| Reorienting Decorum argues that theatrical decorum becomes a key mediating concept for recognizing, and misrecognizing, the foreign on the early modern English stage. Considering the early modern English theater's participation in the circulation of knowledge regarding the foreign, this dissertation argues that discussions of decorum are always engaged with epistemological questions about how we come to know persons or things. True recognition is only possible when what is "proper" to the person or thing can be identified, but what is "proper" may be unknowable until the moment of encounter. Decorum is an aesthetic category, then, that refers to that which is proper, suitable, befitting, or "becoming," a complex matter for the foreign. While decorum was an unstable concept in the early modern period, Reorienting Decorum critically reframes this instability, arguing that the unseen, unrecognizable, or misunderstood qualities of the foreign were made visible, recognizable, and even something to be incorporated by the processes of theatrical convention. By "reorienting" decorum---by showing the interconnection between decorum and the foreign---this dissertation rethinks post-colonial notions of identity as it provides a literary pre-history for the interrogation of the modes of cultural perception that produce knowledge.;In chapters on the history of decorum, Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and Fletcher's The Island Princess, I demonstrate how these major early modern playwrights shared a willingness to seize the language of decorum---returning repeatedly to words like "proportioned," "fit," "becoming," and "beseeming"---when confronted with the task of representing the foreign. By turning our attention to form as a means to understand how audiences (or playwrights) can "recognize" the truly "strange," this dissertation shows how theatrical conventions both participated in making visible the "strangeness" of the foreign in misrecognition, while also enabling new understandings and unleashing new notions of both identity and the decorum appropriate to the character, the play and the nation. My investigation into the theater's capacity to accommodate different kinds of "becomings" prompts a reconsideration of three early modern practices: self-fashioning (showing the violence of decorum when it is "reoriented" in Tamburlaine ), of sprezzatura (Twelfth Night), and of ethopoesis (The Island Princess). |
