| This dissertation shows how humanist attempts to standardize English spelling contribute to the emergence of English literature in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Examining the first publications on English orthography and elementary education, I argue that humanist spelling reform not only revalues English, by formulating an authorized, specifically masculine variety of the vernacular, but also redefines English "men of letters," by enabling men to become "lettered" in the English language in addition to Latin and Greek.; Chapter One, "The Elements of English Literary Identity," outlines the terms of the dissertation by explaining how, as humanists define themselves through writings on language, early modern discourses on alphabetical letters enable authors to mount their own literary, or "letter-ary," self-definition. Examining the first published treatise in English language reform, Chapter Two, "Parsing the Present Imperfect: Sir Thomas Smith's English Orthography and the Rewriting of English Humanism," examines Thomas Smith's extravagant personifications of English letters, to argue that these letters compensate, as negative exemplars, for the absence of classical models in English writing. The subsequent chapters show how English authors manipulate the discourse of English spelling reform to construct affirmative conceptions of English literary identity. Chapter Three, "The New Poet Respells Himself: Spenser's Spelling and the Perversion of English Rime in The Shepheardes Calender (1579)," shows how Edmund Spenser assumes the place left vacant by the classical authorities, but retains Thomas Smith's principle of negative exemplarity, to render himself the exemplary, but inimitable, "new English poet" through spelling. In Chapter Four, "Elementary Shakespeare: Humanist Elementary Pedagogy and Shakespeare's Spelling Lessons," I argue that Shakespeare stages techniques in elementary teaching (in Coriolanus, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Love's Labour's Lost ) to challenge the linguistic and cultural assumptions of humanist spelling pedagogy. The dissertation concludes with "All Things Being Equal: Francis Bacon's Ciphers and the Redefinition of Learned Identity," in which I show how Francis Bacon's depictions of cryptography, in The Advancement of Learning (1605) and De augmentis scientarum (1623), clarify Bacon's model of the seventeenth-century learned society. Bringing English letters into critical visibility, the study reveals how seminal formations of English literary identity turn on early modern disputes over English spelling. |
