The panelists explore three modes of speculation—possibility, virtuality, and contingency—that galvanized early modern thinkers and reshaped this period's literary landscape. These conceptual rubrics, the papers collectively argue, revealed poetic making to be a vital medium through which one could access paradigms of ideal, probable, or even impossible thought—especially as these paradigms intersect with practical and deliberative questions prompted by the need to navigate the real world. By embracing speculation as the vehicle for making sense of a world fundamentally in flux, early modern writers transformed one of the main criticisms of imaginative works—that it deals with immaterial, insubstantial, and by extension irrelevant entities—into its chief asset. Fiction’s alignment with speculation rather than reality thereby becomes a key marker of its aesthetic, epistemological, and social value.
This attempt to define speculative fiction, then, serves to position literary criticism as an essential resource for its disciplinary neighbors. In this way, our methodology offers a counterpoint to our field’s growing indebtedness to the disciplinary methods of history, philosophy, and anthropology, among many others. Early modern poets and dramatists were deeply cognizant that literary writing occupied a different ontological realm from that of other disciplines, which Philip Sidney says are all under the “subjection” of nature. Thus, the study of the distinct concepts that comprise literary speculation can serve as an important model for thinking about the work we do as literary critics and the impact our work can have on other disciplines.
The panel begins with Debapriya Sarkar’s discussion of “Possibility.” This paper argues that the idea of possibility galvanized early modern writers to create imaginary worlds and to invent new methods for investigating “forms such as never were in nature,” as Sidney put it in The Defense of Poesy. In Sidney’s formulation, poetry deals with the possible, or what “may be and should be,” rather than history’s “bare was.” Moreover, as a way of writing that “nothing affirms,” poesie was ideally suited to making sense of the unseen, the intangible, and the unverifiable. Situating these claims within the broader culture of Renaissance uncertainty, this paper traces how writers expand Sidney’s theoretical defense of the scope of poesie, often by adapting and refining his modal claims. While Edmund Spenser claims to construct a world that “might best be” in his allegorical romance, The Faerie Queene, Margaret Cavendish actualizes her belief that anyone “may make what World [they] please” by giving form to the multiple worlds of utopian thought. Indeed, literary authors understand the “possible” to be a capacious notion that encompasses myriad modes: the predictive, the prophetic, the hypothetical, the conditional, and the conjectural. By tracing their engagements with these concepts in their imaginative works, Sarkar argues, we are better able to recover a literary culture that revels in speculative methods of thought and action, rather than one hampered by the uncertainties of religious controversy, political tumult, or scientific innovation.
Through the lens of “Virtuality,” David Hershinow next charts a way to take more fully into account the impulse toward practical didacticism driving early modern speculative fiction—an impulse we might understand as the consequence of turning to literary speculation for answers to philosophical, social, and economic questions. Hershinow argues that the turn toward increased realism in early modern drama—even in those plays that tend toward the fantastical—can best be understood in terms of the period’s developing didactic focus on literature that is virtual. This is to suggest, first, that writers increasingly felt impelled to construct fictional worlds peopled by characters whose actions and reactions adhere to a principle of probable causality, worlds that are virtual in the more modern sense of “virtual reality.” It is also to suggest that drama in this period strived for this kind of probable causality to produce fictions that could serve as a vehicle for practical instruction in ethical virtue—a vehicle, in other words, for training readers in the kind of prudential judgment that dictates effective action in the real world. To underscore the centrality of virtuality in early modern drama, this paper focuses on Marlowe’s Faustus and Shakespeare’s Tempest, two plays that are obsessed with ideas of the supernatural and the fantastic.
In the final paper, “Contingency,” J. K. Barret argues that English writers differentiated speculative fiction from counterfactual fantasy through their investigations of contingency. Sean Silver claims that “when ‘contingent’ made its way into English in the late sixteenth century,” the word “gesture[d] to the web of cause that brought [an] accident into being… [Contingency] names a random event that could not be other than it is.” By Silver’s logic, contingency isolates past uncertainty in a manner that recognizes a possibility that was (and, retrospectively, had to be) instantiated. Barret’s paper extends this view to different ends: by looking at early modern approaches to contingency, she recovers how distinct strands of fiction offer access to unrealized possibility without instantiating it. These literary texts mimic the trajectory of uncertainty recorded in contingency’s outcomes as a means of accessing possibilities that might have been, but were not, realized. Drawing on the works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Stephen Gosson, and George Wither, Barret argues that speculative fiction asserts itself not to resolve the limits of this uncertainty—contingency as past accident; fiction as world making—but rather as a strategy for retaining it.