Sovereignty and Subjectivity in the English Baroque

Exit the King: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in the English Baroque by Tony Oliveira A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Tony Oliveira, 2017 Exit the King: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in the English Baroque Tony Oliveira Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Department of English University of Toronto 2017 Abstract This dissertation argues for a conception of the English 17th century as participating in a common aesthetic of dissonance – an aesthetic which it calls the “Baroque.” More than just a term for the ornate or profuse, its revival of the Baroque designation (and its contentious application to English literature) is a means of describing the period’s fascination with staging artistic figurations in which radically contradictory religious, social, and political paradigms cannot possibly be made to cohere yet must nevertheless coexist. Through readings of Marlowe’s Faustus, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Donne’s Holy Sonnets, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, it traces the period’s apprehension of, and neurotic fixation upon, the incompatibility of these proliferating new epistemologies: Lucretian atomism, the geo-political vistas of the “New World,” the schisms of Reformation, the Copernican revolution, the waning of Church power, and the rise of the Absolutist state. These destabilizing elements are worked asymmetrically into these texts’ designs and suspended in unreconciled dynamic tension, each work culminating in a moment when a figure – Faustus, Prospero, Donne’s speaker, even the Miltonic God – considers the inconsistent logics in which they are now enclosed and imagines a self-annihilation that would afford an escape from an unstable and collapsing system. ii The Baroque has not been a popular name for English poetry. 20th century scholarship deemed it inapt for British literature, invoking it only for the overt, fussy Catholicism of Crashaw or Southwell or to taxonomize heavily brocaded stylistic moments in Marvell or Cowley. My analysis instead uses the concept of the Baroque to diagram this period’s unresolved secularizing pressures, not just in its margins but in texts at the heart of the traditional canon. These disparate works amount to a systemic, self-coherent cultural revolution: a networked era of artistic production that is congruent (but not identical) with the continent’s own counter-reformational renovations, that is distinct from the Renaissance that precedes it, and that anticipates its neo-classical and transatlantic successors. Anatomizing this Baroque therefore troubles a long-standing neo-liberalist narrative of a self-evidently progressive democratic secular age and names the 17th century’s own apprehension of this new era’s tensions at its source. iii Acknowledgements This dissertation was possible thanks to the financial support of the Ruth E. and Harry E. Carter Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2014-15), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship (2012-13), and the Thomas and Beverley Simpson Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2011-12). I am forever grateful for the guidance and insightful readership of committee members Jeremy Lopez and Paul Downes and my supervisor Christopher Warley. This project would never have seen completion without their wit and patience, and would have looked very differently had it not been for their insistence above all on taking seriously the job of reading (both their own and mine). They have been consummate models for what great scholarship and teaching ought to be. This project was fortunate to find in Julia Reinhard Lupton its ideal reader. I am thankful for her insight, her humour, and her willingness to imagine for its future even further, wilder Baroque dimensions and applications. Thanks as well to Cannon Schmitt and Marjorie Rubright for an exciting conversation and for furnishing new avenues of inquiry that have given a “finished” project so many potential directions for further work and intersection. This project owes a debt beyond its footnotes to the many scholars whose work and discussions expanded its frame. In this regard I am particularly thankful to Victoria Kahn and her course in political theology at the 2011 School of Criticism and Theory, which helped sprinkle much of the soil from which the project sprung, and to Roland Greene, whose book and subsequent conversation arrived at a serendipitous moment in helping me find the project’s vocabulary and focalization. Hugh Grady, Jennifer Rust, and Philip Lorenz kindly participated in my panel on the “English Baroque” at the 2017 MLA and helped calibrate the parameters of much of the introductory material over pints. Thanks also to