This thesis is an investigation of the representation of the figure of the man who raped on the early modern stage. The early modern “man who raped” must be distinguished from the modern term “rapist” insofar as the modern term ascribes an ontological or sociological position to the individual male that was alien to the early modern world view. The shifting value of “rape” in the early modern period presaged more modern conceptions of rape as “an experience imposed on an embodied subject, a violent sexual assault that in its corporal nature destabilizes the intersubjective personhood of the victim” (Cahill 207). As such, the shifting values of the term also prefigured more modern conceptions of masculinity and the successful performance of masculine values. The figure of the man who raped on the early modern English stage often was not merely the monster against which successful forms of masculine behaviour could be contrasted – often such characters found a sympathetic audience. And often, that audience was encouraged and directed through paratextual and dramaturgical devices to see themselves in and identify with the man who raped, for he could be redeemed. This thesis uses the lens of the Roman play to investigate sexual assault because Roman plays clarified masculine ideals for the early moderns; Rome, civilization, manliness, stoic self-control and virtus on the early modern stage were all coincident terms that articulated sexual difference and therefore the construction of the male subject (Kahn 15). The first section looks extensively at the English inheritance of Roman and Anglo-Saxon laws on sexual assault, while the subsequent chapters turn to early modern drama more closely. The plays under study are Marston’s Wonder of Women, Heywood’s Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, and Fletcher’s Bonduca. / SSHRC, School of English and Theatre Studies, College of Arts

Du Roland furieux de l’Arioste (1516-1532) au Songe de Kepler (1634), cette thèse propose une étude des récits de voyages aériens dans la fiction narrative de la Renaissance (romans, poèmes épiques, satires) ainsi que des discours théoriques abordant la question du vol et de l’élévation (démonologie, cosmographie, astronomie, discours sur la possibilité du vol humain ou le vol des oiseaux, etc.). Trois principaux objets sont mis en valeur : les voyages célestes écrits dans la lignée de récits comme le Songe de Scipion de Cicéron ou l’Icaroménippe de Lucien de Samosate ; les voyages aériens de la fiction chevaleresque ; le motif du transport diabolique. L’étude montre ainsi l’importance prise par l’imaginaire du vol à la Renaissance, à la croisée de la fiction et des discours savants, et dessine une « pré-histoire » des fictions d’envol avant les récits de Godwin (The Man in the Moone, 1638) et de Cyrano de Bergerac (Etats et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil, 1657 et 1662). Au cœur de cette rêverie se loge tout à la fois le désir de prendre la mesure du monde et les inquiétudes suscitées par ce même désir. / From Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516-1532) to Kepler’s Somnium (1634), this thesis offers a study of aerial and celestial voyages in Renaissance narrative fiction (romances, epic poems, satires) as well as of learned treatises related to the question of flying (demonology, cosmography, astronomy, learned discourses on human and bird flight, etc.). It focuses on three main subjects: cosmic voyages in the tradition of Cicero’s Dream of Scipio or Lucian of Samosata’s Icaromenippus; aerial voyages in chivalric romance; diabolical transvection (eg. fly to the sabbath). It thus shows the extent to which flight captured the Renaissance imagination, at the cross-roads between fiction and learned discourse, and it traces a « pre-history » of fictional flying before Godwin’s Man in the Moone (1638) or Cyrano de Bergerac’s Etats et Empires de la Lune et du Soleil (1657 and 1662). At the heart of this fantasy lies a desire to measure the world from above – together with the anxieties produced by the same desire.

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La rassettatura del Decameron compiuta da Salviati nel 1582 è stata oggetto di dure critiche fin dal Settecento (tra i primi critici ad inizio Ottocento è da ricordare Ugo Foscolo): il grammatico fiorentino è sostanzialmente considerato un ‘pubblico assassino di Boccaccio’ che ha trasformato il capolavoro narrativo della letteratura delle origini in un moralistico elenco di vizi da punire e di virtù da ammirare. Senza ovviamente negare la pesantezza dell’intervento censorio di Salviati (soprattutto per gli occhi di noi moderni), tuttavia l’analisi linguistica e filologica che si presenta in questa tesi di ricerca mostra come il vero intento di Salviati sia quello di salvare più testo possibile del Decameron e anzi di ripristinarne la corretta lezione dopo l’azione grossolana di tanti editori (soprattutto veneziani) della prima metà del 500. Oltre a questo recupero della lingua perfetta del XIV secolo, Salviati, sulla linea delle lezioni di Varchi e Borghini, ha anche inteso riporre al centro dell’italiano la supremazia della favella fiorentina anche nella sua versione moderna da lui spesso considerata come il cosciente completamento di quella del Trecento. / Salviati’s rassettatura of the Decameron has been often considered by many critics only a censorship which thoroughly ‘kills’ Boccaccio and his masterpiece. What is nevertheless evident in this research is that Salviati wants, even if he was bound to a brutal censorship, to restore the true version of the Decameron both from the philological point of view and from the linguistic one. In particular Salviati wants to regain the supremacy on Italian language for Florence after Bembo and his Prose della volgar lingua (1525). The research is the result of a systematic and complete collation between Salviati’s Decameron and the sources which Salviati used: Borghini’s rassettatura, Mannelli codex, the first printed edition (the so called Deo Gratias), and the florentine edition of the 1527. From this collation and from the phonetic, morphologal and syntactical analysis of all the variants and in particular of Salviati’s choices it comes out Salviati’s true will which is twofold: first of all he wants to restore the language of the 14th century (the Mannelli codex), a perfect and sweet language, then he also wants to underline the supremacy of modern Florentines, true and only heirs of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio’s language and culture.

