Concentrating on six plays in the 1610s, this thesis explores the ways theatrical visual effects described as “strange” channel the period’s moral anxieties about rhetoric, technology, and scepticism. It contributes to debates in repertory studies, textual and material culture, intellectual history, theatre history, and to recent revisionist considerations of spectacle. I argue that “strange” spectacle has its roots in the materialisation of morality: the presentation of moral ideas not as abstract concepts but in physical things. The first part of my PhD is a detailed study of early modern moral philosophy, scepticism, and material and textual culture. The second part of my thesis concentrates on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (1609-10) and The Tempest (1611), John Webster’s The White Devil (1612), and Thomas Heywood’s first three Age plays (1611-13). These spectacular plays are all written and performed within the years 1610-13, a period in which the changes, challenges, and developments in both stage technology and moral philosophy are at their peak. I set these plays in the context of the wider historical moment, showing that the idiosyncrasy of their “strange” stagecraft reflects the period’s interest in materialisation and its attendant moral anxieties. This thesis implicitly challenges some of the conclusions of repertory studies, which sometimes threatens to hierarchise early modern theatre companies by seeing repertories as indications of audience taste and making too strong a divide between, say, “elite” indoor and “citizen” outdoor playhouses. It is also aligned with recent revisionist considerations of spectacle, and I elide divisions in criticism between interest in original performance conditions, close textual analysis, or historical-contextual readings. I present “strangeness” as a model for appreciating the distinct aesthetic of these plays, by reading them as part of their cultural milieu and the material conditions of their original performance.

In the four early modern revenge tragedies I study, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, the ubiquitous depictions of corporeal violence underscore the authors’ skepticism of the human tendency to infuse bodies – physical manifestations of both agency and vulnerability – with symbolism. The revengers in these plays try to avenge the death of a loved one whose disfigured body remains unburied and often continues to occupy a place on stage, but their efforts to infuse corpses with meaning instead reveal the revengers’ perverse obsession with mutilation as spectacle. In Chapter one, I show how in The Spanish Tragedy Thomas Kyd portrays the characters’ assertions of body-soul unity to be arbitrary attempts to justify self-serving motives. Although Hieronimo treats Horatio’s dead body as a signifier of his own emotions, he displays it, alongside the bodies of his enemies, as just another rotting corpse. In Chapter two, I explore how in Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare questions the efficacy of rituals for maintaining social order by depicting how the play’s characters manipulate rituals intended to celebrate peace as opportunities to exact vengeance; Titus demands human sacrifice as not just an accompanying element, but a central motive of rituals ostensibly intended to signify commemoration. In Chapter three, I read The Revenger’s Tragedy as illustrating Thomas Middleton’s characterization of the depiction of corporeal mutilation as an overused, generic convention; the play’s revenger, Vindice, attributes multiple, constantly shifting, meanings to the rotting skull of his lover, which he uses as a murder weapon. In Chapter four I argue that in The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster destabilizes spectators’ interpretive capacities; within this play’s unconventional dramatic structure, the main characters use somatic imagery to associate bodily dismemberment with moral disintegration. Corpses, the tangible remains of once vigorous, able-bodied relatives, serve as central components of respectful commemoration or as mementos of vengeance, yet these dead, often gruesomely mutilated bodies also invite repulsion or perverse curiosity. Thus, rather than honoring the deceased, revengers objectify corpses as frightening spectacles or even use them as weapons.

The childbirth metaphor adopts imagery from female bodies carrying and delivering children to describe the effort and relationship of a poet to his/her poem. This was a commonly used trope in the renaissance, particularly by male authors. This thesis examines the way early modern woman poet, Aemilia Lanyer uses the childbirth metaphor in her poem, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Lanyer ultimately considers not only the physical realities of childbirth in her use of the metaphor, but also the emotional, social, and theological consequences. By doing so, I argue that Lanyer reclaims the metaphor from her male contemporaries in order to justify women's participation in literature and theology. Lanyer adopts a position analogous to the Virgin Mary as she "births” her poem. As she situates all women as powerful procreators, she claims a poetic priesthood through motherhood.

