Ruling with Rhetoric: The Oratorical Performance of Power in Early Modern English Drama

Abstract

This dissertation takes as its foundation a belief that words are the basis of the worlds brought to life on the early modern English stage. In examining powerful speakers in the works of Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, this project explores drama that foregrounds the perlocutionary dimension of language and gives prominence to the performative power of words. Drama broadly, and the plays analyzed in this study particularly, emphasizes language’s quality as action and encourages audiences to consider language in networks of power and as a network of power itself. Focusing on early modern history plays and tragedies, my dissertation examines the various ways in which powerful speakers exercise rhetoric to shape their worlds and, conversely, the ways in which their worlds often limit or defeat their efforts. The figures who take centre stage in my analysis are a diverse collection of dramatic characters, but all have in common an essential link between their being and their language. What they say is, in more or less complicated ways, who they are, whether they are larger-than-life heroes like Tamburlaine, devilish villains like Richard III, or those who fall somewhere in between, like Coriolanus, Joan of Arc, and Henry V. If to an extent all the characters who strutted and fretted their time upon the early modern English stage are creations of language, the characters this dissertation examines are particularly sensitive and intense registers of language’s ontological implications. Their being, the core of their selves, is fueled – and frequently burned – by the language they use and the power that pulses within it, which is not always fully under their control.