Materiality, Re-Enchantment, and the Spiritual Imagination in Shakespearean Romance

Abstract

In the final years of his professional life, William Shakespeare's drama entered the period we now refer to as his "late romances," plays in which the supernatural world hovers at the edges of all action, and the lines between tragedy and comedy blur. These plays, written and first performed between 1608-1613, pushed the limits of what was considered stageable and believable in the early modern playhouse. In doing so, this collection of plays responded to a post-Reformation crisis of the spiritual imagination--what to believe, and how to conceive of it--through creative experiments in "enchantment". This thesis argues that these plays amount to a seventeenth-century project of "re-enchantment," and seeks to amend teleological accounts of "the disenchantment of the world" by suggesting that creative resistance to disenchantment was already in progress in the early seventeenth century. Far from being immaterial fantasy, the plays under consideration in this thesis--Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII (All Is True), and The Two Noble Kinsmen--each materialise post-Reformation spiritual dilemmas in performance, bringing to the forefront drama's potential to make visible the otherwise invisible facets of spiritual crisis: contested spaces like Purgatory, the vitality of objects such as relics, and the embodied experience of prophecy. By combining theoretical approaches from areas of ecocriticism, materialism, and affect theory, I explore how the material spaces, objects, and bodies in these texts engage with early modern spiritual dilemmas. Across three case studies, I undertake close readings of theatrical texts in pairs, paying attention to their original performance conditions, and placing them in conversation with each other as well as contemporaneous theological, political, and imaginative writing of the period. In the first case study, I position the oceanic spaces of Pericles and The Tempest as experimental navigations of an alternative Purgatory. In the second, I trace the stage lives of theatrical props in Cymbeline and All Is True as desacralized relics. In the third and final case study, I consider the implications of embodying and producing prophecy in The Winter's Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Together, these case studies test my theory of "the dramaturgy of enchantment," to suggest that re-enchantment is an integral part of these plays' literary construction and reception, with the capacity to induce wonder, awe, terror, and pleasure in the audience. Enchantment is thus positioned as an ambivalent cultural mood; one that can accelerate the decay of damaged sites of spiritual fulfilment, or work to repair them.