping of all activity as georgic activity is symptomatic of the pressures modernity put on the vita activa. Those pressures are due to several related early modern phenomena: 1) the Protestant Reformation, 2) the development of capitalism and the new professional opportunities it spawned, and 3) the ii invention of modern political forms, including the nation state, competing modes of parliamentary and monarchical rule, and nation-building through both Old- and New-World imperialism. The first three chapters explore georgic reformations of labor, work, and action through canonical Early Modern texts. Shakespeare’s As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale, and All’s Well That Ends Well use the georgic mode to stage what Arendt calls the rise of the social by grafting private labor to political action. Shakespeare’s Sonnets use the georgic mode to evaluate two competing career options – making a living as a playwright in a labor society or aspiring to be an artist (“the only ‘worker’ left in a laboring society,” according to Arendt). The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost dramatize the process by which epic action was transformed from an externally oriented category of public deeds to an inwardly oriented hermeneutic for navigating the fallen world. The fourth chapter explores how the georgic mode structured Early Modern world-making, and authorized colonial appropriation. The afterword considers how the georgic mode survives in current discourses of the Anthropocene, and considers what an active, georgic education might mean for the humanities in the twenty-first century. iii The thesis of Alexandra Kathryn Zobel is approved. Jonathan F. Post Lowell Gallagher Julia R. Lupton Robert N. Watson, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2016 iv Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Kathryn Tunstall, from whom I continue to glean the dilating meanings of the words “labor of love.” v Table of Contents INTRODUCTION 1 I. LABOR Grafting the Private and the Political: The Rise of the Social in Shakespeare’s Georgic Comedies 39 II. WORK The Work of Art in the Age of Sprezzatura: “Laboring for Invention” in the Fair Youth Sonnets 112 III. ACTION Pruning Heroes and Planting Seeds: Action’s Inward Turn in The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost 156 IV. WORLDS New-World Georgics and the Colonial Imagination 240 AFTERWORD Georgics of the Anthropocene 278 BIBLIOGRAPHY 297 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thankfully, gratitude is a renewable resource, but were it finite the bulk of my thanks would have to go to my adviser and chair, Robert N. Watson, whose mentorship, advice, and support during my graduate student career have carried me through to the completion of this project. A student could not ask for a more intelligent, provocative, and compassionate chair. Beyond working with me to hone my ideas into something worth defending, Rob has taught me that there is still some humanity in the humanities, that it’s possible to be an excellent educator at a research institution, and that there are many ways to contribute to the intellectual life of a university. I suspect he has a time-generator hidden somewhere in his office, because I have never met someone who is as active in campus culture and more generous with his time. A dissertation is a fundamentally collaborative document and though I won’t be able to identify the fingerprints of every collaborator involved with this one, I know for certain that my committee members are all over this project. Lowell Gallagher’s course on The Faerie Queene was the theoretical loam out which much of this project grew, and it was on his suggestion that I first started reading Hannah Arendt, who has enriched my life in both intellectual and spiritual ways. Lowell is the rare teacher who encourages cross-fertilization across disparate discourses, materials, and scholars, and the best example of the latter is the fact that he put me in touch with Julia Reinhard Lupton, whose work has pushed me to reconsider the received readings of Arendt’s work. Julia’s work and working with Julia has made me think deeply about the possibilities for scholarship beyond the conventions of the profession, and I’m very grateful to have her on this committee. Finally, Jonathan Post has been an incisive reader of seventeenth century poetry and my own prose for years, and the only thing that has been more rewarding than vii working on this project with him has been teaching alongside him in Los Angeles, London, and Stratford-Upon-Avon. I’m so fortunate to have had a committee of eminent scholars and passionate, effective educators. There are many other professors who have had a direct hand in the development of the dissertation, as well as a larger group that have contributed to the intellectual climate of the department, which has had a huge impact on my project. Among the former, I must single out a few. A.R. Braunmuller has provided me with excellent feedback on chapters that do and do not appear in this dissertation. I must also thank him for putting up with my heckling at that abysmal and offensive film, Anonymous. Barbara Fuchs showed me how to elegantly bring post-colonial theory to bear on Early Modern texts. Ursula Heise’s work in the Environmental humanities continues to inspire new ecocritical insights in my thinking. Donka Minkova gave me the eyes of and ears of a linguist. Christopher Mott is my personal pedagogy guru, and he is absolutely right that teaching can be an invaluable research tool in and of itself. Sharing an office with him led directly to an immense burst in productivity for me as young scholar and as a teacher, largely because I had such a thoughtful and intelligent spit-baller and breeze-shooter in the vicinity. Finally, Carol Ann Johnston was my thesis adviser as an undergraduate at Dickinson College, and it was in her classes on Shakespeare and Donne that I realized the richness of early modern literature. I certainly wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her advising and mentorship. I’m grateful to the vibrant communities, organizations, seminars, and research groups that have allowed me to share my work with them and from whom I’ve gained invaluable feedback and insights. Special thanks to Ursula Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann who organized the Sawyer Seminar for the Environmental Humanities — a series of nine interdisciplinary seminars that brought leaders in environmental and humanistic scholarship to viii UCLA. Those seminars clarified my thinking on ecocritical issues in the early modern context, and my thanks to the Mellon Foundation for funding that project and for the dissertation fellowship that allowed me to complete my own project. Many thanks (again) to Lowell Gallagher and Julia Lupton Reinhard, who introduced me to the w/ Shakespeare University of California Multi-Campus Research Group, which hosted events, seminars, and conferences that captured scholarly symbiosis at its best. The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies funded some of my best work at UCLA, including the first annual Medieval and Early Modern Students Association Pedagogy Conference, and their programming exposed me to some of the greatest minds in my field. The Office of Instructional Development and the Center for Community Learning invigorated my pedagogy and my research, and the Shakespeare Company at UCLA renewed my faith in performance as a reading practice, which continues to inform my pedagogy. Finally, my thanks to the English Department at UCLA and the Friends of English for their faith and support, and a special thanks to Michael Lambert, Jeanette Gilkison, and Janet Bishop for all the hard work they do to keep the Department operating smoothly. If a doctorate is a marathon, then I’ve been lucky to have the best running partners out there. I must thank my cohort and colleagues in the program for their friendship and intellectual companionship, including Katie Charles, Will Clark, Daniel Couch, Kim Hedlin, Amanda Hollander, Christine Gottlieb, Holly Moyer, Michael Nicholson, Megan Smith, Amy Wong, and probably many others that I’m forgetting in this eleventh hour. As we all know, the academy does not have a monopoly on intelligence and the stimulating conversation and sanity-saving interventions of many friends beyond the UCLA have been especially important for me, but in particular I’d like to thank Ben Adlin, Jane Berg, Lisa Biddle, Paul Bulakowski, Alex Caldwell, Andrew Chahrour, Kelly “Chui” Hsi, Jimmy Gillan, Alec Lentz, Alex Madsen, Sara Niesen, ix Gabe Rose, and Jaemin Yi.