Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Shakespeare, Middleton, Marlowe

Abstract

<p> In this dissertation, I read several early modern plays - Shakespeare's Richard II, Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, and Marlowe's Dido, Queene of Carthage - alongside a variety of early modem historiographical works. I pair drama and historiography in order to negotiate the question of early modem untimely deaths. Rather than determining once and for all what it meant to die an untimely death in early modem England, I argue here that one answer to this question requires an understanding of the imagined relationship between individuals and the broader unfolding of history by which they were imagined to be shaped, which they were imagined to shape, or from which they imagined to be alienated. I assume here that drama - particularly historically-minded drama - is an ideal object to consider when approaching such vexed questions, and I also assume that the problematic of untimely deaths provides a framework in which to ask about the historico-culturally specific relationships that were imagined to obtain between subjects and history. While it is critically commonplace to assert that early modern drama often stages the so-called "modern" subject, I argue here that early modern visions of the subject are often closely linked to visions of that subject's place in the world, particularly in the world that is recorded by historiographers as a world within and of history. I argue that one can begin to make sense of deaths in terms of their timeliness or untimeliness only by recognizing historically specific senses of the narrativized subject and the imagined relationship between that subject and history. </p>