City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Graduate Center 5-2018 Famed Communities: Trojan Origins, Nationalism, and the Question of Europe in Early Modern England Joseph Bowling The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! Follow this and additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds Part of the Classics Commons, and the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Bowling, Joseph, "Famed Communities: Trojan Origins, Nationalism, and the Question of Europe in Early Modern England" (2018). CUNY Academic Works. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2584 This Dissertation is brought to you by CUNY Academic Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects by an authorized administrator of CUNY Academic Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FAMED COMMUNITIES: TROJAN ORIGINS, NATIONALISM, AND THE QUESTION OF EUROPE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND by JOSEPH BOWLING A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in the English PhD Program in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2018 © 2018 JOSEPH BOWLING All Rights Reserved ii Famed Communities: Trojan Origins, Nationalism, and the Question of Europe in Early Modern England by Joseph Bowling This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Mario DiGangi Chair of Examining Committee Date Eric Lott Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Richard McCoy Tanya Pollard Feisal Mohamed THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Famed Communities: Trojan Origins, Nationalism, and the Question of Europe in Early Modern England by Joseph Bowling Advisor: Mario DiGangi Throughout medieval Europe, royal families traced their genealogies back to the ancient Trojans. Beginning in the Carolingian court, this practice persisted into the early modern period, when narratives of ancient Troy—from accounts of the war to rewritings of Virgil—saturated literary production. Constituting the translatio imperii tradition, in which civilization “translates” from east to west, these legends of Trojan descent allowed European monarchs to legitimize their authority, or imperium, as derived from the Roman Empire, which Virgil famously celebrated as descending from Trojan Aeneas. This tradition formed what I call feudal cosmopolitanism: an affiliation among nobility premised on shared descent that also activated the notion of European identity. However, with the emergence of humanist reading practices in early modern Europe, which read antiquity as exemplary—models to be imitated—the Trojan heroes claimed to have founded the various European kingdoms became national types, representing an identity to be performed, rather than genealogical forebears. In this way, feudal cosmopolitanism gave way to exemplary nationalism—yet shared European identification remained latent in the Trojan accounts. These local, exemplary, and national iterations of the Trojan legends, thus, were never fully extricated from their international, European context. This dissertation argues that the legends of Trojan origin present an unstudied source of English nationalism: their use by poets and dramatists in articulating an insular national identity expressed, at the same time, an iv international longing—a latent desire for connection with the European continent as residue from the legends’ feudal cosmopolitan past. In representing an emergent nationalist identity in England, writers turned to Troy to negotiate via identification, emulation, and competition their cultural and geopolitical position within Europe. This negotiation occurs through discourse of fame, which arises from the illustrious past; but just as treatment of the Trojan legends transformed within the the political communities to which they provided discursive legitimization, the significance of fame—from glorifying nobility and consanguinity to a typifying a territorially defined national community—mutated. In this way, this dissertation reconsiders the genealogies of modernity. In order to elaborate a theoretical frame through which to reread modernity in the early modern, my first chapter engages recent work on nationalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism. More specifically, I build on Caspar Hirschi’s revisionist theorization of nationalism in his Origins of Nationalism (2011, in which he argues that the idea of the nation arises through a dialectic of centripetal and centrifugal discourses, driven by a competition over fame). I use Hirschi to read Shakespeare’s critique of discourses of fame in Troilus and Cressida. Through Shakespeare, I provide an abbreviated textual history, on the one hand, of the development of legends of Trojan origin across Europe and then, on the other, their adoption in England. Ultimately, the play undermines the authority fame confers and severs the event of the Trojan War from both genealogical and exemplary readings. In my second chapter, I analyze John Higgins’s First part of the Mirror for Magistrates (1574), one of the earliest and most significant Tudor treatments of the Trojan-British material, in which the question of historicity becomes less important than Higgins’s construction of a national tradition. I then turn to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which I situate as continuous with Higgins’s earlier project, arguing v that Spenser’s concern with teaching virtue leads him to articulate a national identity attuned to its dependence on a broader European community. My third chapter takes up what I refer to as the “Albion epics”: William Warner’s Albion’s England (1586), Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612), and William Slatyer’s Palae-Albion (1621), all of which constitute English experiments in the epic form and which, individually, attempt to reconcile founding problem of ancient Britain sharing an origin story with its rival European kingdoms, articulating what I refer to as a counter- cosmopolitanism. My final chapter returns to the stage, reading Shakespeare’s treatment of the Roman invasion of ancient Britain in Cymbeline. It argues that, unlike the epic poetic tradition, with its relatively fixed generic conventions, the stage allows for radical reformulations of the legendary material. More specifically, in Shakespeare’s play, he displaces Brute as the exemplary forebear and replaces him with Innogen, Brute’s legendary wife. With this reinvented forebear, Cymbeline points beyond either feudal cosmopolitan or exemplary nationalism toward what I call a sympathetic cosmopolitanism. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS During my first college class, composition I at the University of South Carolina, Lancaster—a small two-year satellite campus—my professor asked each student to share their major and the postgraduate career to which they aspired. Lacking all self-awareness, I responded that I was an English major and that I hoped to become a professor. As a first-generation college student, I feel immense pride to have gotten as far as I have in realizing that goal—but I feel even greater thanks to all of those who have helped me and without whom I would have gotten as far as I have in realizing my aspirations. I owe immense thanks to Mario DiGangi, whose critical eye, direction, generosity, patience, and sense of humor guided me throughout this project. I am also deeply grateful to Tanya Pollard, Richard McCoy, and Feisal Mohamed for the time they spent reading and commenting on drafts of each chapter. Beyond the dissertation committee, I am also thankful for the Graduate Center faculty beyond my committee who aided me in various ways. Clare Carroll offered her support from before I even arrived in New York City; I also thank the Renaissance Studies Certificate Program, which Clare directed, for its funding of my archival research in England. Martin Elsky taught the seminar, on transatlantic encounters in the early modern world, in which I first formulated the idea for this project. Will Fisher was generous with his time talking with me about the field of early modern studies and matters of professionalization and the job market. Duncan Faherty made it possible for me avoid teaching my final year and focus on finishing the project. When I began this project, I participated in the first-year dissertation research seminar, titled “Researching the Archive, 2014-15,” at the Folger Institute. Jean Howard and Pamela Smith directed the seminar: their discussions of research methods provided invaluable feedback vii as I formulated the central questions of my project. I also greatly appreciate the conversations and feedback from my colleagues in the seminar: Charlotte Buecheler, Amy Burnette, Ali Butzner, Dean Clement, Heidi Craig, Rachel Dunn, Jonathan Holmes, Andrew Miller, Victoria Muñoz, Arron Pratt, Ben VanWagoner, and Katie Walker—the last of whom I owe special thanks for her friendship and continued collaboration after the seminar’s end. Throughout my PhD program, I have been able to survive in New York City because of my employment at the Renaissance Society of America, where the then managing editor of Renaissance Quarterly Erika Suffern hired and trained me as a copyeditor. I also am grateful for my coworkers Colin Macdonald, Tracy Robey, Maura Kenny, Evan Carmouche, and Stephen Spencer as well as Carla Zecher, the executive director