© 2021 Maria E. Vrcek ALL RIGHTS RESERVED LITERARY DISORDER: THE POETIC REVOLUTION, 1600-1666 By MARIA E. VRCEK A dissertation submitted to the School of Graduate Studies Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English Written under the direction of Henry S. Turner And approved by _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ _____________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2021 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Literary Disorder: The Poetic Revolution, 1600-1666 By MARIA E. VRCEK Dissertation Director: Henry S. Turner This dissertation theorizes a new understanding of “imitation,” the central objective and operation early modern writers prescribed for fiction, better known in the period as “poesy.” Reading poems, plays, and fictional prose from canonical authors, John Donne, William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, Francis Bacon, and Margaret Cavendish, I uncover expressions of imitation as a process that cultivates not resemblance but disorder: disassembly and (sometimes) recombination. The texts I study thus portray procedures of fiction-making that literary theorists—from classical antiquity to the present day—have not acknowledged, but procedures that enabled the early modern version of imitation: poesy should not merely copy nature but should create or make it anew. Over the course of the seventeenth century, disorder became a new method by which fiction imitated nature. This method for imitation became especially appropriate in this century, when natural philosophers, like Bacon, began to confront how little they knew certainly about nature, that nature was a system of constant variety, generation, and creation. My re-definition of imitation as disorder illuminates that poesy captured this truth about nature through, what I call, literature’s “poetics of disorder.” “Poetics of disorder” are the strategies by which poesy creates ongoing variety and change—through specific literary devices, like the metaphysical conceit, or, in Cavendish’s estimation, by ii recreating, diverting, and withdrawing. Imitating nature’s dynamism, this poetics shows both that trying to map nature’s processes—as natural philosophers strove to do—was and is not the only way to demonstrate understanding of nature and that literature is not simply a frivolous exercise of style or imagination, but a knowledge-making enterprise in its own right. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is an honor to be able to thank so many esteemed scholars for investing their time, care, and attention in my work. Henry Turner has always helped me find a way to reach my work’s greatest potential. Jacqueline Miller’s supreme care for language both renewed my excitement for and grounded my research and writing. Since my first days at Rutgers, Lynn Festa has been teaching me one of my most treasured skills: how to be a smarter, more responsible, and clearer theorist. Wendy Beth Hyman has always treated my work like the work of a colleague. Our conversations not only made me feel like I had a community, but they assured me of the worthwhileness of my project. For being indispensable models of scholarship, teaching, and collegiality, I thank Emily Bartels, Liza Blake, Joseph Campana, Ann Baynes Coiro, Amy Cooper, Jacqueline Cowan, Elin Diamond, Thomas Fulton, Erin Kathleen Kelly, Ron Levao, Jenny C. Mann, Lena Cowan Orlin, Daniel Shore, Owen Williams, Mimi Yiu, and the Rutgers Medieval- Renaissance Colloquium. I am grateful to Megan Heffernan for allowing me to read and cite her forthcoming book and Wendy Beth Hyman and Jennifer Waldron for allowing me to read pieces from the forthcoming special issue of ELR, “Theorizing Early Modern Fictions.” Without the administrative and moral support of the luminous Cheryl Robinson and Courtney Borack, I could not have completed this degree. For generous financial support, I thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Folger Shakespeare Library, and Bridget Gellert Lyons and Robert Lyons. My final and greatest thanks are for my family and friends, especially my parents, the Vrčeks and Scannells all over the world, my cohortmates, and Lawrence. I could write only because of their love, sacrifice, and support. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ........................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iv Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Making Fitter Forms: Donne’s Poetics and the Human ............................................. 24 Chapter 2 “Let confusion live”: A Poetics of Satire from Timon of Athens ................................ 78 Chapter 3 Francis Bacon’s Works of the Imagination: Varying Forms of Knowledge-Creation ......................................................................................................................................... 132 Chapter 4 Margaret Cavendish’s Vitalist Poetics ........................................................................ 181 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 234 v 1 Introduction One of the most entrenched principles in early modern literary theory is that fiction—better known to scholars of the period as “poesy”—imitates nature. While over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “nature” could mean a variety of things—the physical, environmental world; not the appearance of the physical, environmental world but rather its processes: the “creative workings of nature”; and, especially after the mid-seventeenth century, “humane life” or human activities and behaviors—assessments of poesy’s relationship to nature stayed firm.1 Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy (1595) is most often tagged as forwarding this conception of poesy as imitative, but Sidney is not alone: Roger Ascham in The Scholemaster (1570), Henry Peacham in The Garden of Eloquence (1577), George Puttenham in The Arte of English Poesie (1589), and later Thomas Hobbes in his response to William D’Avenant’s A Discourse upon Gondibert (1650) all peddle a vocabulary of imitation, following, copying to describe poesy’s work.2 My project does not dispute the thesis that 1 The first definition of nature is an Aristotelian one. See, especially, S.K. Heninger’s explanation of a shift in the mid-fifteenth century from “the Christianized version of Plato’s realm of essences to the empiricist’s world of observable nature. A work of art became a representation of what exists in fact, rather than a presentation of what is supposed to be in ideal principle” (original italics). By the mid-sixteenth century, Aristotle’s Poetics had influenced poetic making to “represent[t] the actions of men in naturalistic surroundings.” “For Sidney and Aristotle, mimesis of the visibilia of cosmos rather than mimesis of its form became the motivating concern of poetic theory.” S.K. Heninger, Jr., Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 64 and 87. On the second definition, see Gavin Alexander, ed. Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 323n.27. See Thomas Hobbes, “The Answer of Mr. Hobbs to Sr. William D’Avenant’s Preface before Gondibert,” in A Discourse upon Gondibert. A Heroick Poem (Paris, 1650), 130 for the last. See also Arthur O. Lovejoy, “‘Nature’ as an Aesthetic Norm,” Modern Language Notes 42, no. 7 (Nov. 1927): 444-450, https://doi.org/10.2307/2913933. 2 Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, 3-54. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, Or plaine and perfite way of teachyng children, to vnderstand, write, and speake, the Latin tong, but specially purposed for the priuate brynging vp of youth in Ientlemen and Noble mens houses, and commodious also for all such, as haue forgot the Latin tonge, and would, by themselues, without à Scholemaster, in short tyme, and with small paines, recouer à sufficient habilitie, to vnderstand, write, and speake Latin (London, 1570). Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence onteyning the figures of grammer and rhetorick, from whence maye bee gathered all 2 poesy is mimetic, but it asks (and proposes) how: How does early modern poesy imitate nature? What actually occurs in the act of imitation? What do poesy’s processes of imitation look like in practice, as the text unfolds? Despite his high profile, on this topic, Sidney is not as enlightening of the inner workings of mimesis as one might think. Yes, he writes in his Defence of Poesy that “Poesy, therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimēsis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting or figuring forth.”3 Yes, scholars have abundantly theorized each of these different actions—representing, counterfeiting, and figuring forth.4 However, this gesture to, but ultimately lack of explanation of, imitation’s specific actions combined with Sidney’s confusing dicta that poesy imitates nature but is not subject to it—that it “grow[s] in effect into another nature” and “mak[es] things either better than nature bringeth forth or, quite anew, forms such as never were in