Yves Herak

• C5: The aesthetics of co-creativity in early modern English literature

On a lovely day in May 1578, Queen Elizabeth I is walking in the gardens at Wanstead. There, she is approached by an ailing mother, whose daughter has two suitors and cannot decide whom of the two to marry. The woman hopes that Elizabeth will resolve the unfortunate situation by judging who the worthier man is herself. Neither the mother, nor the daughter, nor the suitors are real—they are fictional characters in a royal entertainment performed to please the English monarch. There is no stage on which players act out a play for the queen, rather they act with the queen: she is an integral part of the plot. This example shows why early modern royal entertainments are such tricky business: the poet has to script the role of the monarch the entertainment is for, but there is no guarantee that they will act accordingly. This dissertation project is about precisely these cases: when a conflict between the poet's aesthetic authority and the monarch's aesthetic authority creates a difference in the entertainment. The monarch steps into a co-creative relationship with the poet, whether the latter agrees to doing so or not. This co-creative act then needs to be re-integrated into the printed entertainment text, as it not only includes the text of the fictional plot but a description of the historical event as well. Because of this, entertainments can be simultaneously read from an autological perspective—the author’s poetics prior to the performance—and from a heterological perspective—the poet's authorial account after the performance. The monarch thus becomes a figure of aesthetic reflection, around whom the dissertation evolves. Through these various differences—historical / fictional, poet / monarch, performance / text—the approach pursued here seeks to provide a new angle on the concept of co-creativity. This work is part of working area A in the project, communality in texts, through its examination of how the entertainment form enables collaboration between poet and monarch.

• Authorship
• Fictionality
• Co-Creativity
• Early modern entertainments
• Elizabeth I and James I of England