The gentle-born apprentice, generally a younger son in training within a London Trade Company, was generally perceived as downwardly mobile, and discursive contestation surrounded the privileges, duties, and status of that figure, including whether or not he lost his gentle status as a result of what some perceived as his “bondage” within the apprenticeship contract. As a liminal figure who complicated traditional divisions between commoners and the gentry, the gentle apprentice offers new routes into understanding class and status formation, as well as modes of civic and urban masculine identity. While apprenticeship was a temporary identity for all within an apprenticeship contract, it was one that altered fundamentally the adult identity of a gentle-born young man, a transformation that some gentleman apprentices resisted vehemently. I propose to examine the young, urban, masculine subjectivity of the gentle-born apprentice of the seventeenth century, seeking both an historical explanation for the existence of this figure and an understanding of his place within masculine culture of seventeenth-century London. My sources will include a wide range of archival documents, but my primary dramatic text will be Jonson, Marston, and Chapman’s Eastward Ho (1605). 

—Ronda Arab, Simon Fraser University

The Prodigal Return’d to his Fathers House (1651) represents the only personal contribution the radical printer, Henry Hills (c. 1625-1690), made to the world of Particular Baptist self-writing, a genre that gained increasing vitality and visibility throughout the 17^th century.  Composed while Hills served a prison sentence in the Fleet after being sued for ‘crim com’ by Thomas Hams, a tailor from Blackfriars, and cast in damages for £260 for living openly with Hams’ wife, The Prodigal represents Hills’ public repentance for his conduct, and was intended to facilitate his acceptance back into the Baptist fellowship.

On his release from prison in 1652, Hills was indeed reconciled with the Baptists, and would go on to print a number of their key publications.  However, his adultery, and the scandal that his confession generated, would haunt Hills for years, making him an open target for ridicule, where illicit sex functions as another version of the radical ‘conversations’ Hills’ publications facilitated.

This paper will argue that, in light of the heteroglossic and intertextual dimensions of the text, The Prodigal was originally intended to serve a broad polemical purpose, signalling a denunciation of adulterous behaviour not only in Hills, but on behalf of an entire Baptist community.  By then looking at The Prodigal’s reception history, I will outline how representations of illicit sexualities can be plugged into a range of anxieties related to ‘the uncontrollable reproductive powers of print technology’ (Paper Bullets, 145), and the authenticity of textualized selves.  In other words, the key question here is this: what happens when articulations of the self meet the collective norms and constraints of culture?  In its inception and reception, Hills’ self-narrative repeatedly underscores how early-modern lives are sites of ‘ideology and contestation’ (Writing Lives, 26), textual revisions and dynamic re-representations.

—Michael Durrant, University of Manchester

Recent scholarship on the early modern period has stressed the roles that space (as socially constructed and constructing) and time (as “queer” or nonlinear) play in shaping subjectivity. This paper will advance these analyses, by turning to the mid-seventeenth-century British Civil Wars (1638-1651) to explore domestic warfare’s traumatic impact on the shifting spatial and temporal dimensions of poetic and national identity. More specifically, it will focus on Andrew Marvell’s poems written to and about the Parliamentary General, Sir Thomas Fairfax, in the early 1650s. Literary scholars too often treat the British Civil Wars as primarily defined by metaphoric battles of words, bracketing civil violence and its rupturing effects.  By contrast, I set Marvell’s poetry within both the messy material realities of early modern warfare and the busy, emerging news culture that reported these realities. Drawing on these newsbook reports, Marvell’s poems initially seem to offer war and militarism as ordering principles that create disciplined visions of homogenous, surveyable space and progressive, linear temporality, which in turn anchor the poet and patron’s identities and help define the new English Commonwealth. However, these ordered visions rapidly gave way to disorienting images of violence as a force that disrupts and deforms local and national history and landscape. In “Upon Appleton House,” for example, as Marvell’s persona leaves the disciplined military garden of the Fairfax estate, the poem presents a series of increasingly uncanny encounters between the poet and a violent, alien past and a threatening, even phantasmagoric terrain. In doing so, it reveals both the poet’s persona, and national identity more generally, to be mutating into varieties of formlessness under pressure of recent armed conflict. Marvell, and other poets of this “climacteric” period, that is, reveal a British identity shorn of its stable spatio-temporal coordinates by civil war, and therefore caught at a moment of suspended uncertainty and prolonged transformation into a not-yet-known.

—Catharine Gray, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Hamlet is a play notoriously concerned with issues of temporality. Hamlet’s delay – his deferral of vengeance – and his resulting feminisation have been the focus of a vast amount of scholarly analysis. Much of this work is reliant on the notion that gender on the early modern stage is temporally defined: that men and women are presented as existing at different ends of a temporal binary opposition which pits male action against female delay. In this paper, I suggest that Hamlet works to complicate that binary opposition through its engagement with the dual temporality which defines the prodigal’s transformational identity. The prodigal son both denies the delays of filial duty in order to enjoy the actions of unauthorised riotous living, and at the same time delays his own authorised social maturation through that transgressive enactment of rebellion. This paper explores the ways in which Hamlet’s gendered identity is constructed through the text’s negotiation of the contradictory imperatives to wait and to act which define the temporal identity of the prodigal son.

