Date of Award
9-1-2023
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, certain English poets concerned themselves with the creation and manipulation of abstractions—objects that stand in the mind only. This dissertation examines: the “idea” that, on Philip Sidney’s account, a poem is; binary patterns realized in weak and strong syllables, meter and rhythm, as conceived and employed by Sidney and Edmund Spenser; and dramatis personae, the quasi-human beings whose status is among William Shakespeare’s subjects in The Winter’s Tale. I allege that the Word of God—as it had been described by the Protestant reformers and, preeminently, by William Tyndale—was prototypical of the poets’ abstractions. Tyndale held that the Word was separate from and prior to the scriptures that conveyed it: the Word entered the heart of the Christian as he read, worked a private and righteous feeling in him, and secured the meaning of the text from which it issued. Countering Tyndale, Thomas More insisted that scriptural meaning was a product of publicity—of the uses to which, in everyday discourse, the words composing the Bible were put. Following the reformers, Sidney and Spenser framed an idealist poetics. They regarded themselves as makers of abstract objects, distinct from the text containing those objects: poetical abstractions merged with the private mental substance of the individual reader—and, in certain cases, endowed him with a feeling about the events described in the text. With The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare sought to wed the idealism of Sidney and Spenser with the publicity on which More had insisted.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Joseph Loewenstein
Recommended Citation
Murakishi, Esei Mace, "The Poetry of Abstraction: Mental Objects, Private and Public, in Post-Reformation England" (2023). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3156.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3156