| "Strangely Entangled" explores the fraught relationship of Renaissance English poetry to its classical literary past. As English poetry began to shape itself into a distinctive kind and body of writing, the need for poetic models apart from those of ancient (and now Papist) Rome was strongly felt. The texts I examine, by Puttenham, Shakespeare, and Donne, address this challenge in three ways, updating, invoking and infusing themselves with alternative models. My introduction analyzes how contemporary, imported terms begin to take hold in English, engrafting themselves onto and thereby changing notions of classical authority.; Each of the subsequent three chapters describes how a specific Renaissance text infuses the literary precedents of antiquity with new, imported models. In each case, my analysis issues from a three-fold exploration of the philological, graphic, and formal particulars of each work. My first chapter argues that George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie cultivates a taste for the foreign by supplementing Greek and Latin poetic models with printed images of Turkish and Chinese forms. The second chapter reveals how zero, a recently imported Persian arithmetical symbol, infiltrates Shakespeare's representation of Rome in The Rape of Lucrece by interspersing the text with ciphers, zeros, and printed Os. In the earliest texts of the poem, where the pagination is still indicated by Roman numerals, Lucrece's apostrophic Os seem to leap off the page. While embracing interdisciplinary connections between philology and printing, text and image, East and West, and antique and modern, I keep questions of poetic form and value sharply in view. Working out the complex philological relationship between antique (ancient and venerated) and antic (savage, grotesque, outlandish) which in the English Renaissance shared the same spelling and pronunciation, the final chapter examines the relationship of English Renaissance poetry to its medieval past, and to classical antiquity, arguing that Donne's fascination with physical decay demonstrates a wish to separate the antic and the antique, or at least to place them on the same plane. Furthermore, the irregular metaphors that characterize Donne's metaphysical style imitate the antic grotesque. |
