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Stage and street : the cultural history of the early modern Thames

University of British Columbia

This dissertation is an intervention in a body of work that seeks to narrate the cultural history of the early modern Thames: in it, I aim to rewrite the story of the network of relations between the Thames and its human neighbours. Until now, scholars have overlooked the river’s cultural centrality as both a major English highway and an important London pageant stage. Three main theoretical disciplines form the substrate of my project: historicism, cultural geography, and ecocriticism. Each has very different modes of organizing the world, yet, I argue, bringing these disparate viewpoints into conversation is the only way to engage with the Thames holistically. My discussion flows from tidal current to chronicle, and from chorography and Frost Fair to stage play. While this dissertation’s focus is the sixteenth-century Thames, its chronological scope extends from the completion date of the Historia Regnum Britanniae (c. 1138) to the 1684 Frost Fair on the frozen river. In five chapters I consider the Thames as a fluid staging ground and tidal field of cultural production for the city, the court and the nation. The chapters explore consecutively, its ecology and administration; its cultural mythos; its civic and royal water pageantry; its Frost Fairs; and finally, its relationship with London stage plays. I argue, in this dissertation, for a more varied and dynamic ecocritical engagement with this protean river: I contend that the Thames shaped formulations of English national identity as much as desires of cultural ascendancy inscribed the Thames. Collectively, these chapters argue that while water spectacle and local legend inscribed the river’s surfaces, attempting to transform them into controlled and “practiced places” by means of calculated traversals (Lefebvre, de Certeau), the riverine movements of the Thames, “both familiar and strange” (Brayton 198), continually destabilized these comfortable dreams of mastery, slipping past all the regulations and stories generated to contain it and reshaping both them and their authors.

Text

2024-11-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/55747

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/