Dead reckoning: Knowing and telling in Early Modern English revenge tragedies and history plays.

摘要

The revenge tragedies and history plays popular in London at the turn of the 17th century mark a new approach to investigating and narrating individual experience. I argue in this dissertation that these two genres share strategies for representing extremes of emotional experiences. Primarily, these plays show how characters must first narrate their experiences for themselves before those narratives can be turned outward. I consider Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Marlowe's Edward the Second, and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, the three parts of Henry VI, and Hamlet as case studies of knowing and telling in the dramatic mode. My investigation reveals that these plays engage with contemporary models for managing information, including justice of the peace manuals, literary phrasebooks, accounting handbooks, and navigational guides; by organizing personal knowledge in the context of external structures, characters in these plays are attempting to turn subjective emotion into objective truth.;Dead reckoning, the nautical technique that plots forward direction by reference to previous reference points, acts as the primary organizational structure for my investigation. Characters in these plays produce forward action by looking to their experiences of the past. In extended close readings of my primary texts, I engage with theories of Early Modern forensic and judicial rhetoric to reveal the shared rhetorical techniques that construct the generic properties and conceptual preoccupations of these plays. These generic properties reflect less on absolute categories of the period than on a tendency in modern criticism to insist on their separation. While my reading recognizes generic distinctions, I strive to reclaim the fluidity of the Early Modern categories; in these plays history organizes revenge, while revenge energizes history. I conclude that considering how history and revenge are genres that open the possibilities of dramatic representation to new methods of knowing and telling.