In contradistinction to critical trends which have rendered Milton’s thought disembodied, this thesis studies how seventeenth-century material culture informed Milton’s poetry and prose at the epistemic level and by suggesting a palette of forms for literary play. The first chapter explores the early modern culture of fruit. At the epistemic level, practices of fruit cultivation and consumption inform Milton’s imagination and his vocabulary, thereby connecting their historic-material lives with their symbolic ones. Milton further turns commonplace gestures of fruit consumption into narrative devices that frame discussions of agency, aspiration, sinful and right practice. The second chapter examines two floral catalogues to discover how they find shape through the epistemologies of flowers, ceremony, and decorative arts. Here material culture shapes literary convention, as one catalogue is found to secret ceremonial consolation in its natural ingenuousness, while the other’s delight in human physicality upsets the distinctions between inner virtue and outer ornament, faith and rite. In the third chapter, urban epistemologies of light, darkness, movement, and space are examined through urban phenomena: skyline, suburbs, highways, theft, and waterways. By interpellating contemporary debates, these categories anatomise fallen character, intent, action, and their consequences. Milton’s instinctive distaste for urban nuisances is interesting in this Republican figure and is subversive of some ideologies of the text. Discursive and material aspects meet again in the fourth chapter in a discussion of his graphic presentations of geography on the page. Usually prone to analyses of textual knowledge, they are also informed by the embodiment of knowledge as material object. Milton’s search for a fitting cartographic aesthetic for the Biblical narrative and for the rhetoric of his characters leads him to an increasing consciousness of the ideologies energising these material forms. The fifth chapter explores Milton’s engagement with forms of armour and weapons. Military preferences for speed and mobility over armour help Milton explore the difference between unfallen and fallen being. Milton also uses his inescapably proleptic knowledge of arms and armour as a field of imaginative play for representations that are both anachronistic and typological. These lead to a discussion of imitation in the mythic imagination. In each of these studies, we witness Milton’s consciousness of his temporal and proleptic location, and his attempts to marry the temporal and the pan- or atemporal. In the conclusion I suggest that Milton’s simultaneous courting of the atemporal while he is drawn to or draws on temporal material culture imply an incarnational aesthetic.

This study addresses the problem critics have faced in identifying contemporary perceptions of the barber, surgeon and barber-surgeon in early modernity by examining the literature, predominantly the drama, from the period. The name ‘barber-surgeon’ is not given formally to any character in extant early modern plays; only within the dialogue or during stage business is a character labelled the barber-surgeon. Barbers and surgeons are simultaneously separate and doubled-up characters. The differences and cross-pollinations between their practices play out across the literature and tell us not just about their cultural, civic and occupational histories but also about how we interpret patterns in language, onomastics, dramaturgy, materiality, acoustics and semiology. Accordingly, the argument in this study is structured thematically and focuses on the elements of performance, moving from discussions of names to discussions of settings and props, disguises, stage directions and semiotics, and from sound effects and music, to voices and rhetorical turns. In doing so, it questions what it means in early modernity to have a developed literary identity, or be deprived of one. The barber-surgeon is a trope in early modern literature because he has a tangible social impact and an historical meaning derived from his barbery and surgery roots, and consequently a richly allusive idiom which exerted attraction for audiences. But the figure of the barber-surgeon can also be a trope in investigating how representation works. An aesthetic of doubleness, which this study finds to be diversely constructed, prevails in barbers’, surgeons’ and barber-surgeons’ literary conception, and the barber-surgeon in the popular imagination is created from opposing cultural stereotypes. The literature from the period demonstrates why a guild union of barbers and surgeons was never harmonious: they are opposing dramaturgical as well as medical figures. This study has a wide-ranging literary corpus, including early modern play texts, ballads, pamphlets, guild records, dictionaries, inventories, medical treatises and archaeological material, and contributes to the critical endeavours of the medical humanities, cultural materialists, theatre historians and linguists.

