Lust's Dominion
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UNIVERSIDAD DE JAÉN FACULTAD DE HUMANIDADES Y CIENCIAS DE LA EDUCACIÓN DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA TESIS DOCTORAL SPANIARDS, MOORS AND WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DISCOURSES. A CRITICAL EDITION OF THOMAS DEKKER’S “LUST’S DOMINION” (c.1600) PRESENTADA POR: PRIMAVERA CUDER DIRIGIDA POR: DR. D. JESÚS LÓPEZ-PELÁEZ CASELLAS JAÉN, 16 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2014 ISBN 978-84-8439-959-9 For Sergio, Sabrina, Fulvia and Aldo For Jesús SPANIARDS, MOORS AND WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DISCOURSES A Critical Edition of Thomas Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion (c. 1600) Contents List of illustrations vii Acknowledgements viii INTRODUCTION 1 Resumen e introducción en español 8 OBJECTIVES, HYPOTHESES, METHODOLOGY AND STATE OF THE ART 13 IDEOLOGY, IDENTITY AND OTHERNESS 39 1. Historical contexts and early modern discourses 41 2. Identities and ideologies in early modern England 58 3. Otherness in early modern England. Ambivalent attitudes and historically changing relationships 74 CONCLUSIONS 149 Conclusiones en español 155 A CRITICAL EDITION OF THOMAS DEKKER’S LUST’S DOMINION (c. 1600) 161 1. Textual and editorial notes 163 2. Introduction to Lust’s Dominion 183 LUST’S DOMINION (c. 1600) THOMAS DEKKER 205 APPENDIXES 395 REFERENCES 421 COLLATED NOTES 461 v ESPAÑOLES, MOROS Y MUJERES EN LOS DISCURSOS INGLESES PRE-MODERNOS Una edición crítica de Lust’s Dominion (c. 1600) de Thomas Dekker Índice Lista de ilustraciones vii Agradecimientos viii INTRODUCCIÓN 1 Resumen e introducción en español 8 OBJETIVOS, HIPOTESIS, METODOLOGÍA Y ESTADO DE LA CUESTIÓN 13 IDEOLOGÍA, IDENTIDAD Y ALTERIDAD 39 1. Contextos históricos y discursos pre-modernos 41 2. Identidades e ideologías en la Inglaterra pre-moderna 58 3. Alteridad en la Inglaterra pre-moderna. Actitudes ambivalentes y relaciones históricas fluctuantes 74 CONCLUSIONES 149 Conclusiones en español 155 EDICIÓN CRÍTICA DE LUST’S DOMINION (c. 1600) DE THOMAS DEKKER 161 1. Notas textuales y editoriales 163 2. Introducción a Lust’s Dominion 183 LUST’S DOMINION (c. 1600) THOMAS DEKKER 205 APÉNDICES 395 REFERENCIAS 421 COLACIONES 461 vi List of illustrations Figure 1. Dekker his Dream (1620), pamphlet by Thomas Dekker with a portrait of the author sleeping 164 Figure 2. Plaque from the Sanctuary “Virgen de la Cabeza” in Andújar (Jaén, Spain) to commemorate the conversion of Muley Xeque 197 Figure 3. Commemorative engraving of Muley Xeque’s death 198 Figure 4. Title page from the 1657 duodecimo of Thomas Dekker’s Lust’s Dominion 207 vii Acknowledgements Over the years I have been working on this dissertation, I have accumulated many debts of gratitude. I am deeply grateful to friends at the department of English at the University of Jaén, and especially to Doctors Yolanda Caballero Aceituno, Eroulla Demetriou, Luciano García García, Mª Paz López-Peláez Casellas, Jesús Manuel Nieto García, José Ruiz Mas, Cinta Zunino Garrido, members of the research project “Musulmanes, españoles y judíos en los textos pre-modernos en lengua inglesa: la construcción del otro” (“Muslims, Spaniards and Jews in Early Modern English Texts: The Construction of the Other”). My special thanks go to Professor John Drakakis who assisted me during the development of part of the present dissertation and who widened my knowledge on the early modern period during my academic stay at the University of Stirling (UK). I am likewise thankful to Professor Jüri Talvet, who kindly helped me during my second academic stay at the University of Tartu (Estonia). Finally, my greatest debt is to my husband, my mother, my grandparents and to my thesis supervisor, Professor Jesús López-Peláez Casellas, who helped me in more ways than anyone can even fathom. This dissertation is dedicated to them; their generosity, infinite patience and faith in my efforts more than anything else kept me going while a student at the university; without their constant motivation this work would not have been possible. viii INTRODUCTION Introduction Outline The purpose of the present dissertation is to analyse the representation of Spaniards, Moors and women in early modern English discourses. The main objectives of this study are to determine the rhetoric strategies employed for such representations; to establish how the presence of these individuals poses an element of anxiety in early modern England; to demonstrate that not all the discourses about these subjects were negative (since the attitude towards them depended on political and economic interests); and to support ideas about the importance of alterity in the formation of Western identities. Our last objective will be to elaborate an original critical edition of Lust’s Dominion (c. 1600), by Thomas Dekker. With this contribution we seek to offer a relatively unexplored and seldom edited source, which shows how identities were taking shape during the early modern period together with a growing rejection of (political and “racial”) strangers. In the present dissertation, words such as