Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric

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M A S C U L I N I T Y, G E N D E R A N D I D E N T I T Y I N T H E E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E LY R I C

In early modern lyric poetry, the male poet or lover often appears not as powerful and masterly but rather as broken, abject, and feminine. Catherine Bates examines the cultural and literary strategies behind this representation and uncovers radically alternative models of masculinity in the lyric tradition of the Renaissance. Focusing on Sidney, Ralegh, Shakespeare, and Donne, she offers astute new readings of a wide range of texts – a sonnet sequence, a blazon, an elegy, a complaint, and an epistle. She shows how existing critical approaches have too much invested in the figure of the authoritative male writer to be able to do justice to the truly radical nature of these alternative masculinities. Taking direction from recent psychoanalytic theories of gender formation, Bates develops critical strategies that make it possible to understand and appreciate what is genuinely revolutionary about these texts and about the English Renaissance lyric tradition at large. c at h e r i ne b ates is Associate Professor (Reader) of English at the University of Warwick.

M A S C U L I N I T Y, G E N D E R AND IDENTITY IN THE ENGLISH R E N A I S S A N C E LY R I C C AT H E R I N E B AT E S

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521882873 © Catherine Bates 2007 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2007

ISBN-13 978-0-511-37746-4

eBook (EBL)

ISBN-13

hardback

978-0-521-88287-3

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

page vi viii

1 Introduction

1

2 Masochism in Astrophil and Stella

28

3 Fort! Da! The phallus in ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’

89

4 Abjection and melancholia in The Ocean to Cynthia

136

5 Feminine identifications in A Lover’s Complaint

174

6 The lesbian phallus in Sapho to Philaenis

216

Index

259

v

Acknowledgements

This book has been long in the making and over the years many debts have been incurred. I would like to thank the editors of SEL for permission to reproduce here sections of my article on ‘Sidney and the Manic Wit of the Abject Male’ (2001), a piece that in many ways represents the seed from which this book grew. Thanks are also due to Blackwell Publishing for permission to reproduce here a substantially expanded version of my essay ‘The Enigma of A Lover’s Complaint’ from A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). I would also like to thank Professor Schoenfeldt personally for allowing me to publish the essay there – especially as it was not what he originally commissioned – and for his continued interest in my work. Professors Arthur Kinney and David Loewenstein also read sections of this book in an earlier form and for their long-term encouragement and support I am immensely grateful. My intellectual debts and sources of inspiration are fully acknowledged in the notes, but I would like to take this opportunity to single out Lynn Enterline, Marguerite Waller, Giuseppe Mazzotta, and the late Joel Fineman as the critics to whose work I owe the most and in whose steps I have endeavoured to follow. I would not have been able to complete this project without the periods of study leave that I was generously granted by my institution. No less important has been the supportive and research-friendly environment at the University of Warwick, which I owe to the collegiality of all the staff and students there. In particular, I would like to thank my colleague John Fletcher for first introducing me to the work of Laplanche and for being so admirable a model for the psychoanalytic critic to aspire to. He also read drafts of these chapters and kept me on the straight and narrow. I owe much, too, to my last two Heads of Department, Professors Peter Mack and Thomas Docherty, and would like to thank them both for the faith they showed in me and for the help they provided with the book, especially at the end. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my editor at Cambridge University vi

Acknowledgements

vii

Press, Ray Ryan, who believed in the project from the beginning, stayed with it through its darkest hours, and did so much to expedite its speedy publication in the final stages. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to all my favourite male friends: creative, individual, and so absolutely themselves, they prove better than anybody how much more there is to masculinity than mastery, and vice versa.

Abbreviations

C CI EC ELH ELN ELR JEGP MLN MLQ MLR MP OED PMLA PQ RES Rh RP RR SAR SCJ SCR SE SEL SP SQ SS SSEL St TLS TSLL

Criticism Critical Inquiry Essays in Criticism English Literary History English Language Notes English Literary Renaissance Journal of English and Germanic Philology Modern Language Notes Modern Language Quarterly Modern Language Review Modern Philology Oxford English Dictionary Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Philological Quarterly Review of English Studies Rhetorica Renaissance Papers Romanic Review South Atlantic Review Sixteenth Century Journal South Central Review The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1960) Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 Studies in Philology Shakespeare Quarterly Spenser Studies Salzburg Studies in English Literature Style Times Literary Supplement Texas Studies in Language and Literature viii

chap t e r 1

Introduction

Plangent Petrarchan lovers berated by love, belaboured by sorrow, yet somehow begging for more; mournful elegists unable to part with the object they have lost, obsessively fingering their wounds; lachrymose cross-dressers who not only play the woman’s part but ventriloquize the voice of feminine suffering, abandonment, and complaint: Renaissance lyric is populated by such figures who appear by choice to defy the period’s model of a phallic, masterly masculinity – these adopted positions of impotence, failure, and gendered discontent seeming wilfully to pervert what might otherwise have been seen (indeed, might thereby be defined) as the patriarchal norm. A ‘turning aside from truth or right’ is how the OED defines perversion, its illustrative quotation from Sir Francis Bacon suggesting a monstrous overturning of the habitual order of things: ‘women to govern men . . . slaves freemen . . . being total violations and perversions of the laws of nature and nations’. Apparently doing all in their power to relinquish masculine agency, to submit to emotional states of loss they neither hope nor wish to overcome, to enslave themselves to their mistresses, if not to become enslaved themselves, these figures pointedly deviate from an axiomatically empowered, active, forceful masculinity, and suggest that, as Kaja Silverman writes (commenting on the same dictionary definition and illustrative quotation), perversion ‘turns aside not only from hierarchy and genital sexuality, but from the paternal signifier, the ultimate “truth” or “right”’.1 The perverse masculinities that are the subject of this book are seen therefore as deviating, in the first instance, from a phallic rather than from a strictly ethical standard, the apparent willingness with which these figures embrace castration and abrogate the powers and privileges that might otherwise have been deemed their due being what gives rise, in turn, to any sense of moral outrage or critical scandal. Given the populous nature of the field, this book might have selected any number of Renaissance lyric texts by way of illustration, but the poems that form the focus of the five chapters to follow have each been chosen on the grounds of their extremity – of the 1

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Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

extremity, that is, to which they take their disruption if not dismantling of the phallic norm. Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, for example, is read as an exercise in masochism where Astrophil not only takes pleasure in his physical pain but also courts intellectual torture rather as, in the Apology for Poetry, he compromises the mastery of the speaking voice and so undermines its claims to theoretical consistency, moral seriousness, or masculinist Protestant militarism. Ralegh’s great poem of abject atonement, The Ocean to Cynthia, is read as a document in melancholia in which the inability to mourn a maternal object of desire is seen radically to compromise the formation of a masculine gender identity, the failure to ‘consolidate’ that identity classically manifesting itself in the speaker’s tortured and broken syntax, and in articulations where the text speaks of its own unfinishability. Zelmane’s blazon of Philoclea in the New Arcadia, ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’, is read as an experiment in castration where, in defiance of the critical orthodoxy on the subject, the male poet does not shore up the integrity of his own body by ‘scattering’ that of his female beloved into multiple parts, but is, rather, scattered into numerous body parts himself and, as a cross-dressed Amazon, is thoroughly gender-ambiguated to boot: a situation that does much to query the phallic subject in both its sexual identity and its capacity to produce ‘aureate’ courtly verse. Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint – the only part of the Shakespeare canon that, until very recently, critics have not wanted to know – is read as a parody of male homosocial desire in which instead, as usual, of men writing poems about beautiful women and circulating them among themselves, it is now women’s poems about a beautiful man that end up in other women’s hands, the male subject being virtually erased from the scene and reduced to a mere mediatory relay in the circulation of ‘lesbian’ desire: a situation that has predictably disruptive consequences for the construction and maintenance of a heteronormative male gender identity. And Donne’s Sapho to Philaenis – for some critics an unacceptable affront to the cherished image of a ‘manly’ Donne – is read as the most thorough deconstruction of the masculine subject yet, consolidating the ‘lesbian’ trend already traced in the poems by Sidney and Shakespeare, in order to propose a radical alternative to the traditional poetry of praise: for here the typical scene of mutual admiration and desire is transposed onto a mirror relation between two subjects who, although equal and ideal, are demonstrably not phallic, not ‘whole’. This list is not intended to be exhaustive or comprehensive – there are other poems (by Wyatt, Surrey, Gascoigne, or Marlowe, for example) that might as easily have been included and that were, in an original projection, once to have formed a part of this book – but it is hoped that, in selecting a

Introduction

3

sonnet sequence, an elegy, a blazon, a complaint, and an epistle, the texts chosen as the objects of focus here will, at least as far as the lyric tradition is concerned, be generically varied enough to prove illustrative if not representative. The aims of this book, then, are to draw out the perverseness of male subjectivity such as it is represented in English Renaissance lyric, to show the lengths to which that perverseness might be seen to go, and, above all, to do justice to the scenes of radical alterity which I believe these poems promote – scenes that have not, or not very widely, been dealt with elsewhere or before. Indeed, if anything, the scenes of perversity which these poems parade have been met, more often than not, with various forms of disavowal. The topic of masochism has barely been broached as relevant to Astrophil and Stella, for example, while ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’, if singled out for attention at all, is generally regarded as conventional rather than perverse. As for the poems by Ralegh, Shakespeare, and Donne, the denial of their perversity takes a somewhat different form, registering not so much in a critical silence on the subject as in a distinct critical discomfort and unease. Each of these poems has seriously rattled its readers, evidence for this unsettling of scholarly certitudes being found in ongoing debates about how (in all three cases) these odd, anomalous texts should be generically classified, or about whether (in the case of two of them) they can be deemed authorial at all. I emphasize the point because it is no small part of the argument of this book that the perversity it seeks to locate and to explore has largely been blocked – rendered invisible and inaccessible – by certain critical methodologies and ways of reading that, whether consciously or otherwise, have done their best to deny it and push it out of sight, out of mind. Much of the discussion in the chapters to come is devoted to exactly what such readings are seeking to avoid, and why. One such methodology, for example (which might be considered first if only because it has for so long dominated the field of literary study) is that which organizes its reading of texts on the basis of what Jonathan Dollimore, following Foucault, has called ‘the complex, often violent, sometimes murderous dialectic between dominant and subordinate cultures, groups, and identities’.2 In Sexual Dissidence, Dollimore’s aim is to theorize a form of perversion or degree of radicalism that is extreme enough to shatter the belief systems of the dominant patriarchal ideology, and to that end he contrasts two positions each of which is exemplified, as it happens, by a notoriously perverse (although not, admittedly, early modern) male. The first position – which the critic variously calls ‘radical humanism’ or ‘humanist transgression’ – involves contesting the dominant order but on

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Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

and in its own terms. The paradigm here is the figure of Andr´e Gide who defended his vilified homosexuality on the grounds that it was a truer, more authentic, more essential expression of his being than his society’s normative heterosexuality: a position that resists the dominant ideology by calling upon its own terms of reference (here, an essential self to which one might be ‘true’), using that society’s own deep beliefs in order to correct its shallow societal norms. While it might appear to reinforce the very ideology to which it is opposed, this position is not rubbished by Dollimore who, on the contrary, scrupulously defends it as an important and necessary stage in the struggle against a patriarchal hegemony. Nevertheless, the second position – which he variously calls ‘sexual dissidence’, the ‘perverse dynamic’, or ‘transgressive re-inscription’ – is argued to go incomparably further in its assault on social conventions for it does not employ (and so reinforce) society’s terms of reference but opts, rather, to dismantle them altogether. The paradigm here is the figure of Oscar Wilde who, instead of validating an alternative authenticity a` la Gide, deconstructed – in his dedicated cult of insincerity, superficiality, and style – the notion of authenticity itself. In a quest to find the most radical form of sexual ‘dissidence’ available, Dollimore’s argument traces a trajectory from the first position – good but limited, its moment now passed, its adherents having ‘lost their faith’ (p. 81) – toward the second: a perverse dynamic that, as a form of protest, goes altogether further in its concerted attack on otherwise unchallenged systems of belief and habits of thought. For all the excitement about the radical possibilities that such ‘perversion’ seems to offer, however, the promised revolution never comes, and the reason for this is that the critic never escapes from the dialectic between dominant and subordinate which is where his argument began. For all its ‘deconstructive potential’ (p. 121), that is, the second position does not deconstruct that dialectic but remains firmly embedded within it: ‘the terms of a binary interrelate, interdepend’, Dollimore writes, ‘but to differing degrees: in one kind of interdependence the one term presupposes the other for its meaning [this would be Gide]; in another more radical kind of interdependence the absolutely other is somehow integral to the selfsame [this would be Wilde]’ (p. 229). The two positions carefully distinguished at the start of the book – and structuring the movement of its polemic from one to the other – thus end up merging rather seamlessly into one another, for the difference is not one of kind but, as the critic seems here forced to admit, only of degree: Wilde is only a little further along the same line than Gide but is basically ‘perverse’ in the same way. The argument is obliged to resort to the language of comparatives – ‘more radical’ (p. 229), ‘perversion in this fiercer sense’ (p. 125) – in

Introduction

5

order to assert the greater radicality of the second position as it comes to look increasingly like the, strictly limited, challenge of the first. Since the dominant/subordinate binary is not taken apart but is still kept in play, the negativity of the second position – however ‘fierce’ – proves in the end to be no less contained by what it would subvert, and the situation stubbornly continues to be seen in terms of an entrenched ‘struggle’ between mutually defining, mutually antagonistic parties. The problem here is a refusal to contemplate what might be considered to be the most ‘perverse’ position of all – namely, a truly disempowered position, one that is not to be conceptualized in terms of opposition, contest, resistance, conflict, or, in a word, power. Instead, the ‘pervert’ – of either variety – tends nostalgically to be cast as a rebel or hero, locked in inexorably dialectical combat with a system that has to be kept in place so as to allow him to fight another day. Indeed, as in Foucault’s History of Sexuality (a model to which Dollimore maintains allegiance throughout), it is unthinkable that there might be positions that are ‘in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat’, for such passivity is invariably theorized in terms of resistance: resistances are everywhere, there is a ‘plurality’ of them, ‘points, knots, or focuses of resistance’ that are spread over time and space, ‘mobile and transitory points of resistance’ that contest the social order every way you turn.3 Subordinate and dominant positions are thus dialectically bound together in what Foucault calls a perpetual ‘game’ (p. 45) of pleasure and power. Within this framework, subordination can only be conceived of as insubordination, described in terms of ‘power asserting itself’ (p. 45), or experienced as the rebellious pleasures of travesty, evasion, or resistance. There can be no position of slavery as such because, as in the Hegelian dialectic on which Foucault here draws, the slave has – in his work, in his self-recognition, and in his recognition by others who are his equals – always ‘dialectically overcome’ his slavery and so achieved the condition of the ‘complete, absolutely free man, definitively and completely satisfied by what he is’.4 Critical methodologies that are based on premises such as these thus prove strangely incapable of theorizing what might be thought the ‘perverse’ position par excellence – the masochistic position, that is, in which enslavement is positively cultivated, defeat sought out, and a state of dissatisfaction indefinitely prolonged. Where power is deemed to be ‘everywhere’, there can be no place for those perverse masculinities that would, by contrast, renege on their phallic inheritance: for those figures, that is, who, all things being equal, would ‘prefer not to’; who would do all they could to ‘say “no” to power’; and who would, had they the choice, opt to give the ‘fierce order of virility’ a miss.5

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Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

Such critical methodologies have, nevertheless, dominated the field of early modern studies for some time, and have given rise to a series of what I shall call ‘recuperative narratives’ in which perverse positions of failure or defeat are routinely turned around and re-interpreted as elements within a larger articulation of power. A number of historians, for example, have judged sixteenth-century masculinity to be ‘in crisis’ and have shown the pseudo-monolith of ‘patriarchal society’ to reveal lived experiences of manhood that were, in fact, fragile, disorderly, and inherently anxious. But, while this constituent anxiety reveals, for one critic, the ‘fissures and contradictions of patriarchal systems’, it at the same time ‘paradoxically enables and drives patriarchy’s reproduction and continuation of itself’, so that a ‘negative effect that leads us to patriarchy’s own internal discord’ also proves ‘an instrument (once properly contained, appropriated, or returned) of its perpetuation’.6 For another historian, sixteenth-century masculinity actually drew its ‘psychic strength’ from the disorderly behaviour that codes of social discipline were supposedly designed to check, with the result that ‘what seems at first to be uncivilized “wildness” was in fact carefully structured by the rules of civic society’.7 For others, if the sixteenth-century shift from an older feudal economy to an increasingly capitalist regime brought in its wake a crisis in the contemporary definition of masculinity, then this was more than compensated for by the opportunities that humanist education provided for a new kind of masculine agency and instrumentality, for now a man might fight and win acclaim more effectively with his finely honed words than with a rusty sword: ‘appearing in print before other men’s eyes, became the new place in which men displayed the cerebral equivalent of chivalric prowess, in virtuoso deployments of their skill in probable argument’.8 Historians of the Renaissance lyric would recuperate the less than masterly versions of masculinity to be found there in a similar way, so that, of the ‘hapless, powerless, pitiable male lover’ of Petrarchan tradition, for example, one critic could flatly declare that ‘there was no such thing’, for the image of the ‘lordly, domineering woman’ to whom that figure was generally devoted, turns out to be none other than the ‘roundabout, inverted picture of the dominant upper-class male in his presence as paterfamilias and as master in society and politics’ – the lady can only have been fashioned ‘after his own image’.9 For another critic, the Petrarchan lover’s habitual pose of inadequacy is equally deceptive: ‘helplessness is a relative concept’ when ‘to fall apart in a masterfully crafted sonnet – or, better yet, a perfect sestina – is, in a sense, not to fall apart at all’; instead, the Petrarchan poet garners greater fame through his ‘exercise of an overpowering stylistic mastery’.10 For another similarly minded

Introduction

7

reader, the ‘vulnerable, subject status of the male lover’ within the typical Petrarchan sequence is ‘countered by the mastery of the poet’; while for a third, ‘the abject position of the lover within the Petrarchan fiction is itself a fiction, since as the author the lover is actually controlling the sequence’.11 For some, the lyrics of Petrarch and of Petrarchanism would detail a ‘run of masculine bad luck so insistent that it becomes almost a joke’, were it not for the fact that the poet’s own literary productivity redeems the situation by inducing in him a ‘heady sense of power’, for the one ‘thing the Petrarchan poet has, in compensation for his anguish, is poems’.12 In readings such as this, lyric poetry is seen not as a simple outpouring of emotion but as an artful presentation, carefully contrived with an eye to audience and effect. The portrayal of a self as in pieces or overpowered is not the subjective reflection of the poet’s state of mind but the product of cool authorial judgement. That judgement – the ability to fashion characters and to manipulate events at will – remains paramount no matter how violently the persona blusters, stammers, or writhes this way and that in his folly and desperation. Indeed, the greater the distance between the image of anguished selfhood, on the one hand, and the mind that portrays it, on the other, the greater the comparative composure of the latter: the more miserable the poetic ‘I’, the greater the artistry in presenting its tragic ‘tale of me’. This rhetorical turn – the weaker, the stronger – tropes weakness back into strength again, so that the lover’s very failures come to testify to the poet’s success, the result being a kind of formal restitution in which the poet recoups, in his technical assurance and rhetorical skill, anything the lover might have lost in his chaotic self-presentation. The more extreme the lover’s emotional indiscipline, the more impressive his achievement in containing all that turmoil – those ‘passions . . . without measure’, as Samuel Daniel called them – within literary forms like the sonnet whose verbal economy and metrical discipline made it the supreme example of formal control, a perfect ‘Orbe of order and forme’.13 Poet and persona are clearly distinguished – the lover might be slave to his mistress but the poet is master of his text – and by means of this tried and tested formula the typically enfeebled lover of Renaissance lyric tradition finds himself rehabilitated and definitively re-empowered. What began as a tale of enslavement is thus guaranteed to end up as a record of triumph, the courtly lover’s story of abject failure as the laureate poet’s crowning success. Indeed, one might be forgiven for forgetting that, despite its depiction of the eternally weeping lover, Renaissance lyric had anything to do with abject masculinity at all, for in these readings failure is effectively annulled, subsumed beneath the poet’s achievement in bringing off that failure well, loss or enfeeblement

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Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

is inoculated in advance, foreclosed by the enabling strategies of the poet’s speech. If the lover is not in control of his lady, then the poet is in control of his words, and in terms of future fame (and the critical accolade awarded him for doing so) the one more than compensates for the other. Wedded to a dialectic in which passivity cannot be theorized except in terms of power, recuperative narratives such as these thus leave little scope for a reading that would seek, by contrast, to explore any alternative or ‘perverse’ vision of masculinity. They perform one important service, nevertheless, and that is to indicate, in a very clear way, the obstacle that stands in the way of such a reading, and to that extent they could be seen to show in which direction the present study might proceed. For these narratives depend heavily upon the notion of the sovereign writing subject who is in complete command of his words. The final destination of their argument is the masterly writer who surmounts emotional collapse and contains it within the lyric’s well-wrought form, and, since it is the critic’s job to applaud such technical assurance, the writing subject remains paramount, his virtuosity extolled. In one particularly influential article, for example, Louis Montrose argues that Spenser – the obeisant ‘Elizabethan subject’ – turns the tables on his royal mistress by making her, in the April Eclogue and in The Faerie Queene, the ‘subject’ of his text: the poet, we are told, effectively ‘masters his mistress by inscribing her within his text’.14 This move, however, betrays a suspicious identification on the critic’s part, for he, after all, is a writing subject too. Any argument that praises the ‘controlling power of the writing subject over the representation he has made’ (p. 320) runs the risk of allowing the critic to bathe in reflected glory since to take this line is to shore up the idea of a stable, unitary ego that is the masterful creator and not the hapless creature of his words. The critic’s tribute to the poet’s ‘mastery’, in other words, could be seen to be underwritten by an investment of his own, and his own literary ‘mastery’ – his command of the field, his confident survey of the subject in hand – to be complicit in the model of literary mastery he sets out to reveal. In another essay, Montrose takes care to avoid or at least to minimize such identifications by claiming that the new historicist’s ‘project of historical situation’ necessarily relativizes the critic’s own position, since the latter is a subject in history no less than the poet about whom he or she writes, and yet such caveats are not, within the new historicist corpus as a whole always or everywhere apparent.15 And, where they are not, there is a danger that the dialectical argument will grant the critic a narrative in which his or her own status as a writing subject – as a professional who has something useful to ‘say’ – will come to rest upon the story of poetic mastery he or she tells. More seriously, if these

Introduction

9

recuperative narratives can surreptitiously serve to bolster the critic’s own bid to authority, on the one hand, and where professional pressures continue to demand a competent, authoritative writing subject, on the other, then it is difficult to see why this particular reading of Renaissance lyric should not remain thoroughly entrenched. The most dangerous outcome, at the far end, would be a kind of short-circuit in which the confidence of the critic’s own interpretation would come to depend upon his or her own interpretation of poetic confidence – a nexus of bad faith. Critical distance would thus give way to critical self-investment, at the expense, I would hazard, of a whole swathe of Renaissance literary texts. In the event that those texts should depict anything approaching a ‘perverse’ subjectivity – a subjectivity that is less than masterly – then their radical alterity (not to mention the possibility of theorizing the same) stands in danger of being buried beneath the self-interest of critics who take upon themselves the task of writing confidently and knowingly about them. The project of theorizing not only perverse subjectivities but specifically perverse masculinities, moreover, becomes more difficult still in those cases where the ‘masterly’ writing subject has explicitly been masculinized, and here two well-known readings of Wyatt might serve as an instructive example. In The Light in Troy, for example, Thomas Greene favourably compares the robustness of Wyatt’s poetry with the effete productions of Petrarch who, in spite of glimpsing in Roman poetry – and in the towering achievements of Virgil, above all – a world-view, a sense of self, and a mode of writing which the critic characterizes as ‘hard’ and ‘firm’, unaccountably lapsed back, in the Canzoniere, to an Augustinian subjectivity of sin, taint, and self-division, relinquishing at a stroke an idiom variously valorized as ‘august’, ‘spacious’, ‘imperial’, ‘secure’ and ‘entire’, for one contrastingly demoted as ‘unstable’, ‘narcissistic’, ‘sterile’, and ‘repetitious’.16 Wyatt, however, is shown to redeem Petrarch’s failings by escaping from the claustrophobic indulgences of the self-obsessed Italian and by relating, for the first time in modern poetry, to something outside himself. Where Petrarch goes round in circles, getting nowhere, Wyatt is seen to stage crises – generally crises of faith – which are definitive, unrepeatable, and irreversible: a process that Greene christens ‘linearization’ (p. 250). Wyatt’s ‘single, linear progression into lucidity’ (p. 251) is taken as a major advance. Where Petrarch had dramatized self-collapse, Wyatt takes a long hard look at the collapse of certainties and relationships in the rapidly changing world around him, a look that culminates in the three epistolary satires, which state more openly or directly what his lyrics had tended only to imply. Wyatt’s cultivation of a plain style in these poems is key to his concerned

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Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

moral vision, and entails what Greene presents as a worthy rejection of Petrarchan ornament and decoration: such ‘imagistic asceticism, is essential to Wyatt’s language because it strips the word of its aesthetic pretentiousness and leaves it as a naked gauge of integrity’ (p. 256). Wyatt turns to proverb lore in order to stabilize values in his increasingly unstable world, the use of such maxims and sayings being said to supply his poems with a certain ‘stiffening’ (p. 258), although what really stabilizes his poetry, in Greene’s view, is irony: classical irony, that is, which establishes a ‘hierarchy of moral voices’ and, in setting one authority over another, ‘stabilizes the play of inauthenticities by distinguishing perspectives’ (p. 259). With all this talk of linearity, nakedness, stiffening, and stability, it is evident that, consciously or otherwise, Greene is aligning himself with a long-standing critical tradition that has repeatedly praised Wyatt for his ‘manliness’, seeing him as the perfect picture of what Surrey called ‘manhood’s shape’, and admiring the ‘deep manly sorrow’ of his lyrics, or the ‘manly reflections’ of his satires.17 What is equally evident, however, is the critic’s own identification with such an exemplary figure. The speaking voice in Wyatt’s satires, for example, is said to belong to ‘a civilized critic capable of friendship, anger, discrimination, and wisdom, a well-travelled man in situ, located in a social, historical, geographical context, synthesizing in his firm moral style the native tradition with the ancient, confident of his unblinking estimates, registering depravity, hypocrisy, and suffering without hysteria, strong in his independence . . . which is a token of dignity and poise’ (p. 262). It is difficult to avoid the feeling that this portrait of the poet is shading into a portrait of the critic here, or that the manly satirist whom the critic holds up for praise and whose qualities he manifestly values (so fastidiously removed from anything resembling ‘hysteria’) in fact morphs imperceptibly into an image of the patrician critic who is praising him as such. A second example of such critical identification is to be found in Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, a reading of Renaissance literature that announces itself from the outset to be ‘resolutely dialectical’: ‘for all his impulse to negate, Wyatt cannot fashion himself in opposition to power and the conventions power deploys’, the critic writes, ‘on the contrary, those conventions are precisely what constitute Wyatt’s self-fashioning’.18 The argument proceeds to a discussion of the Penitential Psalms, a text in which – by presenting himself as the remorseful and guilt-ridden David – Wyatt identifies with one of western culture’s most prototypically abject males. By means of a recuperative narrative, however, Greenblatt contrives to bring what was once low back to dizzy heights:

Introduction

11

. . . I, lo, from mine error Am plunged up, as horse out of the mire With stroke of spur. Such is thy hand on me That in my flesh for terror of thy ire Is not one point of firm stability, Nor in my bones there is no steadfastness: Such is my dread of mutability.

‘It is not until we reach the phrase “with stroke of spur”’, comments Greenblatt, that we pick up the ‘paradoxical act of rising beneath and because of immense downward pressure’, the resulting ‘ascent through the acceptance of domination from on high’ being, for Wyatt, ‘the quintessential penitential experience’ (p. 123). Utter submission to God – to the point, the critic interprets, of ‘impotence’ (p. 123) – is thereby redeemed, for it leads inexorably to a ‘higher stability and firmness’ (p. 123). The most crushing and annihilating defeat is thus turned around – recuperated, positivized, made good, made productive – since the intensity of this devotional experience gives rise to an ‘inwardness’ that must perforce express itself in great poetry – in ‘forceful’ poetry, no less (p. 127). Greenblatt’s reading of the satires and the courtly lyrics performs the same dialectical turn, ending up in the same way with the ‘force of his extraordinary intelligence’ (p. 135) and the ‘force of Wyatt’s poetry’ (p. 135). Those places where ‘what should be solid and unambiguous’ (p. 135) in Wyatt’s stance in fact threatens to crack apart and to descend into a wilful incoherence or inconsistency are – most symptomatically – registered by the critic as moments of a distinctly experienced ‘significant uneasiness’ (p. 135), ‘unsettling awareness’ (p. 135), ‘subversive awareness’ (p. 153), or ‘unsettling intimation’ (p. 153), and on these occasions the mastery of the masculine writing subject needs hastily to be restored (‘but why should Wyatt have risked subverting his own moral authority?’, the critic asks in scandalized tones, p. 135). The fraught and compromised nature of Henrician court life thus comes to be seen as being forcefully fraught and compromised, and the scene to be one of intense competitiveness – a classically Foucauldian play of pleasure and power – in which Wyatt emerges as the ‘master of this game’ (p. 137), developing an idiom that is ‘powerfully expressive’ (p. 139) and a language that is ‘a tool, a weapon’ to be deployed in a ‘dangerous contest’ (p. 139). Agency is miraculously restored as everything is now cast in terms of strategy and tactics, so that if Wyatt ever seems to fall apart or go to pieces in his poetry, then it is all part of a game, of the super-subtle chicanery that, as a well-practised Tudor diplomat, Wyatt was a past master. The persona might be abject but the poet is king, and the masterly writing subject is thereby majestically

12

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

re-enthroned (Wyatt’s discourse, for example, is said to ‘enhance the power of the speaker’, and the overarching purpose of his poems to ‘augment his power’ since it is ‘above all power that shapes his poetic discourse’, p. 142). This power, furthermore, is explicitly masculinized, for, in order to win the game, Wyatt is said to enlist the forces of ‘realism, manliness, individuality, and inwardness’ (p. 154), a winning list of attributes that is repeated two pages later: ‘the skilful merger of manliness, realism, individuality, and inwardness succeeds in making Wyatt’s poetry, at its best, distinctly more convincing, more deeply moving, than any written not only in his generation but in the preceding century’ (p. 156). In this star-struck vision of the pre-eminent writing subject – whose mastery is linked inextricably to his masculinity – it is, once again, difficult to avoid the conclusion that the critic is trailing the hero that he has made, precious winners all, both equally determined to win the game, to convince and to persuade, and to demolish their opponents in argument once and for all. Where the Renaissance poet is presented as a glamorous figure with whom the critic has every reason to identify there is little incentive to read his poetry in any other way. The recuperative narrative effectively stands in the way of any alternative reading of masculine subjectivity – one that might choose, for example, to see the various speakers of Wyatt’s poems as abject, masochistic, or perverse – and it blocks the approaches of a different critical practice: one that might, for example, choose to take issue with this somewhat self-congratulatory portrait of what the ideal literary critic should look like. It is for this reason that Greenblatt’s reading of Wyatt has alerted the feminist suspicions of Marguerite Waller who objects that, in his reading of ‘Whoso list to hunt’, for instance, ‘all the male figures are put in the best of all possible positions for maintaining the illusion of the stable, sovereign subject’, at the expense not only of the lady in the poem (objectified, bestialized, denied a voice or subject position) but of any reader who might be female, feminist, or not presumptively heterosexual (or, one might add, who was minded to read masculine subjectivity in a different way).19 As Waller sees it, such positions are all but obliterated by the coercive force of Greenblatt’s ‘rhetoric of critical mastery’ (p. 167). Other such recuperative readings of Renaissance poetry are criticized on the same grounds. At the close of his essay on ‘The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’, for example, Montrose had indulged in a moment of self-reflection and pondered whether the image of the ‘masterly’ writing subject that he had fashioned there might not indeed be a model for the contemporary literary critic who was similarly impelled to assert himself – to see his writing as a ‘mode of action’ – in order to overcome a sense of

Introduction

13

‘professional, institutional, and political impotence’.20 For Waller, however, this insight does not, for all its meta-critical lucidity, prompt the critic to make the obvious inference: that this heroic stance is not the only available option and that the writing subject might, in fact, be theorized in another way – in a way, for example, where ‘impotence’ need not be disavowed. Waller’s insistence that such a way of reading Renaissance texts is possible – indeed, that it would honour the radical potential of lyric poetry and its ability to deconstruct the most complacent of critical certitudes – is a consistent feature of her writing. In her work on Petrarch, for example, she argues that what is revolutionary about the Canzoniere is its vision of human history as irreducibly contingent, a vision that immediately relativizes and so destabilizes the position of the subject, be it poet or critic. Since an inquiry into Petrarch’s historiography would necessarily ‘involve calling into question the commentator’s own authority to know or to judge’, critics have tended to fight shy of it, but Waller’s own strategy, by contrast, is to take the Canzoniere as a ‘pretext for revising our own assumptions’ about literary structure and about the strict necessity for a stable, writing self.21 In another place, she argues that this critical demand for ‘stability’ (here in readings of Wyatt and Surrey’s translations of Petrarch) again leads to the ‘occlusion of the instability of the (male) subject’ and to the invention of a stable, strong writing subject on whom the critic’s own mastery and authority (no less illusory) is made – not so securely, it now turns out – to rest: ‘the investment of either Wyatt’s or Surrey’s translations with such attributes as presence, transparency, and authenticity’, she writes, ‘may be seen as indicative of a similar investment by the reader in his own interpretative position. That is, if either Wyatt or Surrey can be directly and unproblematically in touch with experience, as an autonomous, authoritative subject, then the critic’s position in relation to his material is similarly secure’.22 Waller’s critique of such critical self-investment – as a dubiously uncritical practice in its own right, and as a serious bar to appreciating the true radicality of Renaissance lyric – is to a very large extent the stance that I have adopted in this book, and it serves as a model for the readings that follow, both of critical interpretations that have done their best to occlude that radicality, and of the poems themselves that, at great length and in great detail, evidence a masculine writing subject who does indeed embrace impotence and exhibit his castration for all to see. Waller’s is not the only example I will be following, furthermore. In his own reading of Wyatt, Jonathan Crewe also registers his distrust of the dialectic (or, as he calls it, ‘sophism’) whereby any ‘palpably crafted/crafty simulation of weakness, emasculation, or abjection must “logically” imply

14

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

its opposite’.23 According to recuperative readings like this, Crewe (like Waller) complains, Wyatt’s habitual and recurrent performances ‘of clumsiness, weakness, martyred innocence, passivity, marginality, and masochistic abjection’ automatically find themselves recuperated as exercises of the poet’s ‘craft’, even though thinking about Wyatt in this way risks both ‘projecting an anachronistic image of the strongman on the screen of his poems’ and a ‘renewed indulgence in the dream of a poet as an autonomous, masterful presence, invulnerably withdrawn from his own representations’ (p. 27). It is in order to avoid such risks and to theorize a masculinity in Renaissance lyric that is, indeed, not masterly but mastered – martyred, masochistic, perverse, and not always on the ascent but oriented, rather, in a perpetually downward direction – that in some of the chapters that follow I will find myself, like both Waller and Crewe, resorting to the subject of irony: not, I should emphasize, the classical irony that Greene, for example, uses to re-stabilize Wyatt’s authoritative moral voice, but rather a non-dialectical irony in which, by contrast, the writer’s position (poet’s or critic’s) never stabilizes. ‘As a putatively masculine form seeking its own and its author’s Aufhebung’, writes Crewe of Wyatt’s ‘Whoso list to hunt’, ‘the sonnet instead becomes a misogynistically ironic form in which the logical belatedness, inauthenticity, and failure of the masculine “I” stands cruelly exposed. Incapable of being in the imaginary position of the absolute subject, the masculine speaker, whether Petrarch or Wyatt, cannot occupy the strong subject position in the sonnet either, and his place in the order of precedence will always be that of the one who comes behind the hind’ (p. 42, Crewe’s italics). Waller’s self-referential and self-implicating study of the Canzoniere ends up in the same place too, with Petrarch’s historicism being argued to relativize the reader’s no less than the speaker’s ‘I’ and to lead, therefore, to what Paul de Man called ‘the movement of ironic consciousness’ where ‘to know inauthenticity is not the same as to be authentic’.24 Applying this to Petrarch, Waller finds in the latter’s poetry ‘a kind of ironic progression which puts out of the question the arrival at an end point, the achievement of a privileged position from which to survey the total picture’.25 Limited in perspective and irremediably timebound, the speaker of Petrarch’s lyrics is no more in a position to achieve this totalizing vision than the critic who writes about them, and any claims on the part of the latter to do so are thus to be treated with the requisite scepticism, and their bids to critical mastery to be left in the same state of ironic suspension. If a somewhat optimistic faith in the powers of the writing subject is what stands in the way of theorizing a truly disempowered position, then – in

Introduction

15

order to remove that obstacle and to see the perverse and abject masculinities of the lyric tradition with any kind of clarity – cultivating a certain doubt in those powers might seem to be an advisable if not desirable first step; all the more so, in fact, since the recuperations of and identifications with the ‘masterly’ poet are not a feature of the criticism of the last twenty or thirty years alone but also appear (their formulations different but their effects basically the same) in other and older schools of criticism: indeed, within the larger historiography of courtly love, they might be seen to be almost endemic. In The Allegory of Love, for example – to take one particularly famous and formative case – C. S. Lewis casts the medieval tradition of courtly love in what can only be described as a recuperative narrative, for, although ‘the lover is always abject’, as he puts it, that figure is nevertheless definitively rehabilitated and re-empowered as the critic magics away his tears and transforms his language of emptiness and desolation into one of wholeness and plenitude.26 Concerned lest a lack-lustre performance in love be mistaken for a lack-lustre performance in poetry, Lewis reassures his readers that medieval allegories of love are no ‘frigid form’ (p. 61) but powerful narratives that allowed poets to ‘explore worlds of new, subtle, and noble feeling, under the guidance of clear and masculine thought’ (p. 255). Sexual and poetic potency converge to leave the courtly lover no depleted specimen but the possessor of a deep inner life and the master of a whole new dimension of poetic subjectivity. Not the lifeless, empty abstractions they might at first seem, texts like the Romance of the Rose are, for Lewis, infused with meaning – a rich inner significacio – allowing the poet to dramatize emotional conflicts and concretely to render a vividly felt inner world: indeed, such allegories mark a revolutionary step along the way toward a fully developed poetry of the imagination. Moreover, Lewis not only recuperates the courtly lover here. He also identifies with him, and he does so in a particularly striking way. For, at one point, he describes courtly love as a ‘mystery’, some part of which, regardless of his efforts, always eludes him and so ‘remains inviolate’ (p. 12). The scholar, that is, evidently sees himself as approaching his topic of ‘courtly love’ in much the same way as he sees the courtly lover as approaching his lady love – with fascination, reverence, and awe. Where the critic models his own activity on that of the lover and treats his own topic – here suitably mystified and feminized – as an occasion to generate literary material, he is naturally going to interpret the lover as doing the same thing; and, by the same token, where the lover is seen to treat his lady – similarly beyond his reach, relation, or cognition – as an opportunity for producing great literature, the critic is naturally going to find in him a suitable model on

16

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

which to base himself. Lewis’s characterization of courtly love thus renders visible in a particularly striking way the identificatory relation – nothing short of a mirror-relation, in fact – that obtains between the critic of courtly love and the poet whom he theorizes, for here the critic constructs an image of the writing subject (as productive, noble, and, of course, ‘masculine’) in which he sees a pleasing reflection of himself, and vice versa. It provides an especially clear example, therefore, of the way in which recuperating and identifying with the male lover of lyric tradition can serve the interests of the critic and can help perpetuate a belief in the masterly and masculine writing subject. This may explain, in fact, why Lewis was not the only one to treat courtly love in this way. Denis de Rougemont, for example, also characterized it as a ‘mystery’, an ‘enigma’, as something ‘nothing rational will explain’, for doing so once again cast the critic as, like the poet, in literary pursuit of a thoroughly mystified goal.27 Indeed, as de Rougemont describes elsewhere in his book, courtly love had been particularly prone to such mystification, making it, at the time when he and Lewis were writing (the 1930s), something of an academic cause c´el`ebre. The question of the ‘origins’ of courtly love, for example, had been elevated to a sacred mystery – scholarship’s new Holy Grail – on the subject of which scholars were either at a loss or determined to prevaricate and disagree, any attempts to answer the riddle effectively being seen off in order, it seems, to preserve the mystery: ‘thus, no matter what explanation is offered’, he found, ‘the authorities are apparently determined to pooh-pooh any attempt to give meaning to what they have devoted their lives to studying’ (p. 77). Mystifying their topic, however, clearly suited the ‘authorities’ very well for, by putting courtly love in the place of the distant, elevated lady, it allowed them to continue identifying their own activity with that of the ‘masculine’ and masterly poet. Setting up ‘courtly love’ as an ever more elusive object of quest only made it the more compelling an object of fascination (a lifetime’s study devoted to it) and, as these various scholar-knights tilted furiously with one another over the issue, only the more competitive a field for their inquiries. Indeed, this tendency reached something of a climax in the 1960s when courtly love was mystified virtually to vanishing point. It became fashionable not only to ask what courtly love was but whether it ‘was’ anything at all. It was noted that, coined by the French scholar, Gaston Paris, in 1883, the term amour courtois appeared virtually nowhere in the medieval literature it was supposed to epitomize and that it thus constituted little less than a hermeneutic scandal. Courtly love was branded a ‘myth’ that was ‘no more real’ in the Middle Ages than before or after, a ‘scholar’s hypothesis’, a term with ‘no specific content’, so null and void as to be a veritable ‘impediment

Introduction

17

to our understanding of medieval texts’, and that needed to be purged once and for all in a ‘grand and purifying holocaust’.28 The point, of course, is that phantomizing the subject out of all existence in this way did nothing to erase it from scholarly minds but, on the contrary, elevated it into a grand Debate with all the paraphernalia of a good set-to – entrenched positions tenaciously held, good names staked, reputations thrown into the ring – for, in its very absence or invisibility, courtly love was never more like the mysterious lady, and, in their treatment of the topic, her knights never more justified or heroic in their quest. Approaches such as these thus make a spectacular fetish object out of courtly love itself: as a gap, blank, absence, or vacancy – as the scholarly equivalent of anti-matter or a black hole – the topic was nevertheless capable of generating an immense scholarly literature about itself. Out of this nothing came something – a very great deal, in fact. As these critics transferred lack onto the object of their study, so they filled that gap with words, and, as that object of study came to be thoroughly feminized so their literary productivity came to appear correspondingly ‘masculine’. It is easy to see, then, how these critics could come to identify with the male poet, to view their pursuit as equivalent to his, and to regard the activity of writing as the special preserve of the skilful, writerly male, for, once fetishized, their topic of critical interest and of historical investigation became for them as much a source of literary productivity and power as the lady did for the poet they theorized. In their mutual identification, both critic and poet were seen to produce, out of this unpromising situation, something rather splendid and substantial: the critic, from the mysterious or chimerical topic of courtly love, a great many words; and the poet, from the remote and gainsaying lady, a great many poems. As is the case with all fetish objects, however, any sense of substance or plenitude that might seem to derive from such productiveness is based upon a disavowal, just as, in the typical fetishistic scenario, the male subject disavows his own lack by displacing it elsewhere, classically onto the woman (as here, absent, mystified) or onto the female body that, unlike his own, is supposedly ‘castrated’. This, indeed, is what Jacques Lacan sees the male poet of the courtly love tradition as doing, namely, as projecting lack squarely onto a feminine other – the ever inaccessible lady – as a ruse by means of which to disavow his own castration: ‘for the man whose lady is, in the most servile sense of the term, his female subject’, he writes, ‘courtly love is the only way of coming off elegantly from the absence of sexual relation’, and, as Jacqueline Rose elaborates, commenting on this same passage, ‘Lacan sees courtly love as the elevation of the woman into the place where her absence or inaccessibility stand in for male lack’.29

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Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

This may or may not be the case, for one of the things this book sets out to explore is whether there are occasions within the lyric tradition where the male subject does not, in fact, disavow his state of ‘castration’ but actually chooses to embrace it instead. My point here, however, is that these critical narratives which see themselves and the courtly lover as making something out of nothing, and as being equally ‘masculine’, are complicit in the same disavowal. Indeed, in their identification with that figure, they perpetuate that disavowal, contriving always to cast the masculine writing subject in the best possible light. The same could be said, moreover, of those later critical narratives that interpret the lyric tradition according to the ‘dialectic’ between dominant and subordinate, for, although these do not fetishize the topic of courtly love in quite the same way, they nevertheless interpret the abject lover of that tradition as turning the tables on his mistress or as using his state of abjection as a pretext for the exercise of his rhetorical ‘force’ or ‘power’. According to the recuperative narrative, the poet is seen to turn melancholy sorrow into poetic gold, and, according to the critic’s identification with such wondrous alchemy, he is applauded for doing so. From out of his state of loss or dispossession, the poet produces something very tangible and concrete – a literary artefact, a masterpiece, no less – the excellence of which it is the critic’s job to praise. Lack is aestheticized, eroticized, put on a pedestal and made an object of poetic and critical congratulation. It is, in other words, thoroughly disavowed. Whatever their methodological differences, therefore, the various critical approaches considered so far all contrive to keep the masculine writing subject intact – all the way through, he remains productive, masterly, and unimpaired – whether they approach the topic with reverence and devotion as a ‘mystery’ or ‘enigma’, whether they claim it does not exist but nevertheless use that very ‘emptiness’ as an occasion to speak (‘what a literary outpouring there has been on the subject’, comments Lacan, referring to the work of de Rougemont and others, ‘they’re all at it!’, p. 146), or whether they see the abject male as a masterly, ‘manly’ writer who wins every argument, every game, and who carries all before him with the genius and sheer ‘force’ of his words. In every case, the image of the masculine writing subject as powerful and instrumental is kept in play – an image on which the critics have every reason to model themselves – while that subject’s lack or state of ‘castration’ is roundly disavowed. How, then, might we counter this disavowal? ‘How’, to quote Lacan again, ‘can we expose its fraud?’ (p. 141). How account for the absolute negativity of courtly love (not having the lady, not winning the argument, not getting your way) without positivizing or dialecticizing it? How deal

Introduction

19

with unrecuperable loss, with a lack that exceeds all compensation, with a surplus of dissatisfaction that is not to be recompensed, a state of abjection that puts paid to the grandiose pretensions of the ‘I’? How, in other words, might one theorize castration (a question that, to a large extent, constitutes the motivation for writing this book)? And, by way of an answer, the same identificatory strategies that have proved the problem so far – the block that always intervenes to obstruct the view and to prevent that state of castration from being seen – may well turn out to be the solution. For what the critical narratives discussed so far all have in common is an identificatory relation between the critic and the poet: as writing subjects, the two reflect one another so that where one is ‘masculine’, ‘forceful’, ‘masterly’, and so forth, so is the other. From the critic’s point of view, this mirror-relation has the advantage of being a contained and self-sufficient system – an entirely closed circuit – for there is nothing to break in upon that cycle of reflections nor to disturb what is a satisfactory arrangement all round. Nothing, that is, until attempting just such a theorization comes to be the project in hand: and, where that is the case, the desire to face castration full on might mean starting from a different premise altogether, one that bypasses disavowal and that acknowledges or even willingly embraces a state of dispossession. If previous critical narratives have put two competent writing subjects in front of one another and made it well nigh impossible to see any alternative, then the most efficient way of breaking – or, rather, of changing – that cycle might be, in the first instance, for the critic to acknowledge his or her own ‘castration’ before anything else. They might then find, as a result, that it is this that is reflected back at them in the variously masochistic, melancholic, abject, feminized, lesbianized, nonphallic, and altogether ‘perverse’ masculinities with which the Renaissance lyric tradition abounds. In order to get closer to seeing, acknowledging, and understanding these alternative, ‘castrated’ subjectivities, then, it would seem necessary to adopt critical strategies that start out from what Alice Jardine has called the ‘dismantling of the knowing and finally imperialistic speaking subject’ – that is, of the (implicitly masculine) rationalistic subject of the cogito on which the ‘master narratives’ of the West have largely been based.30 Indeed, doing this would involve, as a first step, a thorough deconstruction of the dialectical mode of thinking since the latter only perpetuates the ever-rotating circulations of ‘power’ and, to that extent, remains complicit with social, intellectual, and political modes of oppression and violence. As Jardine puts it, ‘a redefinition of the dialectic’ – above all in theories of representation hitherto based on the (implicitly gendered) presence/absence binary – has

20

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

come to be seen as ‘a major priority in a world where reversing the positive and negative poles of any given system seemed to have no effect on that system’s economy of violence’ (p. 120). Her aim, instead, is to pursue – or at least to explore the possibility of pursuing – a ‘non-dialectical’ mode of conceptuality, one that, following the philosophers and thinkers of a more radical persuasion, rejects the Hegelian dialectic of Master and Slave and attempts to theorize difference not as a merely oppositional term contained within an (again, implicitly gendered) binary system, but, rather, to re-conceptualize a difference that is ‘beyond contradiction’ (p. 139). As these thinkers endeavour to put themselves in the abjected space that traditional philosophy had pushed beyond the realm of the reasonable, the thinkable, the theorizable, so they assume modes of utterance that had been branded monstrous, ‘feminine’, other, and come to speak (in the form of what Jardine coins as ‘gynesis’) from a ‘non-phallic’, ‘castrated’ position (whether those thinkers are ‘male’ or ‘female’ is, of course, beside the point). With its abolition of difference, of the dialectic, and of opposition – and, with these, of the knowing, sovereign, imperialistic subject – the trajectory of this argument aims finally (although it cannot be called an ‘end’ as such) at a perpetual oscillation where no ‘position’ can ever stabilize: it arrives, that is, at the perpetually ‘falling’ state which characterizes non-dialectical irony. And since, in this dismantling of the masterly subject, no one is spared, least of all the critic him- or herself, then, as Jardine clearly specifies, this approach will necessarily involve, ‘first and foremost, a relinquishing of mastery, indeed, a valorization of nonmastery’ (p. 154). To adopt critical strategies such as these, and to start out from such a position (if that is what it can be called), would mean going beyond certain ways of reading masculinity in Renaissance literature that have become fashionable in recent years. It would mean, for example, revising the reading that sees early modern masculinity as ‘inherently anxious’.31 The latter approach tends to see the formation of masculinity as the struggle to define a distinct gender identity in contradistinction to a feminine (generally, maternal) other from which it needs to differentiate itself: what Janet Adelman, for example, calls the ‘nightmare of a femaleness that can weaken and contaminate masculinity’, and discusses at length in relation to Shakespeare’s plays; or what Copp´elia Kahn, also writing about Shakespeare, similarly describes as his male characters’ ‘dilemmas of masculine selfhood’ as they struggle to separate from a female/maternal matrix ‘in order to be men’; or what Valerie Traub, in the same context, styles ‘male anxiety toward female erotic power’; or what Laura Levine sees, in the anti-theatrical tracts, as a horror that men would ‘dissolve’ into women

Introduction

21

if they failed to assert their masculinity strongly enough, ‘as if femaleness were the default position’.32 Although particularly popular with historians of the drama, readings such as these have also been applied to Renaissance lyric and to the typically abject male of Petrarchan tradition in particular, the latter’s fraught relation with his lady – distant, all-powerful, alternately loved and hated, idealized and reviled – being seen to represent nothing less than the struggle of the male subject to separate from his mother. Readings of this kind are explicitly indebted to the theory of object relations: an account in which the emergence of subjectivity and formation of a gender identity are traced back to the infant’s early, pre-oedipal relation with – and gradual separation from – its primary care-giver, generally assumed to be the mother. This separation – said to bring with it the dawning sense of a nascent ego – is seen to be crucial to subsequent ego-development and to the formation of successful ‘object relations’, for, where that process is disrupted or left incomplete, the most serious psychological problems can arise: indeed, this individuation process constitutes for one psychologist, the ‘field of the basic fault’.33 According to this account, moreover, the formation of a specifically masculine gender identity is particularly problematic insofar as the boy-child’s masculinity comes to be defined only negatively as that which it is different from or in opposition to – namely the mother, from whom he must separate if he is to become a ‘man’. Thus for Adelman, for example, this process of separation becomes a ‘special site of anxiety for the boy-child’ (p. 7), while, for Kahn, where the little girl’s femininity is ‘reinforced by her original symbiotic union with her mother’, the little boy’s ‘masculinity is threatened by the same union’ (p. 10). As a result, masculinity comes to be seen as a particularly fragile construction – one that needs to be constantly re-asserted and re-defined – giving rise to ‘special problems’ that are unique to that gender: ‘the special liability for boys is the different fate of the primal psychic unity with the mother’, so that, unlike the girl, his ‘task of separation and individuation carries an added burden and peril’.34 This inherent weakness is presented as masculinity’s natural fault-line and used to explain phenomena such as why males die sooner, are weaker in the womb, and more prone to childhood infections; masculinity even comes to be mystified as the new ‘dark continent’, as ‘a problematic, a puzzle, an unresolved cryptogram or enigma’. The problem with this approach, however, is that it is causally belated. That is to say, the masculinity that is, however anxiously or incompletely, to be ‘achieved’ through this process of individuation is, in the person of the ‘boy-child’, pre-supposed from the outset, just as the femininity from which his gender identity is to be differentiated is, in the person of the mother, equally

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Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

pre-supposed (even as a foetus, for example – before any kind of separation can reasonably be thought to have taken place – the male embryo is still seen to be harboured within an ‘alien’ female womb).35 From the point of view of those more radical critical strategies that take an altogether more sceptical look at the construction of a stable ‘self’, ‘ego’, subjectivity – let alone gender identity – such critical narratives about sons and their mothers can only serve to naturalize the gender binary and so to perpetuate the invidious ideological oppressions that are carried out in its name. The effect of abolishing that binary, by contrast, and of deconstructing the model of dialectical thinking on which it is based would rather be, as Alice Jardine suggests, to ‘throw both sexes, and their sexual organs, into a metonymic confusion of gender . . . Both “men’s” and “women’s” bodies become truly cut up, fragmented bodies: penises, anuses, breasts, vaginas are cut from the images of their representations in order, eventually, to imagine a new kind of body’.36 It is in order to theorize the similarly ‘confused’, perverse, non-phallic, and gender-ambiguated masculinities in English Renaissance lyric, that the present study seeks to distance itself from those readings that are overly beholden to object relations theory; and why it also takes a sceptical view of those readings that regard early modern masculinity as a matter of constant ‘performance’. For even claims that manhood does not constitute a natural state but is, rather, a ‘status to be acquired and then asserted to others’, or that ‘men are only men in the performance of their masculinity’, or that the ‘performative nature of masculinity [shows] how problematic indeed it is for men to be virile, phallic, and active’ (quite apart from defining that performance in relation to ‘women’) tend to assume the existence of a pre-given, voluntarist subject who chooses to enter into that masquerade, to play that part, to don that role.37 They tend, in other words, to keep the sovereign, masterly subject in play. In examples such as these, the notion of gender performance or construction is still in danger of being misunderstood, as Judith Butler warns, ‘as a unilateral process initiated by a prior subject, fortifying that presumption of the metaphysics of the subject that where there is activity, there lurks behind it an initiating and wilful subject’.38 Where, as in the present study, the ironic suspension of that subject is the overall aim, then any idea of gender being something to be acquired, asserted, or performed, needs to be treated with corresponding caution. The readings of Renaissance masculinity on which this book models its own procedures and approach, therefore, are those that maintain a profound scepticism toward the integrity and mastery of the gendered subject, that are alert to the disavowals involved in keeping that subject in play,

Introduction

23

and that are thus better able to theorize subjectivities that might otherwise be deemed ‘alternative’ or ‘perverse’. The work of Marguerite Waller, for example, has already been mentioned, and her suspicion about the degree of critical self-investment that finds itself embodied in the figure of the masterly writing subject is, to a large extent, what has inspired the contents of this book, just as the orientation of her argument toward a type of nondialectical irony that precludes the arrival at any privileged point of knowing has dictated much of its direction. I return to Waller’s reading of Petrarch in chapter 3 where, discussing Sidney’s blazon, ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’, her vision of the poet as de-centred and subjectively split not only implicates the reader/critic but also counters the prevailing view of the blazon form in which the male poet’s ‘scattering’ of his lady’s parts is seen as a defensive gesture designed to disavow his own castration. This chapter also draws on Giuseppe Mazzotta’s study of Petrarch’s ‘poetics of fragmentation’ and on Lynn Enterline’s depiction of the Petrarchan subject as internally divided and eternally split.39 The latter’s work on the melancholia of early modern literary masculinity has also been a major influence on this book, and in particular on the discussion of Ralegh’s Ocean to Cynthia in chapter 4.40 Some critics have interpreted the Renaissance cult of melancholy in its own recuperative terms, where melancholia is redeemed as the ultimate in masculine chic and where, as distinct from mourning and the still more banal depression (female troubles), it becomes a necessarily gendered condition, an ‘accredited pathology’ that bestows upon its exclusively masculine clientele the prestige and glamour of genius.41 Enterline counters this recuperative narrative, however, and, in her own study, draws on the work of Judith Butler and others in order to explore ways in which the process of melancholy identification irretrievably fractures the formation of gender identity. The construction of ‘masculinity’, for example, is shown to be compromised and problematized beyond recognition by the male subject’s identification with the mother he is obliged to renounce, although neither figure is understood as an empirically bodied subject but rather as the fragile and immaterial after-effect of language, ‘maternity’ and ‘femininity’ being here no less problematic or conflicted categories than ‘masculinity’. The male subject’s identification not so much with a ‘woman’ as with a figure who comes to be ‘signified to him as lacking parts, as a mutilated version of himself ’, is central to this discussion, and also forms a part of chapter 5 which considers the impact that such feminine identifications have on the supposedly masculine subjects of Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint.42 Equally important to the theoretical orientation of this book is Joel Fineman’s work on the paradox of praise.43 For Fineman,

24

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

the relation between praised object and praising subject was to all intents and purposes a mirror-relation, one that was designed, at bottom, to promote the qualities and excellencies of the latter to a superlative degree; and his concern as to the propriety of this arrangement is largely what lies behind my own suspicion that, in the altogether admirable and ‘masterly’ writing subject, critics are guilty of constructing a rather idealized image of themselves. Fineman’s sense, moreover, that the traditional poetry of praise was constructed round a basic correspondence or likeness between subject and object leads him to characterize the epideictic tradition as developing an essentially ‘homosexual’ thematic, and to suggest that it was this that Shakespeare was parodying in the sonnets he addressed to the Young Man. Fineman’s analysis here has proved particularly important for the chapters in this book that explore poems in which a similarly homosexual but, in this case, ‘lesbian’ relation is shown to be in evidence between idealizing lover and idealized beloved. If praise was, traditionally, the preserve of the masculine writing subject, then what happens to that figure when, as in Zelmane’s blazon of Philoclea in the New Arcadia, ‘he’ turns out to be as feminine, scattered, and ‘castrated’ as the body he admires, and, in these circumstances, do such effusions still qualify as praise? What happens to that figure when, as in Donne’s Sapho to Philaenis, the praised love-object is explicitly the mirror-image of the praising subject but neither of them is in possession of a penis? In the course of writing this book, it needs hardly be said, I have been influenced by numerous others whose insights and challenges will be acknowledged and noted in due course. I single out these few at this stage only to declare my allegiance and to signal my indebtedness to those who have been most influential and formative in my thinking. For, like them, this book takes as its point of departure the fact that the ego is not ‘master’ in its own house, that the subject is always ‘in process’, that masculinity is never ‘consolidated’ nor gender identity ‘achieved’, and that, in the final analysis, we are the creatures and not the masters of our words. NOTES 1. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 187. 2. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 21. 3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 96. 4. Alexandre Koj`eve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols, ed. Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 20.

Introduction

25

5. On preferring not to, see Herman Melville, ‘Bartelby’, in Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories, ed. Harold Beaver (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 59–99; on saying ‘no’ to power, see Silverman, Male Subjectivity, p. 2; on the ‘fierce order of virility’, see Michel Leiris, Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility, trans. Richard Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 6. Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 2. 7. Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 120. 8. Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 99. 9. Lauro Martines, ‘The Politics of Love Poetry in Renaissance Italy’, in Historical Criticism and the Challenge of Theory, ed. Janet Levarie Smarr (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 129–44, esp. p. 140. 10. Nancy J. Vickers, ‘Vital Signs: Petrarch and Popular Culture’, RR 77 (1988): 184–95, esp. pp. 193, 186. 11. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 62; Mary Villeponteaux, ‘Semper Eadem: Belphoebe’s Denial of Desire’, in Renaissance Discourses of Desire, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), pp. 29–45, esp. p. 38. 12. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 159, 161, 172. 13. Samuel Daniel, Poems and A Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), p. 138. 14. Louis A. Montrose, ‘The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’, in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 303–40, esp. p. 325. 15. Louis A. Montrose, ‘Renaissance Literary Studies and the Subject of History’, ELR 16 (1986): 1–12, esp. p. 6. 16. Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 125, 123, 117, 118, 130, 110, 120. 17. Wyatt: The Critical Heritage, ed. Patricia Thomson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 31, 55, 44. 18. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 1, 120. 19. Marguerite Waller, ‘The Empire’s New Clothes: Refashioning the Renaissance’, in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings, ed. Sheila Fisher and Janet E. Halley (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), pp. 160–83, esp. p. 178. 20. ‘The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’, p. 332, Montrose’s italics. 21. Marguerite Waller, Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), pp. 4, 63.

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22. Marguerite Waller, ‘Historicism Historicized: Translating Petrarch and Derrida’, in Historical Criticism, ed. Smarr, pp. 183–211, esp. pp. 185, 188. 23. Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 28. 24. Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 173–209. 25. Waller, Petrarch’s Poetics, p. 80. 26. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 2. 27. Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 76, 352, 122. 28. ‘Myth’ and ‘no more real’ from E. T. Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (London: Athlone Press, 1970), pp. 154, 163; ‘scholar’s hypothesis’ from F. X. Newman, ed., in The Meaning of Courtly Love (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1968), p. x; ‘no specific content’ from John F. Benton, ‘Clio and Venus: An Historical View of Medieval Love’, in ibid., p. 36; ‘impediment’ from D. W. Robertson, ‘The Concept of Courtly Love as an Impediment to the Understanding of Medieval Texts’, in ibid., p. 17; and ‘holocaust’ from T. Silverstein, ‘Guenevere, or the Uses of Courtly Love’, in ibid., p. 87. —– Woman’, in Feminine Sexuality: 29. Jacques Lacan, ‘God and the jouissance of The Jacques Lacan and the e´cole freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 137–48, esp. p. 141. 30. Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 106. 31. Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity, p. 2. 32. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 4; Copp´elia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 2, 11; Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 26; Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 8. 33. Michael Balint, The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression (London: Tavistock, 1968), p. 26. 34. David G. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 27, the following quotations pp. 5–6. 35. Elisabeth Badinter, for instance, claims that ‘the male embryo “struggles” not to be female’, XY: On Masculine Identity, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 32. 36. Jardine, Gynesis, p. 139. 37. Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999), p. 31; Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing, p. 7; Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003),

Introduction

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

27

p. 7. For a similar reading, see Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 9. Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 9. Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus, p. 22. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in The Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 6.

chap t e r 2

Masochism in Astrophil and Stella

The perplexing conjunction of pleasure and pain is, most precisely, the point at which Astrophil and Stella begins, the opening lines of the inaugural sonnet marking it out, quite explicitly, as the first in a series of clearly delineated steps: Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show, That the deare She might take some pleasure of my paine: Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine, I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe.1

Before she has read a word, then, Stella is somehow to have apprehended Astrophil’s ‘paine’ – viewed it, perhaps, in what Thomas Nashe (one of Sidney’s earliest and most percipient readers) was to call ‘this Theater of pleasure’ – as if an opening scenario in which ‘the deare She’ were set up as sadistic witness to Astrophil’s carefully staged masochistic production were, in fact, not so much the first step in the programme he sets out as the very condition of its possibility.2 There is, presumably, something pleasurable about that experience – whatever it is – because we know from later sonnets that Stella does indeed go ahead and take step one and possibly two (reading and knowing of Astrophil’s pain), even if she declines to go any further. And, since the general reader is also at this point poised at the same critical juncture, one must ask whether the invitation to enter into some kind of sadomasochistic relation with the poem’s speaker must extend to us as well. What, then, is the nature of this pleasure in pain? Is it the ‘sweet violence’ of tragedy: the feeling to be derived from art’s representation of otherwise painful events, the emotion elicited when things horrible, unnatural, or cruel in themselves are ‘made in poetical imitation delightful’, an Aristotelian commonplace that, in the Apology for Poetry, Sidney adverts to here?3 We know that Stella is capable of this aesthetic satisfaction from the emotional response she has to what Astrophil calls a ‘sad Tragedie’ of 28

Masochism in Astrophil and Stella

29

unhappy lovers (sonnet 45); but the fact that, for all Astrophil’s confidence that ‘Oft cruell fights well pictured forth do please’ (sonnet 34), Stella shows no comparable ‘pitie’ for him (sonnet 45), suggests that, for all his protestations to the contrary, Astrophil’s ‘tale of me’ (sonnet 45) is not a tragedy. Perhaps it is more of a ‘tragicommody’ (Nashe again), in which case Stella’s response might be closer to that of the sonnet mistress of Spenser’s Amoretti who, regardless of whether her lover masks ‘in myrth lyke to a Comedy’ or makes ‘my woes a Tragedy’, watches his antics with a ‘constant eye’ and responds in either case with laughter.4 If her response is closer to this than to the elevated satisfactions of tragedy, then the pleasure that Stella derives from watching Astrophil playact before her might correspond more to the feeling that, all the way through the Apology, Sidney insists is the entire raison d’ˆetre of poetry and art: namely, instructional ‘delight’, the pleasing sensation of being moved to or confirmed in virtue – in this case by a cautionary tale that spectacularly depicts its opposite. Sidney goes to some lengths in the Apology, it is true, to distinguish between laughter and delight – between the ‘scornful tickling’ of the dry mock, on the one hand, and the delight which ‘hath a joy in it’ (p. 136), on the other – but the example he adduces as capable of eliciting the two together is that of the humiliated and feminized Hercules spinning at Omphale’s commandment: a figure who has enough affinities with the humbled and browbeaten Astrophil to suggest that the latter is no less capable of producing such contentment – in sum, the ‘delightful teaching which is the end of Poesy’ (p. 137) – and not least in the mind of the mistress under whose command he similarly languishes. The pleasure that Stella derives from Astrophil’s pain, then, might be just such a delight – beholding Astrophil’s wild self-mortifications with a steady eye and drawing from them the obvious moral conclusion – a position, moreover, that would put her in excellent company with a respectable tradition of moralized readings of the sonnet sequence that draw the same satisfaction of a lesson learned from Astrophil’s thoroughly ill-disciplined behaviour. On the other hand, the pleasure to be gained from this pedagogic delight turns out, on closer inspection, to be less stable and clear-cut than might, at first, have been thought. For Sidney constantly describes the experience of reading morally uplifting literature in terms of being moved or acted upon by an overwhelming power or force. Although ‘delight’ is sometimes treated as a mere preliminary – the inducement or ‘medicine of cherries’ (p. 114) that sweetens the bitter pill of moral instruction – nonetheless, the amalgamated effect of ‘delightful teaching’ is regularly featured as an inexorable pressure or energy that probes the soul, strikes the conscience,

30

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

and spurs the individual to heroic action (and there is evidence that at least one contemporary reader of Astrophil and Stella interpreted the sequence as just such a ‘spur’).5 For example, poetry is said to ‘lead and draw us’ (p. 104), to ‘draw the mind more effectually than any other art’ (p. 115), to have ‘more force in teaching’ (p. 108), ‘as much force to teach’ (p. 110), indeed, a ‘sweet charming force’ (p. 125), its overall effect being to ‘stirreth and instructeth . . . [and] inflameth the mind’ (p. 119), to ‘strike, pierce . . . [and] possess the sight of the soul’ (p. 107). One might begin to wonder, then, whether this active, even aggressive, muscular ‘force’ – administered by the ‘hand of delight’ (p. 115) – that the reader of poetry and literature finds directed at himself, as a result of which he feels ‘wonderfully ravished’ (p. 119), might not, however unconsciously, harbour some kind of masochistic satisfaction. The reader whom Sidney characterizes in the Apology as being variously spurred, struck, drawn, pierced, possessed, or inflamed by this aesthetic force is not, after all, so very different from the lover whom he characterizes in Astrophil and Stella as being variously spurred by love, subject to frequent blows, irresistibly drawn to Stella, pierced by Cupid’s arrow, possessed by desire, or on fire with amorous passion. Moreover, at the point in the Apology where, in a discussion of the love lyric, he gives perhaps his fullest account of poetry’s ‘force’, Sidney seems inadvertently to betray the latent instability of this otherwise proper delight in teaching that the treatise is, in every other respect, dedicated to promoting. For at this point two extraordinary things happen. First, Sidney seems momentarily to forget everything he has said hitherto about the goal of all poetry being virtuous learning, and instead presses its ‘force’ into the service of a form of poetry whose stated aim is the seducing of women; and, second, he puts himself in the imaginative position of the woman who might be on the receiving end of such forcible entreaties: truly many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistible love, if I were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love; so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings . . . than that in truth they feel those passions, which easily (as I think) may be betrayed by that same forcibleness or energia (as the Greeks call it) of the writer. (pp. 137–38)

In a sudden and unaccountable shift of positions, poetry’s ‘force’ is here aimed not at its wonted ‘ending end’ (p. 104) of virtuous action but, quite to the contrary, at the business of successfully bedding women; while the effectiveness of this rhetorical force is not only explicitly sexualized but is seen from the point of view of the woman who is seduced and penetrated: a role that, as we shall see, constitutes the masochistic position par excellence.

Masochism in Astrophil and Stella

31

The great force that poetry exerts in order to invigorate its readers and stimulate them to noble action thus also seems to possess a certain libidinal content which, although normally unconscious or disavowed, seems here rather startlingly to break cover. It is as if, on the far side of the Apology’s ‘official’ argument about ‘virtue-breeding delightfulness’ (p. 141) and all the rest there lies a censored but perverse chapter, an alternative scenario in which the reader of poetry is put in the ‘feminine’ position as being on the receiving end of an overmastering, penetrative, masculinized force . . . and finds the whole experience ‘delightful’ (there is a comparison here, perhaps, with the way in which, behind the ‘official’ portrait of Sidney as noble Protestant martyr and courtly hero, there lies a perverse, Dorian Gray-like alternative: rumours, mostly suppressed or explained away, of an ‘unhealthy’ sexual appetite, of cross-dressing, even of incest).6 This does little for the theoretical coherence of the Apology, it is true (a liability to which I shall return), but it does shed some light on Astrophil and Stella, for in two sonnets toward the middle of the sequence Astrophil describes the same experience of being the feminized recipient of his own rhetorical ‘force’. Hearing Stella set his poems to music and sing them out loud, Astrophil becomes the audience of his own ‘thorowest words’ (sonnet 57) and ‘piercing phrases’ (sonnet 58) – the ‘sharpnesse’ (sonnet 57) and ‘might’ (sonnet 58) of which is not in doubt – and derives an unmistakably masochistic pleasure from the experience: ‘she with face and voice / So sweets my paines, that my paines me rejoyce’ (sonnet 57), ‘most ravishing delight / Even those sad words even in sad me did breed’ (sonnet 58). Just as positions that are normally distinct and clear-cut began, in the Apology, to shift about and slide out of control so here in Astrophil and Stella the roles of reader and writer, subject and object, male and female again merge to become confused. Thus, while Astrophil could be seen as the manly lover who rejects the insipid plagiarisms of other poets in order to express his own passions to Stella with the requisite energia – the determination he expresses in the opening sonnet, after all – he also characterizes himself as the very recipient of these piercing words, that is, as the mistress who ‘delights’ in such ravishment.7 Such an exchange of positions or collapse of categories is, moreover, wholly characteristic of the masochistic perversion which, typically, deconstructs all good polarities as we know them: ‘subject/object, male/female, active/passive, control/acquiescence, rebellion/submission, suspension/anticipation, voyeurism/exhibitionism, pain/pleasure – all vital components of masochism’s scheme of desire’, writes one critic, ‘become paradoxical “oppositions” because masochistic desire, in finding pleasure through pain, is the most paradoxical of desires. Its structure confronts the very applicability of a construct dependent on

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Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric

polarities’.8 In Astrophil’s case, furthermore – as the manly lover becomes the female mistress, and as the writer becomes the reader (or at least the hearer) of his own words – so one begins to wonder whether the ‘pleasure of my paine’ that the sequence’s opening couplet made a condition of its own reading and writing might not – rather than Stella’s – actually have been Astrophil ’s all along. If it is Astrophil whose ‘paines me rejoyce’ and whose sad words produce in him ‘most ravishing delight’, then perhaps it is fair to say that he has been his own audience from the beginning. Like the stage-manager of the typical masochistic mise-en-sc`ene who is both actor and audience of his own lurid scene of ruination, Astrophil too could be playing all the parts – both the castigating judge and the suffering victim – because, either way, both positions end up in the same place: masochistic bliss. This may go some way toward explaining the claustrophobic atmosphere of Astrophil and Stella and the fact that, if pleasure in pain is where the sonnet sequence begins, then it is also, quite explicitly, where it ends: So strangely (alas) thy works in me prevaile, That in my woes for thee thou art my joy, And in my joyes for thee my only annoy. (sonnet 108)

In the opening gradatio of sonnet 1 Astrophil had expressed the hope that Stella’s initial ‘pleasure of my paine’ would eventually modulate, via ‘pitie’, into the pleasure of mutual sexual satisfaction. But that moment, of course, never comes; instead, the corrective restoration of ‘normal’ heterosexual object relations – and with it the cherished polarities upon which theoretical coherence depends – is infinitely deferred, the result being that the perverse alternative is where, for the duration, we remain. It is as if, once we have entered into Sidney’s masochistic ‘Theater of pleasure’, we can – as I suspect Nashe intuited – never leave. If Astrophil is indeed dedicated to producing masochism’s paradoxical pleasure in pain, then it makes sense that he should turn to the most extensive vocabulary of amorous oxymoron available to him – Renaissance Petrarchanism – and, although on several occasions he ostensibly rejects that tradition and its clich´ed lexicon of ‘living deaths, deare wounds’ and the like (sonnet 6), nevertheless one might say that, since a close attachment to the father and the disavowal of that attachment plays (as we shall see) a significant part in the formation of the masochistic character, then Astrophil’s noisy denial of Petrarch as a poetic father-figure could be as much a symptom of the complex as a rejection of it. Whatever the anachronism entailed in applying a nineteenth-century term to medieval and early modern texts,

Masochism in Astrophil and Stella

33

there can be no doubt that, however generalized the definition, the scene of courtly love contains elements that are manifestly masochistic. Moreover, it may well be that, in explicitly sexualizing Petrarch and in ‘undoing’ some of the latter’s many sublimations, Sidney brings to the fore the otherwise latent perverseness of the Petrarchan scenario, and that it is to this – rather than to the merely bibliographical fact that it was the first Petrarchan sonnet sequence to be written in English – to which Astrophil and Stella owes its exemplary originality. In any case, not even the most casual survey of Sidney’s sequence can deny the fact that Astrophil strikes a masochistic pose or that he remains in the suffering position to the end. Indeed, he courts suffering a great deal more successfully than he courts Stella. Unheard, unpersuasive, and manifestly unsuccessful in his avowed aim of winning Stella’s ‘grace’, Astrophil epitomizes the courtly lover’s state of permanently delayed gratification. In thrall to a ‘schoole-mistresse’ (sonnet 46), a ‘Captainnesse’ (sonnet 88), and a ‘Princesse’ (sonnets 28, 107) – who ‘Rules with a becke’ (sonnet 46) and who exerts ‘miraculous power’ (sonnet 7) – Astrophil trembles before this fearsome dominatrix (she also includes in her retinue Cupid as ‘page’ and Honour as ‘slave’, sonnet 35), and likens himself to the ‘slave-borne Muscovite’ who calls it ‘praise to suffer Tyrannie’ (sonnet 2), and to the ‘slave, / Whose necke becomes such yoke of tyranny’ (sonnet 47). He fantasizes that he might be Stella’s pet dog (sonnet 59) or bird (sonnet 83), and he routinely figures himself as a horse who, although he rejects Virtue’s ‘hard bit’ (sonnet 4) yet relishes being ‘Spurd with love’s spur’ (sonnet 98), for ‘The raines of Love I love’ (sonnet 28) and in Cupid’s sharp horsemanship ‘myselfe takes delight’ (sonnet 49). As beast and slave Astrophil is ‘Overthrowne’ and quite ‘subdued’ (sonnet 40) – the captive of those ‘lov’d Tyrants’, Stella’s eyes (sonnet 42) – and he offers up to Stella a ‘conquerd, yelden, ransackt heart’, a craven soul ‘which at thy foot did fall’ (sonnet 36). ‘O ease your hand’, he pleads, ‘treate not so hard your slave . . . Or if I needs (sweet Judge) must torments have, / Use something else to chast’n me withall, / Then those blest eyes’ (sonnet 86). Those eyes send forth ‘arrowes infinit’ (sonnet 17) and also serve Love ‘with shot’ (sonnet 29), while her heart ‘a Cittadell, / So fortified with wit, stor’d with disdaine, / That to win it, is all the skill and paine’ (sonnet 12). Astrophil willingly undergoes love’s torments and his body is fair game for all the missiles Stella hurls in his direction – ‘through my long battred eyes, / Whole armies of thy beauties entred in’ (sonnet 36). Stella’s eyes emit scorching rays that leave ‘burning markes’ on their victim’s skin (sonnet 47), yet still he pleads for more: ‘ˆo eyes, dart downe your rayes’ in order that ‘my death proceed’ (sonnet 42). In Stella’s eyes ‘Paine doth

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learne delight’: ‘O looke, oˆ shine’, he begs them, for even though he complains ‘That through my heart their beamie darts be gone’, he still seeks his own dissolution: ‘Deare Killer, spare not thy sweet cruell shot: / A kind of grace it is to slay with speed’ (sonnet 48). However painful her presence in Astrophil’s life may be, however, Stella’s absence brings no relief but is itself figured in terms of suffering – as a darkness, burning, starvation, or wound (sonnets 89, 106). Moreover, Astrophil not only gladly suffers Stella’s multiple attacks on himself but those of other figures as well: it was, for example, Love who ‘gave the wound, which while I breathe will bleed’ (sonnet 2). As his lord and god, ‘Love on me doth all his quiver spend’ (sonnet 14), while elsewhere Astrophil complains that ‘On Cupid’s bow how are my heart-strings bent’, (sonnet 19), and that his heart is ‘pierc’d’ by Cupid’s ‘bloudie bullet’ and glistering ‘dart’ (sonnet 20). As ‘my Lord Love’ (sonnet 50) and ‘Doctor Cupid ’ (sonnet 61), Love is the masculine authority figure whose ‘Tygrish courage’ Astrophil must appease (sonnet 65), a cruel captain who rides him hard and ‘spurres with sharpe desire my hart’ (sonnet 49). Astrophil is similarly subject to the people around him, and in particular to the male companions and peers whose disapproving looks ‘straight my hid meaning teare / From out my ribs’ (sonnet 104), and whose sharp words penetrate his very being as corrosive ‘caustiks’ (sonnet 21) or ‘Rubarb words’ (sonnet 14). As often as not, however, Astrophil directs blows at himself, whether in straightforward images of self-flagellation – ‘beating my selfe for spite’ (sonnet 1), ‘Hart rent thy selfe’ for ‘to my selfe my selfe did give the blow’ (sonnet 33) – or in more general accounts of self-inflicted suffering or mortification. Thus, he is one of those who, in swerving from truth or right, ‘strive for their owne smart’ (sonnet 5), or who sees ‘my course to lose my selfe doth bend’ and yet he only sorrows ‘that I lose no more for Stella’s sake’ (sonnet 18), or who sees ‘my wracke, and yet embrace the same’ (sonnet 19). Given this great testament of self-willed suffering, it is surprising that Astrophil’s masochistic tendencies have not received more sustained attention. Insofar as critics have responded to Astrophil’s general failure and ultimate despair (which no amount of disavowal can explain away), however, they have, albeit by different means, largely managed to recuperate his losses by turning them into Sidney’s gains. Consider, for example, the tradition of moralized readings briefly mentioned above. Here a somewhat vindicatory approach takes Astrophil’s bitter end – as well as the self-destructive route he takes to get there – as evidence of Sidney’s overarching moral aim, which is to indict the lover’s manifest folly and, in the terms of the Apology, to show the terrible effects of an ‘infected will’ (p. 101). Although no mention

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is made of perversion or masochism, nonetheless, the fact that ‘Astrophil should consider his own desires “ill”’, as one critic puts it, ‘is determined ethically by their end’.9 In these accounts, Astrophil serves as a ‘negative example’, an ‘object lesson’, or ‘exemplary tale’.10 He is the paradigmatic lover-fool who ‘Lookes to the skies, and in a ditch doth fall’ (sonnet 19), and whose sufferings are all too deserved, allowing the reader to extract from his manifold failings the satisfaction of a lesson learned. Readings of this type depend upon making a clear differentiation between the poet and his persona: Astrophil’s wanton dereliction and failure to persuade Stella (or, indeed, to exert any effective masculine agency at all) provide an opportunity for Sidney to exert his own ‘complete control’, the ability to discipline his character’s passions not only within an ethical framework but also within the strict confines of the sonnet form being not the least evidence of his poetic ‘mastery’, a skill that is capable of recuperating even Astrophil’s most inept and submissive postures.11 The split between poet and persona, moreover, allows for the exercise of irony, a reassuringly stable structure which (because the joke is always at Astrophil’s expense) guarantees to make good the lover’s failings, no matter how heinous they are: indeed, the more heinous the better, for the further Astrophil falls from the heights of an ‘erected wit’ the greater the distance from his maker, the greater the irony, and so, ultimately, the greater the force of Sidney’s moral instruction.12 Polarized in this way, the figures of Sidney and Astrophil also frequently find themselves mapped onto those of the active Protestant hero, on the one hand, and the idle courtier, on the other – two positions, furthermore, that are implicitly if not explicitly gendered. Where Astrophil is identified with the effeminate and trifling courtier who confessedly wastes his talent on ‘toys’ (sonnet 18) and who neglects his education and affairs of state for female company and a hopeless affair of the heart, Sidney, by contrast, is identified with the masculine hero who puts into practice the precepts of the Apology – that the ‘highest end’ of all human knowledge is that of ‘well-doing and not of well-knowing only’, the supreme expression of which is ‘the practice of a soldier’ (p. 104) – and who goes to war for his country, being praised by his contemporaries for his ‘manlie’ acts on the battlefield and for the ‘manly wounds’ he received there.13 Indeed, Sidney is seen in the Apology to speak for the ‘earnest protestant activism’ of the late sixteenth century – a set of beliefs in which personal self-improvement through the reading and study of literature went hand in hand with a pro-active and specifically military pursuit of goals.14 In militant Protestant circles of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, such honour was codified in terms of a neo-chivalric prowess and manly virtus, and was seen

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as the vehicle for an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy. Within this context, as Robin Headlam Wells has suggested, terms such as ‘masculine’, ‘manly’, ‘chivalrous’, ‘virtuous’, and ‘honourable’, came to carry a specific political freight, being for the Sidney-Essex faction as much as for the later supporters of Prince Henry, a ‘code that signalled allegiance to a well defined political agenda’, namely, that of ‘the war party’.15 Against all this, Astrophil’s wilful pursuit of a hopeless and painful love affair – in the face of his own better judgement and that of his friends – can only invite censure. Astrophil is hauled up, in particular, for his sexual indiscipline – his indulgence rather than restraint of sexual desire – a libidinousness that comes out in his sexual innuendos and bawdy puns, or ‘inphallicities’ as one critic calls them.16 Although such features of Astrophil and Stella cannot be denied, readings of this kind – which criticize Astrophil’s sexual irregularities – effectively ‘negativize’ the negative, and in so doing regularize the lover’s failings, containing them within the corrective framework of an acceptable poetic and sexual morality. Pathologizing Astrophil in this way becomes, in effect, a normalizing move: one that situates the critic on the outside looking in – in a position, that is, to diagnose and judge the wayward lover and so to uphold the values of what is deemed to be normative, healthy, and ‘proper’. This position, moreover, shores itself up on the appeal – in the person of ‘Sidney’ – to a self-consistent, biographical subject who straightforwardly expresses his meaning and mind in the Apology and who, equally straightforwardly, acts out its virtuous precepts in his life and art: a model of the writing subject with whom the critic has every reason to identify. Astrophil’s perversity is similarly recuperated, albeit in a more subtle way, in a second and, generally, more recent approach that might be said to have been initiated by Stephen Greenblatt’s 1973 article on Sidney and the ‘mixed mode’.17 In these accounts, those elements upon whose strict demarcation the serenity of the ‘ethical’ readings depends – Sidney and Astrophil, poet and persona, humanist and courtier – are instead brought together and combined, to create a more dynamic hybridity and field of opposition. In place of a serene and morally secure Sidney who looks down in disapproval at the antics of his anti-hero and draws a moral lesson accordingly, we find instead an altogether less stable Sidney whose life and art are ‘traversed by contradictory demands’, a figure who possesses a ‘Janus-like ability to present opposing faces’, and whose characteristic self-presentations reveal ‘a mixture of narcissistic pleasure and shame, of earnest and game, of political assertion and politic submission’.18 This alternative approach necessarily destabilizes the serenity of the older, moralized readings because it questions

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the omniscience, resolution, and control – in a word, ‘mastery’ – of Sidney as writing subject, upon which such readings had come to rely. Instead, the tension between oppositional or conflictual positions is internalized if not psychologized so as to produce a Sidney who is anything but masterly – more of the divided or de-centred self, the split or shattered subject, the tormented soul who appears in so many of his writings. On the face of it, these readings would seem to lead promisingly toward a discussion of masochism, and indeed it is here that critics have probably come the closest to addressing the presence of that perversion in Sidney’s life and art. Here Sidney’s entire situation is read as a lifelong drama between authority and submission where, in a difficult relation with England’s ‘formidable, emasculating queen’, he is seen poetically to re-fashion in his works his various experiences of political neglect, subordination, or defeat, so as to produce, in Astrophil and Stella, for example, verses that harbour ‘a tremendous cargo of pain’, even though Astrophil evidently does everything in his power to ‘exacerbate rather than assuage the suffering he undergoes’, and indeed positively ‘delights in his subjection’.19 The Petrarchan tradition to which Sidney is clearly indebted for this scenario of suffering love is openly acknowledged here to be ‘masochistic, articulated as cruelty, disease, distress, pain’, and indeed Sidney’s sonnet sequence is said to be nothing less than a ‘poetics of masochism’.20 Nevertheless, because of the epistemological model upon which these new historicist readings are based, this position of masochistic suffering is almost invariably turned around – contained and dialecticized – by a theoretical structure in which submission or subordination are dutifully re-interpreted in terms of ‘power’. Given the Foucauldian formula of ‘productive’ repression and the dictum that power does not operate in one direction only but circulates round all positions, the repressed or subordinated no less than the dominant or authoritarian, it could be said that this approach is congenitally unsuited to – if not, in fact, incapable of – theorizing masochism as such, for it cannot conceive of a truly disempowered position. Instead, if there is a masochistic position, then it is seen as being ‘productive’ – that is, as bound up inseparably with sadism and, therefore, as the intrinsic part of a dynamic of sado-masochistic power relations. Likewise, if there is masochistic ‘pleasure’ then it is not the paradoxical pleasure in pain but the – altogether more comprehensible – pleasure that ‘kindles at having to evade this power, flee from it, fool it, or travesty it’, ‘the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting’.21 There is no place here for truly unrecuperable loss, for the willed defeat and passive surrender that could be thought to characterize the masochistic position per se.22

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One particularly striking example of the way in which new historicist readings of Sidney regularly recuperate – and effectively cancel – this masochistic position could be seen in their readings of what might, in other respects, be thought of as one of Sidney’s most blatant and public acts of grovelling self-abasement: that is, his gift to the Queen, in the New Year of 1581, of a whip garnished with small diamonds, in token of his submission to her authority over the Alenc¸on affair. Yet what might have seemed a quintessentially masochistic gesture is interpreted instead as a strategy sufficiently witty and ironic as to preserve Sidney’s complete control of the situation: for it is said to allow him to appear humble ‘in manner’ but not in ‘matter’, leaving his high-minded independence from an over-bearing sovereign intact and un-compromised to the last and so permitting him to emerge as the overall ‘master’ of the scene.23 Whether here or in other Sidney performances (in tournaments or tennis courts) on that stage that was the Elizabethan court, or in his fictional representations, including Astrophil and Stella, this turn-around from low to high is found to be endemic – indeed, to be ‘a virtual Sidney signature’ – and yet the formula that automatically converts surrender to victory, humility to triumph, or self-abasement to mastery, is not only incapable of accommodating masochism but also, even if by a more circuitous route, ends up in much the same place as the older, ‘ethical’ readings: with the all-powerful and omni-competent writing subject.24 In the hands of the masterly writer, any social setbacks or political failures that Sidney may have experienced are aestheticized and turned to good poetic account, so that anything negative comes to be compensated for – if not redeemed – by ‘poetic production’.25 The very conflicts and tensions that, according to these readings, presented Sidney as a split, self-divided, or de-centred subject are now recuperated as the source of his ‘power’. Just as Greenblatt found the intense struggles and internal contradictions within Wyatt’s psyche the source of that poet’s ‘manliness’, ‘inwardness’, and ‘individuality’, so here Sidney’s comparably internal combustion is said by Gary Waller to be the ‘very strength’ of his poetry, to give rise to its ‘characteristic energy’, indeed to be the source of that same energia that Sidney named as ‘the distinguishing mark of powerful writing’.26 Irony, again, is drafted in to help account for the poet’s achievement – not so much the ‘stable’ irony of a distant, olympian Sidney who looks down on and laughs at his creature’s expense, but now more a kind of ‘reflexive’ irony directed at his own inner conflicts and self-contradictions. Yet here too, notwithstanding warnings that a cult of paradox, irony, and Empsonian ambiguity can in itself contain such irresolutions and all too easily rationalize them away, Sidney is, in his very uncertainties and

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self-doubts, seen to be a supreme ‘master of indirection’ and ‘connoisseur of doubt’.27 This type of ‘unstable’ irony – which, being self-directed, cuts the ground from under its own feet and undermines its own position, as Sidney has been argued to do in both the Apology and Astrophil and Stella – culminates in a kind of hyper-awareness or heightened level of consciousness, for ‘one cannot play this sort of game without knowing that one is doing it’.28 Absurd, vain, or self-destructive acts (whether on the part of Sidney or of his characters) are thus contained by this appeal to a higher level of self-knowledge – irony’s dialectical Aufhebung – in much the same way that postures of submission or humiliation are co-opted as carefully planned strategies in an all-knowing game of ‘power’. The upshot of all this is that these readings which seemed, at first glance, to come the closest to theorizing the masochistic tendencies that surface so often in Sidney’s life and art end up doing the opposite, and instead praise Astrophil and Stella for its ‘control and composure’, ‘assurance and awareness’, and see Sidney’s sonnet sequence ultimately as an act of ‘masculine, social mastery’, of ‘socially recognized mastery’, of ‘public mastery’, of ‘literary mastery’ and of ‘aesthetic mastery’.29 The abject male is effectively cancelled from the scene and the masterly writing subject (even if he does protest a little to much) once more holds sway. Finally, a third approach needs briefly to be mentioned here – one, indeed, that combines the conceptual premises of the other two – and that is the thesis that Gary Waller develops out of his earlier readings of Sidney and comes to apply, if not directly to Astrophil and Stella, then to the writings of William Herbert and Mary Wroth and to the dense network of familial and literary relationships that he styles the ‘Sidney family romance’.30 Already armed with a shrewd feminist suspicion that traditional readings of Petrarchanism implicitly set the critic up as a competent and complacent writing subject who is called upon to exercise his masculine if not masculinist ‘control and mastery’ of the text in hand, Waller aligns this insight with his previous work on the de-centred male subject and masochistic tendencies of Petrarchan love, and, in a careful synthesis, combines the discourses of psychoanalysis and new historicism in order to forge a new reading of Petrarchanism – one that is, in his opinion, ‘long overdue’.31 Heavily indebted to object relations theory, Waller’s revisionary reading sees Petrarchanism as a remarkably explicit articulation of the fraught – and, in this case, unresolved – process of individuation by means of which the infant needs psychically to separate from its mother in order to achieve autonomous selfhood: a process particularly problematic in the case of the boy-child and the eventual consolidation of a masculine gender

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identity. In order to ‘achieve’ his masculinity, that is to say, the boy’s sense of blissful union with the mother has to be given up and his own femininity denied: a troubled process, as often as not left incomplete, which gives rise, in turn, to a conflictual and contradictory attitude toward women and femininity in general. Loved and yet repudiated, the mother becomes an object of fascination and repulsion, of desire and taboo. In Waller’s eyes, it is this contradictory relation that gives rise to Petrarchanism’s obsessive litany of oxymoron, for the sadistic Cruel Fair of that tradition now emerges as the ‘punishing mother-figure’ (p. 148) from whom the male subject is necessarily expelled but whom, paradoxically, he continues to adore: ‘her effects on him are like those the child feels in the birth, weaning, and separation/individuation process, or whenever he must leave the comfort of the mother and is thrown alone into the world’, Waller writes, ‘yet finding himself inevitably drawn, in reality or fantasy, back to her, puzzled yet reassured by the familiarity of his tortures. She is the all-powerful mother’, he goes on, ‘simultaneously loved and hated, on whose nurturance he is totally dependent, and yet from whom he must break if he is to achieve his . . . individuation’ (pp. 148–49). The male subject endeavours to ward off engulfment and to establish a consolidated masculine identity and stable ego boundaries, but, insofar as the courtly lover typically fails in this regard, his state of permanently delayed gratification puts him in an intrinsically masochistic position: ‘masochism involves assigning to the other the absolute power of forbidding pleasure – in the case of male masochism, giving the all-powerful mother the power of the Law to rule absolutely, at least within the script he laid down, his life and death’ (p. 153). As with the more purely new historicist readings discussed above, Waller’s account here comes close to a full-scale analysis of masochism if not in Sidney’s writing itself then in that of his nephew and niece and in the lyric tradition to which all three could be said to belong. But, for all the critic’s alertness to the dangers of setting up the writing subject as an authority figure, his approach nevertheless ends up in the same place as the previous two. In the first place, because object relations theory is essentially a developmental narrative in which the ability to relate meaningfully with others comes to be the very litmus test of mental health, then any position that, by comparison, is ‘stunted’ or underdeveloped is implicitly in need of treatment or correction. Since, according to this reading, Petrarchanism not only testifies to a conflicted, unresolved relation between men and women in its very structure and language of paradox but also exacerbates the problem and, instead of curing it, goes on about it at numbing length and even enjoys or luxuriates in it – this can only (according to the logic of this persuasion) be branded

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as sick. Scandalously, Petrarchanism lifts the curtain on a veritable gallery of perversions, ‘both sadism and masochism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and – at times, catering for more specialist tastes – transvestism, paedophilia, and necrophilia’ (p. 147). Since, for Waller, Petrarchanism inexplicably ‘valorizes unfulfilment and avoids the possibility of mutuality as the basis for fulfilling relationships’, he is forced to indict it as acting out ‘some of the most destructive, “perverse”, scenarios of interrelationships in our culture’ (p. 157), ending up, in other words, in the same place as the older, ‘ethical’ readings of Astrophil and Stella which, in similarly pathologizing Astrophil’s unfulfilled desire, also situated the critic on the side of what is collectively assumed to be the norm, namely heterosexual object relations whose most successful achievement is summed up in bourgeois marriage. In the second place, because he grounds his argument on the individuation of the male-child from his mother, Waller – like object relations theory generally – effectively enshrines and naturalizes the gender binary. For all his insistence that gender identity is a matter of construction, that identity is nevertheless already pre-conceived in the same way that the masculinity that is ideally to be ‘achieved’ is pre-supposed in the figure of the boy-child from the outset. As a result, and again like the older, ‘ethical’ readings, Waller too appeals, although somewhat more un-self-critically in his case, to the notion of the straightforwardly sexed and bodied, empirical, historical, and material subject – that is to say, to ‘real men and women’ (p. 24) – with the result that, once again, a study of masochism in Renaissance texts deposits us back in the world of conservative-thinking, norm-upholding, self-consistent, unproblematically gender-identified, healthy, centred, consolidated, biographically continuous, and masterly writing subjects. Responses to Astrophil and Stella have thus proved singularly unable, or perhaps one should say unwilling, to address in any consistent or focused way the topic of masochism in Sidney’s sequence, and this in spite of the fact that – with its fantasies of beating, bondage, persecution, bestiality, impoverishment, guilt, humiliation, and all the rest – it could be considered something of a text-book case. This I find interesting in itself. It is difficult to avoid symptomizing these various reactions, and here, as indeed throughout this book, my aim is to treat such critical responses not ‘neutrally’ but diagnostically, as having some often very pertinent things to say about the text in hand. It is fitting, therefore, that – if masochism is variously denied or repressed in these readings – it should nevertheless stage an inevitable return. Critics who end up making a sweeping ‘indictment’ of Petrarchanism, for example, or who castigate Astrophil for being ‘adolescent’, or who reprimand others for being unduly ‘lenient’ if they do not do

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so, unconsciously figure themselves as the punishing father or chastizing judge: that is, they play into the masochist’s hand and effectively perpetuate the sadomasochistic scenario rather than curing or correcting it.32 And a whole new dimension opens up if, as suggested earlier on, the highminded, censorious critic derives any satisfaction from his moral stance, for that would be to find ‘delight’ in poetry’s forceful teaching, the potentially libidinal content of which has already been observed. As before, polarities otherwise held apart in secure and faithful opposition have a way of shifting disconcertingly as sadism threatens to shade into masochism, right reading into wrong reading, and approved morality into reproved perversity. Just as the strictest of moralists – those most punctilious in their obedience – have long given rise to suspicion and, indeed, from early in the clinical literature formed a special category of the ‘moral’ or ‘Christian’ masochist, so these critics might find to their horror that, for all their efforts to the contrary, perversion confronts them whichever way they turn and that, their best intentions notwithstanding, the masochistic ‘Theater of pleasure’ does indeed prove inescapable in the end. None of this directly addresses the question of masochism in Astrophil and Stella, it is true, but it does perhaps point us in the right direction. For one of the most striking things about the various approaches considered so far is that they all attempt – even if by different means and (as now appears) with mixed success – to return us to what could be described as a kind of normative status quo. That is to say, whether they presume a set of shared assumptions about what is right or wrong, healthy or sick; or whether they appeal to empirically bodied and anatomically gendered subjects; or whether they disclose a narrative in which the male subject is, no matter how profound his sufferings or submissive his postures, always restored to a position of ‘mastery’ and ‘power’ in the end: either way, all these accounts effectively uphold the values of what Kaja Silverman calls our society’s ‘dominant fiction’, namely the ideological regime that, from time immemorial, has grounded its systems of value and belief, its modes of social, familial, political, and legal organization, on the supposed superiority of the male subject who, unlike his female counterpart, is anatomically ‘complete’ and ‘whole’.33 The fact, however, that these critics seem, one way or another, to find the topic of masochism so uncomfortable or difficult to deal with might seem to suggest that the ‘dominant fiction’, in whose name they write and whose values, consciously or unconsciously they validate, comes up here against its own, very strict limit; indeed, that what has registered so far as a series of local refusals, blind-spots, or self-contradictions on the part of individual critics or schools of thought might in fact be indicative of a larger and potentially

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more radical scenario in which this perversion – which no amount of censorship or repression seems able to neutralize or contain – actually gets the better of patriarchal ideology and destabilizes if not demolishes the core structures and systems of belief upon which its ‘world’, for good or ill, rests. If we are to go ahead and attempt to theorize masochism in Astrophil and Stella, therefore (not to mention other Renaissance texts), it might seem preferable to start out from this position rather than to end up at it: better, that is to say, to take the un-sustainability of this ideological structure as the point of departure rather than find it come back to shipwreck or parody one’s own best arguments and constructions at the end. The history of the critical readings discussed so far, then, would seem to suggest that the best way to approach the topic is to begin with the premise that the ‘dominant fiction’ is exactly that, a fiction: not the ‘world’, or ‘normality’, or ‘reality’ as we know it but an ideological construct, one that depends for its plausibility and coherence on the exclusion (indeed, on the unthinkability) of certain categories and positions: positions that include among them what Judith Butler calls the ‘nexus of sexuality and pain’.34 For it is just such proscribed positions that show the dominant fiction up for what it is; that exceed, evade, and play havoc with its rationalizing procedures; and that – in living out paradoxes and exercising impossibilities – demonstrate its provisionality and the limits of its power. Instead of beginning with a set of shared assumptions about what is good, proper, healthy, right, or true, then, or with material historical subjects (‘real men and women’), or with the ever-rotating circulations of ‘power’, my starting point here – as, indeed, in every chapter of this book – will rather be the fragility of this dominant fiction and the inherently self-contradictory if not impossible nature of its demands. One of the reasons I begin this book with a discussion of masochism – apart from the fact that the latter is the ruling ‘perversion’ of courtly love and to that extent a paradigm for all the alternative modes of masculinity to be explored here – is that masochism does not so much, or not only, ‘contest’ the social order (to go too far down that route is to run the risk, as with some new historicist readings, of recuperating the masochist as the great Rebel, and to turn his subordination into insubordination) as reveal the dominant fiction’s structural, indeed foundational, instabilities. Masochism does this by exposing and acting out the basic contradiction that lies at the heart of this ideology’s first and most fundamental demand: the requirement that every subject become a gendered being and take up a sexed position within society. In Kaja Silverman’s formulation, the means by which the dominant fiction effects this and ‘interpellates’ its subjects – obliging them to assume their

