Promiscuous Generation: Rogue Sexuality and Social Reproduction in Early Modern England.

This dissertation argues that early modern popular pamphlets, moralist literature, legal statutes, and stage drama consistently represent the criminal underclass – or “rogues,” as they were called – in sexualized terms, as a “promiscuous generation” consumed by “sensuall lust.” These texts construct a causal connection between the supposed immoderate sexuality of the vagrant poor, the deceitful conman, and the wily prostitute and their alleged prodigious fertility, forging tight links between sexual activity, biological reproduction, and the increase of the criminal poor. While literary and cultural critics have commonly consigned rogues to the margins of early modern culture, where they are thought to mark the boundaries of their society, my dissertation demonstrates that rogue sexuality can be found at the center of stage depictions of the English court, capital, and nation. The first half of my dissertation focuses on the biological threat posed by rogues in a range of popular literatures and in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV. The second half examines the role of rogue sexuality in the performance of masculinity and femininity in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. By tracing the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a more normative register, my project challenges the sharp distinctions that literary critics and historians of sexuality tend to draw between early modern discourses of orderly and disorderly sexuality; instead, it illuminates the often-unstable interplay between licit and illicit sexuality, thereby redefining the relationship between the normative and the criminal in early modern England. The analytical category of rogue sexuality also provides a new framework for interpreting the cultural logic of sexual reproduction in early modern England. That is, the early modern panic over the reproductive consequences of promiscuous rogue sexuality charts a movement from thinking about individual sexual sin to the social ramifications of reproductive behavior writ large, comprising part of the pre-history of the modern state’s interest in human reproductive life that Michel Foucault calls “biopower.”PhDEnglish Language & LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/84602/1/arifried_1.pd