Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-dvmhs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-21T22:28:25.639Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Authors and others

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2009

Elizabeth Hanson
Affiliation:
Queen's University, Ontario
Get access

Summary

I have shotte at many abuses, over shotte myselfe in describing of some; where truth failed, my invention hath stood my friend.

Greene's Vision, 1592

The subject has occupied mostly a subjugated position in my discussions of Elizabethan torture and of Shakespeare's plays. The locus of powerful truth, the subject nevertheless emerges in my account as the object of the discovering operations of the Elizabethan or Viennese or Venetian states. What such a formulation tends to leave out, of course, is an account of the position of the discoverers themselves as subjects, of the way in which finding and claiming an external truth, as well as withholding or speaking an internal one, produces an authoritative subject. I have stressed the epistemic and political oppositions of discoverer and internalized subject up to this point in order to make clear the way in which discovery constructs truth as otherness, occluding the discoverer as an original site of truth, or possible object of knowledge. But we have also seen that the discovered and the discoverers show sometimes scandalous, sometimes uncanny affinities with one another. The torturers' secret iniquities become the object of Jesuitical discoveries; the Duke discloses in himself the vicious desires he has discovered in Angelo; the impenetrable Iago understands and controls Othello's and the Venetian state's appetite for discovery. Thus the discovering subject implicit in my discussion up to this point is characterized by an objectivity that folds ambiguously into subjecthood, a primary emptiness that with a shift of perspective becomes a rich secrecy.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Authors and others
  • Elizabeth Hanson, Queen's University, Ontario
  • Book: Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England
  • Online publication: 21 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511585500.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Authors and others
  • Elizabeth Hanson, Queen's University, Ontario
  • Book: Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England
  • Online publication: 21 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511585500.004
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Authors and others
  • Elizabeth Hanson, Queen's University, Ontario
  • Book: Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England
  • Online publication: 21 October 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511585500.004
Available formats
×