The Question of Human Perfectibility in Early Modern English Literature

This thesis considers the contrasting legacies of Stoic humanism and its Augustinian–Calvinist critique, showing how their opposed understandings of human capacity manifest in early modern English literature. At stake is the tension between Stoic exaltation of human agency, celebrated by Seneca as a godlike power featuring the Stoic sapiens, and Calvinist insistence on one’s fallen condition. Chapter One explores how, in Philip Sidney’s poetry and prose, these contrary impulses intersect: Sidney invokes the poet as a divine maker, drawing on both Platonic and Stoic ideals of self-transcendence, while his writings reveal the inadequacy that undermines such a perfectionist claim. This reflects the contest between classical optimism about the powers of the human mind, and the Reformed emphasis on human incapacity which ascribes the making of fiction ultimately to the divine rather than to man.

In Chapter Two, I show how for Shakespeare, this tension emerges in the discrepancy between the idealised self-image and a subversive undercurrent that reveals the unreliability of such a self-image. The tendency to recognise oneself as more than one is appeals to certain protagonists, as it had been appealing to the Stoics in their emulation of Stoic sapiens. While Shakespeare stages characters’ fictional selves attaining imaginative triumph, he also reins in unchecked assumptions of virtue. Milton, by contrast, affirms self-idealisation in his renewed models of Stoic sapiens; a tendency I investigate in Chapter Three. While his writings might appear to impose systematic control upon the reader, they are in fact held by two competing forces of tranquillity and passion, resisting one settled interpretation. By reading poetry as the poet’s mind materialised in words, this thesis details how the engagement with Stoic thought illuminates the understanding of fictional self-idealisation. It argues that such a conversation between a poetic idealism and a philosophic one offers fresh perspectives on the ambivalent but fascinating question of the perfectible self.