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allotted places as men and women within the heteronormative regime – is what Freud styles the ‘positive’ Oedipus complex: the set of affiliations by which the child comes to identify with the parent of the same sex and to desire the parent of the opposite sex. In this arrangement, the boy-child – or, more properly, the little ‘boy-to-be’ – comes to identify with the father (the latter’s ‘masculinity’ being understood not as any essential quality but rather as a set of attributes that are socially coded as such) and, in line with this identification, develops a heterosexual object-choice, that is to say, loves the mother. Likewise, the little ‘girl-to-be’ will identify with the mother (the latter’s ‘femininity’, of course, being understood in the same way), and come to develop a heterosexual attachment to the father. This normative arrangement, however – by means of which little ‘men’ and ‘women’ come into being and society’s gender stereotypes are handed down from generation to generation – is, as Freud himself admits, problematized from the outset by complications that threaten to sabotage it (not to mention the coherence of his own theory as well).35 For the ‘positive’ complex is accompanied and shadowed from the beginning by a ‘negative’ version in which, conversely, the child identifies with the parent of the opposite sex and desires the parent of the same sex. Alongside his ‘positive’ complex, then, the little ‘boy-to-be’ (except that this gendered telos is suddenly thrown into question) also harbours an identification with his mother – he ‘behaves like a girl’, as Freud puts it – and as such nurtures a ‘homosexual’ attachment to the father.36 In the same way, the development of the little ‘girl-to-be’ will be no less problematized by her ‘negative’ identification with the father – making her ‘masculine’ and prompting a ‘lesbian’ attachment to the mother. In its bid to produce heteronormative sexualities and stable gender positions, the dominant fiction does its best to promote the affects and affiliations of the positive complex and to repress or disavow those of the negative one. The reason why it is less than successful in doing so, however, is a basic contradiction that lies at the heart of the positive complex. For, if the assumption of a normative gender identity depends, in the first instance, on the child’s identification with the parent of the same sex, then this is capsized in turn by the counter-demand that that same parent’s specific love-object is strictly out of bounds. In other words, if the ‘boy-to-be’ has to identify with his father in order to become a little ‘man’ and so to develop the appropriate object choice (to love women), then – at the same time as being libidinally directed toward the mother – he is also prohibited from fulfilling those desires with her. He is commanded to be like the father in certain respects (as masculine, heterosexual, and so forth) but to be unlike him in others (as the mother’s lover). The same applies to the ‘girl-to-be’

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who finds her apparently sanctioned (because heterosexual) desire for her father similarly blocked. The taboos against homosexuality and against incest stand in fundamental contradiction to one another. Directed toward a heterosexual love-object whom it is also required to renounce, the child finds itself in an impossible position, and it typically negotiates the dilemma by means of a fatal compromise: one that appears more visibly in the case of those individuals who find it impossible to part with or properly mourn a once-loved object who has died or departed. Like the melancholiac, that is, the child finds a way of doing both, of ‘letting go’ without letting go. It relinquishes the beloved parent as it is required to do, but only by absorbing or internalizing that parent, by taking them into the ego, by preserving them within the unconscious: in a word, by identifying with them. By this means, the boy who is required to identify with his father responds to the contradictory demands that he both love and lose his mother by identifying with her (in part ‘becoming’ her); and the girl who is required to be ‘like’ her mother does the same by identifying with (‘becoming’) her father. These identifications with the parent of the opposite sex are already there, ready and waiting, in the form of the negative complex, which is here called upon to resolve the contradictory demands of the positive one; except that resolution is hardly the outcome, since the solution of one contradiction only results in producing another that is quite as insoluble if not more glaring still. For it now appears that the very condition of taking up a heteronormative gender identity is to identify with the opposite: that is, to be a ‘man’ (to identify with the father) is effectively to ‘be’ a woman (to identify with the mother). The boy’s masculinity is ‘consolidated’ (although that is scarcely the word) by means of an identification with the mother and her femininity, and vice versa in the case of the girl. If the positive Oedipus complex is the means by which the dominant fiction ‘interpellates’ its subjects and generates the basic binary structures upon which its social order and ‘world’ come to depend, then – in this business of producing stable gender identities – it proves something of a liability. This is why Freud’s more ‘complete’ version of the Oedipus complex, discussed in chapter 3 of The Ego and the Id (1923), has long been the focus of those who are more explicitly motivated than Freud himself perhaps could afford to be to question the overall coherence of the oedipal model and the inevitability of – indeed, the social, political, and emotional price to be paid by – a heteronormative gender construction. Much celebrated work has been done, for example, on the culture of ‘gender melancholy’ that results from this situation where the assumption of a heterosexual gender identity comes to rest upon homosexual identifications and attachments

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that have to be lost but cannot be mourned.37 The topic of melancholia is one to which I shall return in chapter 4, where I discuss ways in which it plays itself out in Ralegh’s poem, The Ocean to Cynthia. What makes the insolubility of these oedipal dilemmas relevant to the present discussion, however, is that masochism shines the spotlight on them no less brightly and so exposes the contradiction that lies at the dominant fiction’s core in its own special way. For, in its classic formulation, the unconscious wish that subtends all masochistic behaviours and imaginings is, at bottom, the desire to be loved by the father – that is, to be sexually ‘used’, ravished, or penetrated by him – this being the wish that is so thinly disguised in the scenarios of beating and spanking that feature so often in masochistic fantasies, whether on the part of the strict disciplinarian who longs with a burning ardour for the pricks of conscience and always turns the other cheek, or on the part of the more obviously paid-up masochist who seeks the thrills of more literally epidermal flagellation. This displacement – by means of which ‘I am being loved by my father’ becomes ‘I am being beaten by him’ – habitually also undergoes a second distortion in which the loving/punishing male figure mutates into a loving/punishing female one: the whip-yielding dominatrix of the classic masochistic scene. The traditional attributes of the latter, however – coldness, cruelty, hardness, stoniness, invincibility, and so forth – are, in the first place, sufficiently ‘masculine’ to indicate that the strong, sadistic father-figure is not very far behind her; and, in the second place, enough of a caricature to suggest that this figure need have nothing to do with any actual father but stands as a culturally coded gender stereotype of what being ‘masculine’ could be said to signify. Whatever the apparent gender of the person administering the punishment, therefore, the masochistic subject who is on the receiving end of his or her blows is placed in a correspondingly ‘feminine’ position, as passive, receptive, powerless, penetrated, abused, and so on (although, again, as situational attributes, these constitute what is culturally coded as ‘feminine’ and not qualities intrinsic to women themselves). The unconscious wish that underpins masochism, in other words, and that activates all its multiple scenarios, fantasies, and forms, corresponds to the negative complex of the boy, who ‘behaves like a girl’, and identifies with his mother and desires to be loved as she is loved – that is, to be copulated with – by the father. Since this arrangement corresponds more closely with the positive complex of the girl, then it might seem as if the two sexes diverge at this point and, indeed, as if masochism disrupts the symmetry between the two that has been strictly maintained so far. For, insofar as this arrangement is more in line with what the dominant fiction requires of the

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little girl and the subsequent development of her femininity, then it runs the risk of assuming (by no means unproblematically) that to be masochistic is woman’s ‘natural’ condition (an aggressive, masculine sadism would be the way in which her negative complex would come out). For the man, however, insofar as masochism ‘feminizes’ him and serves as an expression and articulation of his original negative complex, it is sufficiently out of kilter with the social order to be branded seriously abnormal or perverse. And, insofar as it activates his negative complex and therefore enacts the basic insolubility of the Oedipus complex, masochism not only exposes but spectacularly parades the contradiction that lies at the heart of society’s dominant fiction, and thus has radicalizing implications that extend well beyond the aberrant predilections of any private individual. As Silverman writes, the male masochist ‘acts out in an insistent and exaggerated way the basic conditions of cultural subjectivity, conditions that are normally disavowed; he loudly proclaims that his meaning comes to him from the Other, prostrates himself before the gaze even as he solicits it, exhibits his castration for all to see, and revels in the sacrificial basis of the social contract. [He] magnifies the losses and divisions upon which cultural identity is based, refusing to be sutured or recompensed. In short’, she concludes, ‘he radiates a negativity inimical to the social order’ (p. 206). This basic masochistic paradigm has, it is true, also been theorized in other ways, and I shall come to these in due course. For the time being, however, I shall stay with Freud’s formulations that the masochist desires to be ‘treated like . . . a naughty child’ and to be put ‘in a characteristically feminine situation . . . that is, being castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby’, if only because they correspond so closely with Astrophil’s position in the opening sonnet of Astrophil and Stella (and, indeed, right the way through Sidney’s sonnet sequence), and because seeing Astrophil in this way – as a figure who exposes the fundamental contradiction that lies at the heart of the dominant fiction and so threatens to negate the social order – goes a long way toward explaining the otherwise odd silence of previous critics on the subject.38 In what follows, therefore, I take the opening sonnet of Astrophil and Stella – where, after all, the nexus of ‘pleasure’ and ‘paine’ is first announced – as modelling the various masochistic postures and positionings that Astrophil subsequently takes up in the course of the sequence: that of the naughty schoolboy who is found ‘Biting my trewand pen’, who suffers the ‘blowes’ of that fearsome dominatrix, ‘stepdame Studie’, and who languishes in the pains of labour, finding himself ‘great with child to speake, and helplesse in my throwes’ (sonnet 1). This last image of birthing, for example, is one to which Astrophil returns on a

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number of occasions, as when he complains that ‘My mouth doth water, and my breast doth swell, / My tongue doth itch, my thoughts in labour be’ (sonnet 37), or that his thoughts of Stella ‘Cannot be staid within my panting breast, / But they do swell and struggle forth of me’ (sonnet 50). It has been suggested that, in images such as these, Astrophil is articulating the Renaissance commonplace of the ‘parthenogenic womb’ in which male poets conventionally appropriated the female processes of parturition and generation for themselves, claiming not only a power and productivity of their own but one made superior by the comparison – their dazzling intellectual productions being seen as superior to women’s merely bodily issue, and the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the male mind (able to impregnate itself ) being elevated above the secondary or ancillary nature of the female body (unable to produce without being penetrated and inseminated first).39 On the other hand, although what Astrophil brings forth are indeed verbal and intellectual productions – the ‘fit words’ he labours to produce in sonnet 1, or the riddle about Stella’s identity (‘that Rich she is’) in sonnet 37, or the ‘words’ with which he would express her figure in sonnet 50 – nevertheless, these productions are hardly presented as the magisterial issue of the male pen (forceful, powerful, persuasive) but more as inadequate and ill-gotten scraps, as monstrous, aborted, or rejected births, as stillborn or worthy to die. The birth pangs of sonnet 1, for instance, leave Astrophil looking into his heart for words but they do not actually produce anything substantive as such (or, if the sonnet sequence as a whole might be considered what Astrophil gives birth to, then the question of whether it constitutes the words ‘fit’ for the purpose of winning Stella is highly doubtful). In sonnet 50, Astrophil’s inadequate attempts to figure Stella in writing are similarly weak, ill-proportioned, and doomed – ‘those poore babes their death in birth do find’; while, in a later sonnet, the only offspring to survive Astrophil’s labours are intangible and wordless breaths – ‘deere sighs . . . you with my breast I oft have nurst’ – for even his tears have become the victims of infanticide: ‘sorrow comes with such maine rage, that he / Kils his owne children, teares’ (sonnet 95). These could be passed off simply as expressions of the modesty topos – the standard device by means of which the male poet feigns imperfection in order to enhance the greater glory of his name and fame – were it not for the fact that Sidney seems curiously insistent (more so that most) on stressing the inadequacy of his poetic productions (the Arcadia, too, is presented as a ‘babe’ that its author would brutally cast out, an unwanted birth that ‘if it had not been in some way delivered, would have grown a monster’).40 In his various images of birthing in Astrophil and Stella, likewise, Sidney seems

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unusually keen to emphasize the physical process rather than the intellectual outcome, dwelling on the symptoms and sufferings of the pregnant or labouring female body with which he seems imaginatively to identify (itching, watering, swelling, panting) rather than on the poems that are, supposedly, the justificatory end of it all. As for putting himself in the ‘feminine’ position of the naughty child who receives chastisements and blows from a punitive, masculinized figure, then this could well be said to be Astrophil’s habitual pose, for, from the opening sonnet that sees him squirming in his seat and chewing his truant pen, right through to the sequence’s end, Astrophil’s whole relation to Stella and to the experience of love in general is figured in terms of the petulant schoolboy at his lesson or the idle student at his book – a figure in constant need of instruction and correction. Thus, ‘in Stella’s face I reed, / What Love and Beautie be, then all my deed / But Copying is, what in her Nature writes’ (sonnet 3), and, in Stella’s sight, he claims, ‘I a lesson new have speld’ (sonnet 16), even though he knows that he ‘My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toyes’ (sonnet 18) and shortly finds himself distractedly doodling: ‘My verie inke turnes straight to Stella’s name’ (sonnet 19). He is supposed to read ‘those letters faire of blisse, / Which in her face teach vertue’, but cannot learn this ‘lesson’ in her absence or ‘without booke’ (sonnet 56); and, when he does so, he facetiously mis-reads its content, abusing the rules of grammar that ‘children still reade’ (sonnet 63) in order to construe Stella’s double negative, ‘No, no’, as an affirmation of her supposedly reciprocated desire. Stella’s face is the ‘faire text’, the argument and content of whose ‘blushing notes’ and ‘eye’s-speech’ are to be translated and interpreted by her student, even though he remains fixed in his determination to read this lesson wrongly and to persist in his ‘errour’ (sonnet 67). Again, Stella is the ‘fairest booke of Nature’ so that whoever would learn how beauty and virtue can be combined should ‘reade in thee, / Stella, those faire lines, which true goodnesse show’, except that Astrophil does not do this, remaining preoccupied, as ever, with sexual passion, just as later he remains obsessed with Stella’s sexual parts in spite of the fact that her face is a ‘lecture [that] shewes what perfect beautie is’ (sonnet 77). Astrophil even goes so far as to re-appropriate the direction of her virtuous teaching by describing the kiss he snatches from her as the ‘schoolmaster of delight’ (sonnet 79): ‘you teach my mouth with one sweet kisse’ (sonnet 80), ‘Teaching dumbe lips a nobler exercise’ (sonnet 81). It is as Stella’s far-from-model student that Astrophil identifies with Cupid, who, ‘like a child that some faire booke doth find’, simply plays with the pages or looks at the pictures in ‘boyish kind’, instead of heeding ‘the

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fruit of writer’s mind’ (sonnet 11); while in another sonnet, Cupid is the ‘boy’, ‘Rogue’, and ‘poore wag, that now a scholler art / To such a schoolemistresse, whose lessons new / Thou needs must misse, and so thou needs must smart’ (sonnet 46). In another still, Cupid ‘a boy, and oft a wanton is, / School’d onely by his mother’s tender eye: / What wonder then if he is lesson misse, / When for so soft a rod deare play he trie?’ (sonnet 73). Cupid bears something of a dual aspect here, it has to be said, since – as well as potentially receiving blows – he also, of course, deals them out. In sonnet 17, for example, Cupid is punished by his mother for failing to move Mars with his wonted ‘pricking shot’, even though he refused to do so ‘for feare of Marse’s hate, / Who threatned stripes, if he his wrath did prove’. Caught between an aggressive god and a punitive mother, Cupid is here the smarting child – he ‘weeping sate’ – with whom Astrophil can identify, even though his own capacity to wound others in turn, and not least Astrophil himself, is still very much at issue (a point to which I shall return in more detail shortly). For the moment, however, when Astrophil invokes Cupid’s confraternity (in sonnet 65 he says that he is ‘somewhat kinne to thee’, and in sonnet 72 that ‘thou my old companion art’), if it is not as a fellow truant, then it is as the ideal accomplice (one, for example, who makes of Stella’s paleness ‘his paper perfit white / To write therein more fresh the story of delight’, sonnet 102), or even as his ideal teacher: the ‘Doctor Cupid ’ whose job it is to instruct Stella in Astrophil’s true meaning (sonnet 61) and to keep Astrophil attentive to the lessons of love: ‘“Scholler”, saith Love, “bend hitherward your wit”’ (sonnet 19); this ‘love doth hold my hand’, Astrophil comments, ‘and makes me write’ (sonnet 90). Together, all this has the effect of ensuring that Astrophil’s youthfulness and immaturity are never out of the picture, and of perpetuating this image of him as a backward and wayward child. From beginning to end Astrophil complains (although he has no one but himself to blame) of ‘My young mind marde’ (sonnet 21), ‘my young braine captiv’d’ (sonnet 23), and ‘my yong soule’ clipped by despair (sonnet 108). It is as such an errant pupil that Astrophil stands in line to receive the various punishments that are his due, these deriving in the main, of course, from Stella, who ‘throwes onely downe on me’ a whole armoury of missiles, including ‘Thundred disdaines and lightnings of disgrace’ (sonnet 60), ‘arrowes infinit’ (sonnet 17), ‘sweet cruell shot’ (sonnet 48), ‘brave gleames’ (sonnet 7), ‘blacke beames’ (sonnet 47), ‘beamie darts’ (sonnet 48), and ‘flamie glistring lights’ (sonnet 76), although her harshness can also take the form of a stony indifference and refusal to engage altogether, occupying, as she does in the opening sonnet, the infinitely

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distant position of the ‘deare She’. As the first sonnet also indicates, however, this Cruel Beloved of standard sonnet tradition is not the only figure who wields the rod for, from the beginning, she splits apart and multiplies into three, as Astrophil finds himself the victim not of Stella alone but also of Step-Dame Study, who offers him blows, and a Muse who harangues him and calls him ‘Foole’. The effect of differentiating the three in the opening sonnet, is to create the impression that Astrophil is subjected to a veritable hail of attacks and that he is answerable not to one but to a whole gallery of aggressive and dominating females. In each case, Astrophil stands in relation to these hard-hearted women as a naughty or ill-disciplined child toward an adult-, parent-, or teacher-figure. This scenario is one that repeats itself throughout the course of the sequence, moreover, where, in addition to Stella and her routine chastisements, Astrophil falls victim to other powerful females who variously reprimand, punish, deny, and disappoint him. A personification of Patience is invoked, for example, as a further schoolmistress figure who seeks to train Astrophil with her ‘large precepts’ and ‘lead’n counsels’ (sonnet 56). In sonnet 17 – where Astrophil identifies with the scolded Cupid – Venus joins company with the other harsh females by emerging as the cruel mother who punishes her frightened child for her own selfish ends (offended with him for failing to re-animate Mars’ fading love for her, ‘she in chafe him from her lap did shove, / Brake bow, brake shafts, while Cupid weeping sate’). In his identification with this Cupid-figure, Astrophil regularly presents himself as a child denied nourishment and shelter: thus Cupid suffers at the hands not only of Venus but also of Stella, another ‘bad mother’ who withholds ‘or food, or dwelling place’ (sonnet 46), just as (Astrophil’s identification with him still in place) he is the perpetually dissatisfied, ever-hungry infant: ‘“But ah”, Desire still cries, “give me some food”’ (sonnet 71). Stella’s absence is similarly figured as a cruel withdrawal of sustenance – of ‘food of my thoughts’ (sonnet 87) and ‘heav’ns food’ (sonnet 88) – leaving Astrophil’s ‘Orphan sence’ (sonnet 88) to make do with the wholly inadequate and watered-down substitute of mere memory. Toward the end of the sequence, furthermore, another female personification appears who ties these various associations together: ‘False flattering hope, that with so faire a face, / Bare me in hand, that in this Orphane place, / Stella . . . should appeare’ (sonnet 106). Here Hope is as un-maternal in her failure to satisfy Astrophil (he addresses her in the tones of a querulous child: ‘where is that dainty cheere / Thou toldst mine eyes should helpe their famisht case?’) as Stella is in her absence from him (Astrophil figures himself as a passive victim of the female power to disappoint). Soon Hope herself is absent too – ‘But thou art gone’ – the

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experience of deprivation overall being equivalent to the wound or ‘maim’ of an amputee. Between them, then, Stella, Hope, Patience, Venus, the Muse, and Step-Dame Study all combine to produce a figure that appears with striking regularity in Sidney’s writings – that of the distant, unapproachable, false, unkind, selfish, and tormenting mother/step-mother – a figure, I suggest, who has more in common with the dominatrix of masochistic fantasy than is likely to be accidental. Moreover, since this dominatrix classically veils the figure of the punishing father (in her ‘masculine’ attributes of rigour and severity, none too obscurely), then it is not so surprising that she should at times almost shade into the latter (if that Step-Dame is not quite a mother, for example, then she could perhaps be a type of father) or appear with the latter in tow (as Cupid is not only punished by Venus in sonnet 17 but is threatened by Mars as well). In this last example especially – where punishment seems to come from male and female parent-figures alike – the various levels of male masochistic fantasy-formation seem to be made particularly visible. The (classically conscious) fantasy of being beaten by the mother barely conceals the (classically unconscious) fantasy of being beaten by the father, and the latter therefore possibly brings still closer to the surface the underlying unconscious wish to be loved or ravished by him: a masochistic Cupid, that is, would ultimately desire Mars’ ‘stripes’. Indeed, it is noticeable how, in the course of Sidney’s sequence, Astrophil is subject not only to female forces but very frequently to male ones too, as if the loving/beating motherfigure who appears behind Stella, Venus, Hope, and the others also finds her counterpart in a loving/beating father-figure who appears not only in Mars but in numerous other manifestations as well. This is the point, perhaps, at which to return to Cupid’s ‘other’ aspect: his role not as a crying infant or baby boy but rather as an army captain or soldier-in-chief – what one critic calls Cupid ‘in full Ovidian guise, with his torches and arrows, his siege machinery, and his capacity to render the poet an elegiac servus amoris’ – for, as Amor who brandishes the weapons and inflicts the pains of love, Cupid could be seen to be an incarnation of the loving/beating father of masochistic fantasy par excellence.41 This is obviously not the hapless, helpless Cupid with whom Astrophil identifies, but rather the latter’s captain, sweet enemy, and ‘Lord’ (sonnet 50), the fully blown Cupido militans of Ovidian and Petrarchan tradition who requisitions Stella’s body as a collection of armaments or as a military magazine: Stella’s ‘eyes / Serve him with shot, her lips his heralds arre: / Her breasts his tents, legs his triumphall carre: / Her flesh his food, her skin his armour brave’ (sonnet 29). This is the figure who, with his ‘fine pointed dart’ perched on Stella’s face

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(sonnet 8) and his bow and arrows in her eyebrows and eyes (sonnet 17), first ‘gave the wound, which while I breathe will bleed’ and ‘full conquest got’ of Astrophil (sonnet 2), spending on him ‘all his quiver’ (sonnet 14); the figure who deals Astrophil his ‘death wound’ – ‘that murthring boy . . . / Who like a theefe, hid in darke bush doth ly, / Till bloudie bullet get him wrongfull pray’ – ambushing him and fatally piercing him with his ‘dart’ (sonnet 20). In one of perhaps the most explicitly sexualized if not masochistic variations of this topos, Astrophil fantasizes that Cupid rides him like a soldier rides his horse: here Astrophil is ‘a horse to Love’, the latter sharply reining him in and curbing him while at the same time ‘he spurres with sharpe desire my hart’, the overall experience of being ridden and penetrated in this manner being something Astrophil nonetheless finds quite delightful: ‘That in the Manage myselfe takes delight’ (sonnet 49). For all his status as primus inter pares among loving/beating father substitutes, however, Cupid is not the only male figure to probe or assault Astrophil in the course of the sequence. He is shadowed in the thinly veiled personification of despair, whose ‘fierce darts . . . at me doth throw’ (sonnet 39) and who ‘Clips’ the wings of Astrophil’s young soul (sonnet 108); and also by the judgemental figures who observe Astrophil from the surrounding world of the court – the ‘curious wits’ who look on him with prying eyes or the ‘harder Judges’ who criticize him (sonnet 23). In addition, Astrophil also has to contend with the (often well-meant) advice and cautions of his male acquaintances and friends – interventions that are invariably figured as invasive or penetrative, whether in the form of sharp interpretations (that ‘straight my hid meaning teare / From out my ribs’, sonnet 104), or words that corrode (‘right healthfull caustiks’ that ‘Dig deepe with learning’s spade’, sonnet 21), or criticisms that act as purgatives (‘your Rubarb words’, sonnet 14), the latter proving more penetrative in their power than either Cupid’s painful arrows or the vulture that daily tore out the liver of Prometheus. In this last case, indeed, as in the sonnet about Cupid riding Astrophil as his horse, there is at least the possibility or hint of a more graphic fantasy of male homosexual rape, since these purgative words, inserted by one male figure into another, leave the latter in a predictably excremental state: ‘with your Rubarb words yow must contend / To grieve me worse, in saying that Desire / Doth plunge my wel-form’d soule even in the mire / Of sinfull thoughts’. Equally predictably, it is in this mire that Astrophil opts to remain – ‘Then Love is sinne, and let me sinfull be’ (sonnet 14) – selecting (if one chooses to see it in this way) a characteristically ‘feminine’ position: passive, disembowelled, and prone to discharge.

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If it is ultimately the father who stands behind each of these different figures, moreover, then it might be interesting to ask in what way Astrophil relates to more obviously delineated father-figures such as they appear in the sequence, and there, too, some of the roles and positionings which are beginning to become familiar seem again to re-surface. The only direct reference to Sidney’s own father, for example, depicts Sir Henry Sidney as a disciplinarian rider of horses, his strict control of Ulster as Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Deputy of Ireland being characterized as ‘that same golden bit, / Wherewith my father once made it halfe tame’ (sonnet 30). ‘Poetic’ progenitors – the father-figures who stand at the head of Astrophil’s literary inheritance – also make an appearance, although at first glance it might seem as if Astrophil acts out what could be identified as a more ‘positive’ oedipal positioning in relation to them. In sonnet 15, for example, ‘old Parnassus’ and ‘long deceased’ Petrarch appear as defunct fathers whose tired poems Astrophil repudiates and triumphs over (not to mention those of his sibling rivals), apparently succeeding in his infantile aim to love the mother (Stella) and ‘to nurse at fullest breasts of Fame’. Elsewhere in the sequence, however, Astrophil’s repudiation of his literary forefathers – rejecting both the status of their poetry as models and the deeply entrenched, humanist pedagogic tradition whereby such models were held up as worthy exempla for admiration and humble imitation – situates him rather differently and shows signs of replicating the more ‘negative’ oedipal positioning that showed up in his relation to other male figures. In the first sonnet, for example, Astrophil presents himself (or, more properly, his ‘invention’) as ‘Nature’s child’, rejecting the work of ‘turning others’ leaves’ for the labour of giving birth to what lies inside his body: ‘Thus great with child to speake . . .’. In other words, Astrophil specifically abjures the ‘masculine’, humanist tradition of learning and imitation in favour of a mode of production and form of speech – direct and spontaneous emotional utterance – that are contrastingly coded as ‘feminine’, thereby reversing the normal Renaissance ordering of priorities and making a point of choosing a feminine identification over a male one. Just as Astrophil styles himself the bodily child of ‘Nature’ and not the adopted foster-child of an unrelated ‘step-dame Studie’, so he suggests that his own words, when they do come, will be his own ‘natural’ children (with the hint of illegitimacy that this implies) rather than the borrowed offspring of others, and that he therefore derives his poetic inheritance from the ‘maternal’ line, as it were (natural, artless, spontaneous), rather than from the ‘paternal’ one (studious, learned, meaningful). This is a stance he maintains consistently

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throughout the sequence, repeatedly rejecting the inherited iconography of Petrarchanism – ‘living deaths, deare wounds, faire stormes and freesing fires’ – for his own inimitable and (he claims) scandalously un-worked style: ‘I can speake what I feele’ (sonnet 6). In another sonnet, he similarly declines to follow in the footsteps of the acknowledged master of the lyric tradition – ‘Nor so ambitious am I, as to frame / A nest for my yong praise in Lawrell tree’ – since the traditionally male organs of poetic production, like the more normal processes of imitation and borrowing, once again leave him blocked: ‘For nothing from my wit or will doth flow’ (sonnet 90). Instead, he simply speaks of Stella’s beauty or calls incessantly on her name (sonnet 55), the ease and natural ‘flow’ with which these alternative utterances come forth being, not for the first time, coded as characteristically feminine: ‘How falles it then, that with so smooth an ease / My thoughts I speake, and what I speake doth flow / In verse, and that my verse best wits doth please? . . . My lips are sweet, inspired with Stella’s kisse’ (sonnet 74). Such effusions are presented as merely effortless discharge – quite different from the serious, weighty, and learned sententiae that were deemed to typify more masculine cultural production. The fact that this is largely a pose – that (as critics long have noted) Astrophil merely feigns this artlessness and spontaneity and that, for all his claims to the contrary, his poems remain heavily indebted to Petrarch and to the sonnet tradition in general – does not affect the argument in the least, nor alter the fact that, vis-`a-vis his poetic forefathers and the tradition of humanist literary poesis generally, Astrophil is adopting a feminine position. Quite the reverse: it is precisely the feigned and self-consciously ‘acted’ nature of Astrophil’s posture here that indicates that he is playing out in fantasy form a simulation of the negative Oedipus complex. The ‘unreality’ of the pose is what confirms rather than denies its fantasy status. Throughout Astrophil and Stella, then, Astrophil is consistently shown as occupying a ‘feminine’ position in which he labours to give birth, speaks without thinking, writes without working, behaves like a naughty child, and is chastised by an impressive range of male and female figures all of whom, however, are (with their variously forceful, wounding, or penetrating interventions) in one way or another implicitly masculinized, as a result of which the fantasy, ‘I am being beaten’ easily translates into the wish, ‘I am being copulated with’. To this extent, Astrophil could be seen to exemplify the position of the male masochist to the letter. It remains only to be asked whether he also conforms to that other feature of the ‘feminine’ position listed by Freud, namely the condition of ‘being castrated’, and, as

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before, the opening sonnet of the sequence seems once more to indicate an answer. For, if what Astrophil parades is not a serious, full, ‘manly’ self but rather a feminized one, then his choice of metre in the opening sonnet could be seen – in anticipating bathetic falls yet to come – to move in the same general direction. Written in alexandrines, it departs from the ten-syllable line that, by Sidney’s time, had become the accepted norm for the sonnet.42 On the face of it, Sidney’s metrical innovation opens the sequence with something of a fanfare, hexameter verse being the medium classically chosen, of course, for epic. Sidney’s choice of this stateliest of measures thus seems to promise great things to come, for, as Puttenham was to comment, alexandrines ‘be for graue and stately matters fitter than for any other ditty of pleasure’ (Sidney keeps to the grave tenor of the hexameter line, moreover, by punctuating each one with a caesura ‘iust in the middle’, as Puttenham would recommend).43 A heroic start – masculine, hard, and soldierly, as opposed to the merely frivolous ‘ditty’ – is what seems to be being announced here, rather as, in a later sonnet, Astrophil claims to temper his metre to horses’ feet ‘More oft then to a chamber melodie’ (sonnet 84), again rejecting the soft in favour of the hard. It was a typical Renaissance comparison. In his essay ‘On some verses of Virgil’, for example, Montaigne distinguishes the hardy style of the Roman epic from an enfeebled, unmanly style: ‘there is nothing forced, nothing wrested, nothing limping; all marcheth with like tenour . . . The whole composition or text is manly, they are not bebusied about Rhetorike flowers. This is not a soft quaint eloquence . . . it is sinnowie, materiall, and solid’.44 The deliberate choice of hexameters for the opening poem of Astrophil and Stella thus seems to propose – before the sequence has really got underway – that poetry is indeed, as the Apology had suggested, the favourite reading material of the warrior and a direct spur to heroic action. It is as if this extra foot – an extraneous appendage that hangs off the end of each line – masculinizes the poem, adding the finishing touch and supplementing the standard sonnet-form with an extra flourish which, although strictly surplus to requirement, gives the otherwise effete lyric form a bit of epic thrust. For – as is the way with fetish objects – the added foot could be seen to cover a gap or pre-empt any short-fall, giving us two masculine endings, in effect, for the price of one. (Sidney was, as it happens, the first to introduce into English the term ‘masculine’ in relation to rhyme ending in stressed syllables). On the other hand, if this extra foot appears, at first glance, to heroize our subject, it also remains, like any fetish, empty of content – a mirage or lure of imaginary completeness – for it adds nothing substantive to the poem and marks only its difference from the standard

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form. If fetishism contrives to abolish the scandal of sexual difference, then Sidney’s extra syllable merely confirms it, parodically both imitating the norm and doing something different from it. All those heroic expectations that were beginning to build up collapse rather suddenly, as Astrophil turns out to be not such an epic poet after all.45 Indeed, he emerges less a Virgil, marching with like tenor, than a stumbling Ovid, whose Amores begin with an almost identical false start. He was preparing to write an epic, Ovid declares at the opening of his poem, when Cupid intervened and pulled one of his (metrical) feet out from under him – ‘unum surripuisse pedem’ – as a result of which unforeseen intervention, the hexameter verse with which he had, optimistically, begun, became elegiac couplets instead. These lighter measures (in which the first, grand six-foot line is lamely followed by five-footer) being more suited to the lighter matter of love (‘numeris levioribus apta’), Ovid resigns himself to writing about that instead.46 In a similar way, it is explicitly metre that trips the poet up in the opening sonnet of Astrophil and Stella: ‘And others’ feete still seem’d but strangers in my way’. For, in the first quatrain, the rhetorical gradatio – what Puttenham was to call the ‘marching figure’ (p. 208) – breaks step, departing from the norm once again, this time by starting each line with trochaic substitution (from
, ‘running’, ‘tripping’). A jerky, awkward cadence is the result, a deviation upon which Puttenham, for one, would have had some rather stern words to say, making it clear from his own improvements on a line of Surrey’s that stress on the second syllable is, in alexandrines, the ideal. Affecting a suitably Oedipal limp, Astrophil thus embarks on his passion with a faltering step. Writing to Spenser of the experiments in quantitative verse in which he and Sidney had been intimately involved, Gabriel Harvey tells the following ‘pretty Fable’ about the trochee: A certaine lame man beyng invited to a solempne Nuptiall Feaste, made no more adoe, but sate me hym roundlye downe foremoste at the hyghest ende of the Table. The Master of the feast, suddainly spying his presumption, and hansomely remoouing him from thence, placed me this haulting Gentleman belowe at the nether end of the bourd.47

According to Harvey’s allegory, the limping trochee, ‘which standing vppon two syllables, the one long, the other short, (much like, of a like, his guestes feete) is alwayes thrust downe to the last place, in a true Hexameter’. The trochee is not so subordinated in the opening sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, however. On the contrary, here this ‘haulting Gentleman’ (who is conspicuously neither the bridegroom nor the master of the feast) begins

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at the beginning, in a gross perversion of the ‘true’ form. Astrophil sets out, that is, on the wrong foot – the ‘feminine foote’ as Samuel Daniel was to call it – with the result that, as he himself complains, his words ‘come halting forth’, punningly going nowhere as his text both stops (halts) and stumblingly starts (halts).48 Indeed, Astrophil’s failure to stride out in the proper manner positively impugns his masculinity, a mincing gait being the ambulatory equivalent of an effeminate writing style and sure sign of moral degeneracy: ‘Do you not see’, asked Seneca, ‘that if a man’s soul has become sluggish, his limbs drag and his feet move indolently? If it is womanish, that one can detect the effeminacy by his very gait?’49 In his unhappy state, Astrophil could be seen to be suffering from a wellknown condition, hopping, limping, or staggering being a classic symptom of the abject male. Petrarch epitomizes the gauche lover who, having fatally entered Love’s kingdom ‘left foot [il manco piedo]’ first, suffers all the usual consequences: ‘whence I have never had anything but sorrow and scorn’.50 For some sonneteers, wrong-footedness was so recognized a symptom of love that it could serve as a catch all excuse for any moral or, indeed, poetic imperfections. In his Passionate centurie of loue (1582), for example, Thomas Watson begs the ‘frendly Reader’ to overlook any faults in the text on the grounds that ‘it is nothing Praeter decorum for a maiemed man to halt in his pase, where his wound enforceth him, or for a Poete to falter in his Po¨eme, when his manner requireth it’.51 In Astrophil’s case, uncertainty about where (or whether) Astrophil is going – or whether he is going in the right direction – persists throughout the sonnet sequence, as images of stepping, walking, or getting anywhere on foot are repeatedly thwarted. In the opening gradatio of sonnet 1, for example, Astrophil does not step up, mounting the traditional ladder of love in order to achieve the divine rapture of Neo-platonic contemplation, but, rather (as many critics have noted), steps down, descending ultimately into the ‘hell’ (sonnets 2, 100) of erotic obsession and desire, thus replacing the right kind of ‘climax’ with the wrong one – indeed, for one critic, it is a central feature of Sidney’s various dissimulations that, in all his writings, he ‘steps down, not up’.52 If Astrophil does seem to make progress, then it is only to exemplify the proverb festina lente – ‘I willing run, yet while I run, repent’ and ‘in a ditch doth fall’ (sonnet 19) – his speedy wit not really going anywhere, since it is ‘quicke’ only in ‘vaine thoughts’ but is ‘in vertue lame’ (sonnet 21). More often than not, things that ought to move forward are held back or, punningly, ‘staid’. Astrophil later describes, for example, how he was forced by the Muses to restrain words that would otherwise go walkabout: ‘oft whole troupes of saddest words I staid, / Striving abroad a foraging to

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go’ (sonnet 55). Later still, agitated to the point of erection by the enticing sight of Stella, he is obliged ‘with short breath, long lookes, staid feet and walking hed’ to ‘Pray that my sunne go downe with meeker beames to bed’ (sonnet 76). Astrophil’s desire ‘still on the stilts of feare doth go’ (sonnet 66), while it is his ‘foule stumbling’ that causes Stella vexation (sonnet 93; Stella’s words and reasons, by contrast, are ‘firmly set on Vertue’s feet’, sonnet 68). In sonnet 58, the orator’s famed ability to direct his hearers ‘That no pace else their guided steps can find, / But as he them more short or slacke doth raine’ becomes for Astrophil a scene of self-entrapment as he grinds to a halt, the victim of his own ‘piercing phrases’. Elsewhere, steps are associated with something that is pointless, absent or lost: ‘Now even that footstep of lost libertie / Is gone’ (sonnet 2), ‘With how sad steps, oˆ Moone, thou climb’st the skies’ (sonnet 31), ‘Let me no steps but of lost labour trace’ (sonnet 64). Astrophil’s halting step, furthermore, links him by analogy to a whole mythic series that finds itself mobilized around the motif of lameness. In Ecstasies, Carlo Ginzburg exhaustively traces the ‘different phenomena linked by the real or symbolic reference to imbalance of gait: limping, dragging a wounded leg, having a vulnerable heel, walking with one foot unshod, stumbling, hopping on one foot’ – a series which extends from Oedipus through Philoctetes, Anchises, Achilles, Vulcan, Eurydice, and others right up to Cinderella in a mythic and folkloric network of vast historical and geographical range.53 Expanding on L´evi-Strauss’s analysis of mythic lameness as part of a larger strategy to negotiate between history and anthropology, diachronicity and apparently universal archetypes, Ginzburg relates the motif to initiatory rituals, initiation representing a symbolic death. The borderline state of the limping, maimed, left-footed, or semi-shod hero marks him out as a symbolic anomaly from homo sapiens, a species characterized as erect, symmetrical, and bipedal. For Ginzburg, ‘the trans-cultural diffusion of myths and rituals revolving around physiological asymmetry most probably sinks its psychological roots in this minimal, elementary perception that the human species has of itself – of its bodily image. Anything that modifies this image on a literary or metaphorical plane therefore seems particularly suited to express an experience that exceeds the limits of what is human: the journey into the realm of the dead, accomplished through ecstasy or initiation rituals’ (pp. 241–42). Astrophil’s inaugural limp invites us to situate him within this series of faltering heroes, and to see his position as being, from the very beginning, liminal and ambiguous, poised halfway between the human and the animal, the known and the unknown, the living and the dead.54 Moreover, Astrophil’s first step in the opening sonnet

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not only fails to lead anywhere: it also dissolves into pun, as Astrophil flees the blows of that harsh ‘step-dame’, Study. The step which might have seemed to lead, albeit limpingly, forward, indicates instead a sideways move, specifying rather the oblique relation between child and foster parent rather than the direct genealogical line between a mother and her natural child. Indeed, Step-Dame Study’s blows seem to have hit their mark. For, if Astrophil is already limping, then this fearsome female could be seen to approximate to those Amazons who, as Montaigne notes, were believed to maim the ‘armes and legges and other limmes’ of their male children in order both to subdue them and to keep them for sexual use.55 The lame man proverbially made the best lecher because, as Erasmus writes (citing Aristotle in his gloss on the adage), ‘less nutriment passes downwards owing to his defective lower limbs, and more makes for the parts above them and is turned into semen’.56 This ‘natural compensation’ may, like the fetishistic extra foot, serve to restore Astrophil’s phallic prowess, but the achievement is somewhat mitigated if he is symbolically mutilated in order to become the sex-slave of a libidinous, half-incestuous, masculinized mother surrogate. If Astrophil and Stella seems to begin with over-abundance, with syllables extra to requirement, then the extra foot adds nothing and only makes the lover flounder in an unconventional metre and in diversionary puns. From the outset, Astrophil is maimed and directionless, the opposite of the masterful, Protestant male or the Christian soldier who always obeys the injunction to ‘Turn not to the right hand nor to the left: [to] remove thy foot from evil’.57 Indeed, he is more like the Sidney who as a schoolboy suffered from recurring leg trouble, or, if he is a soldier, then he is one who has already been subjected to love’s war and has returned (in a strange anticipation of future events) with a broken leg.58 Stationary or stumbling, moving either sideways or backward, Astrophil does anything but move in the orderly, linear sequence of phallic progression, and appears, instead, as the abject male, the cursed subject, and the body that defies theorization: for, in Judith Butler’s formulation, ‘the body which fails to submit to the law or occupies that law in a mode contrary to its dictate . . . loses its sure footing – its cultural gravity – in the symbolic and reappears in its imaginary tenuousness, its fictional direction’. Such bodies stand as an affront to the dominant patriarchal ideology because they ‘contest the norms that govern the intelligibility of sex’.59 It is difficult, then, to avoid the conclusion that, in all sorts of ways and from the beginning to the end of Sidney’s sonnet sequence, Astrophil occupies a position that could be described as ‘feminine’, whether as a labouring woman in the travail of childbirth, as a naughty child subject to

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innumerable masculinized assaults, or as a split, divided, ‘castrated’ subject whose permanent state of lack and non-possession is figured, among other ways, as a bodily maim or a wound in the leg. As such, these various characteristics appear strikingly to correspond with the negative Oedipus complex of the would-be ‘boy’, in which a mother-identification prompts him to assume a ‘feminine’ position with regard to his father and to fantasize about taking her place in the latter’s sexual affections – a position heavily censored and disavowed by the patriarchal ideological regime, firstly, because it conflicts with the ‘normative’ model of masculinity in which qualities characterized as ‘paternal’, ‘manly’, and so forth, are passed on and perpetuated in society by means of the father-identification of the positive complex; and secondly (and more seriously), because it draws attention to the fundamental unsolvability of the positive complex’s contradictory demands (to love/not love the mother) and therefore severely compromises, if not cancels, the very possibility of producing ‘masculine’ male subjects at all. In playing out the various identifications, positionings, and liabilities of the negative complex, and in exhibiting his ‘feminization’ for all to see, Astrophil thus seems most closely to fit the profile of the male masochist, even if his identity as such is most immediately visible in those scenarios – or beating fantasies – which show him to be the recipient of explicitly penetrative attacks, whether these take the form of cutting looks or wounding words, of darts, arrows, spurs, bullets, rays, beams, or blows. This reading of the psychic structure of masochism is, admittedly, heavily indebted to Freud, and in the preceding discussion I have largely modelled my reading of Astrophil’s state and condition on Freud’s various theorizations of this perversion because the latter seemed to fit Sidney’s sequence so well – not only accommodating Astrophil’s suffering-loving role and relish for self-lacerating mortifications, but also helping to account for the, otherwise unaccountable, reluctance of previous critics even to address the subject.60 Nevertheless, Freud’s work on masochism (like much else) has, of course, been the subject of extensive critique and revision over the years and this is the point, therefore, at which subsequent developments and modifications of his model need to be addressed. One of the objections raised to Freud’s account (as, indeed, to virtually everything that he wrote) is that it all too readily speaks on behalf of the patriarchal ideological regime – in the first place, by (in its talk of the ‘father’ and ‘mother’) enshrining and naturalizing the gender binary, and, in the second, by (in its clinical framework of pathology, perversion, and ‘aberration’) prescribing and perpetuating highly culture-specific notions of what is judged to be the ‘norm’. According to this objection, that is, Freud’s work does its best to uphold

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the dominant fiction and to secure the status of the healthy, right-thinking, normal bourgeois subject – which was exactly the position that, whatever their conscious intentions or political affiliations, previous readers and critics of Astrophil and Stella were also found to occupy, and exactly, therefore, what the present study was seeking to avoid. I have endeavoured, in the preceding discussion, to minimize this risk by insisting where possible that ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are external attributes that are culturally coded as such (as is evident from their generally caricatured and stereotypical nature), and not qualities intrinsic to men and women; and, indeed, that the cultural production of such so-called ‘men and women’ is, in any case, a process fraught with inadequation, incompletion, clumsy approximation, and melancholy compromise. All the same, the possibility remains, first, that – if the ‘father’ is postulated as the figure that lies at the bottom of all masochistic fantasy (as if he stood ‘sodomitically’ behind the figure of the beating mother/dominatrix) – then those qualities subsequently coded as ‘masculine’ (force, rigour, severity, and so on) do indeed stand in danger of becoming naturalized as ‘paternal’ (‘why should the mother not wield such force?’ would, as we shall see, be the direction in which this argument would run); and second, that the binary structures upon which the dominant fiction depends – father/mother, male/female, masculine/feminine, healthy/sick, normal/perverse, legal/illegal, and so on – can, if one is not too careful, therefore re-assert themselves. Moves to revise Freud’s theory of masochism have, as a result, generally sought to neutralize these pernicious binaries at source – in a word, to radicalize it – and none has done this (or attempted to do so) more thoroughly than Gilles Deleuze. In Coldness and Cruelty – his study of the novels of Leopold von SacherMasoch, the writer who gave the pathology its name – Deleuze first signals his determination to deconstruct such binary structures by proposing a complete separation of masochism from sadism (which the clinical literature had treated as complementary from the outset), on the grounds that the two perversions evolve and operate quite differently. His specific target here is the dialectical thinking that cannot conceive of passivity except in relation to power and that automatically conceptualizes the suffering, prone, ‘feminized’ masochist as taking up position opposite the punishing, cruel, ‘masculinized’ sadist – a model that, in Deleuze’s view, is not only trite, convenient, predictable, boring, and not remotely pleasurable (least of all intellectually), but, more seriously, fails to do justice to the uniquely revolutionary nature of this perversion. ‘In place of a dialectic which all too readily perceives the link between opposites’, he writes, ‘we should aim for a critical and clinical appraisal able to reveal the truly differential

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mechanisms as well as the artistic originalities’.61 His strategy for over-going this dialectic is – in anticipation of his later work with F´elix Guattari – to move in the direction of de-oedipalizing masochism. The Freudian model had grounded the structure and behaviours of masochism in the crossidentifications and positionings of the negative Oedipus complex, thereby investing power in the figure of the beating father and, by implication in the patriarchal hegemony which that figure’s exercise of authority and administering of punishment could be seen to represent. Deleuze, by contrast, questions Freud’s basic assumption that, behind the beating woman of classic masochistic fantasy, it must be the figure of the father who is ‘really’ responsible for wielding the whip. ‘Who in reality is being beaten? Where is the father hidden?’, he asks, ‘Could it not be in the person who is being beaten? . . . Is it not precisely the father-image in him that is thus miniaturized, beaten, ridiculed and humiliated? What the subject atones for is his resemblance to the father and the father’s likeness in him: the formula of masochism is the humiliated father’ (p. 60). In a striking reversal of the Freudian schema, the father is now no longer the beater but the beaten – the ‘father’, that is to say, as he exists within the masochist, so that any remaining traces of ‘masculinity’ or vestiges of a father-identification in the latter are beaten out of existence, burned away, purged, and excised from him so as to make him a castrated, de-phallicized, ‘new’ man. The figure whose task it is to liquidate this ‘father’ and any shreds of him such as might still linger within the masochist’s psyche is the mother – the dominatrix herself and none other – and what she crushes out of existence with all her beating, whipping, spanking and so forth is not just the father but the entire father-function: the super-ego, Law, conscience, prohibition, castration-threat, penis/phallus equation, Non/Nom du P`ere, and so on – the whole char-`a-banc, in fact, upon which the patriarchal ideological regime, with its sexual difference, metaphysical binaries, and all the rest, rather precariously depends. ‘The father is excluded and completely nullified’ (p. 61), ‘the father is cancelled out’, ‘is abolished in advance – for all time’ (p. 66), and, as a result, ‘the masochist thus liberates himself in preparation for a rebirth in which the father will have no part’ (p. 66). In Freud’s schema, masochism itself could be seen as subverting the patriarchal order – with its ‘negative’ complex flouting the culturally promoted, ‘normal’ positionings of the positive one – but his theory of the perversion did the opposite, effectively restoring mastery to the dominant, phallic masterly male (and not least to the theorist, to the masterly writing subject himself ). Deleuze’s aim, by contrast, is to theorize masochism in such a way as to pre-empt the possibility of any such surreptitious return of the

