• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

UNTIMELY DEATHS IN RENAISSANCE DRAMA UNTIMELY DEATHS IN RENAISSANCE DRAMA: SHAKESPEARE, MIDDLETON, MARLOWE By ANDREW GRIFFIN, M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University ©Copyright by Andrew Griffin, July 2008 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2008) McMaster University (English) Hamilton, Ontario TITLE: Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Middleton, Marlowe AUTHOR: Andrew Griffin, M.A. (McMaster University), B.A. (Queen's University) SUPERVISOR: Professor Helen Ostovich NUMBER OF PAGES: vi+ 242 ii Abstract In this dissertation, I read several early modem plays - Shakespeare's Richard II, Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and Marlowe's Dido, Queene ofCarthage ­ alongside a variety of early modem historiographical works. I pair drama and historiography in order to negotiate the question of early modem untimely deaths. Rather than determining once and for all what it meant to die an untimely death in early modem England, I argue here that one answer to this question requires an understanding of the imagined relationship between individuals and the broader unfolding of history by which they were imagined to be shaped, which they were imagined to shape, or from which they imagined to be alienated. I assume here that drama-particularly historically-minded drama - is an ideal object to consider when approaching such vexed questions, and I also assume that the problematic of untimely deaths provides a framework in which to ask about the historico-culturally specific relationships that were imagined to obtain between subjects and history. While it is critically commonplace to assert that early modem drama often stages the so-called "modem" subject, I argue here that early modem visions of the subject are often closely linked to visions of that subject's place in the world, particularly in the world that is recorded by historiographers as a world within and of history. I argue that one can begin to make sense of deaths in terms of their timeliness or untimeliness only by recognizing historically specific senses of the narrativized subject and the imagined relationship between that subject and history. iii For Bob and Elaine Griffin, and for Sylvia Bowerbank. iv Acknowledgements Helen Ostovich has been an ideal mentor, supervisor, colleague, and friend since 2001, when I first met her in a classroom while studying for my MA. She has often corrected my gaffes, cheered my successes, challenged me to think clearly, and provided me with all varieties of support. She has provided me with a place to live and write in Toronto when she's away, she has introduced me to friends and ideas, she has insisted on an editor's precision, she has insisted on the Oxford comma, she has employed me, and she has taught me - by laughing easily - how to enjoy early modem drama. This project and I would both be far poorer if not for her efforts and care. Melinda Gough has been a generous interlocutor and a good friend over the past five years. Her seriousness and her professionalism have encouraged me to attempt seriousness and professionalism. I am inspired by the pleasure she takes in the work of criticism, and I am excited by the excitement that she unapologetically exhibits when discussing literature and ideas. She has been an excellent role model. Working with her while writing this dissertation has been both rewarding and fun. Mary Silcox has often put me at ease by showing confidence in both me and this project from the outset. In the classroom, she taught me how to read more carefully than I would have, and she demonstrated - again and again - that good scholars can have good senses of humour. On occasion, she gave me more than enough rope to hang myself, which is an excellent pedagogical strategy. Steph Morley, Gary Kuchar, Graham Roebuck, Sylvia Bowerbank, Carolyn Casey, Jed Rasula, and David Clark have generously contributed significant intellectual and personal resources to this project and to others. They have talked me through problems, provided me with new problems, fed me, housed me on research trips, and pointed me in new directions. This dissertation and I are much obliged. My time at McMaster has included many valuable conversations and great weekends: Suzanne, Shawna, Evan, Jaime, Tim, Emily, Kaley, Brandi Lee, Ben, Justin, and the members of Discipline and Punishment, the departmental softball team, are owed many thanks. I also owe thanks to old friends, Mark, Phil, Matt, Ben, Al, Andrew, Rich, and Marc, and especially Liz, who has been with me for the long haul. As anyone who knows her will recognize, June Cheng deserves more than thanks. She has been a help and a riot. This project was funded primarily by a Canadian Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Other funding for this project came from an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and from a McMaster University Graduate Scholarship and from the Marion Northcott Schweitzer Travel Bursary. v Table of Contents Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama 1 On a Regal Lifespan: Richard II 34 Middleton and the Urban Untimely 88 Tragedy and Epic in Marlowe's Dido, Queene ofCarthage 154 Horatio's Infelicity 214 vi Introduction Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Middleton, Marlowe In the three stanzas that Chidiock Tichbome included in a letter to his wife on 19 September 1586 - the day before he was executed for participating in the Babington Plot - he describes the unusualness of his position: about 28 years old, he is a young man, but he is also preparing for his death. My prime of youth is but a frost of cares, My feast of joy is but a dish of pain, My crop of com is but a field of tares, And all my good is but vain hope of gain. The day is past, and yet I saw no sun, And now I live, and now my life is done. My tale was heard and yet it was not told, My fruit is fallen and yet my leaves are green; My youth is spent and yet I am not old, I saw the world and yet I was not seen. My thread is cut and yet it is not spun, And now I live, and now my life is done. I sought my death and found it in my womb, I looked for life and saw it was a shade; I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb, And now I die, and now I was but made. My glass is full, and now my glass is run, And now I live, and now my life is done. I quote the entirety of the poem now known as "Tichbome's Elegy" because its dreary repetition and its copia of paradoxes speak to the sense of bafflement that characterizes thinking on untimely deaths. Even though Tichbome will be disemboweled alive the day after writing this poem - an execution so horrific that Queen Elizabeth I will insist it not be repeated on the remaining conspirators -he is more concerned here with his death's Ph. D. Thesis: A. Griffin McMaster'University, Department of English and Cultural Studies 2 nonsensicalness than he is with the fact of his death and its attendant agonies. Tichborne is stunned specifically because he is dying and because he is simultaneously too young to die. This preoccupation with the untimeliness of death rather than the state of his soul is particularly striking when one considers that his piety led him to the situation in which he finds himself. At the end of his life, this dedicated Catholic writes a poem that fails to mention God or Church. Rather than contemplating repentance or God or mortality in general, Tichborne here is primarily concerned with the severe disjuncture between the stories that he has imagined proleptically about his life and the current situation in which he finds himself. To distil Tichborne's paradoxes, he presumes that there is something called "his life" which should continue, even though "his life" is coming to an end. Just as the poem frustratingly refuses to develop - each perfectly balanced line repeats the structure and tropes from the previous line, each stanza repeats the structure of the stanza before it - Tichborne imagines his life in terms of a developmental failure: both his poem and his life end, but neither reaches a satisfying conclusion. The close relationship between the poem's form and its content is perhaps the point of this work because Tichborne imagines his life here in literary, or at least narrative, terms. Though it is a lyric, the poem gestures towards narrative by invoking images of organic development in the form of fruit, trees, and crops, but the lyric qua lyric refuses to develop this narrative potential. In lieu of a story is a slew of paradoxes that describe an organic promise nipped in the bud before it blossoms. 1 1 This relationship between confused seasons and untimely deaths is a common topos in the period. See, for instance, Don Andrea in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy as he complains that "in the harvest of my summer joys I Death's winter nipp 'd the blossoms of my bliss" ( 1.1.12-13 ). On the "unseasonable destruction of Ph. D. Thesis: A. Griffin McMaster University, Department of English and Cultural Studies 3 Tichbome juxtaposes this vision of biological unfolding, however, with other images that complicate any vision of his death as a straightforwardly biological anomaly. The poem's organic imagery is set against his allusion to the Fates who have cut his un­ spun thread, and here an ambiguously classical sense of fate becomes apparent.

Load more

  249

Copy Link