Abstract: “Poor Sacrifices of Our Enmity”: Corporeal Sacrifice, Social Reconciliation, and Transcendence

Bruce Young

As Stephen Greenblatt points out, Shakespeare always uses the words atone and atonement in a social sense, to mean the bringing together of divided parties. Yet, even without using these words, Shakespeare offers a host of allusions and images related to the religious doctrine of atonement: references to redemption and salvation, to Christ’s corporeal suffering and death, and to sacrifice—especially to bodily human sacrifice intended to purge sin, satisfy revenge, reconcile enemies, or achieve transcendence of some sort. Here I will focus on these references to and depictions of sacrifice and consider how material acts, especially ones involving bodily suffering and death, could be viewed as achieving social, psychological, and spiritual ends. This thread found repeatedly in Shakespeare’s plays is a telling example of the materiality of religious understanding and practice in the pre-Cartesian world—or rather, perhaps more accurately, an example of what John Polkinghorne has called “dual-aspect monism,” the view, which seems to me dominant among Shakespeare and his contemporaries, that the world, though ultimately constituting a single undividable reality, has two aspects, what can be roughly called material and spiritual. What this would mean for sacrifice is that the sacrificial event can be viewed simultaneously in two ways (if not more): it is an objective event involving material—palpable, visible, measurable, mutable—bodies, yet at the same time it is an event with psychological, social, and spiritual effects, experienced by what are in some sense conscious agents, including the sacrificial victims, the sacrificers, and others who participate in the sacrifice: entities capable of being acted upon but also endowed with motives, with the power to interpret and act, and with vital sensory, emotional, ethical, ideational, and relational experience.

Shakespeare presents a range of sacrificial events toward which the plays suggest a variety of contrasting attitudes. There are brief references to animal sacrifice (practiced by pagans of classical antiquity); in Titus Andronicus the ritual sacrifice of human beings satisfies some primal sense of honor and justice but sets in motion the horrific events of the play; Othello strives without complete success to view the murder of Desdemona as a ritual sacrifice. More ambiguously, the deaths of Romeo and Juliet are viewed as sacrifices—perhaps necessary, or perhaps tragically wasteful and avoidable—that reconcile the families. Lear views certain events, not clearly specified—perhaps his own willingness to give up power, perhaps Cordelia’s self-risking love—as “sacrifices” upon which “the gods themselves throw incense.” The word sacrifice literally means “to make sacred or holy,” a meaning fraught with ambiguity, as René Girard has noted, since “the sacred” can refer to a self-deceiving mystification of violence or to an ethical self-offering capable of achieving genuine, yet not simply otherworldly, transcendence.

A few suggested books:

Girard, René. The Girard Reader. Ed. James G. Williams. New York: Crossroad, 1996.

Polkinghorne, John. The Polkinghorne Reader: Science, Faith, and the Search for Meaning. Ed. Thomas Jay Oord. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press, 2010.

Russell, Robert John, Philip Clayton, Kirk Wegter-McNelly, and John Polkinghorne, eds. Quantum Mechanics: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action Vol. 5. Vatican: Vatican Observatory & Center for Theology, 2002.

Sanders, John, ed. Atonement and Violence: A Theological Conversation. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006.

Shuger, Debora Kuller.  The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity.  Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1994.

A bio:

Bruce Young has taught at Brigham Young University for over three decades. During that time he has also taught in London and Hawaii and spent time in Paris, Beijing, Guatemala, and other parts of the world. His areas of interest include Shakespeare, the English Renaissance, C. S. Lewis, and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. He has written articles on these and other topics, as well as reviews, poetry, and personal essays. In 2009, he published the book Family Life in the Age of Shakespeare and is now at work on a book titled Shakespeare’s Dramas of Atonement.

The Shape of Patience in The Tempest

Deni Kasa

           

In his On Patience, St. Augustine warns Christians not to call a man’s endurance of pain by the name “patience” without first establishing his orthodoxy: “When therefore thou shalt see any man suffer aught patiently, do not straightway praise it as patience; for this is only shown by the cause of suffering. When it is a good cause, then is it true patience. But when that is placed in crime, then is this much misplaced in name” (528). Writing during the English Reformation, William Cowper describes patience in much the same way: “[heretics] may make a shew of voluntary Religion in not sparing the body, but seeing they haue not the truth of God, how can they haue true Patience?” (286). Although these tracts respond to two very different historical contexts, they voice the same tendency in Christian theology to limit patience only to the orthodox. It follows that whoever has the authority to decide what orthodoxy means—the clergy, the nation, theologians—reifies their own authority when they evaluate someone’s patience.

