| This project describes the emergence of religious despair in post-Reformation England as the foundational trauma of Protestant subjectivity, a necessary event on the path to spiritual regeneration, but also a persistent threat to the Christian's assurance of salvation. In its literary representation, this trauma appears as a recognizable trope. The carnality of despair leads to its frequent association with the decaying body, the "body of this death" of Romans 7:28. In its insistence that the sins of the past cannot be forgiven, despair furthermore entails a temporality; in its association with the damning letter of the moral law, it also implies a hermeneutics. In the introduction, I demonstrate that in terms of biblical typology, these are all aspects of "the flesh" of St. Paul's letters, and I argue that despair represents a rejection of the hope that typology implies. I also describe how "the flesh" continues to appear as an obstacle to the moral law in recent discussions of Paul by Alain Badiou and Jacques Lacan. The dissertation's first chapter traces the typological definition of "the flesh" in accounts of Francis Spira, a notorious sixteenth-century victim of despair, and examines this case's influence on Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.;Because the trope of despair implies an interpretation of the past as an insurmountable obstacle, it is also secularized in early modern representations of history, particularly in representations of kingship, where the monarch is victimized by time and by the fleshly body natural. The dissertation's remaining three chapters examine the Tudor legal fiction of the "king's two bodies" in terms of the distinction between flesh and spirit. I examine the lachrymose ruin of Shakespeare's Richard II, showing how his royal despair coincides with a temporal rupture, the failure of dynastic succession. This concurrence of despair with the interruption of the royal succession also appears in Book II of The Faerie Queene, which chronicles the disasters of early British history. I conclude the dissertation with an epilogue on the later convergence of despair and kingship in Milton's Eikonoklastes and in the depiction of Satan as a tyrant in Paradise Lost. |
