Exit the King: Sovereignty and Subjectivity in the English Baroque

This dissertation argues for a conception of the English 17th century as participating in a common aesthetic of dissonance – an aesthetic which it calls the “Baroque.” More than just a term for the ornate or profuse, its revival of the Baroque designation (and its contentious application to English literature) is a means of describing the period’s fascination with staging artistic figurations in which radically contradictory religious, social, and political paradigms cannot possibly be made to cohere yet must nevertheless coexist. Through readings of Marlowe’s Faustus, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Donne’s Holy Sonnets, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, it traces the period’s apprehension of, and neurotic fixation upon, the incompatibility of these proliferating new epistemologies: Lucretian atomism, the geo-political vistas of the “New World,” the schisms of Reformation, the Copernican revolution, the waning of Church power, and the rise of the Absolutist state. These destabilizing elements are worked asymmetrically into these texts’ designs and suspended in unreconciled dynamic tension, each work culminating in a moment when a figure – Faustus, Prospero, Donne’s speaker, even the Miltonic God – considers the inconsistent logics in which they are now enclosed and imagines a self-annihilation that would afford an escape from an unstable and collapsing system. The Baroque has not been a popular name for English poetry. 20th century scholarship deemed it inapt for British literature, invoking it only for the overt, fussy Catholicism of Crashaw or Southwell or to taxonomize heavily brocaded stylistic moments in Marvell or Cowley. My analysis instead uses the concept of the Baroque to diagram this period’s unresolved secularizing pressures, not just in its margins but in texts at the heart of the traditional canon. These disparate works amount to a systemic, self-coherent cultural revolution: a networked era of artistic production that is congruent (but not identical) with the continent’s own counter-reformational renovations, that is distinct from the Renaissance that precedes it, and that anticipates its neo-classical and transatlantic successors. Anatomizing this Baroque therefore troubles a long-standing neo-liberalist narrative of a self-evidently progressive democratic secular age and names the 17th century’s own apprehension of this new era’s tensions at its source.

Department dc:contributor.department

English

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Oliveira, Tony

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Warley, Christopher

• Baroque
• Donne
• Milton
• Political Theology
• Renaissance
• Shakespeare

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/98751

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/98751