Abstract
“How to Do Things with Darkness” describes the development of an early modern culture of interpretation focused on obscure or difficult writing, especially in poetry. In early modern poems, rhetorical manuals, and sermons, the metaphor “dark” appears attached to obscure language and hidden meanings, or to specific tropes, like riddle, enigma, metaphor, and allegory. These dark figures presented readers with certain responsibilities: most likely, they needed to be read several times over; often, they were misread. Dark writing carried important questions with it. Why would you write darkly, if you wanted to be understood? And how should you read dark writing, if you want to understand?
At the turn of the sixteenth century, these questions were repeatedly posed and answered in two traditions: Renaissance humanism and Protestant theology. On the humanist side, dark writing did something surprising: it mounted a critique of clarity from within the rhetorical tradition itself. Clarity was a longstanding pillar of rhetorical theory, praised by Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates, elaborated on by Cicero and Quintilian, and subsequently prized by the handbooks that followed in the wake of these powerful currents. The degree to which darkness was allowed in, or forced out, varied across centuries. In early modern England, I argue, there was a conscious tradition of celebrating obscurity alongside clarity: in ways old and new, rhetoricians consciously prepared their writers and readers to grapple with difficult texts.
On the Protestant side, the challenges to accessibility posed by the Bible's “dark speeches” lay at the heart of the poetry, prose, and theologies of post-Reformation England. Though reformed thinkers famously resisted accounts of scripture’s obscurity, their sense of the skill and preparation a reader needed in order to interpret the Bible were nonetheless formidable. “How to Do Things with Darkness” finds these preoccupations and arguments at the center of the period’s poetics. Dark sayings solicit orientations to the text that are at once intimate and distant, that find capacity and haplessness in their readers, and that give us valuable insight into how it was that poets like Edmund Spenser and John Donne imagined their insights would endure within their readers’ minds. More than anyone else, this dissertation contends, these two poets reimagined and re-engineered the reader’s orientation to hiddenness in a poem, and by analogy, to that which is concealed in the self, in the world, and in the divine.
