Nature and Law in Early Modern English Literature: Shakespeare, Milton, Cavendish

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This project explores negotiations of the relationship between nature and law in early modern English literature. In particular, it examines the role of nature as a source of juridical and political authority: what strategies were employed to assert and stage this authority claim; what problems did they produce? References to nature were used to legitimate a whole spectrum of legal and political positions. During England's central political conflict of the 17th century which led to the Civil War in 1642 and to the liquidation of the monarchy in 1649, both Royalists and Parliamentarians invoked nature's unalterable laws in order to justify their militant policies. Such divisive diversification of legal positions was aided by the polysemic ambiguities of the term 'nature' as well as by increasing competition between the scholastic lex naturalis and more secular conceptions of natural law. In this historical context, all attempts of locating the God of Christianity and His power within the natural order of Creation assumed an eminently political significance.Literary negotiations of the relationship between nature and law reflect key political conflicts of the age. The project engages with such sources in order to reconstruct and revaluate pivotal political and epistemic transformations of the long 17th century. In doing so, it traces both the continuities and discontinuities engendered by the epochal rift of the Civil War and the Interregnum (1642-60). The dynamics of continuity and discontinuity register with particular intensity in Shakespeare and Milton, whose fictional worlds are at the centre of the project's critical investigations. In the current phase, Sidney's Arcadia has been a further focus of interest; in the projected second phase of the project, Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World and other writings by this author will be studied. Sidney, in the 1580s, explores the normative ideals and political anxieties of Elizabethan rule against the exemplary backdrop of pastoral Arcadia; Cavendish, in the 1650s and '60s, seeks to restore a Royalist order of nature in a utopian otherworld, following the traumatic hiatus of the Revolution. In Cavendish's writings a new, heterodox philosophy of nature coalesces with those normative powers of 'natural' affective rule which were canonized, but at the same time already profoundly problematized, by Sidney and Shakespeare. By studying the political role of nature in some of the key texts of early modern English literature, the project illuminates the complex discursive currents and counter-currents, the competing claims to political and epistemic authority that characterize the century between the reign of Elizabeth I and the Stuart Restoration. Encompassing both the 'new philosophy' and traditional systems of knowledge and belief, the transformations which the project explores transcend, and repeatedly run counter to, any unified narrative of modernization.