            In this paper I argue that in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, this theological approach to Christian patience allows Prospero to divide his subjects into those who actively participate in sovereignty and those who do not. Prospero’s subjects are not divided into the heretical and the orthodox, but the binary structure of Christian patience divides them into essentialized classes. Ferdinand, for example, proves his worth through his patience:

            The very instant that I saw you did

            My heart fly to your service, there resides

            To make me slave to it, and for your sake

            Am I this patient log-man;                                                                              (III.i.64-67)

Ferdinand’s willingness to be patient is supposed to prove that he is, to borrow Milton’s phrase, by merit more than birthright a king and a deserving suitor for Miranda. At the same time, Ferdinand’s patience contrasts with Caliban’s notable impatience when performing the same work. This system of supposed merit and reward breaks down, however, when Prospero blames Caliban’s behaviour on his “shape”: “He is as disproportion'd in his manners / As in his shape” (V.i.291-292). Prospero thus essentializes moral behaviour along class lines by reducing it to the material “shape” of the agent: Caliban is as it were predestined to be impatient, and Ferdinand’s patience, it now become clear, was a function of his ostensibly superior “shape” all along. By reading these negotiations of patience in terms of the theological history of this virtue, I argue that Prospero adopts the power once reserved for ecclesiastical authorities in order to divide his subjects according to their shape. In the same way that the governing ecclesiastical bodies must deem a martyr orthodox in order for his patience to be genuine, so Prospero must deem his servant to be of an appropriate “shape” in order for his patience to register as such. The sovereign decision—in one case regarding orthodoxy, in the other regarding material “shape”—precedes the patience of those being judged, and yet the decision is justified as a reflection of the victim's behaviour.

Augustine, Saint. On Patience. Trans. Rev. H. Browne, M.A. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of

the Christian Church. Ed. Philip Schaff, D.D. Vol. 3. Buffalo: The Christian Literature Company, 1887. Print. 527-536

Beckwith, Sarah. Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 2011. Print.

Bouwsma, William J. “The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in

Renaissance Thought.” Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirror of its European Transformations. Ed. Heiko A. Oberman and Thomas A. Brady. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975. Print. 3-60

Cowper, William. Two fruitfull and godly treatises, to comfort the afflicted. London: Printed by

T. S[nodham] for Iohn Budge, 1616. Early English Books Online. Web. February 7^th, 2015.

Nyquist, Mary. Arbitrary Rule: Slavery ,Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2013. Print.

Shakespeare, William.The Tempest. Ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan.

London: Arden, 2011. Print.

Deni Kasa is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. He is writing a dissertation on the relationship between sovereignty and theology in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. 

Unctious Matter in Hamlet

            Though sometimes regarded as a sign of the play’s forward-looking modernism, Hamlet’s skeptical materialism (what Stephen Greenblatt calls the Dane’s “irreducible corporeality”) emerges from Reformation theological debates, especially theories of the eucharist.  Scholars such as Sarah Beckwtih and Katherine Eggert have shown how anxieties about the real presence of the body of Christ within the ritual of communion had broad cultural implications.  This essay examines the shaping influence of a different sacrament—extreme unction—on the play.  The administration of oil by a priest to the deathly ill was thought to be an extra-biblical invention of the church as early as the writings of John Wycliffe.  At the same time, unctuous oil was also a topic of natural philosophy since Aristotle, for whom it was the glue that allowed the four elements to join together and remain fixed.   Medieval and early modern medial writing drawing on this tradition recorded competing recipes for producing healing “unctions” derived from various plants.  Turning to the play, and especially Hamlet’s obsession with material processes of corruption, purgation, and reincarnation, I suggest that unction—a word that appears only twice in Shakespeare and both times in Hamlet—operates kind of enchanted matter that triggers catharsis or purgation in the witnessing audience. 