If we consider the representation of the body in the epic-romances of Torquato Tasso, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser, certain instances of wounding and laceration emerge as crucial turning points in the development of their respective narratives: Clorinda’s redemptive mutilation, Parthenia’s blood-drenched pallor, Amavia’s disquieting suicide, Venus’s insatiable orifice, Amoret’s “perfect hole.” This thesis affords a detailed comparative study of such passages, contending that the wound assumed a critical metaphoric dimension in sixteenth-century epic-romance literature, particularly in relation to the perceived association between body condition and erotic desire. Along with its function as a marker of martial valor and somatic sacredness, the wound, I argue, increasingly is designated in these epic-romances as an interiorizing apparatus, one liable to accrue at any instance into a surplus of unanticipated meaning. As such, the wound becomes an emblem in these texts of what I call the phenomenology of desire—the equation of consummation and loss—as well as the aesthetic and metaphoric mechanism by which these writers seek to overcome it. The four chapters of this thesis constitute individual but cumulative points of response to the problem of thinking about desire as a type of wound. For Tasso, a wound poses a challenge to physical, psychological, and spiritual integrity, but its remarkable capacity for aestheticization also allows Tasso to envision it as a synthesizer of sacred and erotic affects. For Sidney, the prospect that a wound could define a body as courageous or pathetic, as sacred or corrupt, became both politically and socially troubling, and the New Arcadia, I argue, proleptically attempts to defend Sidney against interpretations of wounds that register them as manifestations of corrupt desire. For Spenser, body fracture and erotic wounding are analogic (indeed, almost indistinguishable), and The Faerie Queene investigates the prospect that confusing these analogies can become an empowering, even revelatory experience. In each of these epic-romances, a wound serves both a literal and a figurative function and, in this way, is established as the foremost image by which these writers imagine strength and mutilation, affect and heroism, epic and romance as being inextricably bound.

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.

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Fifteenth-century diplomatic protocol required the city of Florence to send diplomats to congratulate both new and militarily victorious rulers. Diplomats on such missions poured praise on their triumphant allies and new rulers at friendly locations. However, political realities also meant that these diplomats would sometimes have to praise rulers whose accession or victory opposed Florentine interests. Moreover, different allies and enemies required different levels of praise. Jealous rulers compared the gifts, status, and oratory that they received from Florence to the Florentine entourages sent to their neighbors. Sending diplomats with too little or too much social status and eloquence could spell diplomatic disaster. Diplomats met these challenges by varying the style, structure, and content of their speeches. Far from formulaic pronouncements of goodwill, diplomatic orations varied from one speech to the next in order to meet the demands of the complex diplomatic world into which they fit. Contextualizing these orations reveals the subtle reservations of diplomats praising a hostile ruler, the insertion of specific citations to flatter specific audiences, and the changing intellectual and stylistic interests of humanists throughout the fifteenth century. This essay will examine the different shades of flattery practiced by Florentine diplomats and the contexts that explain these variations.

Although it is generally acknowledged that an Elizabethan grammar school education was intensely oral and aural, few studies have approached the literature of its pupils principally in light of such an understanding. There may be good reason for this paucity, since the reading of textual remains in the hopes of reconstituting sound and movement—particularly in non-dramatic literature—will always, in the end, be confronted by an inaudible and static text. Yet for the Elizabethan schoolboy, composition and performance were inseparable, whether of an epistle, a theme, or a translation of Latin poetry. The purpose of this project is firstly to describe the conditions which led to and ingrained that inseparability, and then offer some readings of the poetry, oratory, and drama of those whose voices and pens were trained in the grammar school, here Merchant Taylors’ School in 1560s London. Edmund Spenser, Lancelot Andrewes, and Thomas Kyd all attended Merchant Taylors’ in this period, and their poetry, sermons, and drama, respectively, are treated in the following discussion. It is argued that their texts reflect the same preoccupation with pronuntiatio et actio, or rhetorical delivery, held by their boyhood schoolmaster, Richard Mulcaster. I suggest that delivery provides a unique way of assessing literature in the context of an oral/aural education, largely because its classical and Renaissance rules invariably stipulate that vocal and gestural modulations must follow the emotional and intentional sense of words rather than their literal meanings. Delivery is thus shown to exist at the nexus of orality and literacy, performance and text, wholly absorbed with the concerns of speech, but distinct from language as well. In imagining the physicality of this middle ground within their narratives, it is proposed that Mulcaster’s students recalled an education very often spent stirring the emotions with and for their bodily expression.