Date of Award
Spring 2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Nicholson, Catherine
Abstract
“Reading the Surface” explores the interplay between the textual and the textural in the material and conceptual formation of early modern English literature. In preparing works for circulation in manuscript and print, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers imagined their creations not only (or even primarily) as paper and ink, but as fabrications of a different sort: crystals, jewels, and glasses; colored canvases and painted faces; costumes, clothing, bundles of rags, and elaborately worked textiles. Though the labor of both printer and scribe were central to early modern literary practice, the early modern literary imagination cast its net wider, seeking material reference points for the fashioning of language in contexts seemingly far removed from the world of books. Why did the makers of early modern poems, plays, and prose fictions so often theorize their making as the production of something else entirely: a window, a mirror, an hourglass, a sculpture, a fresco, a gown, or an earring? What influence do these figurative materialities have on the formal properties of vernacular literature, and what bearing do they have on what we now, perhaps reductively, call the “history of the book”? Time and again, early modern authors turn to the surface to imagine modes of containment, distinction, and categorization—as well as to envision the kinds of contact and interaction across (ostensibly) discrete realms the surface may sponsor or prohibit. In casting about for specific material alternatives to pen, page, and printshop, each author makes a case for how a specific kind of text works: how it is made, how it is (or should be) read, how it might be propagated or preserved. Taking surface metaphors at face value, as keys to the self-understanding of early modern English literary forms, reveals the cultural matrices aligning specific material metaphors and the social and intellectual trends they represent. Through detailed case studies examining how specific artisanal surfaces serve as textual analogues, I illuminate the particular allures of diverse materials–qualities like opulence, radiance, or transparency—that early modern authors are eager to claim. As each chapter shows different media coming together in conversation, the surface persistently serves as a major site of negotiation and theorization, standing in for different ways of perceiving, gaining, imagining, and accessing knowledge—in other words, for ways of reading. My opening chapter investigates the conceit of poetry (vers) as glass (verre) through Christopher Marlowe’s 1598 epyllion Hero and Leander, and George Chapman’s continuation beyond Marlowe’s abruptly ending. Tapping into both the mimetic function of art (the mirror of nature) and its relation to classical precedent (a window onto the past), the figure of “Venus’s glass” allows Marlowe to theorize his own place in a chain of translators ostensibly dating back to the Ur-poet Musaeus. Ultimately, Marlowe transforms looking-glass and window-glass into the newly popular magnifying lens–a fitting emblem for his own innovative expansions. George Chapman’s corrective continuation, on the other hand, reimagines the wildly refracting glass as a focalizing prism, curtailing Marlowe’s liberal digressions with moralizing clarification. These divergent views of (il)licit play, epitomized by the ever-changing glass, show how the place of classical precedent, and the role of new anglophone verse translation, were sites of active and anxious negotiation at the end of the 16th century. Where my first chapter looks at the interplay between inheritance and innovation, my second chapter investigates the unstable alliance between performance and preservation. Paint, as it awkwardly straddles the spheres of portraiture and cosmetics, becomes a coded term to evaluate modes of artificial longevity. Its particular ambivalence comes to a head on the early modern stage, where plays like William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Phillip Massinger’s The Picture use paint’s paradoxical connotations (expressive and inauthentic, inconstant and immutable, deadening and enlivening) to encode their own ambiguous intersections of player and prop, performance and print. My third chapter most overtly complicates the relationship between surface and substance by tracing the many “garments” in the life and works of Margaret Cavendish. Despite often presenting depth and ‘dressing’ as a dichotomy, Cavendish’s extensive corpus reveals that, more often than not, the two are one and the same. Though paratextual materials often seem to dismiss the author’s self-professed “ragged” style as the ‘mere’ clothing of thought, the texts within confound the implicit invitation to discard exterior trappings in favor of some more ‘substantive’ inner content. Time and again, Cavendish’s “garments” are repeatedly revealed to be congruent to the bodies they house. Ranging across her early verse “fancies” to her later natural philosophical prose, from her autobiographical endeavors to her semi-fictional letters, Cavendish presents a vision of the universe where garments are bodies, and by the same token, bodies are as easily removed and restyled as garments. This reveals key mechanisms of Cavendish’s plenist materialist universe; equally, it illustrates the logic behind the generic diversity of her writing. Cavendish’s fascination with reworking similar ideas into diverse forms and genres postulates an integral relationship between Cavendish’s paratextual ‘dressing’ and the textual ‘bodies’ within that mirrors the material composition of the universe at large.
Recommended Citation
Richardson, Sophia, "Reading the Surface in Early Modern English Literature" (2023). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1103.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1103
