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Allegory and Modernity in English Literature c. 1575-1675 by Vladimir Brljak PDF

405 Pages·2015·5.66 MB·English
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University of Warwick institutional repository: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap A Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD at the University of Warwick http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/73270 This thesis is made available online and is protected by original copyright. Please scroll down to view the document itself. Please refer to the repository record for this item for information to help you to cite it. Our policy information is available from the repository home page. Allegory and Modernity in English Literature c . 1575-1675 by Vladimir Brljak A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and Comparative Literary Studies University of Warwick Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies April 2015 CONTENTS Figures and Tables 2 Acknowledgments 3 Declaration 5 Summary 6 Abbreviations and Conventions 7 Introduction: Allegory and Modernity 9 Chapter One: Allegory and Poetics 46 Chapter Two: Allegory and Drama 133 Chapter Three: Allegory and Epic 228 Afterword: (Neo)Allegory and (Anti)Modernity 329 Bibliography 356 FIGURES AND TABLES Figure 1. Analysis of three trends in sixteenth-century non-cycle drama. 155 Figure 2. Faustus summoning Mephistopheles. The title page of the first edition of the B text of Marlowe’s Faustus (London, 1616), with four later versions of the woodcut. 170 Figure 3. Reconstruction of the staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, 1.4.38-5.159. 196 Figure 4. “Alas, poor Ghost!” by G. Cruickshank, illustrating the anecdote of a prank played on the actor W. Dowton, imagined as performing the ghost in Hamlet. 197 Figure 5. Mephistopheles as Franciscan friar in The Historie of the Damnable Life, and deserued Death of Doctor Iohn Faustus (London, 1608). 207 Figure 6. Tables explaining the meanings of God’s attributes in R. Bernard’s The Bibles Abstract and Epitomie (London, 1642). 247 Figure 7. The schematic representation of the interpretation proposed at Galatians 4:21-31 in the 1589 edition of T. Beza’s New Testament. 280 Figure 8. Sig. A2r in the fourth (1668) and fifth (1669) “issue” of the first edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. 303 Figure 9. The two engravings in the fourth edition of Paradise Lost (London, 1688) objected to by P. Hume in his Annotations (London, 1695) on the poem. 315 Table 1. Some early English translations of Galatians 4:24, divided into those which avoid and those which employ the term allegory. 278 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis had three supervisors, and is the better for it. Initially, it was supervised by Catherine Bates and Christina Britzolakis, and when it became clear that it was progressing in a direction taking it away from Christina’s interests and expertise, Paul Botley stepped in to replace her. The thesis was thus brought to completion under Catherine’s and Paul’s supervision, while Christina replaced Elizabeth Clarke as my mentor, and remained associated with the project in this capacity. I am deeply indebted to all of them, and have long looked forward to the opportunity to thank them for taking on this thesis, for the time and effort they have invested in it, for the knowledge they so generously shared, for the intelligence and wit with which they illuminated our conversations, and for their unwavering professional and personal support. Elizabeth’s interest and comments on my work exceeded the duties of a mentor, and saved me from at least one major blunder. Along with Thomas Docherty, she also acted as the examiner of my upgrade dossier, and I am thankful for their insightful comments on that occasion. I am also indebted to other faculty members, as well as the administrative staff, of the Department of the English and Comparative Literary Studies, especially to Christiania Whitehead, and to my fellow graduates, including Iman Sheeha, James Christie, Andrea Selleri, Michael Yat-him Tsang, and especially Joanna Rzepa and Máté Vince. Beyond Warwick, Ivan Lupić deserves a paragraph to himself here for all his comments, criticism, encouragement, criticism, advice and assistance, more criticism – in a word, friendship – over the years. So does Goran Stanivukovic, who, at a critical moment, and in the most trying of circumstances, proved himself a model of collegiality and professionalism. I remain deeply moved and grateful, and always look forward to our paths crossing. I am further thankful to Irena Bratičević, for her kindness to barbarians; to Helen Lynch, for her comments, initiative, hospitality, and orientation skills; to Gavin Alexander, for his suggestions regarding my work on Kenelm Digby, and his collegiality in other matters; and to Thomas Fulton, for his valuable comments on some of the Milton material. It is a great pleasure to remember and thank everyone who was involved in the Allegory Studies? conference, which took place at Warwick on 17 November 2013, and who made it the extraordinary day that it was. In addition to Catherine, Karen, Iman, James, and Máté, this includes Sue Dibben at Warwick’s Humanities Research Centre, Karen Lang, 3 Penelope Murray, Lisa Rosenthal, Ery Shin, David Beck, Philip Gaydon, Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., Andrew Laird, Marco Nievergelt, Conor Walton, and especially Jon Whitman, to whom I am also greatly indebted in other respects. I am further grateful to the members of the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Zagreb, including Sonja Bašić, Janja Ciglar-Žanić, Dora Maček, Tomislav Brlek, and Damir Kalogjera, who opened many doors for me. A section of Chapter 3 has now been published, with minor additions and alterations, in The Review of English Studies, n.s., 66 (2015): 403-22. Parts of Chapters 2 and 3 build on some of the research first published in the collection Milton through the Centuries, ed. Gábor Ittzés and Miklós Péti (Budapest, 2012), and Notes and Queries, n.s., 57 (2010): 379-80, 59 (2011): 247-54. I am thankful to the editors and reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Portions of the thesis have also been presented at the following events: 61st Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Berlin, March 2015; 6th Biennial Conference of the Society for Renaissance Studies, Southampton, July 2014; Research Day in Medieval English Studies, Piliscsaba, April 2014; 60th Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, New York, March 2014; The Middle Ages in the Modern World, St Andrews, June 2013; Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Toronto, April 2013; Postgraduate Symposium 2012, Warwick, June 2012; Arts Faculty Seminar, Warwick, May 2012. I am thankful to everyone who shared in the discussions on these occasions. Thanks are also due to the staff of several libraries, including the British Library, Cambridge University Library, University of Warwick Library, Zagreb’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Library, and especially the Bodleian, where much of this thesis was written. My studies were funded by a Chancellor’s International Scholarship from the University of Warwick. I remain grateful for this enormous privilege, and hope that this thesis, along with other projects undertaken during my time at the University, justifies the investment. Further support came from Warwick’s Humanities Research Fund and the Open Society’s Supplementary Grants Programme. As for more personal debts, they are too extensive, and too personal, to be acknowledged here, but be it said that nobody has invested more in me than my parents, Bosiljka and Josip Brljak. 4 DECLARATION I hereby declare that this thesis is entirely my own work, that is has not been submitted for a degree at any other university, and that its contents do not form part of any other dissertation or thesis. 5 SUMMARY The thesis examines the place of allegory in the literature and intellectual culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, especially in its complex and contested relationship to the notion of the period’s (early) modernity. What is modernity’s quarrel with allegory? Why does it run so deep in Western thought, and why has it remained with us to the present day? What specific forms does this quarrel assume in the literary culture of the period now commonly designated as “early modern”? Why has allegory, under its many names, remained a point of differentiation and dispute between various sets of ancients and moderns even into our – some would say “postmodern” – times? Even as scholarship on allegory grows increasingly comprehensive and sophisticated, commentary on these issues has remained sporadic and inconclusive, and the thesis seeks to provide a more focused and comprehensive examination of the subject than has thus far been available. In terms of its format, the thesis pursues with these concerns through three chapters – on “Allegory and Poetics”, “Allegory and Drama”, and “Allegory and Epic” – preceded by an Introduction on “Allegory and Modernity”, and followed by an Afterword on “(Neo)allegory and (Anti)modernity”. The Introduction and Afterword discuss the broader questions raised by the allegory-modernity problem, and thus constitute a polemical frame for the three “case studies” on poetics, drama, and epic, which engage particular sixteenth- and seventeenth- century texts and traditions. These range from such canonical staples as Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or Milton’s Paradise Lost to numerous other, less well known, but no less important works. In reconsidering the place of allegory in this corpus, the thesis is primarily intended as a contribution to English literary and intellectual history. On a broader level, it is also intended as a contribution to the more comprehensive project of “allegory studies”: the emergent nexus of interdisciplinary scholarship tackling those comprehensive and fundamental issues raised by the phenomenon of allegory which transcend particular discipline-, period-, or author-focused contexts. The thesis thus hopes to demonstrate the signal importance of the allegory-modernity problem in any advanced understanding of the Western allegorical tradition, at the same time as it sheds new light on what is in many ways the most important and most contested period – apart from our own, perhaps – in the history of this tradition. 6 CONVENTIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS The citation format adopted in this thesis combines essential references in the footnotes with full entries in the Bibliography. Specifically, the references in the footnotes abbreviate titles, initialize first names, and omit translators and collaborators (except where required for identifying the work in the Bibliography), printers and publishers, and number of volumes for multi-volume works. The following abbreviations are employed: CQ The Classical Quarterly CW The Works of John Milton. Gen. ed. Frank Allen Patterson. 18 vols with index. New York: Columbia UP, 1931-1938. [Columbia Works] EETS Early English Text Society ELN English Language Notes ELR English Literary Renaissance FR The Fortnightly Review GM The Gentleman’s Magazine HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly JEGP Journal of English and Germanic Philology JHI Journal of the History of Ideas JMEMS The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies MLN Modern Language Notes MLR Modern Language Review MP Modern Philology MQ Milton Quarterly MS Milton Studies N&Q Notes and Queries ODBN Oxford Dictionary of National Biography OED Oxford English Dictionary OW The Complete Works of John Milton. Gen. ed. Thomas Corns and Gordon Campbell. 11 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008–. [Oxford Works] PQ Philological Quarterly REED Records of Early English Drama RES The Review of English Studies SP Studies in Philology SQ Shakespeare Quarterly SS Shakespeare Survey UTQ University of Toronto Quarterly YP Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale UP, 1953-82. [Yale Prose] 7 INTRODUCTION ALLEGORY AND MODERNITY

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