EMLS 8.1 (May, 2002]: Article Abstracts

Early
Abstracts

Romancing Multiplicity: Female Subjectivity and the Body Divisible in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World
Geraldine Wagner
College of the Holy Cross

Elizabeth Cary's Mariam and the Critique of Pure Reason
William Hamlin
Washington State University

Propaganda or a Record of Events? Richard Mulcaster's The Passage Of Our Most Drad Soveraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth Through The Citie Of London Westminster The Daye Before Her Coronacion
William Leahy
Brunel University

Religion, Politics, Revenge: The Dead in Renaissance Drama
Thomas Rist
University of Aberdeen

"The Legend of the Bischop of St. Androis Lyfe" and the Survival of Scottish Poetry
David J. Parkinson
University of Saskatchewan

"Thy temperance invincible": Humanism in Book II of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Regained
Sung-Kyun Yim
Sookmyung Women's University

Romancing Multiplicity: Female Subjectivity and the Body Divisible in Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World
Geraldine Wagner
College of the Holy Cross

By exploring the mutually constitutive relationship between the multiple selves represented in Blazing World, my essay argues that this text resolves a tension in Cavendish's work between a female subject proscribed corporeally by societal expectations, and a female subjectivity that emerges through a recognition of the body's textuality. I examine how this corporeal subjectivity is figured through the paradigm of romance, which provides an enabling structure for the transformative encounters that characterize the self-self relationships in this text.

Situating Cavendish's concept of female bodiliness within her organic materialism, which defined nature as an infinitely divisible oneness, I consider how the textual body that Blazing World dramatizes defies dominant Early Modern patriarchal and androcentric ideologies. I do this by demonstrating how Cavendish's philosophy finds its fullest expression in the somewhat homo-erotic friendship between Empress and Duchess, who, respectively, represent her fantasy and worldly selves.

Their growing intimacy is traced through a series of shared experiences culminating in a merging of Duchess and Empress that "gives birth" to a further self, a militaristic Goddess. I read the slippages between these personas and their narrator/author-- herself a character within, and the manipulating pen behind, the text-as opening a literary space in which the limits of both relational and individualist models of identity are exceeded. Finally, I show how Blazing World's thematic exploration of infinite self-generativity is mirrored by its structural circularity.

Elizabeth Cary's Mariam and the Critique of Pure Reason
William Hamlin
Washington State University

Most discussions of Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam have concentrated either on the play's explorations of female resistance to patriarchal tyranny or on contradictions within prevailing political and gender discourses. My essay, while fully acknowledging the importance of this body of criticism, deals rather with Mariam's emphasis on epistemological concerns. Placing the tragedy within the world of theological dispute in which Cary and her readers lived, I focus in particular on the philosophical issues of doubt, credulity, and certainty so central to Mariam's action and choral commentary. Working from strong textual evidence of Cary's familiarity with Montaigne, I argue that Mariam insistently questions the too-sharp distinction between rational and affective realms that the Chorus and several major characters routinely assume - and that contributes significantly to Mariam's death. Cary, in my view, nurtures a readerly skepticism in her audience, with the result that the Chorus's claims become necessary antecedents rather than final adjudications in an ongoing dialectic of judgmental assessment.

The pamphlet written by Richard Mulcaster to commemorate the accession of Queen Elizabeth I to the throne, The Passage Of Our Most Drad Soveraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth Through The Citie Of London To Westminster The Daye Before Her Coronacion, is central to our contemporary understanding of representations of the Queen and of this kind of early modern spectacle. This is demonstrated by the fact that it is a text that is, and has been, constantly used in studies of Elizabeth's reign, her personality and the nature of spectacle itself. This use began with its appearance in Holinshed's Chronicle, and the pamphlet continues to be referred to in most contemporary critical and historical studies. This paper questions whether, given its widespread use as both a historical and critical document, it is, in fact, reliable. The research presented here shows that it was something else entirely, and should be treated as such. In this sense, this document is seen to participate in what Walter Benjamin has described as a "triumphal procession", whereby it has been transmitted throughout history in a normative fashion, being endlessly reproduced in a manner characterised by focusing upon the dominant figure of Elizabeth, occluding its status as a propagandist text.

Religion, Politics, Revenge: The Dead in Renaissance Drama
Thomas Rist
University of Aberdeen

This article argues that in the history of criticism preoccupation with the presentation and treatment of the dead in Early Modern English drama has been too narrowly focused on the figure of the Ghost of Hamlet. To illustrate this, it places Hamlet in the context both of widespread religio-political developments of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries in regard to the dead, and also in more immediately dramatic contexts - for example, John Webster's The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. It thereby shows that critical debates surrounding Hamlet's Ghost are usefully approached from a wider historical and dramatic perspective than has traditionally been the case, and that our understandings of Hamlet itself benefit from such perspective.

Such wider perspective also suggests that by representating the dead, Renaissance drama as a whole, and particularly the genre of Revenge Tragedy, interacted - and invited its audiences to interact - with controversial religio-political developments of the period. Studying representations of the dead in Renaissance drama, thus, gives focus to the interactions of the drama with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious controversy. Theatrical presentations of the dead are shown to give rise to controversy both within and between dramas. They also suggest that individual dramatists engaged in enacted controversy between themselves, thereby providing us with insight into their authors' religio-political sympathies.

"The Legend of the Bischop of St. Androis Lyfe" and the Survival of Scottish Poetry
David J. Parkinson
University of Saskatchewan

Their favoured manner readily characterized as feminine in its tendency to invective and rigmarole, Scottish poets experienced vicissitudes during the precarious early majority of James VI. Robert Sempill exemplifies one authorial strategy during this uncertain period: drawing knowledgeably on the rich poetic tradition of late-medieval Scotland, he hones satire into a political instrument of lasting value for reform, and thereby ensures the survival of elements at least from that tradition. "The Legend of the Bischop of St. Androis Lyfe," a lengthy satire on the colourful Patrick Adamson, archbishop of St. Andrews, contains a variety of evidence for the collection and presentation of a scurrilous but plausible attack on a prominent public figure, an attack that implicates its target in a variety of disgraceful activities, notably the practices of witchcraft. At this decisive moment, satire not only reflects but also influences official and unofficial processes, and attains peculiar relevance to the increasingly sensitive topic of witchcraft.

"Thy temperance invincible": Humanism in Book II of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Regained
Sung-Kyun Yim
Sookmyung Women's University

This essay argues that Spenser and Milton, as humanist artists and at the same time devout Protestants, struggle to cope with the obvious conflict between what they believe to be an ultimate truth and aesthetically sound way to present it. Their ultimate truth is Christian, yet humanist morality and aesthetics are the only way that they can present the truth. By examining, in particular, the temptations Guyon and Jesus confront in Book II of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Regained and how they react against them, we will get to an understanding that the two poets share the same conviction to educate the reader. Guyon, despite his limitations, maintains humanist-Christian virtue of temperance and thus shows by example how Christian must act in this world. To Spenser, humanism is simply an appropriate way to educate the reader to become a good Christian. Milton, however, is keenly aware of the inadequacy of employing humanist ideas and aesthetics in his depiction of the ultimate Christian hero. Humanism must be rejected for Jesus to reveal himself as the victor over Satanic power. Perhaps, Milton's England makes the author of the brief epic more severe towards the humanist tradition he has inherited than Elizabethan England does for Spenser. Nevertheless, in his belief that man is capable of imitating Christ, we can find the humanist spirit alive in the heart of the poet whose beliefs in human nature may have been shattered by the Restoration.