Die vorliegende Magisterarbeit geht von der Kernthese aus, dass ein zweckgebundenes Charakteristikum von Casuallyrik in der Frühen Neuzeit darin besteht, „dass Körperbilder als theoretisch-modellhafte Entitäten, als Katalysatoren und Gegenstand eines Repräsentations-diskurses“ in den Texten identifiziert werden können. Die Analyse geht von der „Frage nach der Funktionsweise und den rhetorisch geschaffenen imaginären Vorstellungen von Körper“ aus und nimmt dabei auch die Zweckgebundenheit dieser literarischen Textsorte, den rhetorischen ‚Bauplan’ und die sozialgeschichtlich-anthropologischen Konzepte ‚Repräsentation’ und ‚Körper’ in den Blick. Da ein literaturwissenschaftlich nutzbares Repräsentationskonzept bisher nicht eingeführt ist, geht es nicht zuletzt um die methodisch angemessene Installierung dieses Ansatzes für die literaturwissenschaftliche Arbeit durch eine interdisziplinäre Verknüpfung der Textwissenschaften mit Aspekten der Kunstgeschichte, der Ästhetik, der allgemeinen und Landesgeschichte sowie der Staatstheorie, Philosophie und Theologie. Vier Epicedien (Trauer-, Grab- und Trostgedicht) aus dem hinterlassenen Werk von Johann von Besser bilden die Basis für dieses Vorgehen. Vor dem Hintergrund der Ideengeschichte (M. Foucault), der Zeichentheorie, der Sozialgeschichte, der Historischen Anthropologie, der Körpertheorie und anderen methodischen Ansätzen werden sowohl Repräsentation und Körper als auch Körper und literarischer (nach rhetorischem Bauplan ‚produzierter’) Text zueinander geordnet. Auf dieser Grundlage werden andere Bereiche des Diskurses angewählt, etwa die Relation zwischen Repräsentation und Zeremoniell, die latente ‚Entkörperlichung’ als prozessuales Resultat der gesellschaftlich-restriktiven Kommunikation (Affektdebatte) oder die Bedeutung des wahrnehmenden Blicks und des bewussten Sehens im Sinne einer Spiegelung des Wahrgenommenen und einer im Ergebnis gedoppelten Repräsentation. Das Ziel der Arbeit erreicht die Bereitstellung von aus der Analyse extrahierten Inhalten des körperlichen Repräsentationsdiskurses. Diese Inhalte stellen sich als problematisierbare Bestandteilsgruppen des Foucault’schen innersten Gesetzes repräsentationsdiskursiver Ordnungen dar und bilden in sich abgrenzbare Analyseeinheiten im Sinne von Desiderata weiterer Arbeiten auf diesem Gebiet. / The following MA thesis insists on the point that an indespensable characteristic feature of casual poems consists in the fact that body in early modern literature can be identified as theoretical-model entities, as catalysts and the object of a repre- sentation discourse. The question of the functional way and the rhetorically created images of body constitutes the centre of attention. That means, the form of calculation of this literary text kind, the rhetorical ,plan ' and the social-historical und anthropological draughts ,representation' and ,body ' are keywords for the inter- pretation. Because a usable representation-concept for these interpretations of early modern literature is not introduced up to now, it is not least about the methodically adequate installation of this approach for the scientific work in history of literature by an interdisciplinary linking of this research with aspects of art history, aesthetics, general history as well as politics, philosophy and theology. Four funeral-, grave- and consolation-poems of Johann von Besser constitute the textbase for this survey. Idea history (M.Foucault), semiotics, social history, historical anthropology, body-theory and other methodical concepts are the theoratical background for the analysis and associates ‘representation’ and ‘body’ as well as body and literary text. On this base other areas of the discourse are selected, the relation between representation and ceremonial for example or the ‚liberation from bodies' as a result of the social-restrictive communication (affect debate) or the meaning; better to say the impor- tance of the perceiving look and the concious glance in the sense of a reflection of the perceived things and a double representation in the result. The aim of this thesis manages the supply of contents extracted from the analysis of the representation discourse of human bodies. These contents present themselves as unities in terms of the most internal law of representation-discursive orders (Foucault) and form separable subjects for further research.