Embodied Acts and the Question of Intention in Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies

Christopher Crosbie
North Carolina State University

When Isabella pleads for Angelo’s life at the end of Measure for Measure, she doubly invokes the deputy’s intentions as reason for exculpation.  Arguing that, at first, “a due sincerity governed his deeds” and that, later, even at his worst, “his act did not o’ertake his bad intent,” Isabella figures intention – whether instantiated or unrealized – as crucial for evaluating Angelo’s actions.  Frequently dismissed as mere casuistry, Isabella’s speech sits uneasily within distinct ethical systems.  A performance redolent of deontological ethics, Isabella’s plea relies heavily on a consequentialist epistemology, one that seems – particularly given the nature of Angelo’s vices – to run counter to Christian notions of transgression.  Taking Measure for Measure as a starting point and gesturing outward to other problem comedies, this essay will examine Shakespeare’s use of intention as a mechanism for reimagining the standards of moral evaluation in an era dominated by Aristotelian virtue ethics.

Selected Works

Beauregard, David N. Virtue’s Own Feature: Shakespeare and the Virtue Ethics Tradition. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1995.

Coodin, Sara.  “What’s Virtue Ethics Got to Do With It? Shakespearean Character as Moral Character.” Shakespeare and Moral Agency. Ed. Michael D. Bristol. New York: Continuum, 2010.

Holbrook, Peter. “Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Classical Reason.” Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics. Ed. Patrick Gray and John D. Cox. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2014. 261–283.

Strier, Richard. “Shakespeare against Morality.” Reading Renaissance Ethics. Ed. Marshall Grossman and Theodore B. Leinwand. New York: Routledge, 2007. 206–225.

Brief Bio:

I'm an Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University and specialize in early modern English drama with a particular interest in intellectual history.  My previous work, which has focused on a wide range of philosophical issues in early modern literature, has appeared in journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Renascence, Renaissance Papers, and Arthuriana, as well as in multiple edited collections.  This SAA paper marks a turn to a more sustained inquiry into the synthesis of Christian and classical ethical theories in early modern English culture.

Alchemy, Agency, and Religious Conversion

There’s a strong conceptual affinity between religious conversion and alchemy. In both cases, a material undergoes a radical – even fundamental – change. Conceptualizing such a change requires drastic, even mystical, vocabulary. Jeffrey Shoulson has recently argued that Shakespeare draws on alchemical tropes in Merchant of Venice to analogize religious conversion. I will build upon his analysis to interrogate how such an analogy affects the agency of religious conversion. While Post-Reformation conversion narratives tend towards the internal, how do alchemical analogies complicate such interiority?

Specifically, I will analyze the writings of the natural philosopher and serial religious convert Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665) alongside Jonson’s Alchemist and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Digby claimed to have found the recipe for the “powder of sympathy,” a compound which purports to cure a wound when applied — not to the wound itself — but rather to the object that created the wound. I argue that his “sympathetic powder” offers a useful opportunity to meditate on questions of agency and transformation.

Like Digby, Ben Jonson conformed to the English Church for a period of years before returning to the Roman Catholic faith. Yet in The Alchemist, as in perhaps all of his city comedies, one might ask: Are his characters capable of conversion? I will argue that alchemical metaphors will hold one clue to developing a Jonsonian theory of religious conversion. In returning to Shakespeare, my hope is that the discussion of sympathy, agency, and alchemy will then allow us to bring the same set of questions back to Shylock and Jessica: They seem both “forced” and yet “not allowed” to “turn Christian.” Perhaps a set of alchemical principles will help us understand that double bind.   

Selected Sources

Craig, Martin. Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014.

Digby, Kenelm. A late discourse made in a solemn assembly . . . touching the cure of wounds by the powder of sympathy. London, 1658.  

Lobis, Seth. Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2015.

Shoulson, Jeffrey S. Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 2013.

Watson, Robert N. Ben Jonson’s Parodic Strategy: Literary Imperialism in the Comedies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1987.

Brief Bio

I am an Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University. My work has dealt with serial converts in early modern England as well as the role of the senses in idolatry discourse. In this paper, I will see if I can merge my two projects.

Materializing Confession: Allegory and History in A Warning for Fair Women

Nova Myhill, New College of Florida

In this paper, I will explore the relation between the historical and the allegorical aspects of crime and punishment in the anonymous A Warning for Fair Women, a true crime play centered on the murder of George Sanders by George Brown with the possible complicity of Sanders’s wife, Anne. My particular interest lies in the staging of interior states that can be made visible only through a series of presentational theatrical conventions—the aside and the allegorical dumbshow--and what this materializing of the invisible might mean in terms of Protestant notions of testimony and providence. The stage can show, can transform into actions, what the scaffold and the pamphlet can only tell, a distinction that becomes vitally important when Brown’s confession on the scaffold fails to confirm the court’s ruling that Anne Sanders is as guilty as the rest except in an aside. The presentational convention of the aside establishes the stage as a medium able to reveal the soul of the figure on the scaffold where the gallows can only reveal the body.

