This is a study of how poets treat the theme of killing and various other depravities and immoralities in Renaissance poetry. The book explores the self-consciousness of the poet that accompanies literary killing, and explores fundamental moments in particular writings in which Renaissance poets admit themselves accountable and to a degree guilty of a process whereby the literary subject is brought to some kind of destruction. Included among the many poems Kezar uses to explore the concept of authorial guilt raised by violent representations are Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and Milton's Samson Agonistes.

This study examines how Renaissance poets conceive the theme of killing as a specifically representational and interpretive form of violence. Closely reading both major poets and lesser known authors, Dennis Kezar explores the ethical self-consciousness and accountability that attend literary killing, paying particular attention to the ways in which this reflection indicates the poet's understanding of his audience. Kezar explores the concept of authorial guilt elicited by violent representation in poems including Skelton's Phyllyp Sparowe, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the multi-authored Witch of Edmonton, and Milton's Samson Agonistes. In each case, he reflects on the poetic process and explores the ethical ramifications for both author and audience. In emphasizing the social, literary, and historical consequences of 'killing poems, ' this volume further advances scholarship in historicist and speech-act theories of the early modern period.

In the archetypal confrontation between the Athenian lawmaker Solon and the Greek poet Thespis, Solon confronts Thespis after seeing him act in a tragedy. He asks Thespis if he is not ashamed to tell so many lies before so many people. In response to Thespis's reply--that it was no harm to say or do so in a play--Solon vehemently blames Thespis for a professional deceit that threatens to pervade society. Solon's criticism of Thespis points to a fundamental motivation for Solon and Thespis: an exploration of the long-standing antagonism between law and theater, between drama's inconsequential fiction and the real world's socially consequential fact, at a crucial moment--the sixteenth century--in England's cultural and legal formation. The literary critics and historians in this volume examine that antagonism and find it revelatory of English Renaissance law and Renaissance theater's institutional connections and interdependences at a time when both were emerging as powerful forces in English society. Renaissance legal processes were subject to dramatic and public representation, appropriation, and evaluation. Renaissance commercial theater, often populated by law students and practitioners, was both subject to the law and subversive of it. The contributors demonstrate that theater and law were not simply relevant to each other in the early modern period; they explore the physical spaces in which early modern law and drama were performed, the social and imaginative practices that energized such spaces, and the rhetorical patterns that make the two institutions far less discrete and far more collaborative than has previously been recognized.