Christopher Pye, who at a key moment encouraged me to hazard impinging on art iv history despite the risk of venturing outside my own field because he saw in such an errand into the wilderness the opportunity of finding new, exciting fruit. I have had the unusual fortune of a great deal of contact over many years and degrees with the talented and generous educators of the University of Toronto. Thanks in particular must go to Liza Blake, Michael Cobb, Andrew Dubois, David Galbraith, Elizabeth Harvey, Katie Larson, Lynne Magnusson, Nick Mount, Mary Nyquist, Carol Percy, Mari Ruti, Paul Stevens, and Holger Schott Syme. The Department of English’s administrative staff have been inordinately considerate and patient with my multitude of missed deadlines and harried misadventures; thanks especially to Marguerite Perry, Sangeeta Panjwani, and Tanuja Persaud for their years of care and thoughtfulness. To David Penner of the Department of Religion I owe thanks for the two-word comment on an undergrad paper that rewired my whole way of writing and thinking: “So what?” To my students I owe a debt I can never repay. Their willingness to challenge, refusal to suffer foolishness yet forbearance with my wilder tangents, and their inexhaustible enthusiasm to share their insights and energy have been an immeasurable source of inspiration and renewal. This project has been enriched and nourished by colleagues throughout its development. Thanks in particular to fellow graduate students Celine Pitre, Denis Yarow, Tristan Samuk, Heidi Craig, Chris Pugh, Craig Plunges, Ethan Guagliardo, Victor Lenthe, Rachel McArthur, Angelo Muredda, Alpen Razi, Sean Starke, Alex Howard, Alys Moody, William Baldwin, Roger Green, Jonathan Abresch, Brittany Pladek, Joel Rodgers, Michael Collins, Chris Piuma, Seyward Goodhand, Jason Peters, Sundya Walther, Miriam Novick, Beth Martin, Alyson Brickey, Erin Piotrowski, Tim Harrison, Tara McDonald, Cristina D’Amico, Matt Schneider, and Andrea Day for their discussion and friendship, from classrooms to movie nights to picket lines, as this project went from something I often could not imagine finishing to something that is done. v This project would never have been completed without the baristas of the Black Canary, the Rooster Coffee House, and Neo Coffee Bar, who were often my only source of food and conversation for days at a stretch. Deepest thanks to my friends Mike Rudolph, Darren Bigras, Josh Murphrey, Jayne and Nathaniel Whitfield, the Mannella family (Sal, Theresa, Stefani, Christopher, Totti, and Leo), Christ Gammage, Christine and Emily Williams, Adrial Fitzgerald, Ashley Burns, and my extended family of aunts, uncles, and cousins, who helped me keep perspective and insisted I join them in the 21st century from time to time. To Adrianne Sharrock, who has always managed to be the furthest place I can still call home. To the TIFF staff, Toronto’s queer community, and the denizens of Twitter, whose perspectives deepened this project’s register. I of course owe among the greatest debts to my family. My parents Maria and Antonio and sisters Tracey and Christine Oliveira have been my unflagging support (both personally and financially) throughout the life of this project and have been refuge from it during its more challenging moments. I thank them from the bottom of my heart. This work is for John. vi Table of Contents Introduction . 1 Chapter One: Doctor Faustus . 41 Chapter Two: The Tempest . 59 Chapter Three: “Batter My Heart” . 89 Chapter Four: Paradise Lost . 126 Conclusion . 162 Works Consulted . 172 vii 1 Introduction: Exit the King 1 “The king rises!” Polonius shouts in alarm, as Claudius at last has enough of Hamlet’s tasteless pageant. “Frighted with false fire” (3.2.260),1 his motion plunges the stage into a turbulent and sudden chaos, as any pretense of theatrical diversion hectically collapses. The scheming nephew, inconstant queen, and corpse of the player-king of The Mousetrap peel uncomfortably back into frozen and discomfited actors suddenly caught up and implicated in political machinations beyond their ken, while Claudius, furious and frightened, orders the house-lights up to make a hasty exeunt. “Lights! Lights! Lights!” echoes among his retinue in confused cacophony (3.2.264), in his wake trailing the scurrying courtiers that helped facilitate his coup. Their panic is understandable; they had mistaken this play’s program for another tacky sequel to the fete of mutual congratulations that now reigns in Elsinore: a lingering party whose toasts and their accompanying jubilant cannon-fire have thus far drowned out the clang of martial manufacture below. They are thus left in their anxiety and bewilderment to speculate: what could have provoked the king’s distressed outburst? The distracted, unbalanced

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