Ecologies of Thought in Early Modern English Drama by Andrew Jonathan Bozio A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2013 Doctoral Committee: Professor Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Chair Associate Professor George P. Hoffmann Associate Professor Steven G. Mullaney Professor Theresa L. Tinkle Professor Valerie J. Traub © Andrew Bozio 2013 Acknowledgements Like any work that develops over the course of several years, this dissertation has been shaped and supported by many extraordinary individuals, and I’m very pleased to be able to thank them there. I’ve had the good fortune to work with an incredible dissertation committee, whose contributions to this project have left me deeply humbled. One of the greatest pleasures of graduate school has been working with Michael Schoenfeldt, whose enthusiasm and support for this endeavor has been unflagging. Mike’s warmth, generosity, and piercing intellect have made him universally beloved within the profession, and I feel very grateful to have learned so much from him while at Michigan. Steven Mullaney has been instrumental in shaping this project. Our shared interest in cognition and in theories of space provided early encouragement in undertaking this research, and he helped to excavate aspects of the argument that remained invisible to me, guiding our conversations with deeply astute questions that challenged me to rethink the terms of this project. Similarly, I owe an incredible debt to Valerie Traub, whose careful reading of this work helped to give the argument shape and solidity. From the beginning of this project, she pushed me to clarify my thinking, and that precision of thought saved the dissertation from becoming mired in abstraction. George Hoffmann consistently left me humbled by his generosity and his insightfulness, and his encyclopedic knowledge of the early modern period added nuance and depth to many of the claims made here. Finally, Theresa Tinkle’s enthusiasm and ii generosity renewed my commitment to higher education. Her wit and warmth sustained me through the most challenging moments of completing this dissertation. In writing this dissertation, I benefited from several institutions and individuals, each of whom supported the development of a particular aspect of the argument. Much of my research was funded by grants from the Rackham Graduate School, the Program in Medieval and Early Studies, and the Making Publics Project at McGill University, and I am very pleased to able to thank those institutions, as well as the research staff at the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Wellcome Library, the Newberry Library, and the Cambridge University Library. At Michigan, I benefited enormously from exceptional faculty members, especially Sara Blair, Alison Cornish, Gregg Crane, Danny Hack, David Halperin, Barbara Hodgdon, Diane Owen Hughes, Kerry Larson, Adela Pinch, Cathy Sanok, Karla Taylor, Doug Trevor, and Ralph Williams. I am also grateful to Barbara Rosenwein, of Loyola University Chicago, for her seminar at the Newberry Library, which allowed me to begin the work that would become chapter two. Portions of this dissertation were presented or circulated at the Premodern Colloquium, the MEMS Dissertation Colloquium, the Mellon Dissertation Seminar run by William Paulson, and at annual meetings of the Shakespeare Association of America and the Renaissance Society of America. I’m grateful to my audiences and interlocutors there, and in particular to the many scholars who, in extended conversation, helped the argument to take its present shape: Erika Lin, Marissa Greenberg, Cary DiPietro, Kurt Schreyer, Gina Bloom, and Evelyn Tribble. While a graduate student, I have been supported by fantastic colleagues and by exceptional institutional resources. My thanks, in particular, go to my cohort and to my fellow early modernists, including Chris Barnes, Katherine Brokaw, Carolyn Dekker, Ari Friedlander, Tim Green, Sarah Linwick, Alice Keane, Adam Mazel, Ben Pollak, Rebecca iii Porte, Amy Rodgers, Stephen Spiess, Leila Watkins, Kathryn Will, Rebecca Wiseman, and Cordelia Zukerman. I am also deeply indebted to the wonderful staff in the English Department, especially to Jan Burgess, whose patience and guidance have shaped my graduate career from the very beginning, and to Senia Vasquez, Karly Mitchell, Bonnie Campbell, Lisa Curtis, and Linda Deitert. In their capacity as jobseeker coordinators, Melanie Yergeau and Sidonie Smith offered insightful feedback on the abstract for this dissertation, and their comments helped to reframe the intellectual scope of the project. I am also grateful to the many individuals who have influenced my approach to teaching. With their enthusiasm and their insight, they reminded me of both the pleasure and the political urgency of our work within the academy, and I know that I will be in their debt for as long as I am in the classroom. In particular, I