The Ethics of Theatre: Community, Selfhood, and Alterity in Early Modern Drama

This thesis explores the ethical stakes of early modern English drama at the critical intersection of religion, poetry, rhetoric, and performance studies. The theatre of the period was a site of competing sources of authority, between religious, philosophical, and poetic perspectives that advocated idealism and virtuous conduct, and rhetorical and performance practices that privileged contingency and probability. The resulting tensions were represented on the stage through various modes of alterity, through which playwrights explored the shifting power dynamics between individuals and the communities to which they belonged. My study argues that the theatre’s defining ethical position must be understood in relation to representations of exclusion in particular, whereby individuals are alienated from their respective communities based on religious, ethnic, racial, sexual, and cultural differences. Such forms of exclusion are countered by marginalized characters through the development of linguistic strategies that seek to offset their loss of authority. Each of my chapters explores different aspects of that process as represented in plays by Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. In my first chapter, I argue that damnation in Doctor Faustus constitutes a form of social exclusion that highlights the coercive mechanisms of religious community formation, which Marlowe dramatizes through what I call an aesthetics of self-conceit, a form of alienation achieved through habit formation. My second chapter looks at expressions of hatred in relation to religious communal belonging in Othello. I argue that the play highlights the ethically fraught means through which Christianity accommodates alterity within its worldview. In the third chapter, I investigate how linguistic practices, particularly religious rhetoric, destabilize political authority in Measure for Measure. My last chapter discusses Jonson’s poetry and drama, specifically the Epigrams, Poetaster, and Volpone. I argue that Jonson develops an exclusionary poetics that enables him to maintain an attachment to his idealized self-conception as a poet in an unruly theatrical environment where authority was perpetually contested between playwrights, actors, and audiences. Through my linguistic analysis of these dramatic texts, I provide new interpretive strategies for investigating the function of ethics in the early modern theatre.

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