A study of Arthurian poetry in the English Renaissance, from Spenser to Dryden.

This thesis traces the development of Arthurian literature through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A comparison of the Medieval flawed romance king and of the epic warrior of the English histories with Spenser's treatment of Arthur in The Faerie Queene reveals the extent of Spenser's originality. Spenser irreversibly altered the course of English Arthurian literature by rejecting Arthur's traditional human failings and by creating a figure of moral and political idealism. These forms of perfection --- intimately connected in the poem to Protestantism, Neoplatonism, nationalism and monarchism --- initiated two divergent, but not mutually exclusive, strands of Arthurian literature in the seventeenth century. Spenser's Arthurian idealism manifests itself in the courtly masques, and especially in Ben Jonson's Prince Henry's Barriers (1610) and Prince Oberon (1611), Thomas Carew's Coelum Britannicum (1633) and William Davenant's Britannia Triumphans (1637). The masques affirm the link between Spenserian Arthurianism and moral perfection, but the Spenserian poets soon raised doubts regarding this pure 'idealism'. This group of poets, particularly Drayton, simultaneously imitate and alter Spenser's use of Arthurian material. In Poly-Olbion (1633)Drayton adapts Spenser's concept of Arthur in order to contrast Arthurianism with Christianity and historicity. Spenser's Arthurian concepts of heroism, nationalism and monarchy initiated in The Faerie Queene are prominent in the political panegyrics of the Stuart period, and are fully explored by Ralph Knevett in A Supplement of the Faery Queene (1635). While Knevett proposes an allegorical representation of political idealism in his Arthurian material, he simultaneously evinces an astute awareness of the increasing contemporary demands for greater veracity and realism in fiction.Towards the end of the seventeenth century Arthurian idealism was losing its momentum. Its final demise can be traced in the works of Milton and Dryden. Milton was initially attracted by Spenser's treatment of Arthur, but he followed the Spenserians in utilizing the moral Arthurian material primarily to foreground the higher truths of Christianity in Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671). By the time Dryden completed King Arthur (1691), the Arthurian tradition could no longer sustain its traditional imaginative appeal.<p

Ophelia’s Ghost

This essay takes as its starting point the 2008 Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Hamlet directed by Greg Doran in order to explore the ways in which Ophelia’s death and burial might be used to disturb dominant cultural codes. As such, it focuses upon the regulatory discourses framing three female subjects: the legal and religious rules governing suicide, in particular the inquest’s record of the death by drowning of Katherine Hamlet in 1579; the account of Ophelia’s death and her “maimed rites” in the Gravedigger’s scene; and the performance of Mariah Gale in the “mad scene.” In each case the female body is perceived to breach expected boundaries: the way in which the real girl’s death presents a series of questions about temporal and spiritual laws; the engagement of the play with those legal and religious discourses by locating the female character as a disturbing absence; and the use of the actress’s body in order to reiterate in performance the sense of threat encountered in the text. In so doing it employs the theories of the abject and the uncanny as discussed by Judith Butler and Julia Kristeva in order to locate where the text’s distorted repetitions uncover the tenuousness of the cultural codes used to regulate the Early Modern understanding of female suicide

How Margaret Cavendish Mapped a Blazing World

Marion Wynne-Davies’s chapter quotes ‘Heaven was too long a reach for man to recover at one step and therefore God first placed him upon the earth’. Maps, and the roads they depicted, were therefore not only useful for navigation on earth, but also a guide on the spiritual road to ‘heaven’. This chapter considers Margaret Cavendish’s fictional accounts of road travel which are derived not from scientific exploration or a quest for spiritual truth, but from political necessity and harsh personal experience. Wynne-Davies argues that in order to understand the roads and journeys of Cavendish’s ‘blazing world’, it becomes necessary to consider her material experience of space in both its political and personal evocations. The Duchess’s fantastical narrative alludes to a host of material journeys: William Barentsz’s attempt to discover a North East passage; the protective delta of Antwerp; and the journeys to London and to Welbeck Abbey. The final confluence of the worlds occurs on the road through Nottinghamshire, as the Empress and the Duchess – in spirit form – fly above what is the A60 today. While Speed claims that ‘Heaven was too long a reach’, Cavendish’s ‘blazing world’ both challenges and undermines any certainty, political, spiritual or gendered, on the roads of early modern Britain

Orange Women, Female Spectators, and Roaring Girls: Women and Theater

The author introduces articles in the symposium "Women and Theater" in "Medieval and Renaissance Drama," describing the primary types of women who attended the theater in early modern England and how they were represented on stage. Orange-women and others sold their wares to audiences. Mary Frith dressed as a man, moved among the audiences, and was represented in Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's "The Roaring Girl." Female spectators were represented to be attending to experience illicit sexual encounters, as well as other reasons besides actually seeing the play. The convergence seems to lie in the middle and lower class status of all the women represented

Orange Women, Female Spectators, and Roaring Girls: Women and Theater

The author introduces articles in the symposium "Women and Theater" in "Medieval and Renaissance Drama," describing the primary types of women who attended the theater in early modern England and how they were represented on stage. Orange-women and others sold their wares to audiences. Mary Frith dressed as a man, moved among the audiences, and was represented in Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton's "The Roaring Girl." Female spectators were represented to be attending to experience illicit sexual encounters, as well as other reasons besides actually seeing the play. The convergence seems to lie in the middle and lower class status of all the women represented