Telos and Philology in the Early Modern English Epic

Abstract

This dissertation identifies an internal contradiction or inherent tension in the Renaissance epic and reads four early modern English epics in light of this generic feature. Vertical pressure from poets' monarchical patrons to craft teleological political narratives legitimating their rule collided with horizontal pressure from the poets’ humanists peers who expected their poems to reflect cutting-edge humanist historiography and its new methods of critically evaluating documentary evidence. Crises in English politics—from the Elizabethan succession, to the unification of the Crowns under the Stuarts, to Civil War and Restoration—made unitary myth-making more imperative than ever, but advances in history-writing made this task more difficult. Before my readings of English epic commence, a wide-ranging, comparative prologue chapter considers the potential relationship between monotheism and teleological narrative in order to isolate politics as the determinative factor.

Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1596) engages deeply with the legendary matter of Britain popularized centuries earlier by the medieval chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, even as Spenser seems to acknowledge how the legends have been discredited. Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion (1612) works through much of the same material, but largely foregoes any attempt to connect the old fables to current political realities, preferring instead to embed these anecdotes from the ancient British past into systematic descriptions of the landscape. Rather than spinning Trojan-British legends into a justification for British unification, Drayton uses the figure of the Severn to remind his readers of the Welsh rights and particularity that has been erased by English hegemony. Abraham Cowley’s Davideis (c. 1640s), while ostensibly about the troubles of King David, also maps onto the exile of the Stuarts during the Interregnum, and rather awkwardly tries to find a Biblical precedent for the Stuarts’ version of absolutist kingship. Finally, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), written after the Restoration of Charles II and Milton’s utter alienation from power politics, rejects English politics and instead dives deep into human prehistory, to the origins of humankind. I argue that Milton’s narrative about the gradual unfolding of human nature and our capabilities resembles the speculative, rational histories couched in the subjunctive written by Hobbes, Vico, Rousseau, and especially Kant. Rather than subjecting these epics to a deconstructive critique that would that expose the poets’ subconscious anxieties, I argue that Spenser, Drayton, Cowley, and Milton were aware of these contradictions, and had the courage—however fleeting—to face destabilizing, disillusioning facts and include them in their great poems.