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dominant fiction’s ostensibly rationalizing, sense-making binary structures: to evolve, that is, a way of formulating masochism that does justice to its truly radical potential. In his mind, masochism cannot surreptitiously prop up the dominant fiction for it seeks, rather, to obliterate and to annihilate that regime, radically contesting its structures and strictures so as to free the masochist forever from its tyrannical laws. This, moreover, explains Deleuze’s initial move of distinguishing masochism from sadism, for, by its very nature, sadism reduces every relation to a power relation and to that extent it remains predicated on the Master/Slave dialectic or the dominant/subordinate binary. To be sure, sadism subverts the law, turning it upside-down and promoting, in place of the Good, its perverse opposite – ‘the Idea of Evil, the supreme principle of wickedness’ (p. 87) – but, however exquisite its tortures or impressively orgiastic its debauch, sadism can never do more than parody the dominant order: even if directed toward utterly evil and ‘immoral’ ends, the dialectic between powerful and powerless remains securely in place. Masochism, however, relates to the law in a quite different way, not so much parodying as radicalizing and deconstructing the existing order – ‘carnivalizing’ it – for masochism is not the antithetical term within a dialectic any more than the sadist’s victim is a masochist (the sadist’s victim is a victim).62 Rather, masochism abolishes the dialectic and does away with its circular thinking for good. Masochism is not radical because it is ‘perverse’ in some particularly disagreeable way, but because it exposes the arbitrariness of such polarized terms and opts out of their prescriptions altogether. It is not outlawed so much as outside the law, less a peculiar condition, marginalized to the wilder regions and obscurer footnotes of psychoanalytic theory, than a means to de-nature the normalcy of a patriarchal order that relegated it there in the first place. For Deleuze, masochism reveals that the Law is not, as it was classically defined, dependent upon some prior and transcendental Good, but rather that what passes as ‘good’ is only a secondary effect of the Law, merely what is said to be good. The masochist effects this reversal in his behaviour, for he does not undergo punishment because he has transgressed: instead, he suffers punishment in order that he might do so (or, rather, he does what the Law calls ‘suffer’ but he does not suffer in the least, which is why, in defiance of ‘normal’ logic, he finds pleasure in pain and seeks it out, relishing, savouring, luxuriating, revelling, and delighting in it). In reversing the causal relation between crime and punishment, the masochist reveals the law to be arbitrary and wholly factitious, ‘self-grounded and valid solely by virtue of its own form’ (p. 82). In the case of the classic beating fantasy, for example, ‘far from punishing or preventing an erection,

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[the ritual whipping] provokes and ensures it: it is a demonstration of the law’s absurdity’, Deleuze writes. ‘The essence of masochistic humour lies in this, that the very law which forbids the satisfaction of a desire under threat of subsequent punishment is converted into one which demands the punishment first and then orders that the satisfaction of the desire should necessarily follow upon the punishment’ (pp. 88–89). Deleuze’s theory of masochism is useful to the present discussion in a number of ways. Parts of its revisionary formulation could readily be mapped onto themes and positionings in Astrophil and Stella that have already been discussed – Astrophil’s subjection to an impressive array of female beating figures, for example, or his status as ‘castrated’ subject – while other parts could as fruitfully be applied: Stella, for example, that ‘most faire, most cold’ of mistresses (sonnet 8), whose lips are the seat of ‘Cupid ’s cold fire’ (sonnet 80), could, for instance, be seen to embody the typical Deleuzean dame, ‘cold – maternal – severe’ (p. 51); or Astrophil, who has done his penance ahead of time and is therefore the bonniest, most carefree, most justified of sinners (‘Then Love is sinne’, he quips, ‘and let me sinfull be’, sonnet 14), could be seen to exemplify the typical Deleuzean masochist, that antinomian jester, ‘a humorist, a logician of consequences’ (p. 89). However, rather than proceeding to develop a Deleuzean ‘reading’ of Sidney’s sequence at this point, what follows will focus, instead, on the success or otherwise of Deleuze’s bid to move beyond Freud’s theorizing of masochism, for, in the long run, this will prove more useful to the present project of finding a way to do the same in Astrophil and Stella. It is important to register, therefore, that certain limitations – or, more accurately, liabilities – exist within Deleuze’s account and that, its revolutionary credentials notwithstanding, it (or parts of it, at any rate) can nevertheless lend themselves to certain re-grouping or containing strategies. In the first place, although Deleuze works to de-phallicize the masochistic subject (who is busy having his father-identification beaten out of him), it could be argued that the phallus is not eliminated from the scene but merely transferred onto the figure of the beating woman, who now takes to herself all the ‘phallic’ attributes of authority and power. This, at least, is how Kaja Silverman reads Deleuze, noting that, although he claims that masochism has nothing to do with the father, ‘he obviously knows full well that this is not the case’ (p. 211), since he manifestly continues to inhabit a world in which the phallus and power go hand in hand. For Silverman, Deleuze’s anti-oedipalizing gestures are thus destined to fall short of their revolutionary aim and to remain within the same ‘Oedipal universe’ (p. 212) of Freud’s original construction. She effectively suppresses one part of Deleuze’s thesis

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(his declared intention to move beyond ‘a dialectic which all too readily perceives the link between opposites’) in order to prioritize another (his ‘rephallicizing’ of the mother) partly because the latter gives her grounds for doing so and partly because this interpretation fits with her own dialectical argument that, for all its subversion of the dominant order, masochism finally remains embedded firmly within it. The revolutionary possibilities sketched out in Deleuze’s prospectus for masochism – not to mention her own – thus end up being domesticated and tamed, contained by the most patriarchal and paternalistic of structures: ‘masochism in all of its guises is as much a product of the existing symbolic order as a reaction against it. Although . . . it shows a marked preference for the negative over the positive Oedipus complex, it nevertheless situates desire and identification within the parameters of the family’ (p. 213).63 In the second place, it could also be argued that Deleuze’s express distrust of dialectical thinking – his prime motivation for separating masochism from sadism – is undermined by his indebtedness, in Coldness and Cruelty, to the work of Theodor Reik. Deleuze’s argument that masochism does not so much parody as radicalize the law, for example, refers to passages in Reik where the masochist is said to show, in his submission, an ‘invincible rebellion’ and to have ‘an inexhaustible capacity for taking a beating’ because he ‘knows unconsciously he is not licked’.64 Deleuze’s reliance on a theorist whose final formula for masochism is ‘Victory Through Defeat’, however, makes his own thesis vulnerable to being read as the same essentially recuperative narrative in which the masochist – ‘insolent in his obsequiousness, rebellious in his submission’, as Deleuze calls him (p. 89) – can be rehabilitated as a grand Rebel and restored to power as the exemplary revolutionary hero. Whatever Deleuze’s explicit resistance to a dialectic that sees passivity only in terms of power, his theory of masochism can nonetheless find itself being appropriated by critics of a Foucauldian persuasion and put to use to re-affirm the coupling of sadism and masochism and to invest the latter’s characteristic modes of submission and acquiescence with their own ‘transgressive force’. The ability of masochism to unbind such dialectical relations and to deconstruct their binary terms once again finds itself re-absorbed and contained, this time within the ‘field manoeuvres of power’.65 In the third place, for all Deleuze’s ambitions to move beyond the oedipal paradigm, there is a case for saying that his account of masochism remains no less rooted within the dynamics of the family than Freud’s. His suggestion, for example, that the beating woman of masochist fantasy is the ‘oral’ mother – to be distinguished from the ‘Oedipal’ mother (the latter ‘linked with the sadistic father as victim or as accomplice’, p. 55) – could be taken to imply

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that he is merely pushing the origins of the perversion back to an earlier, pre-oedipal, pre-genital period of development, the central situation that masochism re-activates being the dyadic relation between mother and child that precedes the intrusion of the father and the oedipal triangulations of the family romance. This is the inference that Gaylyn Studlar makes, for example, and that prompts her to forge an unlikely alliance between Deleuze and the theory of object relations: ‘because masochism develops from an oral stage, infantile fixation centred on the mother, the developmental dilemmas of symbiosis and separation are fundamental to its aetiology and psychodynamic’.66 Although she celebrates the power of masochism to radicalize the patriarchal order, Studlar nevertheless locates the source of masochistic fantasy in the concrete situation between mother and child and to that extent, like object relations theory generally, runs the risk of restoring the gender binary and of tying her argument firmly back to biology. Deleuze thus finds himself here in the (otherwise rather improbable) company of Margaret Mahler, Robert Stoller, Nancy Chodorow, and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, the radicalism of his thesis, while fully acknowledged, now strangely embedded within the conceptual framework of ego psychology. If Deleuze’s reformulation of masochism promised to deconstruct the ideological presuppositions implicit in the Freudian account, then parts of that reformulation – together with these other critical accounts that take them up and develop them – seem to return us, as if with uncanny exactitude, to the place where the readings of Sidney discussed earlier on also finished up: that is to say, with a normative status quo, with Foucauldian ‘circulations’ of power, and with the theory of object relations. The possibility of conceptualizing a state of genuine abjection, of a negativity not to be dialecticized away, a castration not to be disavowed, seems to be as remote as ever, as if this apparently inevitable return to a world of mastery, of subversive ‘force’, and of biologically bodied and gendered subjects were somehow a routine hazard in the theorization of both masochism and Astrophil and Stella, let alone the two together. As before, however, this very failure can in itself point the way forward, if not hold the key. For it is almost as if, in order to theorize masochism at all – to impose some kind of intelligible explanation or coherent rationale on the perversion, to account for its radically destabilizing tendencies even while celebrating them – critics and theorists, whatever their different intellectual persuasions or political affiliations, find it necessary to withdraw to a relatively stable position (or one that can, at least, be stabilized), from which they can observe and evaluate masochism’s spectacular destabilizations in relative safety and without too

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much risk to themselves. What this suggests, in turn, is that the disruptiveness of masochism threatens to disrupt the theory itself, and that there is therefore something about this perversion that defeats the latter’s object – something that is fundamentally resistant to or in excess of theorization. The gap or shortfall that exists between the revolutionary prospects that masochism holds out, on the one hand, and the struggle of various theorists to control and manage these, on the other, might give a very precise measure of the perversion’s disruptive potential. Moreover, this same gap – between the need to acknowledge masochism’s ‘perverse’ nature, on the one hand, and the need to name and contain that ‘perverseness’ within some kind of working definition (if only for the sake of theoretical consistency), on the other, is endemic to the history of its theorization. For the account of the various retrenchments recorded briefly above – in critics’ responses to Deleuze and Deleuze’s response to Freud – repeat incompatibilities and tensions that were already all too present in the latter. Freud insisted on his ‘oedipalized’ explanation of masochism, but he did this both because and in spite of the fact that the perversion ultimately evaded his control: the negative Oedipus complex, he complained in 1923, obscured an otherwise ‘clear view’ of the infantile identifications and made it ‘still more difficult to describe them intelligibly’; masochism still posed a theoretical ‘problem’ in 1924 and remained ‘mysterious’, ‘incomprehensible’, and ‘obscure’ despite his best investigative efforts; by 1937 masochism is on the list of things that stand in the way of the therapeutic process, one of the insurmountable obstacles to psychoanalysis itself.67 Freud’s periodic attempts to grapple with masochism and try to make sense of a phenomenon that maddeningly refused to be pinned down can be taken to represent not, or not only, his ‘intransigent’ loyalty to paternalistic explanation or the allegedly ‘conservative’ drift of his later years, but also masochism’s very effective – and ultimately successful – ability to resist theorization of any kind at all (Freud’s various attempts and failures more or less acknowledging as much). If Freud as the man of science often worked to repress or deny some of the more revolutionary discoveries that his own speculations turned up, then the impact of those same resistances or problematic elements on his own work – however ‘negative’ to the latter’s coherence and intelligibility – prove, as Freud’s best readers have long pointed out, the most fertile ground: for it is precisely at those points where the ‘psychoanalytic paradigm’ or the ‘canonical thesis’ or the ‘dominant dogma’ or the ‘phallic hypothesis’ shows signs of strain or breaks down that those unsolvabilities which genuinely disturb the symbolic and social order – without any recourse to rescue or recuperation – are ultimately made manifest.68

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For Leo Bersani, furthermore, it is Freud’s musings on masochism that provide a particularly striking example of the way ‘Freudian speculation moves toward a disruption of its own categories’, and they thus effect ‘a kind of geological shifting in the entire classificatory system of psychoanalysis’.69 It is for this reason that, like Jean Laplanche on whose work he draws, Bersani pays close attention to the textual aporias and theoretical collapses that are immanent in Freud’s account of masochism, finding in the ‘textual distress’ and ‘torment’ (p. 90) of the Freudian corpus an apt analogy for masochistic suffering itself – the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, for example, are described as ‘a text . . . tormented, so to speak, by knots of tautological and self-cancelling formulations’ (p. 40). The masochistic text, that is, is as contorted as the masochistic body. Bersani arrives at this analogy by re-visiting, like Laplanche, Freud’s account of sexual excitation – for, as Freud had puzzled (initially in the Three Essays and, later, in ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’), sexual excitement is a strangely paradoxical affair: on the one hand, it represents a state of tension which is, by definition, unpleasurable, since it urgently seeks to make some alteration to the present condition; on the other, it is undoubtedly experienced as pleasurable and means are generally found (in sexual ‘foreplay’, for example) to intensify and prolong it as long as possible. There would seem to be something unpleasurable, then, something not entirely linked to satisfaction, something even, Bersani speculates, ‘identical to a kind of pain’ (p. 34), that is somehow intrinsic to human sexuality. In the Three Essays, Freud had suggested that all intense affective processes, ‘even terrifying ones’, spill over into sexuality and that sexual excitement can be the result of any number of processes that occur in the organism once they reach a certain level of intensity, especially ‘any relatively powerful emotion, even though it is of a distressing nature’; while, returning to this discussion in ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, Freud adds that the experience of ‘pain and unpleasure’ would be bound to have the result of arousing sexual excitement, too.70 Sexual excitation would thus seem to derive in part from experiences that were neither sexual nor pleasurable in themselves but, in some cases, frightening, unpleasant, and painful. Laplanche and Bersani take Freud as implying here that such excitation occurs whenever the body’s ‘normal’ range of sensation is exceeded or breached – when the organism is flooded or overcome with stimuli that it cannot, for the time being, master or ‘bind’, stimuli that therefore introduce a large degree of disturbance and perturbation into its psychic organization. ‘Sexuality would be that which is intolerable to the structured self’ (p. 38), comments Bersani, and the polymorphously perverse nature of infantile sexuality (not yet subordinated to

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the genital ‘aim’) is an indication of the child’s situational susceptibility – even in the most ordinary of upbringings – to excessive external stimuli which it experiences as so many shocks, intrusions, traumas, and effractions, and as a result of which it is ‘shattered’ into sexuality. ‘Sexuality is a particularly human phenomenon’, Bersani goes on, ‘in the sense that its very genesis may depend on the d´ecalage, or gap, in human life between the quantities of stimuli to which we are exposed and the development of ego structures capable of resisting or, in Freudian terms, of binding those stimuli. The mystery of sexuality is that we seek not only to get rid of this shattering tension but also to repeat, even to increase it’ (p. 38). According to this line of thinking, masochism is not some peculiar aberration that manifests itself in the adult life of certain ‘perverse’ individuals, but is, rather, the origin of human sexuality itself and the model for all the latter’s myriad different manifestations. It is this same ‘gap’, moreover, that makes itself visible in the shortfall between theoretical attempts that do their best to get a handle on masochism and this perversion that routinely ‘shatters’ them, exceeding that theory’s limits and defying its most cherished of logical formulations. If sexuality is intolerable to the structured self, then masochism is intolerable to the structured text. From this one might deduce that the theoretical account best able to deal with masochism – and in closest sympathy with its subject matter – would be that which willingly abandoned itself to such ‘shattering’, which did not resist or deny masochism’s regular wreckage of its statements and propositions nor find the logical contradictions that resulted either embarrassing or frustrating, but, rather, ran to meet them, knowing that its hypotheses would be scotched if not demolished on every occasion. To theorize masochism in a way that finally did justice to its radical potential, might, then, require the theorist to radicalize his or her own procedures, to abjure the pressures of self-consistency, and to relinquish any claim to mastery: a model of criticism – or, rather, of ‘masocriticism’ – that has recently been sketched out by Paul Mann. ‘The very disciplines of scholarship, the operational order of definitions and categories, the architecture of citation and proof’, he writes, addressing his reader, ‘all of this is invoked as law, but invoked only so that I can be seen to have transgressed it, and not in any modernist romance of transgression, not as a glorious revolt against established order, not to exceed but to fall short, to fail, as all transgressions do, and to inspire your brilliant ridicule over my botched procedures and spotty logic, to turn your magnificent contempt against me’.71 His aim is to find a way round culture’s ‘extraordinary ability to recuperate opposition’, where even the wildest statements of the avant garde or most

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paradigm-breaking conceptions of post-modern art inevitably find themselves being re-absorbed and re-circulated within the ‘white economy’ of cultural production – ‘artworks for sale and journal articles for academic symposia’ (p. xi). How eschew this recuperative narrative if not by cultivating strategies of self-destruction and self-immolation? How say ‘no’ to power if not by declining, as a preliminary move, ‘the force of logic, persuasion, association, seduction, law, coercion, demand’ (p. 20)? What if all the paraphernalia of critical ‘mastery’ – ‘terminology, logic, methodological consistency, ideological propriety, the vetting of credentials, the registration of one’s proper name as trademark’ (p. 22) – were simply a means of submitting willingly to the superiority of a ‘master’ Author or text, not to mention to the withering judgements and brutal dismissals of peer review and critical exchange? How move beyond the various psychoanalytic models and theorize masochism in a way that does not contrive always to restore ‘power’, whether it be to the beating father, the rebel masochist, or the beating mother (Freud, Reik, and Deleuze are all mentioned here)? How, in fact, move beyond even Bersani who had suggested, in the final pages of The Freudian Body, that, if sexuality replicates the primary experiences of ‘shattering’, then art replicates that replication in a series of ‘ironic selfreflections’, and criticism does the same in turn, only this time with an ‘aggravated irony in the repetition’? ‘The irreducibly dysfunctional relation between pleasure and adaptation in human life’, Bersani had concluded, ‘is, paradoxically, “corrected” only by our ironic reflections of, and on, the dysfunctional itself. Only through this process of ironic reprise – productively mistaken replications of consciousness – is the violence of our masochistic sexuality modulated into a product, or rather process, of culture.’72 Mann takes issue with Bersani’s final move here as a last-minute reprieve, an unwarranted re-affirmation of critical mastery and power: ‘one gathers that for Bersani the notion of criticism as the most refined articulation of cultural masochism is good news’, he comments, because, ‘as usual, it puts the critic in a privileged position’ (p. 36). If he exercises such ‘irony’, that is, the critic will be able to rise to a position of heightened awareness from which he may look down and knowingly survey the terrain (an endpoint that may well seem familiar). For Mann, however, this move – which is tantamount to a recuperation of mastery at the eleventh hour – wipes out everything that had previously been said about the ability of masochism to ‘shatter’ such formulations, and, at a stroke, negates masochism’s negativity (‘corrects’ it was Bersani’s word) by converting it into something positive, into a steady stream of cultural production that includes not only literature, art, and criticism, but, as the supreme contribution, the critic’s own

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‘product’ too. To remain true to masochism’s negativity – which is what the pursuit of a thoroughly ‘masochistic’ criticism really amounts to – the ‘masocritic’ must in all fairness give up this kind of irony, or, alternatively, replace it with a kind of irony that does not deposit him in this position of heightened self-awareness. For ‘the pseudo-privileges of self-consciousness have no bearing here’, Mann insists: ‘masochism is precisely the point at which such privileges give themselves up. Awareness is no longer an issue, and all it discovers is that it never was. The critical point is that criticism will perpetuate this replicative process whether it is aware of it or not’ (p. 36). I emphasize the point because, although the connection remains implicit in Mann’s essay, it could be seen to link his suspicion that the ‘Hegelian order’ is incapable, finally, of acknowledging masochism’s true negativity (‘at one and the same time’, he writes, ‘masochism is the fulfilment, the parody, and the reversal of the master-slave dialectic’, p. 44) with the effort that other critics and philosophers have made to define a kind of alternative or ‘negative’ irony that similarly manages to evade the totalizing operations of dialectical thought. Must the ironic, ‘Socratic’ position of knowing that you know nothing, for example, in itself be a positive thing-to-know, or can it approximate to a more truly negative (one might say ‘masochistic’) position in which that ‘knowledge’, empty as it is, is in turn subjected to doubt, that doubt to further doubt, and so on ad infinitum? Must irony always stabilize into a ‘position’, in fact – even one that knows that it knows such a position to be impossible – or can it leave the ironist in a (masochistically experienced) state of permanent destabilization, of free fall, of hovering or floating, of ‘unrelieved vertige, dizziness to the point of madness’?73 In going beyond Bersani here, and in seeking to cultivate, in his own ‘masocriticism’, a kind of negative irony that oscillates endlessly between positions without ever arriving at the third point of dialectical ‘knowing’ or rest, Mann could be argued to come closest to those parts of Deleuze’s thesis which, when not recuperated or contained, did the most to project masochism’s radical potential, starting with the opening insight that, in order to theorize masochism, it is necessary to leave the dialectic behind. In one of the chapters where he discusses the difference between sadism and masochism, for example, Deleuze had distinguished the ‘irony’ of the former from the ‘humour’ of the latter – a distinction that, in the present context (and, again, drawing on the work of other critics and thinkers on the subject) might be taken to imply a difference between a dialectical irony that, in sadism, transcends the law, and a resolutely non-dialectical irony – here, for the sake of clarity, termed ‘humour’ – that, in masochism, deconstructs it. ‘What we call humour’, Deleuze had

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written, ‘ – in contradistinction to the upward movement of irony toward a transcendent higher principle – is a downward movement from the law to its consequences’ (p. 88).74 Sadism replaces the principle of a transcendental Good with the principle of a transcendental Evil – ‘its higher, impersonal model is rather to be found in the anarchic institutions of perpetual motion and permanent revolution’ (p. 87) – a position from which the law, here in grotesquely parodied form, may loftily be surveyed. Masochism, by contrast, punctiliously observes the law and scrupulously obeys it to the letter, but it does so in order that it might commit the sin that the law had set out to prohibit, thereby deconstructing the law and demonstrating its absurdity. Here ‘the law is no longer subverted by the upward movement of irony to a principle that overrides it, but by the downward movement of humour which seeks to reduce the law to its furthest consequences’ (p. 88). Deleuze does not sustain the radical possibilities briefly glimpsed here in this deconstructive ‘humour’, for, when he returns to the topic in a later chapter, the masochist’s ‘humour’ is said to be indistinguishable from his (Reik-inspired) ‘triumph’ and ‘liberation’ (p. 101). Nevertheless, it could be seen as providing a model for Mann’s ‘masocriticism’ which does everything it can to disclaim mastery of any kind and so to remain faithful to masochism’s negativity right to the end. ‘Masocriticism’ is not the mode of writing I have adopted in this book, but it is, I think, one that might be found in Sidney – who so often cultivates a writing self that is inadequate and immature, that perversely refuses to produce what his period or peers might have judged ‘serious’ literature, or that undercuts the otherwise weighty statements of his propositional prose – and that is why, at the risk of rather a long digression, I have traced the difficulties that inhere in theorizing masochism as far as this point. For this ‘downward’ turn that leaves the masochist (and, by extension, the ‘masocritic’) in a state of perpetual falling – the privileges of mastery or knowledge ever suspended, the satisfactions of closure ever deferred – might be seen to have affinities with Sidney’s characteristic mode of self-abasement, or with his tendency, as noted earlier on, to step ‘down, not up’.75 In the Apology for Poetry, for example – which might have some claim to be his own version of what ‘masocriticism’ might look like – Sidney famously and controversially introduces his closely argued thesis with an opening anecdote that threatens to undermine each of the propositions that follow. Those critics who wish to preserve the serious content of the Apology, and the value of its claims for poetry and art, tend to ignore or suppress the Pugliano story, or even, in one case, to recuperate its endorsement of horsemanship as ‘a potent symbol of aristocratic manhood’.76 Others see Pugliano’s praise of his own profession

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and of the creatures that are at its centre (praise so glowing, Sidney’s narrator confides, that ‘I think he would have persuaded me to have wished myself a horse’, p. 95) as straightforwardly ironic, as a counter-example that sets off the latter’s own vocation and apology all the better. Even those who place the self-love modelled by Pugliano – which the narrator proceeds directly to apply to himself – within the serio ludere tradition generally and with Erasmus’ Praise of Folly in particular (the latter being specifically alluded to here) tend, finally, to recuperate Sidney’s self-subverting gestures by emphasizing the seriousness, wittiness, and cleverness of this play. There is no reason, however, why the narrator of Sidney’s Apology should not be left thoroughly un-recuperated – no reason within the text itself why he should not wholly cancel his formulations nor have the plaudits of wit and wisdom withheld from him. For George Puttenham, defending poetry a few years later, the horseman who parades his knowledge proudly before others was indeed the crowning example of how not to defend one’s art. Modestly rounding off his own poor Arte, he ended with the plea that Elizabeth not think of him as another Aniceris, the prince’s coachman who had so impressed Plato’s academy with the discourse of his profession (‘how to lanche forth and stay, and chaunge pace, and turne and winde his Coche, this way and that way, vphill downe hill, and also in euen or rough ground’) as to receive from the philosopher the following deathless putdown: ‘verely in myne opinion this man should be vtterly vnfit for any seruice of greater importance then to driue a Coche’.77 In Sidney’s case, however, the horseman is not obviously a joke candidate against whom the narrator contrasts his own more serious self, but is presented, rather, as a ‘master’ (p. 95) in whose steps (like a peaceable beast) the latter follows – indeed, he is a figure, however foolish, with whom Sidney could be said closely to identify.78 Again, there is no reason why he should not remain in that lowly position, unless, perhaps, it is to rescue the dignity of the critical writing subject. Margaret Ferguson sees between Pugliano and Sidney’s narrator a dialectical master–servant relation in which the latter ultimately ‘masters’ his teacher (both by ridiculing his example and by extracting from it the good use to which self-love can be put) and, so armed, strives in turn to assert his ‘desire for mastery’ over the readers of his text.79 As she comes close to admitting at the end, however, the degree to which he could be said to succeed in this enterprise depends in large measure on the self-love of his readers themselves. Sidney’s text, she writes, ‘offers a model of that relation between text and reader which consists of a constant turning of master into servant and servant into master . . . [It] establishes and undermines rhetorical authority, its own and others’, as it explores the paradox that poetry ‘must be gently led, or rather

