“Martyred Signs”: Reformation Hermeneutics and Literature By

Reading “Martyred Signs”: Reformation Hermeneutics and Literature By Stephanie Meredith Bahr A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor David Landreth, Chair Professor Maura Nolan Professor Ethan Shagan Summer 2016 Abstract Reading “Martyred Signs”: Reformation Hermeneutics and Literature by Stephanie Meredith Bahr Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor David Landreth, Chair This dissertation—Reading “Martyred Signs”: Reformation Hermeneutics and Literature— contends that Reformation struggles over Biblical interpretation generated a violently unstable hermeneutic environment and exerted a defining influence on Renaissance literature. Although the Reformation hinged on the most fundamental question of literary study—how to interpret texts— most literary scholars encounter these Biblical hermeneutics only indirectly, reduced to doctrinal bullet points. Such a distillation misrepresents as stable product an unstable process fraught with violence, in which the stakes of interpretation were torture, execution, and damnation. Through close analysis of Catholic Thomas More’s and Protestant William Tyndale’s theological polemics, my first chapter shows that the very hermeneutic distinctions often reified by current scholarship—that Catholics embraced myriad allegorical senses, whereas Protestants insisted on a solitary literal sense—were actually in perpetual collapse. Although More’s and Tyndale’s interpretive theories are wildly different, their interpretive practices become nearly indistinguishable. I argue that their vicious print battle and its violently unstable hermeneutics shaped Renaissance textuality, poetics, and the fraught categories by which Renaissance readers understood reading. The dominating pressures of these theological hermeneutics cannot be limited to explicitly religious contexts, nor is their influence a purely passive, environmental phenomenon. My next three chapters demonstrate that Thomas Wyatt’s lyric poetry, Edmund Spenser’s epic allegory, and William Shakespeare’s commercial drama actively take up the challenges these violent and contradictory hermeneutics present. Both stylistically and thematically, Wyatt’s verse hangs poised between More and Tyndale’s hemeneutic ideals, expresses a profound longing for Tyndale’s ideal of the stable, literal sense that it treats as unachievable due to the irredeemable corruption of the multitude on whom More’s ideals depend. Whereas Wyatt’s poetry embodies the uneasy tension between Protestant ideals and Protestant practice, Spenser’s poetry seeks to resolve that tension. Confronted with the iconoclasm and anti-aestheticism of the many Protestants who (like Tyndale) condemned romance, allegory, and poetry, Spenser’s Faerie Queene implements all three to create an orthodox depiction of Protestant doctrine and hermeneutics. Figural allegory is the only way for Spenser to transform the inward, illegible process of reading-as-salvation into an externally legible pedagogical narrative, yet this narrative is inescapably violent—populated by demonic doppelgangers and rife with physical and psychological torture, murder, and rape. A similar brutality dominates Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In Titus, Reformation disputes about whether to read figuratively or literally play out on stage as characters brutally literalize the conventional metonymic fragmentation of the body and as the Romans and Goths enact narratives on the bodies of their enemies. Titus dramatizes the interpretive instability of the Reformation as rape, murder, dismemberment, and cannibalism. By reinvesting in early vernacular theology, my project recovers one of the earliest 1 sources of hermeneutic theories in English, which yoked the physical and psychological violence of the Reformation to the very act of interpretation. 2 Table of Contents Table of Contents: i Acknowledgements: ii Introduction: Confessional Battles and Interpretive Violence: iii Chapter One: The Reformation Hermeneutics of Thomas More and William Tyndale: 1 Chapter Two: Thomas Wyatt’s Hermeneutic Longing and the Reformation: 35 Chapter Three: Faith and Violence: The Faerie Queene’s Hermeneutic Accommodation: 51 Chapter Four: Titus Andronicus and the Interpretive Violence of the Reformation: 80 Bibliography: 101 i Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like thank my peerless adviser, David Landreth, for his brilliant insights and generous mentorship. When writing this dissertation felt like a bewildering journey through Faerielond, he guided me more reliably than The Palmer and with considerably more good humor. I cannot imagine this