Visible God : A study in culture, drama and the mystery of commodification in the English renaissance

Abstract

The area of interest of this thesis is summarised by the term commodification. This is on the one hand anachronistically and yet unavoidably framed by the broader discourses of modern political economy and social and cultural theory; and on the other it immediately recalls recent turns in Anglo-U.S. literary and cultural criticism that are deeply ingrained within the present historical and theoretical moment. In a significant number of recent critical studies on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, in fact, the shared interpretative preoccupations of the new theoretical and historicist criticism, that during the last two decades or so have been broadly grouped under the recurring headings of subversion and containment, power and ideology, the self and sexuality, are now in the process of being reinscribed in a critical and interpretative horizon that increasingly foregrounds economics, the market and material production and reproduction.

This study therefore is proposed both as a metacommentary on contemporary debates in cultural and literary criticism and theory, and as an original historical materialist interpretation of early modern cultural texts that include writings from popular Elizabethan literature such as Thomas Harman and Robert Greene's social pamphlets and, in particular, a body of dramatic works by Thomas Dekker, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton.

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