Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser (review)

Abstract

James A. Knapp. Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xii + 231. $89.00. Breaking with historicist accounts of early modern in terms of political and religious iconophobia and iconoclasm, James Knapp offers fascinating and original study of early modern visuality--encompassing range of experiences including ekphrasis and in mind's eye--and ethical questions it provoked. Indeed, great passion of book is arguably not for Renaissance literature but for way in which ethical response to visual in Spenser and Shakespeare speaks to twentieth-century phenomenology and a new body of work on morality and ethics in philosophy, literary theory and cognitive psychology (16). Knapp begins by acknowledging that attraction to and anxiety about in early modern literature reflects critical moment when English culture was undergoing epistemological, theological and aesthetic transformations that would mark transition from medieval to early modern era (2). Reformation skepticism about vision as catalyst in spiritual matters (fundamental to Neoplatonic and Pauline discourses) clashed with philosophy's increasing trust in empirical observation, hence the question of how people ought to be moved by visual sparked intense debate (2). The Reformation privileging of word over image was thus not simply religious imperative, but an attempt to separate reasoned, stable, and implicitly verbal world of morality from unstable, emotional realm of visual experience (31). Literary artists, however, embraced power of visuality to elicit not only emotional but ethical reactions, and chief among them were Spenser and Shakespeare, for whom a crucial test of one's virtue lies in how one responds to images (27). There are two key tenets to Knapp's argument that Spenser and Shakespeare are seen to share. First is assumption that truth be accessed by rejection of material world, but that (citing phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion) the invisible (truth) is only available in ... 'the crossing of visible (59). Also underpinning argument here is work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who offers uncontested evidence that one must see or feel in order to think, that every thought known to us occurs to flesh' and whose insistence on figure of intertwining or chiasm, to define embodied proves highly suggestive for Knapp's close readings of Spenser and Shakespeare. The second assumption relates to distinction between morality as set of principles from accidents of particular situation and ethics, which cannot be thought apart from singular situations in which human subjects are challenged to make ethical decisions (24). Drawing upon recent developments in psychology, including work of Jonathan Haidt, Knapp argues that moral plays fairly minor role in guiding human action (21), Haidt's automatic intuitive reaction being initially dominant. Similarly, in Spenser and Shakespeare, moral conviction is produced phenomenologically, welling up in their characters despite their awareness of established principles and in tension with calm domain of reasoning (22). Both writers are judged to be acutely aware of tension between morality and ethics, which often begins from ambiguous nature of visual experience. In section on Spenser, which considers his translations in Jan van der Noot's Theater for Voluptuous Worldlings (1569), The Shepheardes Calendar (1579), and The Faerie Queene (1590), Knapp moves on from Ernest Gilman's influential assumption that '[d]epending on passage of his work that falls open, one can find in Spenser militant reformer on question of or lover of decoration and display willing to employ more traditional discriminations between their use and abuse' (48) to suggest coherent trajectory. …