EMIGF V: Chloe Holmquist & Victor Hainagiu

Chloe Holmquist, PhD Student in English, University of Toronto

“this more gross and courser mettaled age”: Performing Matter in Heywood’s The Brazen Age

First printed in 1578, Arthur Golding’s vernacular translation of the Metamorphoses was one of the most influential texts for both poets and natural philosophers seeking to understand the changeability of the material world. It should not be surprising, then, that the prolific English playwright Thomas Heywood would attempt to translate “Ouids woorke of turned shapes” for the stage. Often dismissed by scholars as impractical and lowbrow, Heywood’s adaptation—spanning a mere five plays—proved immensely popular because of its use of elaborate costumes, on-stage transformations, and flying machine. Such spectacle was often the target of antitheatricalists, who insisted that theatrical performance disrupted the boundaries between reality and fiction precisely through its capacity to re-inscribe both objects and bodies with new meaning. Yet Heywood’s The Brazen Age (1609) purposefully calls attention to its own artifice and uses theatre’s “translating” and “trans-shaping” of forms to probe at questions of materiality typically reserved for scientific treatises. This paper will focus on the convergence of Heywood’s philosophical engagements with both performance and scientific theories of matter (such as “atomies”) within his central figure of the blackened and limping god Vulcan. At once conventional and destabilizing, Heywood’s Vulcan challenges our assumptions of what the early modern stage could do.

Victor Hainagiu, PhD Candidate in English, University of Toronto

Nature’s Narrative: The Growth of Restoration in Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans

The dramatized struggles of devotional poetry are often grounded in the difficulty of reliably accessing the spiritual realm beyond the physical world’s veiled distractions. Within Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans, nature itself proves to be the central guide for structuring the poetic subject’s relationship with God and accommodating a narrative of social and political loss. This analysis considers Vaughan’s unprecedented focus on nature among the metaphysical poets within the context of the Anglican community’s persecution, particularly the Puritan banning of the Book of Common Prayer in 1645. I argue that Vaughan depicts the natural world not merely as a pastoral, proto-romantic retreat, but rather as a model that provides a narrative framework for restoring humanity’s fallen state and his community’s religious crisis. To that end, I highlight the extent to which his motifs of natural renewal are best understood within the Old Testament prophetic tradition, especially the books of Isaiah and Ezekiel, in contrast with critics who generally point to the influence of the Song of Songs and psalms on Vaughan’s poetry. By drawing on such biblical subtexts in his representations of seasonal cycles, Vaughan shows how these cycles can ultimately be transcended at the personal, political and even eschatological level.