The End of the Age of Miracles: Substance and Accident in the English Renaissance
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The End of the Age of Miracles: Substance and Accident in the English Renaissance by John Richard Tangney Department of English Duke University Date:_____________________ Approved: ___________________________ Maureen Quilligan, Chair __________________________ Sarah Beckwith __________________________ David Aers __________________________ Laurie Shannon Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2009 ABSTRACT The End of the Age of Miracles: Substance and Accident in the English Renaissance by John Richard Tangney Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Maureen Quilligan, Supervisor ___________________________ Sarah Beckwith ___________________________ David Aers ___________________________ Laurie Shannon An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2009 Copyright John Richard Tangney 2009 Abstract This dissertation argues that the 'realist' ontology implicit in Renaissance allegory is both Aristotelian and neoplatonic, stemming from the need to talk about transcendence in material terms in order to make it comprehensible to fallen human intelligence. At the same time dramatists at the turn of the seventeenth century undermine 'realism' altogether, contributing to the emergence of a new meaning of 'realism' as mimesis, and with it a materialism without immanent forms. My theoretical framework is provided by Aristotle's Metaphysics, Physics and Categories rather than his Poetics, because these provide a better way of translating the concerns of postmodern critics back into premodern terms. I thus avoid reducing the religious culture of premodernity to 'ideology' or 'power' and show how premodern religion can be taken seriously as a critique of secular modernity. My conclusion from readings of Aristotle, Augustine, Hooker, Perkins, Spenser, Shakespeare, Nashe, Jonson and Tourneur is that Hell is conflated with History during the transition to modernity, that sin is revalorized as individualism, and that the translatability of terms argues for the continuing need for a concept of 'substance' in this post-Aristotelian age. I end with a reading of The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous contemplative work from the fourteenth century that was still being read in the sixteenth century, which offers an alternative model of the sovereign individual, and helps me to argue against the view that philosophical idealism is inherently totalitarian. iv Dedicated to my parents v Contents Abstract...............................................................................................................................iv Acknowledgements............................................................................................................vii Introduction..........................................................................................................................1 1. Words and Things............................................................................................................7 2. Spenser's Knights of Dialectical Reason.......................................................................61 3. The Multiplying Villainies of Nature..........................................................................102 4. Language and Matter in Nashe, Jonson and Tourneur................................................145 5. The Devil's Contemplatives.........................................................................................179 Bibliography....................................................................................................................198 Biography.........................................................................................................................211 vi Acknowledgements This dissertation is primarily an extension of the mental conversations I've had with Maureen Quilligan's hugely stimulating seminars and books. She has been a most generous reader of my work during six years of graduate school, for which I am very grateful. Although my research is based in the long sixteenth century, David Aers got me interested in the middle ages during my first semester here, and I have always felt at home in the medievalist community at Duke. I am grateful to him for his many insightful reading suggestions. Sarah Beckwith's classes are largely responsible for my interest in The Winter's Tale, and for my sense of what Shakespeare's late plays can become in performance. I'd also like to thank her for being such an encouraging and cheerful presence in my graduate student life. Laurie Shannon's class, Mapping Early Modernity, was seminal for this dissertation and will continue to provide a reference point in the future. I benefitted greatly from her intricate exam-questions, and I am grateful to her for continuing to work with me even after her departure from Duke. I'd like to thank Ranjana Khanna for sitting on my exam committee. I'm also grateful to Fiona Somerset, whose Chaucer course was important in the development of this project, and who taught me how to pronounce middle English. Anne Gulick, Nathan Hensley and Aisha Peay were kind enough to read drafts of chapter four and made insightful comments on them. Russ Leo has been an important interlocutor, and a sharer of my interest in theology. Finally I must thank my parents for their moral support, for occasional financial bailouts, and for all the other ways they have enabled their children to be penniless artists and intellectuals. vii Introduction Focussing centrally on the period between the publication of the first three books of Spenser's Faerie Queene in 1590 and the publication of Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy in 1611, this dissertation looks at how a premodern disposition towards 'realist' ontology, as reflected in the literary genre of allegory, begins to change into a concern with epistemology, mimesis and secular drama. Allegory is a typically medieval genre, secular drama an early modern one, while poetry, like philosophy, spans both genres and periods. I am interested in allegory and drama as representing human interiority, and in poetry as their common medium. Because interiority is mediated by signs the first chapter looks at the relationship between words and things in the sixteenth century, when they were equivalent aspects of a material universe created in time by a transcendent God. It argues that two contradictory orientations towards the materiality of signs, and the meaningfulness of objects can be detected in puritan and anglican writers respectively. One of these defines itself in continuity with the middle ages, and the other recognizes a break. One is interested in liturgy and sacraments, while the other is more oriented towards reading and preaching. The latter has affinities with early modern science, while the former exists in continuity with a premodern science that was in all respects catholic. It is my contention that allegory is readable as psychomachia. In presenting the psychology of a typical rather than a particular individual, allegory also has much to say about the political state in which such an individual is constituted. The interiority that Allegory depicts is a mappable one, extended in space, and the ineffable otherness that it points towards is God. Naturalistic drama, which I treat in the third and fourth chapters, presents particular individuals as representative, in a political sense, of a greater whole, 1 not as microcosm to macrocosm, but as manifestations of an immanent reality with no discoverable inside or outside. The characters evince an interiority that is not spatial, but that has much in common with the the metaphysical substance that is the telos of allegory. Yet the actors in a Shakespearean drama often represent themselves as having the transcendent longings of premodern Christians, while Spenserian allegory contains the seeds of post-Aristotelian secular materialism. The fourth chapter looks at Nashe's Unfortunate Traveller, Jonson's The Alchemist and Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy. These works manifest a relation between words and things that is no longer realist but not entirely mimetic, or 'realist' in the modern sense of that word. Nashe's picaresque narrative continually subverts logical connections in favour of equivocal ones. Jonson figures language as a fungible substance, rendered opaque by the deceitful characters who use it for ill rather than for good. Tourneur's work is instructive because it is rendered incoherent by the same tensions that enabled Shakespeare. These are tensions between idealism, materialism and what I call nominalism. I qualify the term nominalism because while there is arguably a connection between the literary fictions I am writing about, and the late medieval philosophical tradition that is problematically termed 'nominalism', I am less concerned with tracing the lines of filiation than with showing that these writers are thinking about a universe made up of individuals rather than species or ideas. Aristotle subordinated the individual to the state, and modern democracy makes the state serve the individual. In both cases there is a productive and potentially destructive tension between individual and collective. Aristotle and modern democracy have in common a concern with human flourishing,