'And Hector laughed': comic treatment of the myth of the Trojan War in early modern England

My thesis foregrounds the centrality of the comic mode to the reception of the myth of the Trojan War in early modern England. For a period characterised by a singular fascination with exemplarity, the Trojan myth offered an important depiction of men’s pursuit of distinction, providing both the exempla of male virtue and the ways of subjecting these exempla to scrutiny. The incongruities inherent to the practice of exemplarity, I argue, made it particularly susceptible to comedy since comedy springs from and revolves around incongruity. Of all extant texts on the Trojan myth in early modern England – the thesis presents an exhaustive corpus (c. 1550–1700) – half are either fully or partially comic; the same almost equal split between the serious and the humorous is seen in passing allusions to the myth. This substantially revises what we know of the Trojan War’s place in early modern England. While it has long been known that the Trojan myth was the most popular classical myth in England at the time, my research shows that a humorous reading of it was not a deviation; comic treatments were as frequent as earnest ones. The thesis suggests that a major role in developing this comic tradition was played by drama: the embodiment of the Trojan War on stage in the first part of the seventeenth century contributed to how the myth’s male heroes grew to be perceived by the second half of the century, the period when comic appropriation of classical mythology became formalised in the burlesque. My thesis thus offers a new detailed pre-history of the English burlesque, demonstrating how the genre originates with the period’s critique of exemplarity and how it heralds the ‘quarrel of ancients and moderns’. The thesis also re-contextualises Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. With its irreverent tone and a fixation on characters’ laughter, the play is shown to be participating in the nascent tradition of mocking Troy’s exemplary legacy, a tradition that Troilus and Cressida itself seems to propel by influencing other dramatists and, with them, the cultural scene more broadly. Finally, by drawing attention to the importance of the comic mode to the early modern critique of exemplarity, the thesis advances our understanding of this central phenomenon of humanist rhetoric.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Ganberg, Evgeniia

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Demetriou, Tania

• early modern England
• Trojan War
• Shakespeare
• comedy
• humour
• classical reception
• mythology
• drama
• exemplarity

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/e759442c-ffc1-4d84-b88f-38181e7772d6/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0009-0002-0635-2456

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/391128