Penetrating wit: Sexual language and satiric tragedy

"Penetrating Wit: Sexually Descriptive and Satiric Tragedy" examines how the satiric tragedians of the English Renaissance employ the languages of sex, including sexual slander, titillation, insinuation and obscenity, in the service of satiric aggression. There is a close association between the genre of satire and sexually descriptive language in the period, particularly in the ways in which both the genre and the languages embody systems of oppositions. Sexually descriptive language exhibits an ambivalence which allows it to express heterogeneous and even contradictory ideas (e.g. desire and loathing, order and chaos, generation and decay) simultaneously, and this ambivalence fits with the often-observed ambivalent position of the satirist as both condemning and resembling or participating what he scorns.;In this dissertation I argue that sexually descriptive language serves four purposes for the satiric tragedian, all of which are engendered in part by social and cultural conditions in the period. In the first chapter I argue that those languages allow him to raise questions central to the construction and regulation of social and political order in the period, particularly with regards to the impending death of the aging and childless Elizabeth I. To support this contention, I undertake a close analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet. In my second chapter I argue that the languages also allow him to engage imagery of sexual disease and contagion in an expression of bodily contempt and metaphoric corruption. I support this argument with a close reading of select scenes of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy. In my third chapter I argue that the languages of sex permit the aggressing satirist a figurative and invasive congress with the object of satire, which in some cases is also the object of desire, reflecting in part commodity culture in the theatre, as well as Reformation theology. I support this argument through a close, critically informed reading of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling. In my fourth and final chapter, I argue that the languages of sex provide him with metaphors for exploring the experience and the paradoxical ideology of service and its institutions. I support this chapter with a close reading of selected scenes from Othello.;In examining these four purposes I review a broad range of texts by satiric tragedians, moralists, medical writers and critics, paying particular attention to the works of William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and John Webster. My critical orientation in this dissertation is largely Cultural Materialist, although my scholarship is also informed by other approaches, including Feminism and New Historicism.