dissertation or my time at UC Berkeley without his unwavering faith in me and his unflagging support and kindness. This project has also benefited immeasurably from the expertise and insights of both Maura Nolan and Ethan Shagan. My especial thanks to Maura for her rigor and her enthusiasm, for keeping me honest on the middle ages, and for offering so fine an example of scholarship on Thomas Wyatt’s verse. Many thanks to Ethan in particular for his insights into the complexity of confessional divides and religious expression in the Reformation and for reminding me that sometimes scholarly pursuits must wait so you can be with family to “support the home team” in a difficult time. Infinite gratitude to my mom, my dad, and my brother, Arthur, for their love, support, and inspiration. Without you, none of this would have been possible. To mom, especial thanks for being my first and best composition instructor and my enthusiastic interlocutor and cheerleader as I wrote this dissertation. Thanks to dad for his unwavering faith in me, for truly understanding the ways I’ve struggled, and for setting a model of academic perseverance against the odds. And thanks to my brother who has always been my best friend, teacher, and mentor, from my earliest memories of Cat’s Class to the fateful phone call that first launched my dissertation project nine years ago. No words are sufficient. And with heartfelt appreciation to all the amazing friends who have been there for me as I persevered in this (nearly) overwhelming undertaking, but especially: to Jocelyn Rodal for her exceptional grant writing advice and aggressive confidence in my abilities; to Stephanie Moore for her brainstorming brilliance, insights on allegory, and for being my better half and doppelganger, the Una to my Duessa; and to Anna Morrison for her profound insights into lyric poetry and for the acute eye and tireless proofreading that helped me to cross the finish line. I cannot imagine writing this dissertation without you by my side. And last but by no means least, my thanks to Lily Rosenthal and all my other students past, present, and future. You give me strength and inspiration when I need it most. ii Introduction Confessional Battles and Interpretive Violence Writing one-hundred years after William Tyndale first printed his translation of The New Testament, John Donne’s Expostulation 19 vividly expresses a fundamental hermeneutic and spiritual tension for Reformation Protestants and Catholics. He writes: My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest. But thou art also (Lord, I intend it to thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to thy diminution), thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too . .1 Here, Donne describes God by both of the hermeneutic categories—literal and figurative—that were so thoroughly integrated into Reformation strife. When and whether to interpret the Bible literally or figuratively was a focal crux of the Reformation, and such seemingly abstract distinctions held the very tangible dangers of torture and execution. Donne’s uneasy caveats reflect the primacy of the literal sense in Protestant England; however, Donne’s invocation of the simultaneously metaphorical in God’s Word and God’s self also illustrates the uneasy truth that literal and figurative are inescapably interdependent. From the earliest days of the English Reformation, the very hermeneutic distinctions that lend Donne his tone of anxiety—that Protestants insisted on a solitary literal sense, whereas Catholics embraced myriad allegorical senses—were radically unstable. Maintaining such distinctions in practice proved a precarious challenge, leading to a pivotal hermeneutic collapse: although Catholic and Protestant interpretive theories are wildly different, their interpretive practices are nearly indistinguishable. Catholic Thomas More and Protestant William Tyndale’s vicious debate about Biblical interpretation, widely circulated in print and the vernacular, defined the terms and obsessions of English hermeneutic thought that haunt Donne into the seventeenth-century; yet neither passionate debate nor state violence could yield a doctrinal consensus or a consistent interpretive method. This dissertation contends that these violently ambiguous Reformation hermeneutics exerted a defining influence on English Renaissance literature across forms and genres, from Thomas Wyatt’s lyric poetry to Edmund Spenser’s allegorical epic and William Shakespeare’s commercial stage. Starting in the 1520s with Thomas More and William Tyndale and continuing through to the intense confessionalizing of Elizabethan London, the English

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