The thesis traces the evolving attitudes towards rhetoric in the highly-rhetorised English-language prose of the late sixteenth century by focusing on a term that was itself subject to significant change: 'wit'. To wit's pre-existing denotations of intellectual acumen, capacity for reason and good judgement was added a novel meaning, related to the capacity for producing lively speech. As a term encompassing widely divergent meanings, many Elizabethan and early Stuart works explored 'wit' as a central theme or treated the term as significant to explorations of the human mind, its capacity for rhetoric, and the social and moral dimensions of this relationship. The research centres on how 'wit' is seen and how it corresponds to rhetorical wittiness as produced in practice, and questions the implications of this for understanding the social and moral dimensions of the authorial wit. By focusing on the early vernacular manuals of rhetoric by author such as Thomas Wilson and Roger Ascham, on Lyly's and Greene's euphuist prose, and on Thomas Lodge's and Sir Philip Sidney's prose defences of poetry, the first half of the thesis explores the term's conceptual ambiguity. Potentially both reformative and deceptive, this ambiguity becomes a useful tool for the author looking to construct a profitable persona as a Wit, or a brilliant-yet-unruly master of rhetoric. The second half of the research notes how 'wit' tends to outlive its usefulness as a multivalent term in later writings when these seek to move away from the social commodification of an author's rhetoric. Examining Sidney's theological and political aims in The New Arcadia, Thomas Nashe's carnivalesque questioning of the idea of profit, and Francis Bacon's systematic interpretation of Nature, the research suggests that rhetoric and 'wit' maintain both their significance and their ambiguity into the seventeenth century. A meta-rhetorical signpost, 'wit' comes to reflect through its use and disuse both the issues at hand and the inherent self-reflexivity of any attempt to deal directly with rhetoric.

This study examines an important eighteenth-century French querelle about literary education which has so far gone unacknowledged by scholars as a querelle and which, I argue, helped redefine contemporary notions of littérature. This querelle is the series of disputes about how to reform literary education in the collèges, which gathered momentum in the early 1760s, following the expulsion of the Jesuits and the publication of Rousseau's Émile (1762). I propose that we call this querelle the Querelle des collèges. Using a combination of close reading, sociological methodologies, and scholarly approaches to the study of early modern querelles, I examine how a diverse corpus of texts debated how to reform collège literary teaching practices. By resituating Émile in this context, I show that it was one among many interventions in the Querelle des collèges. My study of this Querelle demonstrates that querelleurs increasingly reached a consensus that practices associated with the disciplines of rhétorique and belles-lettres should be replaced by new practices of littérature, which were intended to turn boys into French 'grands hommes'. This Querelle was not only constituted by texts, but also by pedagogical practices, as evidenced by the results of my original archival research into the literary teaching practices of the École royale militaire, founded in 1751. Finally, my analysis situates the Querelle des collèges in the context of broader eighteenth-century debates about education, which I argue should be understood as the Querelle de l'éducation, and I provide the first corpus of this Querelle. This thesis challenges scholarly claims that littérature is a nineteenth-century invention. It argues, instead, that modern notions of littérature as 'an aesthetically pleasing, valued text', and 'a national canon', which began to appear in the late seventeenth century, were stabilised and legitimised by being written into the school discipline of littérature, which emerged between 1750 and the Revolution, in the context of the Querelle des collèges.

