Shakespeare's Cupio Dissolvi: desire, death and renewal

Hartley, Richard Jon (2024). Shakespeare's Cupio Dissolvi: desire, death and renewal. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

This thesis draws attention to the theme of destructive renewal in Shakespeare’s plays and narrative poems. Scholarship to date has explored Shakespeare’s destructive acts and frequently attributed them to a crisis of character: a result of shame, melancholy or hubris. Little attention has been given to the notion that these destructive, often self-destructive, acts are motivated by a desire to die. This thesis focuses on these moments of desiring death and reveals them to be expressions of faith, love, power and renewal. Many plays and other texts are discussed, but a particular focus is placed on three of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Timon Athens, and his narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. In these works, I find persistent, if varied, manifestations of a sentiment found in St Paul's epistle to the Philippians, 'desiderium habens dissolvi, et esse cum Christo' [I desire to dissolve, and be with Christ]. This Pauline sentiment, abbreviated to cupio dissolvi and invoked in sermons, religious treatises and emblem books in late medieval and early modern Europe, had become, by the late sixteenth century, a powerful expression of faith in the resurrection, and a belief in the soul’s priority over the flesh.
I intend to follow the early modern users of cupio dissolvi, employing the sentiment as a shorthand for a desire for destructive renewal. In the first four chapters, the analysis remains tethered to its Christian inception, which is important to the context of early modern literature and allows a roving freedom to articulate a broader paradigm of desiring violent renewal. In some texts, such as Hamlet, the paradigmatic use of cupio dissolvi intersects with a strong allusion to the original Pauline desire; in others, such as Romeo and Juliet, the paradigm is stretched in its application to notions of a secular union in death; and in the final chapter, which explores Shakespeare’s epic poem The Rape of Lucrece, cupio dissolvi is used alongside twentieth-century literary theory, ostensibly removed from its Christian origin.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):