This essay considers the relation between ethical accountability and authorship in Henry V and other Shakespearean plays. It argues that the insistent displacement and redistribution of guilt by Henry V, and by the play's choral reflections, meditate upon a similar phenomenon encountered by Shakespeare in an increasingly corporate theater. The play's pronounced metadramatic self-consciousness concerns the same literary history with which it participates: how does one own (and own up to) one's words and actions in a theater populated by middlemen and structured against private ownership? Henry V's complication of culpability reflects and embodies the theater's vexing of conventional notions of authorial responsibility. This complication corresponds with a moment in Shakespeare's career at which the authorial voice of lyric, and even the solitary responsibility claimed in the epilogue of 2 Henry IV, was becoming unstable and untenable.

In 1672, John Starkey, dissenting publisher, member of the Green Ribbon Club, and later a political exile in Amsterdam for having published Nathaniel Bacon's Historical Discourse in 1683, issued a new translation of Suetonius' History of the Twelve Caesars. A Bodleian copy of this work was was attributed to Andrew Marvell in a seventeenth-century hand, an ascription that made sense in view of the fact that Marvell had obviously been working closely with Suetonius in both parts of the Rehearsal Transpros'd, especially the Second Part, and offered extensive analogies between Nero and Caligula and Samuel Parker, his opponent in the debates over enforced conformity. This ascription was later undermined by Pierre Legouis on the grounds that the passages about Nero and Caligula in the translation and in Marvell's tracts were "ni identiques, ni tres differentes," an inconclusive conclusion. Careful philological comparison, however, can now confirm that Marvell had the Suetonius translation in front of him (or in his head) as he marshalled his ammunition against Parker, though he rearranged or condensed its sentence structure, perhaps precisely to conceal the fact that he was the author of all three works. It appears that Marvell also consulted the earlier translation by Philemon Holland (1606), whose style was now obsolete, but whose vocabulary was occasionally too vivid to ignore. The entire exercise offers us a glimpse of the complex and far from disinterested motives behind translation--and retranslation--of the classics in the early modern period.

I propose that Kant's Groundwork is extensively related to Milton's sonnet on his talent and blindness, "When I Consider." I am aware that my proposal of a significant relation between Kant's thought in the Groundwork and a passage of seventeenth-century English verse may seem not only incredible or trivial but, much more offending, necessarily (in Kant's terms) heteronomous to the autonomy that is the condition of the categorical imperative. I try to suggest, however, that Kant's relation to Milton's performance provides Kant's access to autonomy in the exercise of his "special talent" [besonderes Talent] for exemplarity, that is, for his particular "teaching" [Belehrung] of exemplarity in the categorical imperative (4:388-9). Kant's teaching in and of autonomy thus represents his way of learning from Milton. At the same time, I do not require immediate credibility for this suggestion as a condition for establishing the principal facts of the relation between the Groundwork and Milton's sonnet. Indeed, it is clear to me that further articulations of the significance of this relation may well be in order.