Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser [Hardcover]

Focusing on works by Shakespeare and Spenser, this study shows the connection between visuality and ethical action in early modern English literature. The book places early modern debates about the value of visual experience into dialogue with subsequent philosophical and ethical efforts.Introduction: Image Ethics Harnessing the Visual: From Illustration to Ekphrasis From Visible to Invisible: Spenser's 'Aprill' and Messianic Ethics Looking for Ethics in Spenser's Faerie Queene 'To look, but with another's eyes': Translating Vision in A Midsummer Night's Dream The Ethics of Temporality in Measure for Measure 'Ocular proof' and the Dangers of the Perceptual Faith 'Disliken the truth of your own seeming': Visual and Ethical Truth in The Winter's Tale

Knapp combines sensitivity to things seen with considerable philosophical subtlety. This book will appeal most of all to those steeped in the work of phenomenologists and prepared to approach poetry through their eyes. - Renaissance Quarterly

More than any other book in recent Renaissance studies, Knapp's makes a convincing case for the need to return to the riches of phenomenology, not for the sake of making the Renaissance 'relevant' to contemporary debates (although he does this admirably), but so that we can see the convergence of both periods on basic questions about the body, sympathy, reason, and vision - questions that have occupied philosophical and religious discourse for a very long time. - Michael Witmore, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Image Ethics in Shakespeare and Spenser represents a profound and thoughtful engagement with the drama of moral decision in Shakespeare and Spenser. Working with philosophical, theological, and scientific texts from both Renaissance letters and contemporary thought, Knapp movingly demonstrates the intimate role that mental and physical images play in an embedded and embodied ethics experienced in time. ThrlĂ3