“Entertaining Strangers” reveals how theories and practices of hospitality shaped and were shaped by the early modern print and theater industries. Whereas earlier studies of hospitality and literature have focused on aristocratic patronage, in this dissertation I reveal the vital importance of commercial hospitality as a framework for ethical and social relations in the playhouse and on the printed page. I begin with the surprisingly individualistic, yet strictly non-commercial, upper-class hospitality of country house poems by Ben Jonson, Aemilia Lanyer, Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, Andrew Marvell, and Marie Burghope, before turning to domestic travel narratives, particularly those by the working-class poet John Taylor, to show how professional writers accommodated commercial hospitality scenarios by revising traditional models. Intervening in recent scholarship that places early modern travel writing within a trajectory of increasing individualism, I argue that the genre’s emergence in English literature depended upon the ethics of hospitality as expressed in acknowledgments of gratitude that I term “guest writing.” The second half of the dissertation looks to the theater, which undermined the traditional hospitality scenario dominated by a singular master-host. I read Hamlet, Histrio-Mastix, and the manuscript play Sir Thomas More for their use of a popular yet rarely discussed late-sixteenth-century plot device: the unexpected arrival of traveling players. Through this device, I argue, early seventeenth-century plays theorize the theater itself as a form of hospitality. In readings of the paratexts of printed plays, I demonstrate the importance of hospitality to notions of authorship in the period. After the eighteenth century, the author came to be envisioned as a kind of host, the bountiful owner of the hospitable space of the text. Yet seventeenth-century paratexts present a very different view of both hosting and authorship, locating hosting authority with communities of actors and identifying the author not as a host but rather as a cook, whose skillfulness is predicated on collaborative service. Thus, I argue, scripts of hosting and guesting across a variety of literary forms provided an ethics and a model for authorship and audience relations. At the same time, the burgeoning business of entertainment transformed the parameters of hospitality to include hybrid forms of exchange between strangers in the marketplace.

Creator

• Blankenau, Katherine Elizabeth

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-jxw3-rm92

Subject

• Philosophy
• Theater history
• English literature

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15447
• etdadmin_upload_791923

Keyword

• Travel writing
• Hospitality
• Performance studies
• Print culture
• Poetry
• Paratexts

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright