University of Cambridge
'Serious Lots': Chance and Choice in Early Modern English Literature
Abstract
dc:description.abstractThis dissertation examines changing attitudes toward chance in early modern England by focusing upon the literary representation of ‘serious lots’: lotteries applied to a ‘serious purpose’. Used to allocate inheritances, elect civil officials, divvy up colonial lands, distribute punishments and dispense rewards, the ‘serious lot’ permeated every aspect of early modern life. I argue that, as tools applied at key moments to navigate questions of uncertainty or epistemological doubt, the ‘lot’ is vitally important for tracing the contours of ‘chance’ in the period: at once compelling its user to confront the vagaries of chance and forcing them to articulate how it worked. This makes my dissertation a study of ‘choice’ as well as ‘chance’: the chances that confronted the early modern mind, and the choices they made in representing it. My thesis rides a wave of renewed interest in ‘lotteries’, and a resurging interest in the history of chance: from work concerning the history of probability, to its connection to England’s expanding colonial and commercial horizons, and its depiction in drama, poetry and prose. Often rooted in a narrative of progress, this dissertation challenges the scholarly assumption that ‘chance’ underwent a uniform process of development, from the arbitrary dictates of the goddess ‘Fortuna’, to the calculated probabilism of mathematical risk. Instead, it posits that it is not chance which changed in the period, so much as our attitude toward it: our tolerance of its instabilities, our eagerness for its rewards. Taking the form of a series of case studies from the late Elizabethan period to the late Jacobean, from early modern pageantry to drama, science, theology and prose, it charts the emergence of a number of diverse perspectives on how to use chance, and how to represent it: from a symbol of the perils of political life in William Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, to a representation of colonial opportunity in Thomas Middleton’s Saxon play Hengist, King of Kent, to a representation of the serendipities of science in Francis Bacon, and a forerunner of probability in the fractious theological debates of the Puritans Thomas Gataker and William Ames. What emerges is a picture, not of chance’s mastery, but of her slow accommodation: a gradual surrender to the vagaries of fortune, and an acceptance of all the perils that attend it. Taken together, these chapters not only point to the rich, variegated and polysemous landscape of chance’s ideological life, but literature’s active role in shaping it. The project thus recasts our understanding of contingency in the period by placing ‘literature’ at the heart of a new history of chance: one attuned to the instrumental emplotment of contingency, rooted in the practical navigation of its effects, and sensitive to its granular changes over time.
Degree
thesis:*- Name dc:type.qualificationname
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Level dc:type.qualificationlevel
- Doctoral
- Grantor dc:publisher.institution
- University of Cambridge
- Year dc:date.issued
- 2024
Author and committee
dc:creator, dc:contributor.*- Author dc:creator
-
- Mortimer, Thomas
- Advisor dc:contributor.advisor
-
- Mukherji, Subha
Subjects
dc:subject × 9Rights
dc:rightsIdentifiers
dc:identifier.*- DOI dc:identifier.doi
- https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.112025
- OAI identifier oai:identifier
- oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/373696