'Such strange desygns': Madness, subjectivity, and treason in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy and culture

The dissertation investigates homologies between representation of madness on the tragic stage and the ideology of order and obedience that purportedly fashioned subjectivity and sovereignty alike in Renaissance England. The point of departure is the example of the Earl of Essex, whose rebellious "madness" and repentant public death share ideological as well as spectacular affinities with representations of madness in the Shakespearean theatre. This intersection of madness and treason in English Renaissance culture suggests a resonant tension in the crucial reformulation of subjectivity taking place in conjunction with the Protestant Reformation and centralization of the nation-state. The discourses of madness articulate and enact the cultural contradiction of a subjectivity at once valorized by Protestantism and humanism, and constrained by the absolutist claims of the monarchy upon inwardness.;Chapters 1 and 2 examine the discursive and structural parallels between historical Essex and fictive Hamlet, as well as representations in madness in plays by Kyd, Marlowe, and Marston. Both the Essex debacle and Hamlet demonstrate a specific alignment of "madness in great ones" and treason, that absolute transgression against absolutist authority. The alignment of treason and madness begins to break apart only when absolutism itself is overtly questioned, as in King Lear (Chapter 3) and Macbeth (Chapter 4). Chapter 5 focuses on Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, and the emergence of the notion of a rational, "private" subject in the seventeenth century. The Duchess of Malfi thus prefigures the exile of madness from subjectivity--the banishment, confinement and disciplining of unreason that, as Foucault has argued, informs modern constructions of insanity.