Joseph Kidney: Stages of Survival: Rhetoric, Death, and Comedy Between Renaissance and Reformation

My project looks at English drama in the first half of the sixteenth century, particularly as drama, along with other forms of literature, were affected by the wider European projects of Renaissance and Reformation. I centralize the writer Nicholas Udall as an exemplary figure who produced many different kinds of literary works: drama, religious tracts, educational handbooks, an anatomy textbook, and various compendia of ancient wisdom. The project has a particular interest in the way that the science of rhetoric, or the art of persuasion through language, gets passed down from antiquity and adapts to new cultural contexts in early modern literature.

Funding from The Europe Center allowed me to travel to London in the spring of 2024 and conduct research that was instrumental in the completion of my dissertation. Accessing different archives in London and its surroundings, while also exploring the rich presence of early modern history and culture in London’s museums, churches, and theatres not only deepened the project I had been working on in California for some years, but enlivened indelibly my ongoing encounter with the intellectual and cultural world I had been studying for my adult life though at both a temporal and a geographical remove.

My dissertation, Stages of Survival: Rhetoric, Death, and Comedy Between Renaissance and Reformation interrogates the dynamic between the Renaissance and the Reformation, with particular focus on early modern drama in the early sixteenth-century. Drawing on the history of rhetoric, early modern humanism, Reformation theology, attitudes towards death and dying, classical reception, theories of metatheatre, and more, this dissertation centralizes the life and work of Nicholas Udall, whose heterogeneous career as a pedagogue, dramatist, reformer, and translator provides a unique lens through which to explore the sometimes baffling variety of literary production in a formative period marked by both sudden reversals in the political culture and rapid importation of new and subversive ideas from the continent. With particular focus on the mock funeral scene in Udall's groundbreaking comedy Roister Doister, this project argues for comedy's aesthetic power as an explorative mode that harnesses the freedom available to a genre that passes itself off as tentative, as a species of recreation, while drawing together, like no other artistic form, disparate aspects of cultural meaning. This dissertation develops a new pedigree for early modern English comedy, rooted in the long transmission, through rhetorical handbooks, of ideas about amplification, or various modes of verbal expansion enfolding both exaggeration and prolixity.

The main objective of this research trip was to consult, in a series of archives (The British Library, Westminster Abbey, and Eton College), books that had belonged to and been heavily annotated by Udall, the protagonist of my dissertation, and early editions of Udall’s own books. Through work on the dissertation, I had already been making arguments regarding Udall’s particular style of humanism, a mode that prioritizes pedagogy, literary imitation, and the search for vernacular equivalents to specimens of Latin eloquence. In one way or another, Udall’s literary production is rooted in a meticulous attention to pre-existing literary texts, which is to say that his works are predicated upon a sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit methodology of reading. By examining works that Udall owned and annotated in his own hand, I was able to confirm my own suspicions about his practices as a reader, while also expanding my ideas about the ways in which he allocated his attention to texts underneath his readerly eye. Patterns of reading, consistent though never uniform, emerge from his annotations of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, Aesop’s Fables, the works of Filippo Beroaldo, and religious texts like psalters. To spend time with these books that belonged to Udall is to follow the legacies of interpretation that replicate themselves in his own commentaries, translations, and pedagogical manuals. These scholarly relations often take the form of commentaries on previous commentaries, a process of multigenerational incorporation that is bound up in the importation of continental literature into literature of the English vernacular. Looking as well at early editions of books written by Udall allowed me to develop further the picture of literary circulation in Udall’s own moment, as it becomes possible to see his previous interactions with books in his own collection take on a new life as readers go on to interact with him. Minor details with major repercussions from these research sessions assisted me in completing my dissertation, while further observations have provided material for an article in progress.

While in London I was able to complement these dissertation-focused scholarly activities with evenings and the odd afternoon dedicated to experiencing all (or at least a pale approximation of all) that the city had to offer an early modern scholar with a professional and personal interest in theatre, history, art, the archaeology of death and burial, and all things early modern. Many of these activities and events represented “bucket list” experiences for a North-American-based scholar most often merely imaginatively inhabiting Shakespeare’s England. I was able to see both Richard III and Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare’s Globe, an open-air Twelfth Night in Regent’s Park, a ballet version of The Winter’s Tale at The Royal Opera House, and Sir Ian McKellen as Falstaff in Player Kings at the Noel Coward Theatre. One afternoon took me out to Hampton Court Palace, built for the Tudor monarchs, while another day found me at the transcendent exhibition of Michelangelo’s last decades at The British Museum. Proceeding from one extraordinary church to the next, I beheld the resting places and monuments of John Milton (St Giles Cripplegate), Lancelot Andrewes (Southwark Cathedral), and John Donne (St. Paul’s Cathedral). Donne, once Dean of St. Paul’s, looked on from his marble statue as I watched the current Bishop of London install the new Bishop of Edmonton. This sort of incommunicable superposition of past and present, living and dead, whether in religious forms, old plays once again brought to the stage and reimagined in new ways, or late style etchings that retain the power to revitalize, provided the environment outside of the research that will inevitably sustain my investment, both as a researcher and a teacher, in the early modern period’s hold on our contemporary moment.