Renaissance Self-Criticism

What characterizes the Renaissance sensibility of the self? Two things, perhaps:

First: not the playing of roles, but the consciousness of playing roles, the consciousness that creates an ironic distance between role and role-player. Richard II is entirely expressed in his assigned role; Henry V seems conscious that he is taking up a role. (Hardly surprising for the son of a usurper.)

Second: not the playing of roles, but the tendency to stand to the side to evaluate one’s own performance. Hamlet thus becomes his own dramatic critic: “What an ass I am” after a vengeful rant; thought causes things to “lose the name of action,” he concludes after a series of thoughts.

Is this new? It’s hard to think so, when we think of Augustine; surely he’s a critic of his own performances. But the Augustine of the Renaissance (in contrast to the Augustine of the Middle Ages) was the Augustine of the Confessions.