Works Cited:

Campana, Joseph. “Staging Allegory,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 55:2 (2015): 327-39.

Dolan, Frances. “Gender, Moral Agency, and Dramatic Form in A Warning for Fair Women.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 29 (1989): 201-18.

Owens, Margaret. Stages of Dismemberment, University of Delaware Press, 2005

Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.

Quick Bio: I'm an Associate Professor of English at New College of Florida. Most of my work is on early modern audiences, which involved some work on martyrdom because of its consistent production of wildly differing interpretations from its spectators; I'm thinking about it as a representational rather than an epistemological problem, which means that I'm interested in physical staging issues. I've also been thinking a lot about asides lately. I'm trying to use this paper to think about felony executions in religious and performance terms.

Sacralizing and Aestheticizing Disability in Shakespeare’s Richard III

Sacralizing and Aestheticizing Disability in Shakespeare’s Richard III

Mardy Philippian, Ph.D.

Simpson University

Abstract for SAA 2016 / Seminar 49: “Shakespeare, Materialism, Religion”

Late in act 3 of Shakespeare’s Richard III, the play’s “rudely stamped” titular figure manipulatively appropriates a prayer book and “stands ‘tween two clergymen” in an act of self-sacralizing. Richard Cloucester, later King Richard, choreographs this public spectacle in an effort to elide the sense of holiness and moral probity, which was commonly associated with prayer book worship, with his own dubiously formed body. Yet this is not the only moment in the play when Richard seeks to remake himself in the image of a sacred figure. As early as 1.2.249-250, he apostrophizes in soliloquy, and through careful allusion, that he is not unlike the figure of Yahweh in the Hebrew scriptures. Richard’s disabled frame is gradually refashioned as inscrutable material form.

In my essay I argue that Richard’s use of contemporary religious books, allusions to Hebrew scripture, and the careful exploitation of his physical difference is not merely his particular collective strategy for usurping monarchical authority in Shakespeare’s late fifteenth-century England. Rather, in employing these techniques of deception and manipulation of public sentiment, Shakespeare’s Richard also partakes in, borrowing Tobin Siebers concept, an aestheticizing of disability. As Siebers argues, "Aesthetics is the human activity most identifiable with the human because it defines the process by which human begins attempt to modify themselves, by which they imagine their feelings, forms, and futures in radically different ways, and by which they bestow upon these new feelings, forms, and futures real appearances in the world (Disability Aesthetics 3). Shakespeare’s physically impaired villain, then, cunningly draws upon contemporary associations with sacred materials to aestheticize, or “modify,” his material form.

Bibliography

Cummings, Brian, Ed. The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2011.

Hobgood, Allison P. and David Houston Wood. Recovering Disability in Early Modern England.  Columbus: Ohio State U of P, 2013.

Iyengar, Sujata, Ed. Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body. New York:  Routledge, 2015.

Siebers, Tobin. Disability Aesthetics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010.

-- --. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008.

Swift, Daniel. Shakespeare's Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2013.

Short Bio

Mardy Philippian, Ph.D.

I am currently Associate Professor of English at Simpson University in Redding, California, where I teach courses in early modern English literature and culture. My research and publications primarily draw upon three areas of investigation: disability studies, cognitive theory, and religious studies.

Memory as Literary Prescription in English Renaissance Homiletics

Amy K. Burnette

This paper investigates how image-producing aspects of the ars memoria informed structural and stylistic conventions of early seventeenth-century English homiletics. I focus on the sermons of Church of England clergyman Thomas Adams, who, since disappearing into obscurity after the early 1630s, has remained one of the more significant buried literary talents of the seventeenth century. Celebrated by Robert Southey as "the prose Shakespeare of Puritan theologians," Adams was highly visible in print from the 1610s through the late 1620s, during which he published eighteen individual sermons, five sermon collections, and a lengthy commentary on St. Peter's second epistle. This paper is concerned with "The Sinners Passing-Bell. Together with Physic from Heaven," the last in a group of four sermons published as The Devil's Banquet (1614), in which Adams uses the image of the apothecary's shop as a mnemonic device to explain how scripture can be stored in and called forth from memory to protect the soul and facilitate its ascent to heaven--that is, as a means of spiritual healing. 

