GHOST COMPLAINT: HISTORIOGRAPHY, GENDER, AND THE RETURN OF THE DEAD IN ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE By Donald Jellerson Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English August, 2009 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Professor Kathryn Schwarz Professor Lynn Enterline Professor Leah Marcus Professor Peter Lake Copyright © 2009 by Donald Jellerson All Rights Reserved ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The work of these pages would not have been possible without the abundant generosity and uncompromising intellectual acumen of my committee. Lynn Enterline, Leah Marcus, and Kathryn Schwarz have been unflagging supporters of my work from the first days of my graduate career. What I write here will not do justice to the intellectual and personal debts I owe them. Kathryn Schwarz has been a mentor, a friend, and a stunningly keen reader, all at just the right times. I could not have hoped to have a better guide through the process of writing this dissertation. I thank Leah Marcus for her consistent support and availability, her clear readings of my work, and her tireless efforts to educate and advise me, even at my more recalcitrant moments. Thanks to Lynn Enterline for allowing me to follow in her footsteps and prodding me out of them when necessary. Those who sense the influence of Lynn’s work on mine throughout these pages will also note that I can only dimly reflect her inimitable brilliance. And Peter Lake, who joined my committee more recently, has nevertheless been an incisive reader, a patient teacher, and a wonderful interlocutor. Over the years, several conversations and exchanges have been central to the formation of this project. In particulary, I thank Madhavi Menon, Michael Neill, and John Kerrigan for taking the time to get to know my work and offering sage advice. At Vanderbilt, several people have generously helped me along at key moments, including Jay Clayton, Carolyn Dever, Sam Girgus, Sean Goudie, András Kiséry, John Plummer, Dahlia Porter, and Paul Young. Thanks especially to Jonathan Lamb and Bridget Orr for sharing thoughts and even providing a home base for my research in Cambridge. iii The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities provided a dissertation-year fellowship, allowing me to write full-time during my final year at Vanderbilt University. I thank the directors of the Warren Center, Mona Frederick and Edward Friedman for their support. Thanks also to the Warren Center staff and fellows with whom I had the priviledge to collaborate: Polly Case, Jeffrey Edmonds, Sarah Nobles, Sonalini Sapra, Derrick Spires, Laura Taylor, Jonathan Wade, and David Wheat. I received generous research grants for trips to the Folger Library and the British Library during the summers of 2007 and 2008 from the College of Arts and Science at Vanderbilt University. During the summer of 2008, the Vanderbilt University Graduate School Dissertation Enhancement Grant provided additional research funds. Also during the same summer, I attended a two-week seminar on “Belief and Unbelief in the Early Modern Period” at the University of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of the Renaissance with the generous support of the Mellon Foundation and the Newberry Library Consortium. I am grateful to the directors of the seminar, including Ingrid De Smet and Peter Marshall, as well as my fellow participants. Thanks especially to Jennifer Rust, who continues to be a valued colleague. I have learned an enormous amount from my colleagues and friends at Vanderbilt. Thanks especially to Ben Graydon, Sarah Kersh, Miranda Nesler, Nicole Seymour, and Daniel Spoth. I could not have finished without the diligence and insight of my amazing writing partner, Christina Neckles, and I cannot imagine getting through graduate school, much less writing a dissertation, without my stalwart friend and brilliant colleague, Rebecca Chapman. Finally, I thank Eileen Dougharty, who consistently and lovingly supported my endeavors for no more reason than that they were mine. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii Chapter PREFACE............................................................................................................................1 INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................10 I. THE HISTORIOPOETICS OF THE MIRROR FOR MAGISTRATES..................32 II. AESTHETICIZING JANE SHORE......................................................................56 “Her great shame won her much praise” ...................................................68 “My selfe for proofe, loe here I nowe appeare”.........................................79 “The unsolved antagonisms of reality”......................................................94 III. SAMUEL DANIEL’S THE COMPLAINT OF ROSAMOND...............................98 IV. HAUNTED HISTORY AND THE BIRTH OF THE REPUBLIC IN THOMAS MIDDLETON’S THE GHOST OF LUCRECE.................................135 The Name and the Pen .............................................................................144 Haunted History.......................................................................................154 Corrupt Generation ..................................................................................161 V. ‘THE TYRANT TIRES ME AN AUNT’: COMPLAINT, TYRANNY, AND THE WINTER’S TALE.........................................................................................170 1590s Ghost Complaint............................................................................175 Patriarchy Lost.........................................................................................181 Tyrants Chastised.....................................................................................187 Reconsidering Complaint and The Winter’s Tale....................................193 BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................196 v PREFACE Nobody heard him, the dead man, But still he lay moaning: I was much further out than you thought And not waving but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved larking And now he’s dead It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way, They said. Oh, no no no, it was too cold always (Still the dead one lay moaning) I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning. —Stevie Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning” Stevie Smith’s poem features three intertwined voices in atemporal and disembodied relation. The dead man speaks without quotation marks and outside of time. He speaks retrospectively, summarizing his life for us and for an unspecified “they.” Whoever “they” are—in whatever unspecified past they occupy—they presume to know about the meaning of the poor chap’s life and death: “he always loved larking…it must have been too cold....” They think they know what the cold did and what the man loved. The untimely speaking of the dead man interrupts their presumption. The voice of the poet mediates this misunderstanding: as the disembodied “they” and “him” miss each other, the poetic voice, in the third person omniscient, erases itself in its own discourse. That “Nobody heard him” even though he “lay moaning,” makes the poet the nobody who heard him and who now tells us. The poem produces its effects by framing three voices that attempt to capture each other across time and death. 1 We might recognize in the faintly condescending “Poor chap, he always loved larking” our own elegiac relation to the dead. Faced with the trauma of absence that a dead body inevitably recalls, we struggle to make meaning out of the past events seemingly attached to that body. We console ourselves with this new meaning, this epitaph. As in the elegiac tradition, we may also console ourselves by suggesting that something belonging to the body survives in memory or in an afterlife. But Stevie Smith’s poem interrupts the impulse toward consolation when it speaks in the voice of the dead man. “Oh, no no no,” the dead man says. The triple “no” scuttles the elegiac project, putting the meaning of the poor chap’s life and death back in question. The meaning “they” have made of the dead man’s life is spurious. He was never waving. The friendly gesture of meeting or departure, the motion that signals our connection to and knowledge of each other, never meant that at all. Instead it has only ever meant I’m dying. The signs of connection, love and “larking,” have always only anticipated death. “It was too cold always.” The speaking of the dead threatens disruption and erasure. When the dead speak, they question the meanings we make of death itself; they remind us that we value the dead by revaluing them. They remind us that we construct the border between the dead past and the living present as a defensive bulwark, erecting a consolatory wall that allows us to fix past meaning into a form that authorizes our progress into the future. At Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln famously speaks over the bodies of the dead. The words are incised on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial: “we highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” “We,” the living, make our resolutions—“we highly resolve”—in the graveyard. We 2 construct our future perfect—“these dead shall not have died in vain”—in order to construct our perfect