Cette thèse se propose d’étudier comment, entre 1527 et 1555, l’affermissement de l’épître en vers à l’intérieur du champ poétique s’est produit par une diminution paradoxale de son statut, depuis le prestige de l’héroïde ovidienne jusqu’à la forme modeste et familière dépréciée par Du Bellay dans la Deffence et Illustration de la langue Françoise (1549). Lieux de construction d’une figure auctoriale affirmée, les recueils d’auteur ont constitué le medium privilégié de cette « personnalisation » du genre épistolaire. Dans une première partie, une analyse diachronique révèle qu’aux balbutiements imprimés de l’épître personnelle (1527-1532) succède une période d’hégémonie éditoriale du modèle familier (1532-1549), avant que la diffusion imprimée de l’épître ne soit corrélée à la défense d’une poétique « marotique » (1549-1555). La deuxième partie examine les représentations de l’épître personnelle à l’intérieur du corpus : celle-ci s’affirme en exhibant sa modestie, que ce soit par la revendication d’un intertexte récent, par l’élaboration d’un decorum soulignant la marginalité du poète ou par la mise en œuvre d’une poétique du sermo. La troisième partie articule les approches matérielle et poétique pour monter comment la dispositio des sections épistolaires donne à voir le surgissement d’une familiarité débordant les principes de composition chronologiques et hiérarchiques, en même temps qu’elle exprime la singularité de cette nouvelle poétique épistolaire. / This dissertation offers to uncover how, between 1527 and 1555, the establishment of the French verse epistle as a poetic genre paradoxically happened through a diminishing of its status, from the prestigious Ovidian héroïde to the “low” familiar type criticized by Du Bellay in his Deffence et Illustration de la langue Françoise (1549). It argues that the marotique-type printed collections, which are built around the assertion of a strong auctorial figure, played a great part in this transformation, as they proved to be a designated supporting medium for the “personalization” of the epistle. The first part of this thesis analyzes from a diachronic perspective the interplay between the poetic establishment of the genre and its anthologization: this led to the singling out of a first period in which poets explored the genre through the debuting medium of the recueil d’auteur (1527-1532), a second period that consecrated the printed familiar epistle (1532-1549) and a third period during which epistles’ authors redefined the genre in order to challenge Du Bellay (1549-1555). The next part investigates the way printed epistolary collections reflect a specific image of the genre, which asserts itself by highlighting its own modest status, whether this means hiding its Horatian background, emphasizing the humble social status of the poet or elaborating a decorum that revolves around marginality. Finally, a third part analyzes the dispositio of several emblematic epistolary collections, arguing that the order through which the epistles were displayed was orientating the readers’ reception of the genre as well as expressing the singularity of the epistolary poetics elaborated by our authors.

This thesis reconstructs the genre of urban satirical pamphleteering. It contends that the pamphlets of Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and Barnaby Rich are stylistically and generically akin. Writing in a relatively undefined form, these pamphleteers share an interest in describing contemporary London, and employ an experimental style characterised by its satirical energy. In addition, they negotiate a series of tensions between profitability and play. In the early modern period, ‘profit' was variously conceived as financial, moral, or rooted in public service. Pamphleteers attempted to reconcile these senses of profitability. At the same time, they produced playful works that are self-consciously mocking, that incorporate alternative perspectives, and that are generically hybrid. To varying degrees, urban satirical pamphlets can be defined in relation to the concepts of profitability and play. Chapter One introduces the concept of moral profitability through an examination of Elizabethan moralistic pamphlets. In particular, it analyses the anxious response to profitability contained in Philip Stubbes's Anatomie of Abuses (1583). Chapter Two argues that Greene disrupted appeals to totalising profitability, and instead demonstrated the alternative potential of play. Chapter Three examines Nashe's notoriously evasive pamphlets, contending that he embraced play in response to the potential profitlessness of pamphleteering. Chapter Four argues that although Dekker and Middleton rejected absolutist notions of profitability, their pamphlets redirect stylistic play towards compassionate social commentary. Finally, Chapter Five explores Rich's relocation of moralistic conventions in pamphlets that are presented as both honest and mocking. Taken as a whole, this thesis re-evaluates the style and genre of urban satirical pamphleteering. It reveals that this frequently overlooked literary form was deeply invested in defining and critiquing the purpose of literature.