Epistolary Culture and Early Modern English Drama, c.1550-1642

This thesis provides the first in-depth study of letters in early modern English drama. Building on a survey of more than 400 extant playtexts, it illuminates the widespread practice of writing and reading letters across performance cultures c.1550–1642. The letter experienced a renaissance as a personal form of correspondence and a literary device in this period. This thesis argues that playbooks and the stage provided imaginative spaces for depicting everyday letter-writing practices while responding to and shaping England’s burgeoning market for epistolary literature.

The chapters focus on four kinds of letters, each of which provoke questions about materiality, embodiment, and epistolary rhetoric and its established tropes. Chapter 1, “Printed Letters,” asks what happens when letters appear in printed playbooks. It argues that, rather than reproducing paper props, letters in drama typically adhere to literary print conventions, which mark out letters as vehicles for characters’ epistolary voices and the book as a compelling space for performances of letter-reading. Chapter 2, “Copied Letters,” traces shifting attitudes about literary love letters from the Tudor court to the Caroline theatre and shows how anxieties about copying emerged alongside printed model love letters. Plays featuring copied correspondence emphasize concerns about emotional sincerity, but they also demonstrate how copying can be frustrated and exploited by assiduous readers. Chapter 3, “Torn Letters,” analyses the compelling reception of Ovid’s Heroides onstage and argues that acts of textual fragmentation aid letter-readers in performing epistolary complaints and rewriting the emotional and practical outcomes of the letters they receive. Chapter 4, “Bloodstained Letters,” examines the interpretive complexities that arise when letters incorporate bodily fluids. It illustrates how playwrights transformed the language of bloodletting from martyrologies and literary love letters as well as the materials of stage blood into metatheatrical commentaries that highlight the stage letter’s affective impact on playgoers and playreaders.