Plotting early modernity: Practical knowledge and the architectonics of English dramatic form (William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson)

This dissertation examines English Renaissance drama as an example of what historians of science have termed "practical knowledge," a hybrid mode of reasoning and representation predicated on making, doing, using, and pleasurable imitation. The dissertation examines how questions of epistemology converge with problems of literary form, even as it argues that the idea of "form" itself must be expanded to include the drama's many conditions of production: its collaborative modes of composition, different textual formats, theater design, and stage performance, in which space itself emerges as a preeminent medium of representation. Reading plays by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Dekker alongside English poetic treatises and vernacular manuals devoted to geometry, surveying, and measurement, the project argues that early modern dramatists and literary critics derived a structural concept of dramatic action, or plot---as well as their ideas about the social and ethical uses of dramatic plot---not only from statements of classical or Continental theory but from contemporary technical fields in which geometry was used in a productive, instrumental way. The project thus describes an encounter between literary and scientific discourses during a period in which both fields were still in the process of formation.; Chapters One and Two survey the development of geometry in England and its epistemological characteristics, as well as its place in poetic treatises, gentlemanly reading practices, and State sponsored projects. Chapter Three examines how space was used on stage as a mimetic medium and how print altered critical notions of dramatic form. Chapter Four discusses the confrontation between rhetorical and geometrical ideas of structure in Jonson's early comedy and in his collaboration with Inigo Jones; Chapter Five demonstrates how both Jonson and Dekker deploy practical methods of geometric representation to solve formal problems of emplotment in city comedy, mapping action onto urban locations to open a proto-realist representational space in which the narrative and ideological preoccupations typical of early modern London might be articulated and given form.