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The Normativity of Representation After Shakespeare by Robert W Fictions of Authority: The Normativity of Representation after Shakespeare by Robert W. Tate Department of English Duke University Date:__________________ Approved: _______________________ Sarah Beckwith, Advisor _______________________ Julianne Werlin _______________________ David Aers _______________________ Thomas Pfau Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2020 ABSTRACT Fictions of Authority: The Normativity of Representation after Shakespeare by Robert W. Tate Department of English Duke University Date:__________________ Approved: _______________________ Sarah Beckwith, Advisor _______________________ Julianne Werlin _______________________ David Aers _______________________ Thomas Pfau An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2020 Copyright by Robert W. Tate 2020 Abstract The core claims of this study are that dramatic and political practice mutually depend on rich concepts of mimesis––of exemplary images and formative imitation––for their coherence; that the seventeenth century bears witness to a gradual and intricate impoverishment of these concepts; and that this degeneration transpires reciprocally across dramatic and political theory. Accordingly, this project tracks early modern ideas of what it means to be an actor––on the stage or in the world––and of how actors’ claims to represent (a) people can make claims on (a) people’s action. It reveals in these ideas a growing inarticulacy regarding the ends of actors’ representative claims. Through close readings of Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Dryden, a story emerges: a shift from defending mimetic art as a tradition of moral and civic (trans)formation, toward exempting or abstracting mimetic art from any framework of ethical and political thought whatsoever. Lost in this shift are the interconnectedly aesthetic and normative criteria of representation. Lost with these criteria are visions of mimetic action as a dynamic that can call a people into existence. Figuring an image of the people, in this richer sense, does not mean simulating or replicating a preexisting entity (reducing its being to a model proportional to our present understanding). It means actualizing the being of that entity (opening a path beyond our present understanding). It means revealing a horizon in which people(s) may glimpse who they are called to become. After Shakespeare, this figural concept of representation becomes circumscribed by pictures of artificial reproduction and assimilation. In the realm of politics, what results is an inability to conceive of how representative persons condition a people’s rational and participatory agency in civic life. iv In the realm of the theatre, what results is an inability to conceive of how dramatis personae can appear not just as static types of manners or roles, but as narrative-bearing agents––capable of accounting for their character(s) and calling audiences to account. Neither domain can articulate how images infuse and educe communal transformation. Collectively, then, this study’s close readings attest to a collapse of authority and power in early modernity––a confusion of how auctoritas summons and binds our agency, with how potestas coerces and canalizes our behavior. Behind the waning of dramatic poetry’s authority lies a waning vision of moral and civic traditions as living and shaping matrices. For the authority of a tradition does not inhere in persons’ positions within institutional hierarchies. It flows from images of action, which reveal who persons aspire to be and why. Strictly speaking, authority is an attribute not of persons, but of the images persons bear. Persons hold authority through disclosing the source(s) and end(s) of their traditions––through making themselves exemplary. Authority thus names a normative claim on us––a call for our participation in joint undertakings that precede and surpass us. Our poetic and legal fictions can issue these calls only insofar as they figure what is at once before and beyond us, informing our mutual, conscientious commitments. v Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv Contents ............................................................................................................................. vi List of Figures .................................................................................................................. viii Acknowledgments .............................................................................................................. ix 1. Introduction: Scenes from a Conceptual History ............................................................ 1 2. Representation and Revelation in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra ..................... 13 2.1 The Tragedy of the Republic .................................................................................. 19 2.2 Images of History: Between The Use of Appearance and the Call of Disclosure .. 36 2.3 “Let Rome be thus informed”: Authoring History in the Public Spheres ............... 53 2.4 Caesar’s Moment: The Power of Images ................................................................ 62 2.5 Arts of War and Acts of Love ................................................................................. 71 2.6 The Alienation of History and the Authority of Imagination ................................. 88 3. Images or Persons? Representation and Artifice in Parker and Hobbes .................... 106 3.1 The Neo-Roman Concept of Freedom .................................................................. 119 3.2 Liberalism before Hobbes: A Lacuna in Skinner’s Genealogy ............................ 123 3.3 Liberty after Hobbes ............................................................................................. 129 3.4 Intellectual Traditions and the Uses of Genealogy ............................................... 135 3.5 Hobbesian Personation and the Genealogy of the State ....................................... 138 3.6 State Personation after Hobbes ............................................................................. 153 vi 3.7 Persons and Agents ............................................................................................... 160 3.8 Convergence or Collision? .................................................................................... 163 3.9 The Power of Peoples (or Persons) ....................................................................... 169 3.10 The Authority of Fictions (or Figures) ................................................................ 191 4. The Fate of Character in the Restoration Theatre of Passion ..................................... 210 4.1 The Science of Passions ........................................................................................ 217 4.2 The Science of Manners ........................................................................................ 223 4.3 “He died my convert”: Aureng-Zebe .................................................................... 231 4.4 “And thus one minutes feigning has destroy’d / My whole life’s truth”: All For Love ............................................................................................................................. 256 5. Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 269 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 273 Primary Sources .......................................................................................................... 273 Secondary Sources ...................................................................................................... 277 Biography ........................................................................................................................ 291 vii List of Figures Figure 1: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651). Engraved by Abraham Bosse. 106 Figure 2: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (British Library Egerton MS 1910). Drawn by Abraham Bosse. .............................................................................................................. 107 viii Acknowledgments For a dissertation that concentrates on the concepts of exemplarity and imitation, it seems inevitable that its acknowledgments section should come to encompass something more than particular notes of gratitude. Not that the fit and proper expression of thanksgiving is a trifling matter. Far from it. But, in this context, for my expressions to amount to acknowledgments, they must also recognize my guides and guardians as having exemplified the practices to which I aspire. Of course, as a doctoral student, one is ever following models of intellectual virtue whom one cannot hope to equal––certainly, not during one’s tenure as a doctoral student (quite likely, not ever). And one’s teachers, perplexed by the outcome of one’s attempts at imitating their example (if not by the very attempt to imitate them at all), may find their student misdirected. The criteria for success in these endeavors cannot be determined from the outset. At some point, we look back and find what it was we were hoping to achieve and
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