Waddell, James William Stubbs; (2024) Vigilant regard and dew attent: Attention and distraction in early modern English romance, 1580-1625. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis examines ideas about distraction, as depicted in—and, some historical readers argued, engendered by—English romances. England between 1580 and 1625 was subject to pervasive anxiety about mind-wandering, lax attention, and other kinds of mental indiscipline. Distraction was thought to signify or cause a variety of ills: slack prayer, unruly passions, lapsed chastity, and slapdash scholarship. This thesis views early modern England’s distraction crisis through the prism of vernacular romance narratives, both seductively distracting and indecorously distracted. It will argue that writers and translators of romance—Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Sir John Harington, and Lady Mary Wroth—playfully engaged with the prevailing mood of concern about distraction, alluding to its supposed dangers while simultaneously revelling in its taboo appeal. I begin with Sidney’s Arcadia (in its 1593 printed form), which both thematises and wrestles with literary distractions from masculine civic duty, drawing on ideas set out in the Defence of Poesy. Turning to the Faerie Queene, I examine Spenser’s engagement in Books I and II with the practice of prayer and management of passions, which are threatened both by distraction and by monomaniacal excess of attention. Staying with The Faerie Queene, I investigate Spenser’s engagement—through Book III and the poem’s 1596 second part—with themes of chastity and marriage, and their ambiguous connections to mental vigilance and laxity. The subsequent chapter, on John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso, demonstrates his mischievous appropriation of humanist scholarship’s paratextual scaffolding, meant to facilitate attentive scholarly reading, turned to playfully distracting ends. In my final chapter on Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania, I argue that discreetly faked inattention constitutes a form of attentional sprezzatura, recuperating stereotypically feminine duplicity as a form of aristocratic tact. Taken together, these chapters contend that distracted romances figured forth newly emergent forms of selfhood and subjectivity.

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