Identity and Awareness: Manifestations of Self and Persona in Early Modern English Drama

Abstract

This dissertation traces five early modern English dramatic characters through their crises of identity. The reader will follow the very different ways these characters respond to the demand that they represent themselves in the respective social worlds they inhabit. The protagonist in each of the plays, in Gammer Gurton's Needle, in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, in Arden of Faversham, and in Shakespeare's Othello, uses rhetorical skills, personal appearance to the senses, and action to embody the function the fictional world prescribes for them. It will appear that the three corresponding media, that is, language, perception, and action, do not only give characters an opportunity to manifest aspects of their public persona; they also represent that dramatic world, its social conditions, and the identity of others to the characters I examine. Besides building a complex image of who they are, each character negotiates his or her relationships to others through these three media. Are characters content with the social identity they build in the process, or are they aware of who they are in some way other than what they show? Is there a part of who they are that eludes representation? When they fail to comply with the requirements of a social identity, or when they decide to withdraw from it, characters testify to a degree of consciousness that they possess, or wish they possessed, an interior space, a sense of self, as a part of their identity. The self is elusive; it resists a simple definition, but the chapters that follow point out hints and signs that in characters are aware of their precious inwardness, often in the moment when they are losing it. The analyses take advantage of the critical literature on the early modern individual both before Stephen Greenblatt's groundbreaking work appeared in the field and in the era that it has strongly influenced. Reflections on a range of contemporary written discourse support the study of the characters' success and failures in their search for identity.