Atoms of change : philological intersections and cultural transformation, 1587-1621
Keywords: Comparative Literature.

This dissertation captures how cultural change in the Renaissance, including the political uses of history, the legacy of classical antiquity, and matters of identity, is refracted on an atomic level in the circulation and re-use of textual fragments across linguistic and historical boundaries. By investigating Renaissance practices of reading and composition across poets, playwrights, and political intellectuals, the project demonstrate how literary questions of imitation and translation are enmeshed in the larger cultural transformations of the period. Committedly transnational in its approach, Atoms of Change traces the movements of textual fragments and rhetorical forms across English, Latin, Italian, and German and demonstrates the shaping force such concealed extracts exert on literary form and cultural signification in their new contexts. The first chapter, "Reading for Echoes: Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and the Uses of History in the Age of the Armada" is a study originating from a new archival discovery of one the earliest and most systematic applications in England of Machiavelli's Discorses on Livy and Guicciardini's History of Italy to a specific political problem, the threat of Spanish invasion in the months prior to the Armada of 1588. Its subject is an Elizabethan treatise on foreign policy, existing in fragments that can only be reconstructed through uncovering its concealed and revisionary translations of Florentine writing. The chapter is at once a work of textual restoration and of intellectual history, reviving a voice obscured by discrete adaptations of Italian political thought, transmitted by impersonal counsel such as aphorisms and examples. Textual restoration reveals the treatise to be engaged in a sustained negotiation between Machiavellian exemplarity and Guicciardinian historicism, reflected in its tactical adaptations of Florentine aphorisms and examples. History is diminished as a source of definite political knowledge and enlarged as an illustration of the vulnerabilities of nations and kingdoms, establishing an urgent need for prudential judgement in sovereigns and their counsellors. In turn this propels the treatise toward an increasingly rhetorical use of examples, mediated through figures such as Geoffrey Fenton, in order to cultivate this faculty of judgement in its readers. As a whole the chapter demonstrates how immediate political pressure shaped how Machiavelli and Guicciardini were read, interpreted, and applied in an English context, tracing this intellectual shift on the granular level of manuscript text. The subject of this dissertation's second chapter, "Illusion and Interpretation: Shakespeare's Alcestis and the Philology of Recognition, " is the problem of allusion in drama as window onto the covert legacy of Greek tragedy on Renaissance theater. It takes as its focal case Shakespeare's use of the Alcestis myth of female resurrection and spousal reunion, dramatized by Euripides and familiar from Latin and vernacular retellings, across plays from Much Ado about Nothing to Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale. Too heavily mediated and ambivalent to constitute an allusion, and yet too fragmented and unsystematic to constitute an adaptation, it represents an intertextual relation that comes through only in fragments and develops cumulatively, shifting the temporality of reading and recognition and challenging our understanding of what it meant to look and sound classical in the period. The third chapter, "Patchwork: Der bestrafte Brudermord and the Problems of Hamlet" approaches the complex textual history of Shakespeare's Hamlet by way of its first continental adaptation, the German play Fratricide Punished. Inverting a perspective familiar from critics such as T.S. Eliot, this chapter demonstrates that the Brudermord is instead a deliberate revision that attempts to patch over gaps in the English drama by revising both the short 1603 Quarto and the extended Folio version, while integrating material from The Tempest and the German Haupt-und Staatsaktion repertoire. The chapter develops the critical concept of the patchwork to enable reading across the Brudermord's imperfections for what it produces, as a Hamlet from the margins emerging from the spaces between languages, borders, and texts. The fourth chapter, "Herbert and the Hellespont: Martial, Race, and the Topographies of Homoeroticism, " begins by unravelling a network of racial, geographic, and homoerotic allusion in a Latin love poem sent in manuscript by Herbert to Francis Bacon. Taking as its starting point a persistently unresolved crux, the poem's apostrophe to the beloved "Ceste, " the chapter traces this name from an eroticized slave in Martial's Epigrams through to its early modern associations with narratives of romance and conquest dividing Europe and Asia, as the city of Sestos on the Hellespont. Its network of allusion and etymology sends readers on a search outside the poem, through contemporaneous debates about race, sexuality, and the poetics of blackness and beyond to the problem of literary contextualization. As a coda to this dissertation, "Auxesis and the Amoretti: Spenser and the Poetics of Minor Differences, " turns to a figure paradoxically associated most closely with the emergence of a distinctively English literary tradition, yet equally noted for his manifold allusions to continental and classical poets. This chapter intervenes into the problem by approaching it through the lens of genre, arguing that Spenser's sonnet sequence, the Amoretti, produces a distinctive spin on the poetics of auxesis, or amplification, through its integration of epic motifs from continental poets such as Ronsard, Tasso, and Camões. In a sonnet, a genre marked from its origins by hyperbolic praise and constrained formally by length, auxesis can fundamentally be only a minor change. Minor in its individual instantiations, yet gathering force as it builds throughout the sequence. The Amoretti, or romances in miniature, themselves turn on the poetics of minor differences and the magnification generated through positioning on the printed page and within the sequence. Miniaturization and carefully patterned motifs become the technique by which Spenser domesticates continental models for an English audience. The purpose of this concluding reflection is to demonstrate how translingualism and geopolitical tension may be contained and indeed effaced through minor literary adjustments at a critical juncture for the history of the English language and literary tradition