The politics of exception in Renaissance drama

This dissertation analyzes the interplay of two kinds of exception to normative order: one political, pertaining to the conditions of emergency in which sovereign authority asserts itself outside the rule of law; the other generic, focusing on self-conscious ruptures of formal dramatic. Accordingly, it examines characters suspended outside or above what Aristotle defines as the essentially "political" life of man, as well as dramatic modes that either deviate markedly from their classical and mediaeval predecessors or that constitute historical innovations that first emerge on Elizabethan and Jacobean stages. My primary goal is not only to demonstrate the ways Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Middleton negotiate the febrile political tensions of their period, but also to show how their works illuminate modern political phenomena, such as the secularized state of exception, grounded in mediaeval and Renaissance political theology. Consequently, I argue that the plays' depictions of increasingly dehumanized corporeality provide us with an occasion to reconsider the works of pre- and post-Holocaust political thinkers that, while drawing on early modern dramatists to support their analyses of historical practices of statecraft, remain at least partially gender-blind.;Each chapter stages a dialogue between an early modern play and a modern work of political philosophy (by Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Kantorowicz, and Hannah Arendt). The first chapter, on Marlowe's Edward II, argues that the spectre of the recently-executed Mary, Queen of Scots, appears allegorically refracted in the figures of Edward II, Gaveston, and Isabella, each of whom represents a different threat to dynastic rule. Chapter two contends that Shakespeare's treatment of the political economy of the gift in the life of the citizen-soldier Coriolanus lays bare the ongoing state of emergency that characterizes the Roman Republic. The third chapter claims that the hyper-erotic displays punctuating the cycle of retaliatory violence in Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy trouble the status of absolute authority within the corpus of normative law, counterpointing Carl Schmitt's thesis on decisionist sovereignty. Finally, the epilogue argues that Katharine's predicament in The Taming of the Shrew exemplifies the necessity of taking into account the gendered assumptions that produce "bare life."...