Settlement aesthetics: theatricality, form, failure
Creators: name: Pirri, Caroline
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2020

description: Settlement Aesthetics identifies a period of English history between 1570 and 1620 – bracketed by the search for the Northwest Passage and Jamestown’s Starving Time – when the New World project was popularly regarded as a failed enterprise. Critics have deemphasized these early years, reading them as only a stage in England’s imperial ascent. But as my project shows, dramatists were taking up and adapting accounts of settlement’s failures, recognizing in them a set of formal techniques for representing crisis that could help them respond to changes in their own medium. The demands of the repertory system and a commercial interest in cultivating audiences motivated dramatists to adapt current events for popular consideration, to turn the theater (in Ben Jonson’s words) into a “staple of news.” By the late sixteenth century, unprecedented geographic expansion outside the theater precipitated an expansion of the dramatic setting in new genres such as city comedy, dramatic romance, and tragicomedy. As a result, theater’s foundational technologies – prop, person, line, and scene – were themselves undergoing a sea change. The plays I consider draw on the forms of settlement crisis, from cartographic illiteracy and spatial disorientation to the failure of traditional expertise, to show how fraught and uneven this theatrical expansion was. My chapters, one on New World writing itself, and three on the dramatic texts that responded to it, reconstruct the formal vocabularies that emerged from settlement’s signature catastrophes. By reading dramatic interest in settlement as aesthetic, rather than merely thematic, I show how settlement failures were central to the history of dramatic form. By recovering a history of settlement before settlement – settlement that is still unsettled – I recover the aesthetic legacy of New World writing as it was understood by early moderns themselves. Writings emerging from the settlement context considered the New World less as a place or distinct setting, than as a container for epistemological and generic uncertainty. The imprint of settlement’s material and representational failures, retained in drama, then, invites us to look for coloniality in places, and in forms, that we might not expect. What makes the dramas I consider – from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine to Ben Jonson’s early city comedies – New World plays is not their fidelity to specific settlement documents, the frequency of references to the Americas, or an explicitly colonial setting, but the way they translate the tropes and conventions of colonial catastrophe into a theatrical language, turning them to new uses and occasions. While work on the global Renaissance often cites ‘the early modern world’ as a critical abstraction, I identify a fifty-year span (1570-1620) and a geographic context (American settlement) to show how the questions and conflicts surrounding the New World might also have implications for how we read colonialism’s futures. By exposing the anxiety, doubt, and uncertainty that attended imperialism’s rise, Settlement Aesthetics draws a line between the seventeenth century and the present. Given that we are still settlers, my project outlines the vocabularies of catastrophe that mark our own settlement moment.