UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI BERGAMO DOTTORATO DI RICERCA in LETTERATURE EUROAMERICANE XXVIII Ciclo Writing the Nation and Writing
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UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI BERGAMO DOTTORATO DI RICERCA IN LETTERATURE EUROAMERICANE XXVIII Ciclo Settore scientifico disciplinare: L-LIN 10 “Letteratura inglese” Edvige Pucciarelli Writing the Nation and Writing the Empire From Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Beauty to Edward Elgar’s The Crown of India Supervisori Chiarissima Professoressa Angela Locatelli Chiarissima Professoressa Rossana Bonadei Anno Accademico: 2016-2017 Acknowledgments I would like to express my deepest thanks to both my supervisors, Professor Angela Locatelli and Professor Rossana Bonadei. This dissertation was made possible because of their invaluable critical insight and for their incredible effort in reviewing all the written material. Professor Angela Locatelli and Professor Rossana Bonadei offered me steady moral support and encouragement throughout these years allowing me to complete this work. My deepest thanks go to Antonio Silla, the best loving and supportive brother- friend I could have ever wished for, to Professor Paola Tornaghi, to Doctor Erica Dilk and to Maestro Alessandro Buffone for their precious support throughout years of friendship. There have been many other people who have supported me during these last difficult years and I thank each and every one of them. My special thanks go to Professor Geoffrey Charles Hutchings, who started this study making me discover Ben Jonson and the Masque when I was an undergraduate student so many years ago. Table of Contents I The Textual Literary Space As Political Space .......................................................... 4 I.1 A Turning Point in the Study of Literary Space in 20th-Century Literary Theory .. 9 I.1.1 Modern Spatial Theorists: Bakhtin and van Baak .......................................... 12 I.2 Towards an Allegory of Space............................................................................... 16 I.3 Towards a Theory of Literary ‘elsewhere’. Foucault’s ‘heterotopias’ .................. 18 I.4 Heterotopia in Literary Studies ............................................................................. 26 II The Masque As Poly-System Genre ........................................................................ 32 II.1 The Jonsonian Masque As a Political Medium .................................................... 32 II.1.1 The Jonsonian Masque in 20th-Century Literary Criticism: An Overview ... 39 III Jonson’s Masque as Space of Jacobean Britannia ............................................... 56 III.1 Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness As Imperial Heterotopian Space ................ 56 III.1.1 Nation and Empire in The Masque of Blackness ......................................... 56 III.1.2 ‘What Land Is This?’: Politics of Inclusion and Cohesion or ‘Britannia’ As Heterotopian Space ................................................................................................. 63 III.1.3 ‘Britannia’ in the Banqueting House As Heterotopian Space ...................... 79 III.2 Jonson’s The Masque of Beauty As Imperial Heterotopian Space ..................... 89 III.2.1 Nation and Empire in The Masque of Beauty .............................................. 89 III.2.2 ‘Motum mundi from the East to the West’. Harmony of the Spheres As Heterotopian ‘Britannia’ ....................................................................................... 107 IV Elgar’s The Crown Of India As a Space of Imperial Rhetoric .......................... 120 IV.1 The Political and Musical Context of Elgar’s Masque: The Crown Of India ... 120 IV.1.1 Nationalism in English Music at the Turn of the 20th-Century .................. 120 IV.1.2 Imperialism in Elgar’s Music..................................................................... 124 IV.1.3 Elgar and the British Literary Tradition ..................................................... 126 IV.2.1 Elgar’s ‘Imperial Masque’: The Crown of India, 1912 .................................. 132 IV.2.2 The Three Durbars’ Ceremonies ................................................................ 136 IV.2.3 Commission and Composition of the Text and Score ................................ 141 V Elgar’s Masque The Crown Of India 1912 As Imperial Heterotopian Space .... 150 V.1 Musical Analysis of The Crown of India: Places of the British Empire ............ 150 V. 1.1 Edward Elgar’s Incidental Music for the ‘Imperial Masque’ The Crown of India ...................................................................................................................... 153 V.2 Henry Hamilton’s Libretto for The Crown of India As Imperial Heterotopian Space ......................................................................................................................... 164 V.2.1 Nation and Empire in The Crown of India .................................................. 164 V.2.2 ‘When East to West to one attuned, entwinned’. ‘Britannia’ in the London Coliseum Theatre As Heterotopian Space ............................................................ 178 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 186 APPENDICES ............................................................................................................. 191 Appendix A .................................................................................................................. 194 TEXTS ...................................................................................................................... 194 I. The Masque of Blackness by Ben Jonson ......................................................... 195 II. The Masque of Beauty by Ben Jonson ............................................................. 210 III.The Libretto for The Crown of India, 1912, by Henry Hamilton .................... 224 IV. Edward Elgar’s Score for The Crown of India, Opus 66, 1912, Arranged for Military Band by Frank Winterbottom (1918) ..................................................... 239 Appendix B .................................................................................................................. 259 From The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians ...................................... 261 I. Edward Elgar’s Complete Musical Works ........................................................ 262 II. Elgar’s Bibliography ........................................................................................ 284 SECTION A General Biographical and Critical Studies ...................................... 284 SECTION B Studies of Particular Works, Stage .................................................. 290 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 297 Primary Literature..................................................................................................... 298 Secondary Literature................................................................................................. 299 Tables of Figures Figura 1: William Hole. Britannia, frontispiece. Print, 1607, drawn for William Camden’s Britannia sive Florentissimorum Regnorum Angliae, Scotiae, Hiberniae, London: George Bishop and John Norton, edition 1607 .................................................. 5 1 2 3 To Professor Geoffrey Charles Hutchings, Who taught me how to read poetry set to music. 4 I The Textual Literary Space As Political Space Premiss In Tudor times, and especially during Elizabeth I’s reign (1558-1603), England became a political maritime power, thus shifting the axis mundi on Europe’s geopolitical and historical map. The British Isles (‘Britannia’ ) were defined in spatial terms in a cartographic vision, expressing a particular structure that was social and cultural as well as philosophical and political. This vision is also reflected in the literature of the time. The British Isles appear on the map, historicised and contextualised as an epistemological structure, i.e. an expression of the specific cultural and political practices and traits of a national community isolated from the rest of Europe. This juxtaposition of a precise ‘local’ vision and an international one by means of cartographic and geographical tropes represents national and nationalistic thinking, with broad configurations of space and culture. English cartography is centred on the domestic and ‘private’ national society and its landscape in contrast to the rest of the world -- intending to show that national identity coincides with the island’s geographical confines. The new English mappa mundi places the British Isles in its centre thus giving a specific central position to the nation and to the beginnings of empire. Camden’s cartographic image of Britannia offers us a map portraying figures and symbols. It can be read as narrative made up of fragments that recall and fix on the map moments of history, politics, wars, commerce and myth. This is a mappa mundi, which in its didactic function, historical as much as it is geographical, blends classical and biblical sources as well as space and time concepts in order to focus on and recount the nation’s history. The iconology of this map, if we note its various symbolic and political messages, reveals that Camden inserts into it a series of geographical utopias. There we find the Earthly Paradise, the Age of Gold and the Happy Isles; all together these elements offer a powerful image of the Isles as a geographical utopia, stemming from the yearning for abundance, harmony and peace under the aegis of a strong