Against Reproduction: Where Renaissance Texts Come from - Paperbackby Stephen Guy Bray (Author) The idea of the author as parent and the text as child is a pervasive metaphor throughout Renaissance poetry and drama. In Against Reproduction, Stephen Guy Bray sets out to systematically interrogate this common trope, and to consider the limits of using heterosexual reproduction to think of textual creation. Through an analysis of Renaissance texts by poets and playwrights including William Shakespeare, Christopher