The Dead Beloved in English Petrarchism
Open Access
- Author:
- Peacock, Jayme
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- July 31, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Patrick G Cheney, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Patrick G Cheney, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Garrett Sullivan, Jr., Committee Member
David Andrew Loewenstein, Committee Member
Sherry Roush, Outside Member
Marcy Lynne North, Committee Member
David Andrew Loewenstein, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Renaissance
Authorship
Petrarchism
Genre - Abstract:
- This dissertation seeks to expand current critical understandings of English Petrarchism by presenting it as a generically transformative mode that Renaissance writers deployed through the figure of the dead beloved. From Greek tragedy forward, the Western canon is littered with dead women, and Petrarch’s Laura becomes the central figure of amorous loss for the English Renaissance. Yet this recurrent figure remains unstudied. This dissertation attempts to resolve this oversight by examining Petrarchism’s impact on literary form and authorship through the figure of the dead beloved in the poetry and drama of the English Renaissance. Petrarch’s Laura was the most influential dead beloved for Renaissance writers, and both drama and poetry (with the notable exception of sonnet sequences) take up this figure. I therefore examine the dead beloved through a lens of Petrarchan tropes and features. In particular, I argue that the dead beloved functions as a crucial mechanism of change for the genres and forms represented in and by a given text. Through her, Petrarchism can interact dynamically with multiple other forms within a single work, resulting in generic disruptions and reformulations. Chapter One presents this process in Spenser’s Daphnaïda, in which the shepherd-poet Alcyon wallows in Petrarchan grief for the dead Daphne, resulting in a warping of elegy and pastoral. Chapter Two argues that Marlowe’s 1 Tamburlaine makes Zenocrate the point of origin for the hero’s reconciliation of epic and amatory modes, and that her death in 2 Tamburlaine divorces this reconciliation and subverts notions of epic immortality. Chapter Three turns to Shakespeare’s Ophelia, arguing that her death and affinity with lyric poetics make her an Orpheus figure. As such, her death points to the failure of poetry to overcome mortality, a truth that undermines the poetic aspirations that Hamlet declares at her funeral. Chapter Four turns to two Stuart revenge tragedies, Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy and Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, which both literalize Petrarchan tropes and weaponize the corpse of the dead beloved as an instrument of revenge. Both plays express a nostalgic longing for the idealized Petrarchan figure, yet both rely on her death to carry out revenge, and both conclude without any surviving Petrarchan characters, suggesting a cultural readiness to dispense with the mode. Not only do these texts confirm the dead beloved as a major figure in English Renaissance literature, they also suggest that writers understood her as a powerful tool for generic manipulation.