| Important studies in the history of reading have made a substantial case for the essentially utilitarian character of early modern reading strategies. They describe how humanist pedagogues, scholars, and literary theorists in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries commended for widespread use a reading practice that encouraged the reader to extract aphorisms, sententiae, and models of emulable behavior from literature of all kinds and genres. While this is undoubtedly an important story about reading in the period---it is, in fact, one I elaborate throughout the dissertation---it is not the whole story: it neglects an early modern discourse of literary pleasure that explores the aesthetic, intellectual, and even erotic gratifications that epic poems, plays, romance fictions, and works of classical history and philosophy offer the reader.;The central argument of the dissertation is that the didactic, or what early modern scholars and writers described as the utile, quality of literature, existed in troubled relation to what they described as its dulce quality---that is, its power to please, delight, or gratify the reader or auditor. Indeed, prominent scholars, literary theorists, and polemicists such as Roger Ascham, Desiderius Erasmus, Richard Mulcaster, Stephen Gosson, and Philip Stubbes expressed anxious concern about the power of literary pleasure to distract, corrupt, misguide, and debauch readers of literature and auditors of plays. But rather than simply serving as a prejudice to be ignored or skirted the suspicion directed toward literary pleasure helped to produce the ethical, aesthetic, and political complexities of some of the most celebrated works of sixteenth-century English literature, among them John Harington's translation of Ludovico Ariosto's epic romance Orlando Furioso, Thomas More's Utopia, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Philip Sidney's An Apology for Poetry and the first version of the Arcadia, and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Even as these works offer their readers or auditors models of moral response to the text---either through explicit instruction in paratextual material or voices of critical commentary embedded in the texts themselves---they also suggest that their primary reward lies in an experience of intense and ultimately amoral pleasure. |