Apothecaries appeared on the Renaissance stage in plays such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Middleton’s The Roaring Girl, and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, but the apothecary’s shop itself was also a sort of theater in miniature, with its ornate jars, vials of colored waters and remedies, usually set out where passers-by could easily view them in windows and through doorways. Adams’s choice of provocative sermon titles such as The white deuill (preached at St. Paul’s in 1612, the year of the first performance of Webster’s play that bears the same title) suggests not only his awareness of the market in which his sermons competed for readership, but also of popular taste for the sensational apparent in contemporary drama. In "The Sinners Passing-Bell," Adams figures himself as a physician, referring to scripture as “balmes,” “drammes,” and “receits” meant to be stowed away in the apothecary’s “old store,” or memory. The metaphor of the apothecary’s shop is employed not only as a means of ordering the memory artificially, but it is also, I argue, the convention through which Adams’s sermon is able to achieve its intended effect: the striking image of the apothecary’s shop would have provided an easily recognizable, yet distinctive, mnemonic device for Adams’s wide array of readers and auditors. 

Selected Bibliography:

Bolzoni, Lina. The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001.

Clark, Stuart. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 2007.

Hunt, Arnold. The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590-1640. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010.

Pender, Stephen. "Rhetoric, Grief, and the Imagination in Early Modern England." Philosophy and Rhetoric 43.1 (2010): 54-85.

Wallis, Patrick. "Consumption, Retailing, and Medicine in Early-Modern London." Economic History Review 61.1 (2008): 26-53.

Bio:

Amy K. Burnette is a sixth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York. She is currently at work on her dissertation, Praxis Memoriae: Memory as Aesthetic Technique in English Renaissance Literature, 1580-1630, which explores how ideas circulating about memory, principally within the context of the humanist revival of the classical ars memoria, supplied late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century authors with a theory and practice of literary invention. A version of her first chapter, titled "Bearing Death in The Winter's Tale," will appear in the second revised edition of Dympna Callaghan's A Feminist Companion To Shakespeare.

Prospero and Caliban in Gibeon: Spiritual discernment and The Tempest’s covenantal materialism

Sam Kaufman

My paper begins from the premise that The Tempest’s incessant uncertainty about the location of the power of the moon marks its reception of Galileo’s instantly famous 1610 telescopic observations of the mountainous and pitted lunar surface. If the moon was mere matter like the earth, whence and wherefore its influence, if any? The play sees the ensuing materialism as both a political and a theological problem, demanding the reconciliation of providential action with practical politics. While traditional theories of mystical monarchy provided one nominal solution, the lability of spiritual powers in the person of the material “airy spirit” Ariel, who has served both Prospero and Sycorax, represents this solution’s failure. Like much 17^th-century political philosophy, the play represents several attempts to build up a new materialist politics via revived versions of Stoicism and Epicureanism, but these attempts fail. One way to explain these failures is through the traditional theological problem of the discernment of spirits – the distinction between spiritual experiences or events due to God and the devil – which could theoretically serve as an immanent means to discern providence in action. I will argue that Ariel’s lability also confounds simplistic forms of discernment, instead demanding an aestheticized form of discernment that avoids the risks of elitism or sensuality through a modification of covenantal theology that stresses the importance of suffering undertaken by both parties, a suffering which exceeds Stoic and Epicurean theorizations. As a side product, Prospero’s Machiavellianism is potentially resolved through appeals to a covenantal form of politics and a Lutheran understanding of demonism as spiritual trial. But more significantly for this seminar, the play faces providence through a covenantalism that is capacious enough to accommodate its terms over time to the maturations of its parties, in particular their changing understandings of their selves and the universe. My paper will suggest how the biblical story of Gibeon triangulates the miracles of the play, covenantal theology, 17^th-century political thought, and 17^th-century responses to Galileo. What I call “covenantal materialism” is the play’s cautionary refusal to build its ethics, à la Stoicism and Epicureanism, on a reductive materialism whose basis seemed to be currently changing, but to rely instead on the imaginative and voluntaristic capacities of its parties.

Barbour, Reid. English Epicures and Stoics : Ancient legacies in early Stuart culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

Clark, Stuart. Thinking with demons: The idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe. Oxford UP, 1997.

___. Vanities of the eye: Vision in early modern European culture. Oxford UP, 2007.

Coolidge, John S. The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.

Evett, David. “Luther, Cranmer, Service, and Shakespeare.” Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins. Centred on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way. Newark: U Delaware P, 2004. 87-109.