would like to thank Theresa Tinkle, Jennifer Bryan, Justin Kolb, Tershia Pinder-Grover, and all those who contributed to the 2011 Preparing Future Faculty Seminar. Finally, whenever the pleasant solitude of writing this dissertation lost its charm, I was fortunate to have a wonderful community of friends, family, and loved ones, without whom I simply could not have completed this project. They include Melanie Adams, Daphna Atias, Brent Beam, Catherine Bozio, Joe Breakey, Michelle Fortin, Lisa Gottlieb, Justin Joque, Michael-Salomon Jost, Eric Kampe, Dan McAdams, Jeff McCabe, Caroline Miller, Rebecca Pallmeyer, Dan Vernia, Jörg Zeller, and Cordelia Zukerman. To Ruth McAdams, I owe everything – her love and support have made these years the happiest and most fulfilling that I have known. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Introduction Cognitive Ecologies on the Early Modern Stage 1 Chapter One Amatory Cognition and the Shape of Cosmos in John Lyly’s Endymion 20 I. Amatory Cognition and the Neoplatonic Cosmos 32 II. The Displaced Soul and Endymion’s Place in the Universe 58 i. Endymion in Extracosmic Space 64 ii. Cynthia’s Rule over Intramundane Place 77 III. The Spatial Politics of Cynthia’s Court 84 Chapter Two The Ecology of Remembrance: Memory, Place, and Affect in Dido, Queen of Carthage 102 I. Moving through Memory: Troy’s Destruction and the Arts of Memory 106 II. Ecological Memory and the Reconstruction of Troy 121 i. Aeneas’s Hallucination before the Walls of Carthage 121 ii. Translatio Imperii as a Form of Memory 128 III. Troynovant and the Place of Memory in Early Modern London 138 Chapter Three Embodiment and the Perception of Place in King Lear 144 I. Early Modern Phenomenology and the Perception of Place 147 II. Phenomenology and the Space of Dover Cliff 155 III. Cognition in the Wild: Lear’s Emplacement in the Storm 162 v IV. The Performativity of Space 177 Chapter Four Bartholomew Fair and the Performativity of Space 182 I. “When’t comes to the fair once”: Performativity and the Theatrical Conception of Smithfield 187 i. The Performative Constitution of Space 187 ii. Performativity and the Displacement of Memory 192 II. “I’the heart o’the fair”: Thinking Smithfield 196 i. The Captivation of Bartholomew Cokes: The Fair as Umwelt 200 ii. Zeal-of-the-land Busy and the Disenchantment with Space 209 III. Emergence and Smithfield 215 Conclusion The Poetics of Emplacement 219 Bibliography 224 vi Introduction Cognitive Ecologies on the Early Modern Stage In the Induction to John Marston’s The Malcontent, Will Sly stages a complex meditation on the relationship between memory and space within early modern performance.1 Posing as a playgoer, Sly refutes the stagehand’s complaint that one cannot sit onstage at the Globe, arguing that “We may sit upon the stage at the private house,” and he further justifies his tactical displacement of performance space by claiming that he must aid the playgoers: “I am one that hath seen this play often and can give them intelligence for their action.”2 The Malcontent was first performed by the boy actors at Blackfriars, and Sly implies that his memory of this previous performance will enable him to correct whatever discrepancies appear when Burbage’s company enacts it within the Globe.3 Suggestively, he claims to supplement his memory with two forms of cognitive scaffolding, the one an object, the other a practice. “I have most of the jests [performed at Blackfriars] here in my table- 1 Of the three quarto versions of The Malcontent to appear in 1604, the first two list John Marston as the sole author, with the third including John Webster and noting that augmentations have been made. The Induction only appears in this third quarto, and although there have been questions regarding its authorship, Charles Cathcart notes that “a certain consensus has been reached” favoring Webster as the author of the Induction. See Cathcart, “John Marston, The Malcontent, and the King’s Men” The Review of English Studies, New Series, 57.228 (2006): 43. Nevertheless, I follow convention in using Marston’s name when speaking of the play. 2 John Marston, The Malcontent in English Renaissance Drama, David Bevington, Lars Engle, Katharine Eisaman Maus, Eric Rasmussen, eds. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), Induction.2, 14-5. All further references are from the Induction and will be cited parenthetically. 3 Sly and the actors – Richard Burbage, John Lowin, and Henry Condell – comment explicitly on this appropriation of The Malcontent. When Sly asks with regard to Marston’s play, “I wonder you would play it, another company having interest in it,” Condell figures it as recompense for the boy actors’ theft of The Spanish Tragedy, correlating an actor’s age and height with the size of a page: “Why not Malevole in folio with us, as Jeronimo in decimo-sexto with them? They taught us a name for our play; we call it One for Another” (75-9).