Double Anatomy in Early Modern and Postmodern Drama [antikvár]

I "To Know the Author Were Some Ease of Grief."' Early Moderiv Tragedy and the Constitution of the Subject Poststructuralist theories of the constitution of the subject have exerted such a diverse and decisive influence on Renaissance scholarship that readers and interpreters of early modem English drama might be taken by surprise when they encoimter Hieronimo's outcry in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. The protagonist of this sixteendi century revenge play, so parental for all subsequent productions of the genre, verbalizes with an extraordinary postmodern insight the problematic which is also central to the epistemological concerns of the early modem subjet.^ Who is the author? Hieronimo's question does not only pertain to the murderer of his only son. The scope of this scrutiny is cosmic. Who is the authoritative controller of meanings, productions, destinies and identities in the social circulation of texts, discourses, and signs? Subjectivity and identity are problematized in English Renaissance tragedy in complex metatheatrical frameworks through the metaphor of authorship, which establishes a dramaturgical scenario that keeps recurring throughout the early modem period. The protagonists of these dramas are subjects whose identity is constituted in relation to a task which places them in a situation where they must occupy positions of authorship as opposed to others who do not control the discursive space around themselves. The task almost always involves the taking up of some new identity, often one opposed to the original personality of the actor-character. Role-playing, which is aimed at the fulfillment of the task, becomes a testing of the subject's ability to preserve an original, authentic identity. The fashioning of the new identity results in the assimilation, or the fusing together, of the earlier and the new, fake personalities, and by the end of the dramatic action the protagonist faces an identity crisis in which, retrospectively, even the reality of some initial, self-sufficient identit}' or self-presence becomes questionable. The promise of the fully self-realized, self-h-ansforming Renaissance individual gradually turns into a laboratory of identity in which we are witness to the disintegration of the protagonist's con- The Spanish Tragedy. Hieronimo, II. v.40. References are to Thomas Kyd, The SpatJ-ish Tragedy ed. J. R. Muliyne (Tlie New Mermaids. London: A & C Black, 1989). ^ See, for example, the two seminal articles of the poststructuralist critique of the author function: Roland Barthes. "The Death of the Author." In hnage - Music - Text (Fontana Press, 1993), 142-148; Michel Foucault. "What Is an Author?" In Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle eds Critical Theory since 1965 (Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1986), 138-147.