부산대학교 도서관

Summary: This dissertation examines the ways in which representations of sexual jealousy in early modern drama (c. 1590–1640) engaged central questions of religious faith in post-Reformation England. Plays from 1590–1640 constitute a literary micro-narrative of a cultural debate regarding the legitimate grounds of belief and the proper relationship between erotic and spiritual desire and between secular and sacred epistemology. The drama's treatment of jealousy as a religiously-inflected theme is indebted to the biblical paradigm which figured religious apostasy as female adultery that angered a jealous God, but early modern playwrights significantly revised the trope, shifting attention to the subject position of a human husband whose jealousy signaled either deficient or immoderate belief. This emphasis on jealousy as a faith experience is further illuminated by the relationship between jealousy and religious zeal, two terms, derived from the same Greek root, that were not linguistically or conceptually distinct in the English Renaissance. While jealousy is occasionally defended as a legitimate response to the prospect of sexual infidelity in ways that recall earlier valorizations of the passion, the vast majority of early modern plays link jealousy with the religious fervor and mistaken belief typically associated with the zeal of Puritan dissenters. Early modern jealousy plays reflect and serve a polemical function in the critique of Puritan zeal while they demonstrate a corresponding suspicion of the compatibility of passionate eroticism and religious faith. The jealousy plays of the period contributed to the emergence of an alternative model of faith, one characterized by reason and moderation, one eventually quartered off from the erotic domain. The chapters deal extensively with several plays by Shakespeare (The Comedy of Errors, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello and The Winter's Tale), Thomas Middleton's The Changeling (which largely attempts to rehabilitate jealousy and zeal) and five plays by John Ford. In addition, I examine John Dome verse, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and tracts on religious zeal as a means of exploring how the early modern England variously envisioned the relationships among jealousy, zeal, and faith.