—Sarah Lewis, University College Dublin

In recent years there has been a dynamic interest in early modern representations of ethnic difference. Studies of early modern drama and travel writing have sought to decipher the power plays present in depictions of Islamic cultures and empires. Characterised sometimes by both historians and scholars of early modern literature as ‘ethnographies’, the numerous traveller’s accounts of the Ottoman Empire and their portrayals of peoples and religions provided their readers with representations shaped and motivated by religious polemic, search for knowledge, and material for the better understanding of the formations and functions of empire.

This paper seeks a new framework for looking at early modern English portrayals of Levantine peoples: a framework that takes into account not only the search for eyewitness-information and knowledge, but also the polemical elements and religious bias present in these writings. I will argue, that early modern English writings about the Ottoman Levant can’t be reduced under the rubric of ‘ethnography’ alone, but should rather be seen as complex products of self-fashioning, as investigations of collective religious identities and loyalties, and as searches for historical knowledge, both for polemical and non-polemical purposes. Following the advice of Natalie Zemon Davis, and reserving the word ‘identity’ to refer to the ‘external marks that are part of social relations’ rather than to mean ‘inner issues of subjectivity’, I will look at formations of early modern ethno-religious identities in the Levant by paying special attention to the Levant Company chaplain William Biddulph’s depictions of Eastern Christians.

—Eva Johanna Holmberg, University of Helsinki and Queen Mary, University of London

This paper examines the imagery that several English and Scots travelers used to describe the eastern Adriatic region known in the Renaissance as Illyria. In Illyria, ethnic and religious identities of diverse native peoples were continually re-defined due to the military, economic, and cultural interventions of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, the Venetian Republic, and other foreign powers. The travelers are particularly interested in the Illyrians’ loss of lives and property through material destruction in warfare and the strategic impoverishment of Illyrian lands enabled by the restrictive policies of foreign rulers. These types of deprivation dovetail with the loss of bodily boundaries in images of the Illyrians’ sexual impropriety and physical deformations that sometimes escalate into the bestial and the monstrous. While such imagery was common among visitors from the British Isles particularly in “exotic” parts of the world, I am interested in the role that the widely recognized plasticity of the Illyrian geographic, political, and other boundaries may have played in their remarks, and particularly the status of the Illyrians as slaves or allies to the Turks, the Venetians, and the Habsburgs.

—Lea Puljcan Juric, Independent Scholar

Since Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies (1957), one dominant trend of scholarship on Shakespeare’s Richard II has read the play as an investigation of the question of the king’s sacred or secular political identity. In this paper, I would like to skirt the question of sacred vs secular kingship by reconsidering ways in which materiality—specifically the land—constitutes political identity. Drawing from, on the one hand, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the assemblage and, on the other, from Jane Bennett’s concept of material affect, I will explore how, in Richard II, Shakespeare offers nonhuman matter a determining role in Henry Bolingbroke’s usurpation of Richard. Finally, I will connect the agency of the land to several key moments of prophetic utterance in they play in order to consider how those utterances articulate the role of the nonhuman and material within political conflict.

—Joseph Bowling, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Deposed, imprisoned, alone, Shakespeare’s Richard II supposes, “Nor I nor any man that but man is / With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased / With being nothing” (5.5 39-41).  What is this “nothing” that Richard claims he is?  And is Richard – whom Bolingbroke continues to consider a threat to his ascent, and who will, in the moments before his own death, kill two people – really, in any sense, “nothing”?  This paper proposes that Richard’s ontological provocation incites – perhaps even necessitates – a radical reassessment of subjectivity.  With recourse to the work of affect theorists John Protevi and Brian Massumi, the paper argues that in the first half of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Richard’s political role as king defines his subjective experience and limits his sense of bodily potential – of the potential of his own body, and the potentials of the bodies around them.  When his kingdom is overthrown, Richard II, as a subject, collapses, as the new political conditions no longer make such a subjectivity tenable.  The effect of his downfall is, however, a kind of liberation.  During his negotiations with Bolingbroke, and especially during his imprisonment at the end of the play, Richard senses what a body that has for so long called itself a king can also do, or become.  Richard’s realization that he is “nothing” is an encounter with what Protevi and Massumi term the virtual: the potential for political systems, and their subjects, to transform.

—Michael Shelichach, The Graduate Center, CUNY

“Loneliness” was a new concept in early modern England. Milton was particularly attracted to it: whereas Shakespeare had only used the word four times in his career, Milton used it seven times in the The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce alone. Though his transformation of ideas about the relationship between husband and wife in this text has been well-documented, however, his equally important contribution to the invention of the nascent affective category of loneliness has been overlooked.

Studies of early modern selfhood have tended to treat the questions of affect and embodiment as separate objects of study: paying attention to loneliness offers a corrective, in that it puts pressure on the relation between them. This paper considers Milton’s role in the emergence of a concept that not only impacted notions of marriage, but also transformed ideas about subjectivity, interiority, and identity.

—Amelia Worsley, Princeton University