Other(s), alien(s) or stranger(s) will be employed interchangeably to describe elements which are alien to an individual or community, rather than a mere national foreign element. Particularly, the word Other will be capitalized and used as a substantive in order to distinguish it from the determiner, adjective or pronoun “other.” We will seek to separate different (intersecting) groups of strangers, including political or national Others, that is, the foreign 3 4 Spaniards, Moors and Women in Early Modern Discourses enemies of a given nation, such as Spain, from the English perspective; “racial” Others,1 that is, those who, from our point of view are considered (truthfully or not) as having a different complexion, and who are rejected for this reason (especially black individuals in a white community); religious Others, those considered different for their religion (or alleged lack of religion); and domestic Others, that is, internal political enemies, such as renegades, bastards, and, from a patriarchal point of view, gendered strangers, that is, women. Introduction Today, we have at our disposal a limited (but growing) number of critical works that approach the study of alterity, as the characterization of subjects described as “Others,” during the early modern period (1485- 1660). Such individuals were usually represented as the inhabitants of the “periphery” of those societies that consider themselves as physically and morally more “central”; that is, the “civilization.” However, at the moment, contemporary literary criticism has been mainly limited to the study of the Ottoman Turk, the Jew, or the Spaniard, often disregarding other ex-centric or marginal minorities, especially if they embody different “alterities”: North Africans and Spaniards, or (Catholic) women, among others. Consequently, the present work will mainly focus on the connections among national (or political), ethnic, 1 Throughout the present dissertation, the words associated with the concept of “race” will be placed within commas since we agree with the idea that human beings cannot be scientifically distinguished for their “race” or complexion in the same way that we cannot establish a clear-cut cluster of individuals on the grounds of their heights, body mass, and so on. Introduction 5 religious, gendered and domestic Others, and on the association of these individuals from the early modern English perspective. We will focus on the Western perspective towards the figure of the “Moor,”1 whose image is not only “racial,” since in this period they could be associated with national and religious “strangers” (a term popularized during the seventies by Leslie Fiedler) and even with domestic and gendered Others. Likewise, we will suggest that, among the various and relatively numerous dramatic works dealing with Muslim or Morisco topics, those in which there is a combination of these cultures with the Spanish Catholic one could be particularly relevant for the study of the formation of English (and, in a wider scope, Western) identities. In fact, this construction took shape in a historical context where the Spanish, Moroccan and Ottoman societies were the most influencing and internationally recognized economic and political forces of the period. Finally, we will analyze how in various discourses concerning women and other domestic strangers in England (such as the so-called “renegados” or the underprivileged groups) we encounter a reproduction of the negative image of the foreign Other. In this way, we will study how, from the early-modern period, such discourses would eventually affect the image of the forigner as well as that of domestic and gendered Others in England and in the Western world. 1 In spite of the negative connotations associated with words such as “Moor,” “black,” “renegade,” “heathen” or “bastard,” they will not be employed derogatorily, but as a way to use and analyse the early modern epithet to describe these individuals. We will employ the word Moor, in order to identify an otherwise undefined group of individuals and societies, which, as we will argue later on, were mainly associated with features such as blackness or heathenism (often, independently from their actual complexion or religion). 6 Spaniards, Moors and Women in Early Modern Discourses Since we start from the hypothesis that the early modern period will act as a liminal space (in the sense that Homi Bhabha provides) in the creation of early modern English (and eventually Western) identities, and since the idea that the role of Spain, being influenced by the muslim culture, could be pivotal in this process, the present work will seek to provide an interdisciplinary approximation to the study of otherness. As a textual materialisation of this critical perspective, we will provide a critical edition of the dramatic work by Thomas Dekker, Lust’s Dominion (c. 1600). In this edition, accompained by an analysis of the work, we will present an innovative study on the figure of Muley Xeque, Prince of Morocco (1566-1621), whom we will propose as the probable model for the creation of the “racial” and political Other protagonist of the play, the Moor Eleazar.