Shakespeare's Tumid Embroidery: Lucan and the Figuration of Sovereign Power in the Two Tetralogies

Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Faircloth, Adam
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 03, 2021
- Committee Members:
- Claire Mary Colebrook, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Garrett Sullivan, Jr., Committee Member
Patrick G Cheney, Committee Member
David Andrew Loewenstein, Committee Member
Daniel Chapin Beaver, Outside Member
David Andrew Loewenstein, Program Head/Chair
Claire Mary Colebrook, Committee Chair/Co-Chair - Keywords:
- Shakespeare
Lucan
Sovereignty
Henriad
Pharsalia - Abstract:
- Shakespeare’s Tumid Embroidery is the first full-length study to examine Shakespeare’s reception of the Neronian poet, Lucan. In the past thirty years, critics have established Lucan’s tremendous influence upon Shakespeare’s contemporaries and Caroline successors. However, there remains no critical consensus as to the extent to which Shakespeare was familiar with Lucan’s civil war epic, the Pharsalia, or whether Shakespeare read Lucan at all. Shakespeare’s Tumid Embroidery resolves theses contentions, demonstrating that Shakespeare not only read Lucan, but that Lucan’s poetics deeply inflected Shakespeare’s portrayal of civil war and his conception of sovereign power. The central claim of this study is that Shakespeare worked routinely and directly with a Latin text of the Pharsalia from the beginning of his dramatic career. Recurring allusions to Lucan’s distinctive catalogue of omens, familial violence, and intestine warfare distinguish Shakespeare’s early tragedies and histories as Lucanic meditations on civil war. The presence of further, idiosyncratic translations of the Pharsalia within these works confirms that Shakespeare worked with Lucan’s epic first-hand rather than through an intermediary. This study focuses on the plays of the two tetralogies, which contain the most frequent and distinct instances of Shakespeare’s engagement with Lucan. Collectively, these plays contribute to a Pharsalian project reassessing the political and cultural legacies of England’s Medieval civil wars. Shakespeare’s sustained meditation on Lucan’s poetics shapes his portrayal of sovereign power. Critics have long considered Shakespeare’s figurations of sovereign power as committed to an organicist vision of the English body politic where the sovereign polity is conceived as an intrinsically living and vital concept. Shakespeare’s Tumid Embroidery seeks to overturn these assumptions. Following Lucan’s characterization of the Roman civil war as an act of self-slaughter and a necrotic turn in the life of Rome’s political institutions, Shakespeare surveys England’s own civil war past in order to explore the rotting intellectual foundations of sixteenth century de jure (legal) sovereignty.