The claims of the past: Traumatic events, compensatory narratives and the formation of identities in early modern England

This thesis asks that we begin to reassess how early modern poets and playwrights took part in the new passion for historiography. It reads poetry and drama as participating in the shift to a social memory based on new methods of archiving history, methods that ordered the past in efforts to overcome it. Developments in historical reflection gave birth to generations of reluctant noninheritors who looked at history as past but who, nonetheless, also remembered it as disordered and unruly. The thesis explores how drama, poetry and prose register historical events such as the Reformation, secularization and royal death in England and argues that for Marlowe, Shakespeare, Kyd, and Middleton, the narrative strategies of popular histories—Holinshed, Stowe, Hall, and Foxe—fail fully to assimilate crises of the past they are trying to represent. The playwrights' staged representations of death and bodily fragmentation first register but finally repeat the traumatic experience of unassimilated history. When symbolic modes of expression fail in revenge tragedies, body parts, ritual funeral practices, and royal performatives signify in often violent and unpredictable ways. In this excess, the plays register the unintegrated impact of England's history as well as the way unassimilated events recur, disrupting both individual and collective memory. Poets also attempted to memorialize contemporary history in an effort to leave it behind. For Marvell and Milton, however, what is most resistant to assimilation is the theatrical nature of the regicide as commemorated in Eikon Basilike . For these poets, the experience of the execution is linked with a symbolic form that challenges their abilities to move beyond the critical event. Comparing their literary and political reactions to the circumstances surrounding 1649, the thesis demonstrates how compensatory historical narratives perpetuate the loss that they are designed to mitigate. By examining attempts on the Renaissance stage to give form to remembered events like royal death and the Reformation and by interrogating the limits of symbolic form in poetry and political prose, I demonstrate how public memory is the fragile product of the ambivalent desire to flee history.