Dennis Kezar. Guilty Creatures: Renaissance Poetry and the Ethics of Authorship.

Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. viii + 268 pp. index. $45. ISBN: 0-19-514295-0.

Guilty Creatures, a study of the English Renaissance "killing poem," explores the author's creative and ethical responsibility for his creation. For this study's purposes, a "killing poem" may be an elegy, epic, closet drama, tragedy, or history play whose self-reflexive literary strategies direct the reader's attention to the author's violation of the subject position of the character he creates. "At the most figurative level ... the killing poem destroys its subject not by representing its death, but by revealing that subject's lack of ownership of its own representation" (15). Kezar emphasizes the "self-consciousness attending literary killing--the representation of a violence that itself reflects upon the violence of representation" (6). Guilty Creatures seeks to discover the distinction between representational and interpretative killing by investigating how the "poet and audience collaborate in producing a literary death" (7).

This study begins with John Skelton's elegy, Phyllyp Sparowe, and in doing so, Kezar establishes "that the killing poem need not shed blood to produce a body" (15). In seeking to immortalize Phyllyp Sparowe in her needlework, the poetic subject, Jane, "draws Philip's blood and protest at the precise moment she begins to 'prycke' his beak--the instrument of voice and agency--into her own textual property" (28). Although she "may want a lasting tribute to her pet,--she seems all too aware that the poet's power of representation, and of creating a work of epitaphic permanence, in some way violates the theme being celebrated" (28). Chapter 2, turning to the Serena episode in book 6 of Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, questions two authors' appropriations of their subjects--John Donne's of Elizabeth Drury and Spenser's of Elizabeth Throckmorton--for their own literary purposes. Donne slights Drury to display his own wit, and Spenser appropriates Throckmorton to enactment and simultaneously condemn a "poetics of indiscretion," i.e., one that kills the poetic subject by displaying her and by inviting spectatorship. The remaining four chapters reflect on the ways in which dramatic texts negotiate the ethical bridge between author and spectator. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, written for the Globe Theater's inaugural season, "celebrated" that opening with "a theatrical killing that is at once an admission of authorial guilt and a declaration of professional power": the death of "Cinna the poet, dismembered for his name by an audience that has become actors, falls as the superlative victim of the archetypal sacrifice of a 'private man's life' to the mistrial of public theater" (91). Then, by comparing The Witch of Edmonton (John Ford, Thomas Dekker, and William Rowley) to its prose source, Henry Goodcole's The Wonderful Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch, Late of Edmonton, Her Conviction and Condemnation and Death, Kezar demonstrates how the play turns Goodcole's narrative into a spectacle which exposes the complicity of the community, whose own ends were served by the witchcraft trial, into a "fantasy of persecution." Chapter 5 reads Samson Agonistes as Milton's reflection on his own participation in killing a king, and sees the play's resistance to interpretation as "the author's conscious effort to frustrate the predatory interpretative appropriation that it invites" (16). The book concludes with a reflection on the antagonism between drama and elegy that contrasts Shakespeare's Henry V--which illustrates the negative ethical implications of theatrical spectatorship--with two contemporary elegies that suitably treat death without appropriation.

All the killing poems Guilty Creatures considers contain a textual moment that has persistently resisted critical interpretation. Kezar's method involves presenting conflicting interpretative positions, selecting the one most useful to his own reading, and then refining that reading by historically recontextualizing the "killing poem." His study of Samson Agonistes, thus, appropriates Stanley Fish's skeptical reading of the play (e.g., "Question and Answer in Samson Agonistes, "Critical Quarterly 11:237-64), which locates the play's resistance to transparent interpretation in the dissonance between the Chorus' interpretation and Samson's inaccessible inward communication with his God. Kezar extends Fish's resistant reading to associate Samson's inwardness with the ars moriendi tradition (specifically Thomas Becon's The Sick Man's Slave, 1561), a tradition likewise employed by Charles I'S Eikon Basilike. By then drawing parallels between Samson and Milton's Eikonoklastes, Kezar sees Samson as a Milton's continuing reflection on his role in the death of Charles I and as an effort to prevent the Restoration reader from reading Samson merely as an exploration of responsibility, guilt, and innocence.

Guilty Creatures, a courageous exercise in criticism, is indeed, as Kezar suggests, eclectic--not only in its critical practices but also in its reading methods. Kezar moves with considerable facility from the "killing poems" that are his focus across the canon of English Renaissance literature, drawing in interpretative bits and pieces that elucidate and complicate his literary analyses. Although Kezar identifies this as a piece of "ethical criticism," his critical practices draw upon feminist theory, New Historicism, and, paradoxically, deconstruction. Entering its readings through moments of textual aporia, Guilty Creatures engages deconstructive notions of rhetoric and language, but instead of using linguistic resistance to collapse interpretative certainty, it recenters textual strategies in constructing authorial agency and intentionality. In doing so, Kezar reunifies the subject position for both the author and his creation, even though he says, "Such an approach does not entail reinvesting the Renaissance author with autonomy recent scholarship has done so much to challenge" (8).

Although Kezar's study is provocative and his arguments compelling, the reader seeking a contribution to the kind of extratextual understanding of authorship and reading practices that has become the focus in studies of "the history of the book" will leave unsatisfied since Kezar constructs the author and the reader entirely from rhetorical strategies within the literary text. Similarly, some readers might be skeptical about the study's contributions to "historical understanding." When Guilty Creatures moves from the literary text to the intended historical moment, it relies heavily on the tertiary work of literary critics who have accepted uncritically the work of select historians of the period. Had Kezar extended the often-brilliant skepticism of his reading strategy to his "historical" resources, the study would have benefited significantly. That Kezar both employs and departs from postmodern critical strategies should not be taken as a criticism of his work. His critical strategies are provocative--especially his investment in what he describes as "a relatively 'new ethical enquiry'" (9).

The notion of a "new ethical inquiry," however, may prove problematic to some. As Wayne C. Booth reminds us in his introduction to The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988), ethical criticism, while repeatedly repudiated in the past century, has proven remarkably persistent. Literary study for the past ten or fifteen years intentionally or inadvertently has held texts (and implicitly authors) responsible for their representations of gender and race and their complicity in upholding class distinctions. Kezar's ethical criticism, however, only peripherally explores these matters. Instead, he challenges readers to consider their complicity and guilt in acts of literary exploitation, violence, and murder that may be associated in some way with historical reality. While this may have implications for Renaissance readers, who, like Milton, participated in some way in killing the king, or who voyeuristically shared in Throckmorton's exhibition and discredit by reading Spenser, where this kind of ethical criticism takes us is not altogether clear. Are we, too, complicit in Charles I's death or Throckmorton's court banishment? One problem with ethical criticism is that it depends upon a shared ethos, and the ethos that informs Kezar's study is elusive. The ethos of transgressive authority and vulnerable subjectivity that informs Guilty Creatures is not so uncontested in Renaissance studies that the study's ethical judgments--of Renaissance authors and audiences, or of ourselves--are inviolable.

CYNDIA SUSAN CLEGG

Pepperdine University