Imagining the theo -political body in early modern English literature

This dissertation argues that early modern English literature---by Spenser, Shakespeare, Sidney, and Milton---articulates the effects of the fragile uniformity of the Elizabethan Settlement in its varied portrayals of an ascendant Protestant nation that remained captivated by a residual Catholicism at its religious and political core. Despite the official hegemony of Protestantism, Catholic assumptions, arguments, and narratives were not marginal to an English culture traumatized by years of religious instability. Tudor and Stuart monarchs appropriated elements of Catholic ritual to establish a polity in which political power was grounded in theological tropes. Ironically, the construction of this sacralized sovereignty aided in the defense of a body politic that believed itself to be besieged from without and bedeviled from within by Catholic agents. The paraphernalia and propaganda of English political sovereignty imitates precisely those "idolatrous" claims that the Church of England, and the monarch as its supreme governor, sought to suppress in the religious arena proper.;The literature of the period anatomizes the discord between this increasingly bold adaptation of Catholic ideology by the state and the fiction of its exclusion and effacement perpetuated by radical factions of English Protestantism. In each work, the return of the Catholic generates figurative excess inassimilable to a Protestant present. In my chapter on Spenser's Faerie Queene, I argue that latent Catholic elements intrude upon the epic's Protestant nationalist allegory, enabling a critique of the Elizabethan regime's dependence on a lingering affective investment in Catholic forms. In my chapter on Measure for Measure, I demonstrate how Shakespeare's tragicomedy uses the rhetoric of coinage to figure a division within political sovereignty; the consequences of this division for the spiritual health of the body politic are in turn mapped onto an allegorical debate between Protestant and Catholic representative figures in which the coin reappears to mediate between opposing positions. In the final chapter, I trace Milton's allergic reaction to the royalist tract Eikon Basilike and its plagiarism of Sidney's New Arcadia to differences between the two Protestant poets' relationships to the Catholic past and strategies for imaginatively circumventing martyrdom as a form of civil idolatry.