Kahn, Victoria Ann. Wayward Contracts : The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Bio:

My thesis began as a study of poetry’s variable role in framing the competing epistemic claims of early modern disciplines. A few years and a couple of abandoned chapters on Donne and Marlowe later, I’m completing a more reasonably focused dissertation on how Shakespeare (Midsummer vs Tempest) and Webster (The Duchess of Malfi) received Galileo’s lunar observations – secularizing, or not, and in what ways. The lunar observations’ scientific and cultural particularities make strange familiar stories of disenchantment, prompting quite idiosyncratic reimaginings of the relationship between the natural/philosophical, theological, political, and aesthetic. For example, sex is a huge part of the story – big surprise.

Next up, if the grant gods smile, a postdoc studying the interplay between philosophical and theological conceptions of spirits (from holy to material to demonic) in Shakespeare.

This paper is a reframing of a piece of the dissertation.  

The Dissolution of the Engine of this World: The Decay of Nature as Ecology and Commonwealth

Justin Kolb

Francis Shakelton's pamphlet A blazyng Starre (1580) reads the English earthquake and comet of 1580 as omens of “the finall dissolution of the Engine of this worlde […] whiche by many manifest and inevitable reasons I gather, can not bee farre of.” A blazing starre is the first known instance of a peculiar sort of slow apocalypse: “The Decay of Nature,” a gradual dissolution that sees the world, infected by sin, gradually crumble into its constituent elements, order receding back into atomized chaos:

[I]t shall manifestly be proved that this worlde shall perishe and passe awaie, if wee doe but consider the partes whereof it doeth consist, for doe we not see the earth to be changed and corrupted: […] Doe wee not in some places also read that mountaines have falne doune, by reason of earthquakes: […] Also have ye not read, that seas have rebounded backe, overwhelmed whole Cittes, and utterly drowned whole provinces: And what are these strange alterations els, but evident arguments that the world shall one daie have an ende.

This world waiting to be put out of its misery would become a major strand in English intellectual culture in the first half of the seventeenth century, succinctly summarized by George Herbert’s poem “Decay”:

I see the world grows old, whenas the heat

Of thy great love once spread, as in an urn

Doth closet up itself and still retreat,

Cold sinne still forcing it, till it return,

And calling Justice, all things burn.

In this paper, I will examine an earlier response to the decay of nature. In William Shakespeare’s Richard II ­(1597) we see Gaunt’s “other Eden, demi-paradise / This fortress built by Nature for herself” (2.1.42-43) crumble, and Richard’s claims to command the stones prove groundless. But in Richard’s final scene, the play briefly re-imagines a decaying hierarchy as a dynamic commonwealth, nature as a republic of creatures who approach each other as equals, on grounds of sympathy and love, and exist in a constant state of negotiation. The constellations of kings, prisoners, horses, grooms, stones, and jacks o’the clock are in constant swerving motion. The mutability of the world becomes a sign of hope and vitality, rather than despair and decrepitude. It’s all too brief, but for a moment Richard manages to convene what Bruno Latour calls the Parliament of Things, an assembly of human and nonhuman actors combining to make a world.

Unfortunately, Richard’s new constitution arrives at five minutes to midnight and assassins cut him off. Nevertheless, the possibility he floats remains a vivid alternative to the despair usually prompted by the decay of nature. As our own warming world faces rising seas and crumbling shores, we might learn from this transitory commonwealth and consider turning away from apocalyptic despair and convening our own parliament of things.

Murray Bookchin. The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. Oakland: AK Press, 2005.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Jonathan Goldberg. The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009.

Victor Harris. All coherence gone: a study of the seventeenth century controversy over disorder and decay in the universe. New York: Cass, 1966.

Julia Reinhard Lupton. “Creature Caliban,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 1. Spring, 2000: 1-23.

Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Steven Shaviro. “Consequences of Panpsychism.” The Nonhuman Turn. Ed. Richard Grusin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 19-44.

George Williamson. "Mutability, Decay, and Seventeenth-Century Melancholy." ELH 2, no. 2 (1935): 121-150.

Justin Kolb is an assistant professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo 

I am currently at work on a book manuscript, Spongy Natures: The Inhuman Ecologies of Ben Jonson's London, which reads Ben Jonson's city comedies as applications of a variety of material praxes, ranging from humoural medicine to alchemy to magnetism, in an effort to create characters suited to the rapidly changing city of London. 

I have also published work on Jonson, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bruno Latour, posthuman approaches to early modern English literature, and Islam in early modern literature.