'Raptures of futurity': Monumentality and the pursuit of posterity in early modern drama

My dissertation offers a new model for understanding the relationship between early modern dramatists and literary posterity. Critics have long noted Ben Jonson's proprietary claims over his texts, and recent studies have reevaluated Shakespeare's interest in print. In focusing on issues surrounding the conditions of production, however, these studies tend to underestimate the plays themselves as resources. I argue that the various ways in which Jacobean dramatists thematize the period's preoccupation with memorialization in their works relates fundamentally to their own interest in self-perpetuation. My introduction outlines the post-Reformation historical developments that produced these anxieties over memorialization and places Renaissance dramatists within this context.In chapter one, I argue that, with his Tamburlaine plays, Marlowe self-consciously defies both the commemorative rituals and the eternizing tropes of the poetry of his time. Tamburlaine's argument for its value as an enduring literary object works paradoxically through an insistence on its status as an ephemeral, theatrical work. Chapter two explores how Ben Jonson assimilates Marlowe's classicism but at the same time aims emphatically to preserve his works for posterity. In his Roman tragedy Sejanus, Jonson adapts a Roman sense of monumentality to his own literary project in order to assuage the tension between his immortalizing ambitions and the transitory nature of the medium in which he writes. Chapter Three investigates Shakespeare's attitude toward commemoration in The Winter's Tale, which, I suggest, represents the desire to secure one's posthumous identity prior to death as a destructive impulse that paralyzes the living. In my last chapter, I argue that John Webster's preoccupation with monumentality and its relationship to commemoration, which repeatedly features in his prefaces, resurfaces as a crucial framing device in The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi. My project ends with a brief epilogue that considers how Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner poignantly demonstrates that attempting to control the conditions of one's legacy is a precarious enterprise.