Violence and Liminality: Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s Contested Thresholds Submitted by Kaye McLelland to UCL as a thesis for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in ENGLISH LITERATURE I, Kaye McLelland, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Signed:.......................................................................................... 1 Abstract This thesis uses a bi theoretical perspective, historical frameworks, and textual analysis to examine interactions between violence and liminality in the work of Spenser and Shakespeare and in post-Reformation literature and culture more generally. Liminality in this context is defined as the state arising at the centre of ritual, or a threshold state, often one existing between two things more usually considered as binary oppositions. Spenser's Faerie Queene and the plays of Shakespeare provide the primary focus for this research owing to these writers’ fascination with the types of metamorphosis and transformation that can happen in liminal space. Other literary and cultural texts are also analysed, most notably the sermons of the Calvinist preacher Thomas Adams. Adams’ theological concerns provide useful comparisons with Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s work. Instances of liminality are considered under the headings of adolescence, gender, sexuality, mental state, and physical disability. The application of a bi theoretical perspective facilitates a re-evaluation of the issues of gender and sexuality raised in the first three chapters, whilst the final two chapters offer a significant contribution to the emerging field of early modern disability studies. Each of the threshold states examined was perceived as threatening violence, owing to fear and distrust of the ritualistic or the unknown. They also attracted violence as an expression of fear or as a ritualistic attempt to control the liminal space, closing down the threshold in ways that ensured the resulting individual was an acceptable member of early modern society. Furthermore, the texts examined repeatedly depict the perpetuation of the paradox between binaries as a means of producing spaces of immense power, creativity, and potential. This thesis looks at how these responses to liminality reflect the social and religious thresholds being faced in this period, and how they are connected in the Renaissance cultural landscape to the ultimate liminal space between life and death. 2 Acknowledgements This thesis is dedicated to my children, Ford, Kean, Elliott, Ewan, and Harriet, who have had to share me with it and who have reached so many of their own milestones and thresholds between its conception and birth. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my supervisor, Helen Hackett, for her patience, encouragement, diligence, and expertise. Her dedication and willingness to take on someone on an unusual career path have made this process accessible and her unstinting support has been invaluable. Many thanks also to Peter Swaab for his role as secondary supervisor and for his many valuable insights and for stepping in with such good grace whenever necessary. Thank you to Alex Roberts and Liz Williams for their help with Latin translation and to those who have kindly helped by proofreading sections of my work, in particular Holly Matthies and Cathy Baldwin. Thank you also to Susan Anderson for organising, and allowing me to speak at, the Disability and the Renaissance conference, which proved such a formative occasion for my research. I am also very grateful to Helen Bowes-Catton for our many productive interdisciplinary discussions, and to the other members of BiUK for their unquestioning support of an infiltrator from the Arts and Humanities. Finally, thank you to Marcus and to my other loved ones and friends for your unerring support and encouragement, without which this could never have happened. 3 Note on the Text Unless otherwise stated, references to The Faerie Queene are to Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton et al. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007) and references to Shakespeare’s plays are to William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Jay Greenblatt et al. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). References to Shakespeare’s sonnets are to William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones, Arden Third Series (London: Methuen, 2010). Biblical references are to Lloyd E. Berry (ed.)’s facsimile edition of the Geneva Bible unless otherwise stated (London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). Oxford English Dictionary is shortened to OED throughout and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is shortened to ODNB. Early modern terminology such as hermaphrodite, madness, lunatic, and cripple is used where appropriate, with explanations to mitigate the potential offensiveness of such terms to modern readers. In general, when quoting from early modern texts, i/j and u/v remain unchanged whereas I have updated VV to W. Updated spelling is taken from later scholarly editions where these are used. The place of publication for pre-1800 texts is London unless otherwise stated. 4 Contents List of Illustrations 6 Introduction 7 Chapter 1 47 Liminality of Life Stage: Education, Adolescence, and Corporal Punishment Chapter 2 99 ‘Hell’s Pantomimicks’: Violence and Liminal Gender in the Festive and Everyday Worlds Chapter 3 140 ‘I wooed thee with my Sword’: Violence and Liminal Sexuality in Renaissance Literature and Culture Chapter 4 190 Lovers, Lunatics, and Poets: Violence and Altered Mental States in Renaissance Life and Literature Chapter 5 238 ‘Halting to the Grave’: Liminal Narratives and the Disabled Body Conclusion 283 Bibliography 307 5 List of Illustrations Andreas Vesalius, ‘Tertia musculatorum’, 245 De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543). Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library, London. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Claude Paradin, ‘Non sine causa’, Devises Heroïques (sig. B3r). 269 Reproduced by permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections (Class mark: Sp. Coll. S.M. 815). Unknown Maker, Iron Artificial Arm (1560-1600). 273 Science Museum, London, Wellcome Images. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hans Von Gersdorf, ‘Insertion of Artificial Arm and Leg’, 274 Feldbuch der Wundartzney (Strasbourg, 1530). Wellcome Images, Wellcome Library, London. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 6 Introduction Every threshold creates a binary, between inside and outside, before and after. Between each of the binaries created by socially imposed thresholds between life-stage, genders, sexualities, and between human and non-human, or life and death lies the possibility for transgression. Some individuals do not fully transition through the liminal space between categories that society deems part of a natural progression, and some seek to traverse categories deemed immutable. Early modern society was subject to immense change and was, perhaps partly as a result, acutely concerned with scientific, religious, and social categorisation exemplified in phenomena such as the study of anatomy, the identification of Catholics, and the class stratification expressed in the sumptuary laws. Spenser and Shakespeare demonstrate a corresponding early modern preoccupation with fluidity, ambiguity, and metamorphosis. I therefore set out to explore the historical context for Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s depictions of these mutable thresholds and liminal spaces, asking why these depictions are so often permeated with violence. This thesis focuses on Spenser’s Faerie Queene and a selection of Shakespeare’s plays including Titus Andronicus, Richard III, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, The Tempest, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. It uses bi theory as a critical lens, as set out later in this introduction, through which to conduct an historical investigation of early modern cultural conditions and their impacts on Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s depiction of violence as it relates to liminal spaces and states. ‘Liminality’ is defined as ‘a transitional or indeterminate state’ of transformation in progress, occurring between stages of a person’s life; especially 7 where such a state is ‘occupied during a ritual or rite of passage’.1 Work on defining liminality within a Social Sciences framework was spearheaded by Arnold Van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage (1909) and greatly developed by Victor Turner in the 1960s. ‘Liminal’ also has a more general, but related, sense of something that pertains to a ‘limen’ or ‘threshold’, something that exists between two states that are usually considered to be binary, for example, outside and inside, or child and adult.2 For the purposes of this thesis I am concerned with liminality as a threshold state whether ritualistically generated or otherwise. In a society where rituals of religion, instruction, and punishment were often violent in nature, do these liminal states result from violence or cause it? Do they invite violence or threaten it? Violence in early modern culture was pervasive and commonplace. In her 1995 article on the social meanings of early modern violence, Susan Amussen identifies the problems with using murder rates and other statistical analysis