PROPHECY AND THE POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION IN RENAISSANCE ENGLISH LITERATURE

British political prophecy extends back to the twelfth century, with Geoffrey of Monmouth's collection of Merlin's prophecies. In the late Elizabethan period, a veritable explosion of prophetic and prognostical activity occurred, kindled by the religious and political upheavals of the Reformation and inflamed by the nation's anxiety concerning the Spanish threat and the uncertainty of succession. Elizabethan society consisted of a cacophany of prophetic voices that challenged the central authorities of church and state. I have defined prophecy as the voice of the private, self-authenticating prophetic speaker who proclaims an alternate vision of the truth and the future outside the established order. In the political arena, prophecy served as provocation to change, and was thus the weapon of dissent and rebellion. In Elizabethan England, prophecy resonated with power and danger.;I examine a wide range of literary works--with emphasis on The Faerie Queene and Richard II--as well as numerous tracts to analyze the ways in which the beliefs and fears of Elizabethan culture imaginatively defined themselves. I argue that the literary works about prophecy in themselves served a prophetic function because they were inevitably subject to politically motivated interpretation. In particular, I explore the connection between Shakespeare's Richard II and the abortive rebellion of the Earl of Essex in 1601. In the last chapter, I show prophetic discourse to be a timeless model of pure textuality, devoid of one specific meaning and therefore possessing a plurality of meanings.;My dissertation focuses on the issue of prophetic interpretation. Although prophecy purported to be the voice of divine truth, prophetic discourse traditionally possessed an obscure, symbolic style that undermined exactly the idea of absolute, received meaning upon which valid prophecy, and stable political authority, depended. The history of prophecy--from the Greek oracles to Merlin to the Book of Revelations--is the history of misinterpretation, often with fatal consequences for the would-be interpreter. Any one prophecy signified only at the juncture of a particular interpreter and a particular historical moment. Therefore, traditional prophecies were continually re-interpreted and re-applied; I call this process of prophetic signification the "politics of interpretation.".