My dissertation analyzes the fascination with evil in Renaissance English literature by examining the aesthetics governing representations of evil places, characters, and actions in the work of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Critics from Sidney to Stanley Fish have argued that Renaissance poets use representations of evil to disgust readers and thereby incite them to virtue, and that evil can appeal to healthy readers only by incorporating elements of misguided virtue or deceptive beauty. Instead of allowing a poem's explicit moral agenda to rule out potential poetic effects, I focus on the importance and power of the aesthetic conventions governing representations of evil. These alternative aesthetic standards, which I call sinister aesthetics, do not merely appropriate pleasurable conventions for representing beauty and virtue, nor do they violate those conventions in order to disgust readers with ugliness. Instead they valorize the dark and hideous as admirable poetic subjects---and, by association, risk encouraging evil itself. In the works I analyze, these sinister aesthetics fall roughly into three classes: artfully self-revealing deceit, infernal magnificence, and fascinating deformity or filth.;My first chapter applies pressure to contradictions in Renaissance poetic theory, in order to reveal the subtle ways in which Renaissance critics like Tasso and Sidney acknowledge the aesthetic principles and the pleasurable effects of evil representations. I then consider three texts that deploy sinister aesthetics in increasingly complex ways. The Faerie Queene tests the limits of its capacity to aestheticize filth through antagonists like Error and Duessa. The dangerous beauty of the Bower of Bliss reveals evil's complicity in the appeal of the sensual, while the Bower's destruction implicates virtuous action---and virtuous allegory---in the production of ugliness. Shakespeare's Richard III combines in one character the appeal of the artfully self-revealing deception, or "palpable device," with a poetics of deformity, empowering Richard as a fascinating, hellish prodigy through the curses directed at him. Finally, Paradise Lost incorporates sinister aesthetics into divine punishments such as the tortures of hell, as well as divine self-representation (God's "majesty of darkness"), thus providing a theological justification for the poetic use of the tenebrous, horrid, and infernal.
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