Unhuman Encounters in Early Modern Drama

Abstract

This dissertation uses contemporary posthumanist and media theory, early modern educational and literary humanist texts, and the dramatic work of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, and William Shakespeare to chart the variety of theatrical response to early modern ideas of “humanity” in the wake of humanist education’s cultural ascent. As London’s early commercial playwrights, trained in humanist schoolrooms, adapted and staged humanism’s attitudes about art’s ability to “delight and instruct,” they relied on ideas formulated about the written word. Historicizing both humanism and posthumanism as methods of relating to media objects, I argue early modern drama takes as its subject the contingent and performative processes by which the humanizing of “the human” is carried out, undermining the humanist notion of texts as objective mediators of moral or ethical truth. Instead, the stage prompts encounters with an array of human-adjacent entities, the unhumans of my title: frightening and comic stage devils, simulated racial Others, uncanny echoes, and even the books central to humanist study. The media innovations of the theater thus enriched and complicated early modern thinking about the purported humanizing qualities of the literary arts.