Magical imaginations, or instrumental aesthetics from Sidney to Shakespeare

"Magical Imaginations" argues that poetry and magic were bound together in Renaissance England, since the very qualities we recognize as aesthetic are those the Renaissance saw as having ethical, social, and even material effects. Recasting the post-Kantian, anachronistic terms of our present debates about early modern literary aesthetics, the dissertation demonstrates that Renaissance poetry was neither an autonomous sphere constructed to be disinterested nor merely one site among others for ideological contestation; it shows that poetry was, rather, both the producer of aesthetic effects not found in other cultural sites and a discourse explicitly interested in the instrumental ends that such effects might have in social and political life. The dissertation further argues that magic shadowed Renaissance poetry because magic was not an esoteric philosophy interested merely in occult knowledge, but a socially central endeavor that attempted to mediate the numinous in order to produce political power and to control the behavior of subjects without their consent.;Chapter One argues that Sidney's conception of instrumental aesthetics in The Defense of Poesie relied on theories of psychological coercion that emerged in tracts on magic, and that his Neoplatonic justification for poetry's coercive effect was characterized by Protestant theology as a demonic fiction. Chapter Two argues that in the 1590 Faerie Queene , Spenser conflated the imaginative images inspired by allegory and those thought to be inspired by demons in order to produce an anxious inward attention in the reader, who would thereby become a kind of self-monitoring, self-regulating disciplined subject. Chapter Three argues that Christopher Marlowe explicitly situated Doctor Faustus on the Protestant side of a theological debate over the instrumental efficacy of magical language in order to enable the rumor that devils had been conjured to the stage during performances of his play. Chapter Four argues that even though he drew Prospero as the magician whom James I swore in his writings to condemn, Shakespeare produced The Tempest successfully at court because he conflated aesthetic pleasure and juridical compassion, thereby enabling pleasure instrumentally to enact even in the monarch the empathy characteristic of the ethical subject.