Please join us for the open forum at 2:30 (Hagerty 455) and the lecture at 4 PM
Abstract: This talk explores how two late sixteenth-century plays participated in a larger cultural discourse linking cycles of imperial rise and fall to the force of fortune. I begin with a consideration of the shifting meaning of “fortune” in the period and its gendered articulations, focusing on how new forms of economic fortune affected understandings of cosmic fortune and its relationship to free will. Through brief discussions of Machiavellian philosophy and a sixteenth-century visual tradition linking iconic representations of Fortune to Occasion, I identify a gendered dialectic between fortune and human will in which masculine action is increasingly privileged. Then, turning to the plays, I consider how the stage appropriated this dialectic in order to problematize and reframe it. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus charts the rise and fall of its protagonist’s fortunes in relation to the cyclical turns of world empire and the over-reaching ambition that helps drive its fluctuations. Faustus’s imperial aspirations, the play suggests, offer a parody of world empire’s tragic course and implicate the Reformation in a cautionary tale about the dangers of fueling fortune with human ambition. By contrast, Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay gives freer reign to fortune, positing a more celebratory view of imperial ambition and envisioning British empire on the cusp of a glorious ascent led by a female monarch. In both plays, Helen of Troy occupies a central symbolic position – showing how the dangers or possibilities of fortune find expression through female conquest or opportunism. Reisch wheel.pdf
Bio: Jane Hwang Degenhardt is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is writing a book provisionally titled Fortune’s Empire: Chance, Providence and Overseas Exploration in Early Modern English Drama. This study explores the ways that England’s economic expansion through global commerce and nascent colonial exploration heightened awareness of the role of fortune in the world—both as a cosmic force of chance and as a new understanding of wealth that was earned rather than inherited. Identifying “fortune” as a pivotal keyword in early modern English drama, it argues that fortune distinguishes England’s incipient struggle to enter the world of empires. Her previous books include Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (Edinburgh UP 2010; paperback edition 2015); and Religion and Drama in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2011), which she co-edited with Elizabeth Williamson. These studies reflect her interests in conversion and embodiment, the logics of religious and racial difference, performance, and dramatic genre. She has published in numerous collections and journals, including PMLA, ELH, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Studies in Philology, and others.
