Image conscious: The reformation of the image in early modern England

This dissertation argues that a literary aesthetic arises in early modern England as a means of negotiating this culture's “image consciousness.” I use this phrase to designate an ideological structure that manifests itself in a preoccupation with figures, a preoccupation apparent not only in the iconoclastic acts and theological discourse of the Reformation but also in the socio-political, literary, and scientific arenas. Addressing a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, my project argues that an increasingly palpable hermeneutic anxiety about verbal and visual figures engenders English Renaissance culture's efforts to enforce an ideological distinction between the signifying systems associated with images and words. I make the claim that this iconoclastic attempt to distinguish between images and words may be located in the emerging distinction between the figural and literal realms and, ultimately, in the cultural articulation of the division between the literary and the scientific that structures modern western thought.; This project begins with a reading of Calvin's program of iconoclasm within the context of medieval and early Reformation image theory. Chapters Two and Three argue that the poetic outpouring at the end of the sixteenth century may be understood in part as an analogous attempt to negotiate issues engaged by the image debates. In these chapters I trace this culture's shifting theory of interpretation, apparent in the humanist genre of the Emblem, in Sidney's poetic theory, and in the poetry of Donne and Spenser. Chapters Four, Five, and Six argue that the rise of the public theater in England, Marlowe and Shakespeare in particular, also occurs partially as a response to the anxiety that attached itself to the process of interpreting both images and words, an anxiety that also engenders a discourse of sexuality itself that we may understand as an effect of iconoclastic thought. Finally, I examine Shakespearean romance in the context of Francis Bacon's scientific theory and posit that this reforming process contributed to the rise of a scientific perspective or “enlightenment.” What I define as the reformation of the image culminated in the construction of what would come to be known as empirical reality and temporal duration. These ideological structures would assume the ideologizing work that the iconoclasts had manifested earlier by furthering the distinction between the real and unreal, the literal and figural, the scientific and the literary.