Table Of ContentThis Distracted Globe
This Distracted Globe
Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature
Marcie Frank, Jonathan Goldberg,
and Karen Newman
Editors
fordham university press
New York 2016
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Frank, Marcie, editor.
Goldberg, Jonathan, editor.
Newman, Karen, 1949– editor.
Title: This distracted globe : worldmaking in
early modern literature / edited by Marcie Frank,
Jonathan Goldberg, Karen Newman.
Description: New York : Fordham University Press, 2016.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: lccn 2015036362
isbn 9780823270286 (hardback)
isbn 9780823270293 (paper)
Subjects: lcsh: English literature—Early modern,
1500–1700—History and criticism.
Material culture in literature.
Literature and society—England—History—16th century.
Literature and society—England—History—17th century.
BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / Renaissance.
Classifi cation: lcc pr428.m38 d57 2016
ddc 820.9/003—dc23 lc record available at
http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036362
Printed in the United States of America
18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
contents
Preface vii
Introduction: World Enough and Time
jonathan goldberg (with karen newman
and marcie frank) 1
Part I. materiality
1. Worldly Muck: Translating Matter in Book 2
of The Faerie Queene
brent dawson 23
2. Extreme Cary
david glimp 45
3. Marlowe’s Footstools
aaron kunin 64
Part II. sociality
4. “Who Is Speaking Here?”: Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
Modern Authorship, and the Contemporary University
robert matz 81
5. Hamlet and the Truth about Friendship
james kuzner 100
6. “Racked . . . to the Uttermost”: The Verges
of Love and Subjecthood in The Merchant of Venice
lara bovilsky 121
7. Cities of the Stranger
meredith evans 142
v
vi Contents
Part III. universality
8. What It Feels Like to Be a Body: Humoralism,
Cognitivism, and the Sociological Horizon
of Early Modern Religion
daniel juan gil 163
9. Woman as World: The Female Microcosm/
Macrocosm in Shakespeare and Donne
lynn maxwell 190
10. The Nether Lands of Chouboli’s Dastan
madhavi menon 212
Acknowledgments 231
List of Contributors 233
Index 237
preface
The essays in this volume were prompted by “Writing Sex and Other Mat-
ters with Jonathan Goldberg,” a conference held at Brown University on
September 21–22, 2012. Papers presented at the conference lie behind
about half of the essays found in the pages that follow. These essays, we
found, spoke to essays offered subsequently by other contributors, often in
surprising, unplanned ways, across markedly different scholarly styles. This
confl uence furthered the prospect of a collection, of which this book is
the result. The various contributions take up questions of materiality—of
bodies, of writing—that project and encompass the multiple worlds we
inhabit and from which we imagine our world differently, a distracted re-
lationality, to recall Hamlet’s phrase about the globe that has come to title
this collection of essays. Hamlet’s “globe” is a fi gure for the world, for
his head, and for the stage on which he performs and speaks the words
provided for him in a script he is at that moment claiming to attempt to
remember and inscribe within. These concerns about multiple materiali-
ties refl ect an abiding interest for Goldberg as a literary theorist and prime
mover of queer theory, but it is especially gratifying that a conference in
his honor helped to produce scholarship with a freestanding life of its own,
for dynamic generativity is at the heart of his scholarly and pedagogical
ethos.
In their different ways, these essays refl ect the worldmaking power of
Renaissance literature. As the entry in the recent Dictionary of Untrans-
latables reminds us, world is not a term with singular meaning. It includes
cosmological, ontological, theological, chronological, sociological, an-
thropological, and existential senses.1 As Roland Greene observes in the
“World” section of his recent Five Words, an exploration of fi ve generative
concepts in early modernity, the questions that move through world in the
period were provoked by the scientifi c and philosophic theories of mul-
tiple worlds as well as by colonialist ventures into the so-called New World
that threw the relations between subject formation and worldmaking into
question. “World” is about relations between the whole and the partial, the
vii
viii Preface
singular and the multiple, the corporeal and the abstract, the natural and
the constructed, the human and the divine, the subjective and the corpo-
rate, questions central for early modernity. These are not questions simply
confi ned to the word world.2 So, although that word is not sounded in every
essay in this collection (the introduction addresses a Spenserian etymology
for world), the questions raised in these essays resonate with the multiple
meanings of world. Ranging across the canonical writers of the period, the
essays collected here treat the world as cosmos, globe, earth, universe, so-
cial sphere, and mundanity in order to explore these meanings. Although
most of the essays focus on early modern English literature, these forays
into worldmaking extend beyond the boundaries of a single literary tradi-
tion. This is most palpably evident in the wide range of theoretical con-
cerns engaged in the volume, as well as in their rich contextualization that
ranges from Pauline doctrines to the throne of Saint Peter, from classical
sources to the creation of Urdu.
Refl ecting on the range of meanings of world, the essays are grouped
into three categories: Materiality, Sociality, and Universality—rubrics
meant to suggest some of the ways essays on disparate authors, genres, and
topics, and displaying differences in methodology and outlook, nonethe-
less speak to one another as well as to concerns that may engage readers
with interests in these topics more broadly. The fi rst group—with essays
by Brent Dawson on Edmund Spenser, David Glimp on Elizabeth Cary,
and Aaron Kunin on Christopher Marlowe—explores the stuff of which
the world is made and the objects it fails to contain. The second group—
featuring Robert Matz on Shakespeare’s sonnets, James Kuzner on friend-
ship in Hamlet, Lara Bovilsky on the extremity of male-male relations in
The Merchant of Venice, and Meredith Evans on pirates and global relations
of belonging—deals with the social relations the world enables or disables.
The third group—with essays by Daniel Juan Gil on religious bodies in
Henry Vaughan, Lynn Maxwell on microcosm/macrocosm tropes in John
Donne and Shakespeare, and Madhavi Menon on Chouboli’s Dastan—con-
templates the applicability of the norms of one world to another, whether
that transfer happens between this world and the hereafter, within the gen-
dered spheres of male and female, or in relations between the “fi rst” and
“third” worlds. Equally invested in exposing the worldmaking and world-
destroying energies of the texts they analyze, these essays’ shared interest
in the instability of their texts’ worlds means that they also overlap across
the rubrics in which we have grouped them. The introduction to the vol-
ume offers further discussion of world and worldmaking by way of rumina-
tions on the multiple ways these essays speak to one another; it also offers
Preface ix
a theoretical framework for refl ecting on worldmaking in early modern
literature through readings of Spenser as well as Sir Thomas Browne, John
Milton, and Andrew Marvell (the last three not addressed at length else-
where in this collection). It ends by considering how this volume furthers
the work of queering the Renaissance.
notes
1. Barbara Cassin, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical
Lexicon, trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Natha-
nael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski; trans. ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra,
and Michael Wood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 1265.
Originally published as Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des in-
traduisibles (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 2004). An entry for “Welt” can be found
on 1217–34 and an entry on “planetary” on 1223.
2. Roland Greene, Five Words (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2013), 143–72.
