Spiritual homosociality in English Renaissance drama

This dissertation explores stage monarchs' homosocial relations with their subjects in relation to the monarch's loneliness at the apex of the patriarchal hierarchy and his divine authority as God's regent on earth. Focusing on works by Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, this dissertation describes spiritual homosociality -- filial, fraternal, or rivalrous relations with spiritual beings -- as one of the ways in which male Renaissance stage monarchs compensate for loneliness or alienation from other males in the process of their struggle for power, particularly either strengthening authority or obtaining legitimacy. Here spirituality refers to both supernatural and psychological elements of a sovereign's emotional exchanges with his subjects within a political environment. The main focus of spiritual homosociality lies not with the supernatural/spiritual agents' gender but with the ways in which those agents affect the male protagonists' institutional and interpersonal relations. Tracing stage monarchs' spiritual and homosocial relations in Marlovian and Shakespearean political plays, I argue that these two playwrights explore the inner selves of princes as natural persons, presenting the ruler's cognition of human subjectivity, which is represented on stage as the ontological loneliness of the man of highest power. Yet I also argue that these playwrights' plays demonstrate the fact that early modern England was receptive to supernatural environments and to the potential political importance of uncanny agents or circumstances surrounding the fate of the king, his people, and his state. Examining the modes of spiritual homosociality, diversely represented but fundamentally interconnected, in political plays of two remarkable English Renaissance playwrights, this dissertation concludes that spiritual homosociality not only serves as a necessary quality for successful rulers in the interpersonal and institutional relations, but also marks how early political science overlaps with political theology and the supernatural.