Forms of imperfection in the English Renaissance

This dissertation argues that the problem of perfection was central to English literary culture in the wake of sixteenth-century humanism. For English humanists such as Roger Ascham, the great authors of classical antiquity were supposed to offer perfect examples of literary excellence. But these models often survived only in fragmentary form—half a speech, an unfinished treatise, a few lines of poetry, or a work altogether lost. As English writers looked to the examples that humanism supplied to invent an English vernacular eloquence, the broken corpus of antiquity proved a sticking point. Acts of cultural imitation large and small were suspended between the fragment in hand and the ideal on its horizon. As poet Samuel Daniel complained, those who hoped to reform English writing on the model of antiquity were “told that here is the perfect art of versifying, which in conclusion is yet confessed to be unperfect.” My project illuminates the historical particulars and formal contours of this dilemma through the story of the Greek painter Apelles, whose “imperfite worke,” poet John Harington alleges, was “so full of the perfection of his art, that no man durst euer take vpon him to end it.” In successive chapters (and a brief coda), I trace echoes of this story across the work and early reception histories of John Lyly, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Francis Bacon. I find that the classical visual arts supplied English writers of the period with a vocabulary for reimagining the utility of poetry when humanism’s claims to perfection began to fade into irrelevance.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference