This dissertation examines representations of artistic professionalization in Early Modern English drama. Focused on the paragone—a series of sixteenth and seventeenth-century treatises that argued for the superiority of one artistic medium over all others—I approach drama from a sociocultural perspective, utilizing a textual archive that includes drama, antitheatrical texts, emerging artistic history, and rhetorical manuals. Bridging the theoretical gap between Early Modern literary and cultural studies and contemporary revisions of theories on visual culture, this project argues for the cultural efficacy of the rising multimedia artist, the dramatist. While my interdisciplinary study builds on scholarship related to print and performance, idolatry, and art history, my project responds to current interest regarding the significance of multimedia perspectives. My research opens up traditional analyses of textual rhetoric to the realm of the visual and sheds light on the relation between aesthetics and cognitive processes in the Renaissance. Departing from previous reflections on the role of the verbal and visual in Early Modern drama, I conceptualize more specifically the tie between the rising visual and verbal artist and the ways in which this connection gets expressed in performance during England’s tumultuous religious and political Renaissance.
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