Reading Thomas Nashe's Religious Rhetoric Through Kenneth Burke's Perspective by Incongruity
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2019 "I sing of cruelty and compassion together": Reading Thomas Nashe's Religious Rhetoric through Kenneth Burke's Perspective by Incongruity Charles Jeffrey Moody University of Tennessee, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Moody, Charles Jeffrey, ""I sing of cruelty and compassion together": Reading Thomas Nashe's Religious Rhetoric through Kenneth Burke's Perspective by Incongruity. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2019. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/5638 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Charles Jeffrey Moody entitled ""I sing of cruelty and compassion together": Reading Thomas Nashe's Religious Rhetoric through Kenneth Burke's Perspective by Incongruity." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Robert Stillman, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Jeffrey Ringer, Kirsten Benson, Maureen Taylor Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) “I sing of cruelty and compassion together”: Reading Thomas Nashe’s Religious Rhetoric through Kenneth Burke’s Perspective by Incongruity A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Charles Jeffrey Moody August 2019 To Mandy, Ollie, Savell, and Lela ii Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude for the English Departments at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Auburn University at Montgomery. These two departments have been continual sources of encouragement throughout my academic career. Specifically, the professors, administrators, and graduate students at The University of Tennessee provided tremendous support as my family moved through difficult times beginning near the outset and extending through the end of my time in the program. I would also like to acknowledge the care and support of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Their doctors, nurses, and staff members took a scared family in a new city from across the state and made us feel at home. Finally, I am most grateful for my family and especially for my wife Mandy and my children Ollie, Savell, and Lela. iii Abstract This study considers the late 16th - early 17th century English writer Thomas Nashe’s various texts through a rhetorical lens as informed by the 20th century rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke’s works. Nashe remains an enigmatic character in English literature as he presses the boundaries of appropriateness in various ways, and, despite his attempts to guide his readers to Christian application, the texts present problems for reconciliation with a Christian motive. However, Burke’s discussion of perspective by incongruity and the dramatistic pentad provide a helpful set of terms for understanding how Nashe’s texts work to accomplish such a motive. This study primarily considers three of Nashe’s most well-known texts, Christs Teares over Jerusalem, Pierce Penilesse, and The Unfortunate Traveller, along with the lesser known The Terrors of the Night to present Nashe as consistently pressing the boundaries of rhetorical appropriateness to prompt his readers to a reconsideration of their interior motives. His texts accomplish this goal by developing incongruous perspectives that seek to disrupt the readers’ expectations of each of these types of texts. This study also serves as a working example for combining the disciplines of literary and rhetorical studies in effective ways. iv Table of Contents Chapter One: Thomas Nashe’s Incongruous Rhetoric 1 Chapter Two: “I am a Child […], yet I can doe all things,” 33 The Incongruity of Prophetic Rhetoric Chapter Three: Seeking Redemption in the Devil: 71 Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse as Religious Rhetoric Chapter Four: Scenes of Division: 102 Rhetorical Violence in The Unfortunate Traveller Chapter Five: Thomas Nashe’s Subversive Exposition of Dreams in 142 The Terrors of the Night Bibliography: 168 Vita: 179 v Chapter One: Thomas Nashe’s Incongruous Rhetoric Introduction Thomas Nashe remains an enigmatic writer for Renaissance English literary studies because his texts include multiple divergent combinations of religious content with shifting authorial positions and grotesque, violent imagery. Such disparate subject matter makes understanding Nashe’s religious commitments through his works a difficult task. However, viewing Nashe’s work through Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical framework, and specifically using the concept of perspective by incongruity, indicates Nashe’s overall motive of seeking the audience’s spiritual reformation. Combinations of elements from Burke’s dramatistic pentad (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose) applied within and across Nashe’s texts reveal how the author consistently uses transgressive approaches in his writing to prompt his audience’s division from outward attachments to religious belief that mask an inward lack of faith. This argument provides the means for uniting apparent contradictions in Nashe’s work and follows recent movements that challenge the sacred/secular divide prevalent in literary and cultural studies. The Problematic Link between Nashe’s Beliefs and Texts Upon hearing of Thomas Nashe’s death in 1600 or 1601, Ben Jonson composed an epitaph titled, “They say a made a good end.” In this poem, Jonson attempts to reconcile the contradictions of his apparent friend and sometime collaborator by drawing a distinction between the content of Nashe’s texts and his “true” self. Jonson first praises Nashe’s wit, proclaiming, 1 “The man whose want hathe causd a generall dearthe / Of witt; throughout this land: none left behind / to equall him in ingenious kynd” (6-8).1 Jonson then describes the violence and overtly personal nature of Nashe’s satire, for “when any wrongd him lyving they did feele / his spirite quicke as powder sharp as stele” (13-14). Despite his praise of Nashe’s wit, Jonson attempts to separate the writer from it, arguing that Nashe “to his freindes [his] faculties were faire / pleasant and mild & as the most temp’rate ayre” (15-16). The epitaph separates friends and enemies by the ways that they experienced Nashe as either “pleasant and mild” or wielding a violent wit as fast as a bullet and as dangerous as a blade. Jonson supplements these positive descriptions with a recounting of Nashe’s penitence, saying that he “diedst a Christian faithfull penitent / Inspired with happie thoughtes & confident” (25-26). The epitaph memorializes Nashe in a way that promotes his virtues and faith, apparently hoping to counteract the public reputation of his attacking wit with a private piety and graciousness known amongst his friends. The context of Nashe’s Christianity takes place among the entrenched battles of the turn of the 17th century between the authorized English church and Puritan agitators influenced by reformation movements in Europe. John E. Booty’s insightful edition of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer explains the important compromises that the English church sought between these groups and that come to bear in seeking to reestablish Protestant order at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. The 1559 version would be the authoritative text, along with Scripture, for faith and practice under the church’s authority during Nashe’s brief career. With the ouster of Queen Mary I, the Catholic threat had been weakened and more pressing arguments centered on 1 This study maintains the spelling of the quoted editions of Renaissance works except in the few cases that require modernization for clarity. Nashe frequently uses italics when writing a character’s name, and I have modified these names to plain text where appropriate to avoid confusion with published texts. 2 whether or not the English church would follow the Continental models in pursuing a shift in leadership style to a Presbyterian model among other changes. Shifting the role of authority in the church would have tremendous impact on its leaders but also on the individual practices of the parishioners. The English church was tasked with finding its own Protestant identity in the midst of this organizational and devotional turmoil. The 1559 Book of Common Prayer shows the pursuit of the church to promote a peaceful authority that claimed the movements of God. Booty explains, [Elizabeth I’s] religion was not that of the zealous […] It was that of the Christian humanist, involving devotion and moderation, and delighting in beauty, the beauty of a perfect literary style, the beauty of orderly religious ceremony, it was a religion linked to national sentiment, with the conviction that God was doing a mighty thing, through his Deborah, for England, and through England, for the world” (332). The idealism of the new queen’s movements of compromise reveals a desire for the virtues of the good and peaceful life, yet these are prescribed notions for achieving this existence as opposed to policies that leave the people to their own devices. Within this “mighty thing,” there was little room for detraction, and Booty shows that, in the changes in the 1559 book, “there was a checking of a forceful movement in a Protestant or Genevan direction and settling down to that via media which has become characteristic of Anglicanism” (330). This via media was an ambitious movement for a church that had seen turmoil in the initial reformation during the reign of Henry VIII and subsequent violent returns to Catholicism under Mary.