Guilty Creatures: Renaissance Poetry and the Ethics of Authorship (review)

We all know that Renaissance subjects are "self-fashioned" and Renaissance "laureate" poets are "self-crowned." But while we may be "newly bored" talking about the variations of new historicism that Stephen Greenblatt's and Richard Helgerson's books inaugurated, nothing as useful as Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Self-Crowned Laureates has come along.¹ It is in part this situation that makes Dennis Kezar's Guilty Creatures: Renaissance Poetry and the Ethics of Authorship so exciting, vital lines of ethically informed inquiry. Kezar accomplishes this not by thinking about something "other" than Renaissance "selves" but by showing us that an ethical responsibility to the other—the subject or "victim" of representation—determined Renaissance poetry, drama, and subjectivity as much as the desire to fashion the self by destroying the other. Greenblatt certainly took into account the other's continuous role in self-fashioning, but the distinct tendency in his work and those he has influenced has been to portray the early modern self as a subject-creating steamroller, ethically oblivious to the helpless other against which that subject is fashioned.

Kezar asks us to approach this "familiar paradigm" of self-fashioning "from a different angle" (6) and "isolates some of those puzzling passages. . . where the poet ... accepted the possibility that art can destroy its subject" (8). These passages suggest that Renaissance artists were often conscious of the potentially destructive power of art, and that this self-consciousness shapes their work and understanding of their own social roles as artists. This attention to the "responsibility for the other" provides us with a new understanding that brings us closer in sensibility to the early modern period than we have been in recent years. The "other" in this book emerges not as an object for use by the self but as something more complex. Kezar does not cite or explicitly use the work of Emmanuel Levinas, but in his analyses of Skelton, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and even Thomas Dekker, Kezar reveals a Levinasian desire to engage the other (in representation) without subsuming the other within the same.

Simply put, we have not considered the extent to which Renaissance artists apprehended the potential violence of "other-fashioning": "the coercion involved when" a subject is silenced, appropriated, and displayed "before dubious and numberless judges" (88). In offering Julius Caesar as his inaugural play for the new public Globe Theatre, Shakespeare was not just aware of the potential for violence but considered it a condition of the stage's, and the playwright's, existence. There is really not the same sort of ethical tension found in Spenser and Skelton as there is a willing acknowledgment of the artist's ethical violations. Because Shakespeare recognizes that he cannot control the audience's response to the subjects he represents, he gives himself and his play over to the potentially misunderstanding audience for their judgment. Indeed, Shakespeare constructs his play in a way that encourages its own haphazard "mutilation" by diversely motivated interpreters, just as he "dismember[s] . . . Cinna the poet at the center of the dramatic action" (88). Shakespeare's is not the gesture of a sacrificial victim but the strategic, even laureating, "design of a survivor" (106) alert to the constitutive features of the authorial self in the theater. Shakespeare creates an authorial self (and laureate fame) not by creating others only to destroy them but by giving himself up to others: "Whatever power Shakespeare asserts in this play in fact results from and coextends with a comfortable, continued vulnerability" (112).

Chapter 4 begins with a strongly stated claim: "No Renaissance art form calls more loudly for our ethical response than that representing the persecution and execution of witches" (114). In Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and William Rowley's The Witch of Edmonton, Kezar locates a play that "one of the most radical dramatic challenges to the legal and cultural production of...