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it must lead’ (p. 162). It provides, in conclusion, ‘an unsettling model for the activity of the reader who is also a writer’ (p. 162) – that is to say, for the literary critic him- or herself. The critic who would ‘master’ his or her own readers (with, for example, a coherent reading of the Apology), in other words, is obliged to acknowledge that their authority for doing so – their ability to convince, persuade, and so forth – rests on a model of mastery that has been thoroughly destabilized in the process. To recoup Sidney or his narrator as ‘masterly’ – to raise him up from the lowly, foolish, servile, or bestial position in which he begins (and, since the Apology closes with self-love, ends) – has more to do with preserving the critic’s own investment in such a figure of authority than with anything else. Were they to be a ‘masocritic’, on the other hand, no such recuperation of the masterly writing subject would be necessary. Both the reader and the writer of the Apology would be able to tolerate – indeed, would relish – the state of infinite regress that irony’s (or, more accurately, ‘humour’s’) eternally self-cancelling operations placed them in. The bottoming out or evacuating of authority that would result would not be a fate to be avoided or ashamed of but a state to be sought out, savoured, and prolonged. The ‘shattering’ of affirmable propositions, after all, is what Sidney’s Apology patently works to do, even if acknowledging as much would, strictly speaking, require the ‘unsettling’ of any critic who said so. As has been noted on numerous occasions, the narrator’s insistence that the poet is a creator of fictions (this, rather than mere versifying, being what entitles him to the name) and that the latter ‘never affirmeth’ (p. 124) those fictions to be true, necessarily compromises the former’s statements, for the rules governing verification and falsifiability do not apply to fiction and, in its company, propositional prose is forced to lay down its arms, its assertions denied any grounding and now floated as mere play. ‘If it be, as I affirm’, the narrator wags, ‘that no learning is so good as that which teacheth and moveth to virtue, and that none can both teach or move thereto so much as Poetry’ – the argument of the Apology in a nutshell – ‘then is the conclusion manifest that ink and paper cannot be to a more profitable purpose employed’ (p. 123). ‘Much virtue in If’, the sagacious Touchstone might reply, as the narrator’s propositions thus effervesce and evaporate before our eyes, but the point is not to rescue those propositions – to recuperate their content and value by setting them back on serious ground.80 Rather, it is to acknowledge that, if the satisfactions of ‘mastery’ are to be forgone and a state of intellectual ‘vertige’ to be embraced in its stead, then there is no better way of doing so than by fictionalizing those statements from the outset. As Richard Rorty points out, theorizing this kind of negative

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irony or ‘humour’ in propositional prose is a contradiction in terms – a necessarily self-defeating exercise – and should one wish to do so, then, as some philosophers and writers have demonstrated, fiction or poetry would be a ‘safer medium’ for the purpose than what passes for theoretical prose.81 If the Pugliano anecdote throws all the statements that follow it into a state of free fall, then this need not be explained away or recuperated as a piece of ‘wit’, but could be seen, rather, as a deliberate move, a distinct choice, on the part of the reader or writer of the Apology alike. For the anecdote acts as a kind of frame – equivalent to the statement, ‘this is Thebes’ or ‘this is play’ – within which all that follows is understood to be fictive and imaginary.82 This play-space is what Sidney’s narrator calls the ‘golden’ world of poetry and what Harry Berger calls the ‘second world’ of fiction and art: ‘the playground, laboratory, theatre, or battlefield of the mind, a model or construct the mind creates, a time or place it clears in order to withdraw from the actual environment. It may be the world of play or poem or treatise’, he goes on, ‘the world inside a picture frame, the world of pastoral simplification, the controlled conditions of scientific experiment. Its essential quality is that it is an explicitly fictional, artificial, or hypothetical world’.83 Within that world, certainly, it is possible to behave with the utmost seriousness – to absorb all the Apology’s arguments about Plato and Aristotle, about mimesis, about the teaching and learning of virtue, even about the definitively poetic creation of just such a heterocosm – but this does not detract from the fact that, in marshalling all these arguments, the narrator has been proceeding like the self-loving horseman all along, thereby rendering every statement that he makes provisional and undermining the seriousness of his claims. It is not that play is serious (the point usually made if the weightiness of the Apology is to be salvaged) but, rather, that seriousness is play; and the writing subject who would forsake mastery and masochistically position himself as the foolish horseman instead – if not as the horse itself – would have it no other way. It is exactly this position that Astrophil occupies in Astrophil and Stella – that of the ‘Foole’ whom the Muse harangues in the opening sonnet (and who is little wiser by the end) and of the figure whose very first step in that opening gradatio leads him downward (as his subsequent steps invariably lead backward, sideways, or nowhere) – as if that lowly role and humiliating interpellation were not only his allotted position but his chosen state for the entire duration of the sequence (Astrophil is also addressed as ‘Foole’ by Morpheus in sonnet 32, and as ‘sir foole’ by Cupid in sonnet 53). Discussing ways in which masochism might best be theorized, therefore, brings us back, via a somewhat circuitous route, to the opening sonnet

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of Astrophil and Stella. For if the Apology introduces its argument with an exemplum of how not to argue, then Astrophil and Stella could equally be said to begin with an exemplum of how not to write poetry – a move that puts the status of that text no less effectively in doubt. Detailing the history of past words that were ‘sought’ but either rejected or not found, the opening sonnet exists in indeterminate time, an extended prolegomenon to the sonnet that has yet to be written and is endlessly deferred. What exactly is this poem that tells us that it is not – or not yet – a poem? Hovering at this critical juncture – suspended in historical time and caught in the interstices of the literary tradition (‘others’ leaves’, ‘inventions fine’) – Astrophil could be said to find himself in the same no-place (utopia) as the speaker of the Apology and other notorious spokespersons of paradoxical praise. Like that of the dedicated ironist or ‘humorist’, Astrophil’s ‘I’ floats uncertainly between its constructed future and its constructed past. Moreover, if Astrophil is not – or not yet – saying what he wants to say, nor even addressing the figure whom, ultimately, he wants to address (Stella is still being referred to in the third person here, as ‘the deare She’), then what is he doing? As has often been noted, Astrophil’s stressed declaration that he speaks ‘in truth’ trips up almost immediately on that perversely punning feint – ‘and faine in verse my love to show’ – introducing the inaugural poem not as the sincere expression of a ‘full’ authenticated self but rather the product of a split between the ‘I’ that loves and the ‘I’ that writes. The poem elaborates, in a roundabout way, the gap between the two. To say, as Astrophil effectively does, ‘what follows is not the sincere expression to which I aspire’ is tantamount to saying ‘this is falsehood’, thus putting him in good company with all the liars, Cretan or otherwise, who admit that they are lying. ‘I sought fits words to paint the blackest face of woe’, he writes, describing that past effort in a differentiated present with words that are, ambiguously, both fit and unfit; but that that ‘I’ – the first and only pronominal ‘I’ to appear in this opening sonnet – is as necessarily divided as the liar’s, rendering the truth-content of his statement as impossible to grasp.84 Re-working this sonnet in Jordan II, George Herbert would strive to put back the ‘sense’ that Astrophil has removed here, to restore the ‘full’, guaranteed meaning that constitutes the ground of all metaphysics: the divine Word.85 Yet his recuperating gesture is a mark of the absence that haunts Astrophil and Stella. Astrophil’s ‘I’ never stabilizes. Sonnet 34, for example, dramatizes its fissured status more starkly still: ‘Come let me write, “And to what end?”’. The two voices play off against one another as the pen hovers ironically over the page, and when a third voice intervenes – ‘Thus write I while I doubt to write, and wreake / My harmes on

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Ink’s poore losse’ – its ‘I’ can no more resolve the debate than a ‘higher’ truth or state of heightened consciousness can synthesize negative irony.86 Some critics view the entire tradition of courtly love as ‘ironic’ in the sense that its negative portrayal of human passion – all those sighs and tears – is supposed to point the reader in the poet’s intended direction, namely toward God and the realization that divine love and not mere eros is the proper goal of all human aspiration.87 To extract such a ‘moral’ from Astrophil and Stella, however, is just what Astrophil makes so difficult to do, for throughout the sequence he routinely rehearses all the moral arguments that there are to be made against love – its folly, immaturity, vanity, and so forth – only, just as routinely, to opt for that same folly, immaturity, and vanity whenever he can. In sonnet after sonnet, the volta is characteristically delayed to the final couplet, even to the final line or half-line, so as to make the collapse of whatever moralistic case Astrophil has been mounting against love for twelve, thirteen, or thirteen and a half lines all the more spectacular: ‘It is most true, that eyes are form’d to serve / The inward light . . . True, and yet true that I must Stella love’ (sonnet 5); ‘Vertue’s great beautie in that face I prove, / And find th’effect, for I do burne in love’ (sonnet 25); ‘Vertue awake, Beautie but beautie is . . . Unkind, I love you not: O me, that eye / Doth make my heart give to my tongue the lie’ (sonnet 47); ‘Let Vertue have that Stella’s selfe; yet thus, / That Vertue but that body graunt to us’ (sonnet 52); ‘As fast thy Vertue bends that love to good: / “But ah”, Desire still cries, “give me some food”’ (sonnet 71); ‘But thou Desire, because thou wouldst have all, / Now banisht art, but yet alas how shall?’ (sonnet 72). This movement back and forth is strictly repetitive, the two positions of virtue and desire playing off against one another without either being dialecticized to a ‘higher’ truth (a didactic conclusion) or resolved by closure (sexual conquest). By the last sonnet, Astrophil is no further ‘forward’ – either in learning his lesson or in winning Stella – than he was at the beginning and the masochistic paradox of pleasure in pain is as much in evidence as ever. Rather than reading Astrophil’s periodic collapses as intended to direct us toward a model of virtuous Protestant behaviour, however (a reading that I take to be unduly pious), one could, alternatively, read them as temporary punctuation points in which Astrophil briefly gathers himself – and all these right-thinking arguments – together for no other reason than to have them (and himself ) ‘shattered’ into masochistic bliss. Astrophil’s arguments no more stand up to scrutiny than his body and soul stand up to attack, and they are as liable to collapse and dismemberment as his physical frame. From the opening sonnet, Astrophil is presented as a shattered, anatomized creature who is commanded to peer into his own heart; and, as that organ

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remains pierced, probed, ransacked, rent, griped, spurred, and burned for the whole of the rest of the sequence, so his moral resolutions to get a grip on himself and to pull himself together are no less subject to being punctured or taken apart. Astrophil and Stella is the lengthy record of these disarticulations. If the Pugliano anecdote had jeopardized the ‘seriousness’ of the Apology – suspending all its arguments as exempla of self-love and of folly – then the opening sonnet of Astrophil and Stella, which presents us with the words of a liar and a fool, could be said to do exactly the same, and to usher us into the same unreal, fictive, and intrinsically ludic space in which serious propositions or moral lessons are permanently on hold. And this, I think, is the ultimate statement of masochism in Astrophil and Stella: a fundamentally intellectual masochism that is the model, in the final analysis, for all the physical assaults and bodily sufferings which, however chronic or acute, were only ever metaphors for a state of mind in which mastery has been given up for good, in which coherent arguments or moral ‘positions’ are held only to be ‘shattered’ into pieces, and in which non-resolution is traded for closure. As the Apology opts to remain within the play-world that both epitomizes and undermines its arguments about fiction and art, so Astrophil and Stella, too, withdraws into and remains for the duration within the same carefully constructed world in which everything is equally ‘poetic’ and unreal: a world that has much in common, in fact, with the typically contrived and artificial world of masochistic fantasy – with its ritualistic imaginings and theatricalized scripts, game-plans, and role-play – and that draws attention to its own constructedness no less repeatedly. This is perhaps what Nashe was referring to when he described Sidney’s sequence as a ‘Theater of pleasure’ – a specialized place in which cherished meanings and conclusions are left outside the door but where the experience of that loss is strangely pleasurable, pleasurable enough to urge Astrophil (and his readers should they so choose) to remain there. Astrophil and Stella has long been seen as a kind of game: Alistair Fowler noted some time ago that the numerology of the sequence alluded to the game of bowls played by the hundred and eight suitors in the Odyssey, fifty-four stones being set on either side of a central, ‘Penelope’ stone, ‘which he that hit was master of the game’, as Sir Thomas Browne put it in his commentary on Homer.88 That Sidney’s sequence falls short of the ‘completing’ hundred-and-ninth sonnet has been taken to indicate the censurably hopeless and unsuccessful nature of Astrophil’s courtship. Within the context of masochistic play, however, it could also be read in another way – as indicating, rather, the pointed renunciation of such mastery, the creation of an enclosed, fictional world

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in which such ‘mastery’ is not to be had, and the determination to remain within that world for as long as possible.89 Astrophil’s relation with Stella, then, and his playing of the ‘Penelope game’, might be seen to approximate more to the games or jokes by which the troubadours so often characterized their relationships with their mistresses – the jocz partitz or games of even odds that they had an uncertain chance of winning (the origin of our word ‘jeopardy’).90 Those are the best kind of games. Evenly balanced, they can go on forever, with any break in the play purely arbitrary and signifying no kind of conclusion. When it is no longer a question of winning or losing, there is no reason for the playing to end; and this may explain, perhaps, why closure is so often irrelevant in the literature of courtly love, why the courtship is indefinitely prolonged, its narrative aleatory, its outcome deferred, and its desire held up agonizingly, deliciously – such is the nature of absorbing play – for the game’s infinite dur´ee.

NOTES 1. Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 1, in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 2. From Nashe’s preface to the 1591 unauthorized edition of Astrophil and Stella, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), iii.329. 3. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), pp. 118, 114. 4. Amoretti, sonnet 54, in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989); ‘tragicommody’, Nashe, Astrophil, p. 329. 5. In A Poetical Rhapsody (1602), for example, Francis Davison defends lyric poetry on the grounds that love, being ‘virtuously intended and worthily placed’ is a ‘spur to all generous actions’, as many excellent writers have shown, ‘and specially the ever praise-worthy Sidney’, quoted in Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 125. 6. As Alan Hager notes, a ‘sexual “spot”’ has always blotted the otherwise idealized portrait of Sidney’s posthumous image, an ‘undertone of disapproval and uneasiness with the difficulty of holding Sidney up as a perfect exemplar of social virtue when he was apparently a man of considerable sexual appetite’, Dazzling Images: The Masks of Sir Philip Sidney (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1991), pp. 31, 30. Hints of this alternative image appear in John Aubrey’s suggestions that, for example, Sidney died less from the wound he heroically received in battle than from having sexual relations with his wife on his sick-bed (against all medical advice); or that he had an incestuous relationship with his sister, Mary; or that, in his good looks, he was ‘not

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masculine enough’ (see Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), pp. 280, 220, 278). The last suggestion also chimes in with what Katherine Duncan-Jones calls the ‘slightly odd remark’ made by Arthur Golding who apparently found it necessary to deny that Sidney had entered the battlefield ‘disguised in Ladies’ attire’, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), p. 38. 7. For Maria Teresa Micaela Prendergast, Astrophil is subversive insofar as he assumes the position (desiring, lustful, superficial, and so forth) traditionally coded as feminine thereby presenting a poetics that the critic describes as ‘perverse’, ‘The Unauthorized Orpheus of Astrophil and Stella’, SEL 35 (1995):19–34, esp. p. 29. 8. Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 35, Studlar’s italics. 9. James J. Scanlon, ‘Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella: “See what it is to Love” Sensually!’, SEL 16 (1976): 65–74, esp. p. 68. 10. ‘Negative example’: Scanlon, ‘Sidney’s Astrophil ’, p. 66; Thomas P. Roche, Jr., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS Press, 1989), pp. 195, 196, 197, 202; Margreta de Grazia, ‘Lost Potential in Grammar and Nature: Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella’, SEL 21 (1981): 21–35, esp. p. 35; and Daniel Traister, ‘Sidney’s Purposeful Humour: Astrophil and Stella 59 and 83’, ELH 49 (1982): 751–64, esp. pp. 751, 760; ‘object lesson’, Alan Sinfield in ‘Sidney and Astrophil’, SEL 20 (1980): 25–41, esp. p. 26; ‘exemplary tale’, Chauncey Wood, ‘“With Wit My Wit Is Marred”: Reason, Wit, and Wittiness in Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella’, SS 13 (1999): 245–61, esp. p. 253. 11. ‘Complete control’, Roche, Petrarch, p. 233; ‘mastery’, from David FarleyHills, ‘The “Argomento” of Bruno’s De Gli Eroici Furori and Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella’, MLR 87 (1992): 1–17, esp. p. 9. 12. Apology, p. 101. For Jan van Dorsten, ‘irony’ has become ‘the operative word’ for all those interested in the ‘essential ambiguities of Sidney’s writings’, cited in Charles S. Levy, ‘Sidneian Indirection: The Ethical Irony of Astrophil and Stella’, in Sir Philip Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture, ed. Gary F. Waller and Michael D. Moore (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 56– 66, esp. p. 58. In addition to Roche’s book (the most sustained account of Sidney’s irony in Astrophil and Stella), see also: Richard A. Lanham, ‘Astrophil and Stella: Pure and Impure Persuasion’, ELR 2 (1972): 100–115. In Post-Petrarchism: Original Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), Roland Greene argues that Sidney develops an ironic clash between Astrophil’s characterological role (as hero) and his attributes (as lover). 13. ‘manlie’ acts, from Angel Day, Upon the life and death of the most worthy, and thrise renowmed knight, Sir Phillip Sidney (1586), sig. Bv ; ‘manly wounds’ from Arthur Golding, trans. Philippe du Plessis Mornay, A woorke concerning the trewenesse of the Christian religion (1587), sig. *3v .

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14. Alan Sinfield, ‘The Cultural Politics of the Defence of Poetry’, in Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture, ed. Waller and Moore, pp. 124–43, esp. p. 124. 15. Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 9. 16. Roche, Petrarch, p. 211. 17. Stephen J. Greenblatt, ‘Sidney’s Arcadia and the Mixed Mode’, SP 70 (1973): 269–78. 18. Quotations, in order, from: Gary F. Waller, ‘The Rewriting of Petrarch: Sidney and the Languages of Sixteenth-Century Poetry’, in Sidney and the Interpretation of Renaissance Culture, ed. Waller and Moore, pp. 69–83, esp. p. 79; Lisa M. Klein, The Exemplary Sidney and the Elizabethan Sonneteer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), p. 24; Joseph Loewenstein, ‘Sidney’s Truant Pen’, MLQ 46 (1985): 128–42, esp. p. 132. 19. ‘Formidable, emasculating queen’, from Richard C. McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (Brighton: Harvester, 1979), p. x; ‘cargo of pain’ and ‘exacerbate’ from Christopher Martin, ‘Turning Others’ Leaves: Astrophil’s Untimely Defeat’, SS 10 (1992): 197–212, esp. pp. 198, 207; ‘delights in subjection’ from Paul Allen Miller, ‘Sidney, Petrarch, and Ovid, or Imitation as Subversion’, ELH 58 (1991): 499–522, esp. p. 516. 20. Waller, ‘Rewriting’, p. 72; Loewenstein, ‘Sidney’s Truant Pen’, p. 141. 21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 45. 22. On the inability of the Foucauldian model to theorize masochism except as a dialectical component of sadomasochism, see Suzanne Gearhart, ‘Foucault’s Response to Freud: Sado-masochism and the Aestheticization of Power’, St 29 (1995): 389–442. As a cautionary example of the way in which an explicitly Foucauldian approach can prove incapable of theorizing masochism in medieval and Renaissance texts of courtly love, see Carol Siegel, Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the Story of Love (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). Siegel is unable to see the abject male subject of this literary tradition as anything other than active, heroic, ennobled, and empowered. 23. See Maureen Quilligan, ‘Sidney and His Queen’, in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 171–96. For similar readings of this episode, see: Sally Minogue, ‘A Woman’s Touch: Astrophil, Stella, and “Queen Vertue’s Court”’, ELH 63 (1996): 555–70; and Elizabeth Mazzola, Favourite Sons: The Politics and Poetics of the Sidney Family (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Loewenstein is one of the few who does not so recuperate Sidney’s ‘ornate capitulation’ here, ‘Sidney’s Truant Pen’, p. 132. 24. ‘Virtual Sidney signature’, Quilligan, ‘Sidney and His Queen’, p. 177. 25. Hager, Dazzling Images, p. 80. 26. Waller, ‘Rewriting’, pp. 78, 79, 81. 27. Hager, Dazzling Images, p. 11; Greenblatt, ‘Sidney’s Arcadia’, p. 274.

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28. Michael R. G. Spiller, The Development of the Sonnet: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 108. 29. ‘Control and composure’, ‘assurance and awareness’ from McCoy, Rebellion, pp. 22, 109; ‘masculine’ and ‘socially recognized mastery’, from Quilligan, ‘Sidney and His Queen’, pp. 185, 188; ‘public mastery’, from Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Politics of Astrophil and Stella’, SEL 24 (1984): 53–68, esp. p. 54; ‘literary’ and ‘aesthetic mastery’ from Arthur F. Marotti, ‘“Love Is Not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order’, ELH 49 (1982): 396–428, esp. pp. 408, 413. 30. Gary F. Waller, The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert, and The Early Modern Construction of Gender (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993). 31. ‘Control and mastery’ from Gary F. Waller, ‘Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance Women’s Writing’, in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret Patterson Hannay (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1985), pp. 238–56, esp. p. 243; ‘long overdue’ from Waller, Sidney Family Romance, p. 145. 32. Waller, Sidney Family Romance, p. 157; Lanham, ‘Astrophil ’, p. 104; Roche, Petrarch, p. 195. 33. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 15. 34. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 94. 35. As Freud laments, these complicating factors make it ‘difficult to obtain a clear view of the facts in connection with the earliest object-choices and identifications, and still more difficult to describe them intelligibly’, The Ego and the Id (1923), SE, xix.33. 36. Ibid., p. 32. 37. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990); eadem, ‘Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification’, in Constructing Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 21–36; and eadem, Bodies That Matter; as well as Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). 38. Freud, ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, SE, xix.162. 39. Moira P. Baker, ‘“The Uncanny Stranger on Display”: The Female Body in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Love Poetry’, SAR 56 (1991): 7–25, esp. p. 8. 40. In ‘A Womb of His Own: Male Renaissance Poets in the Female Body’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 266–88, Katharine Eisaman Maus suggests that Sidney’s appropriation of the female generative powers does not indicate any sense of inadequacy but that he nonetheless scrambles the gender roles in such a way as to prevent any automatic or straightforward recuperation of male power. For the Arcadia as

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric an unwanted birth, see The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 3. Miller, ‘Sidney’, p. 508. The following section of this chapter represents an expanded version of my ‘Astrophil and the Manic Wit of the Abject Male’, SEL 41 (2001): 1–24. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 72. Montaigne, The Essayes of Michael, Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio, 3 vols. (London: Dent, 1910), iii.100–101. Maureen Quilligan discusses Sidney’s use of feminine rhyme in the poems of the Old Arcadia and concludes that he uses it to ‘articulate the patriarchal chaos at the heart of the plot’ as if ‘the proper prosody for political upset is feminine rhyming’, in ‘Feminine Endings: The Sexual Politics of Sidney’s and Spenser’s Rhyming’, in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 311–26, esp. pp. 313, 315. Quilligan does not, however, mention Astrophil and Stella. Ovid, Amores, I.i, lines 4 and 19; see also Ovid’s sexualized description of the elegiac couplet in line 27: ‘In six numbers let my work rise, and sink again in five [Sex mihi surgat opus numeris, in quinque residat]’; in Heroides and Amores, trans. Grant Showerman, revised G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2nd edn. 1977), pp. 318–32. The present discussion was inspired by Duncan Kennedy’s playful reading of Ovid in The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chapter 3. Letter to Spenser dated 23 October 1579, in Spenser: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), p. 640. Daniel, Poems and A Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), p. 150. The examples which Puttenham cites of trochee and iamb offer some suggestive word-associations: ‘for your Trocheus of a long and short ye haue these wordes maner, broken, taken, bodie, member . . . for your Iambus of a short and a long, ye haue these wordes restore, remorse, desire, endure’, Arte of English Poesie, p. 120. Seneca, Epistle cxiv, in Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard M. Gummere, 3 vols. (London: Heinemann, rev. edn. 1943), iii.301–303. Canzoniere 360, lines 9–13, in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976). See also the putative lameness of the pilgrim in Dante’s Divine Comedy: lameness in the left foot is analysed as a wound of concupiscence, incurred as a result of Original Sin, by John Freccero in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 29–55. Thomas Watson, Poems, ed. Edward Arber (London: J. and W. Rider, 1870), p. 21. Hager, Dazzling Images, p. 14.

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53. Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, ed. Gregory Elliott, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990), p. 240. 54. On the further punning possibilities of this step that is not a step, see Joel Fineman, ‘“The Pas de Calais”: Freud, the Transference and the Sense of Woman’s Humour’, in On Puns, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), pp. 100–114; and Jacques Derrida, The Post-Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Derrida plays on Freud’s ‘pas d’´ecriture’, ‘pas de marche’, and ‘pas de th`ese’ in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). What Derrida writes of Freud’s text, indeed, could equally be said of Sidney’s: ‘the very procedure of the text itself is diabolical. It mimes walking, does not cease walking without advancing, regularly sketching out one step more without gaining an inch of ground. A limping devil, like everything that transgresses the pleasure principle without ever permitting the conclusion of a last step’, Post-Card, p. 269. 55. Montaigne, ‘Of the Lame or Crippel’, in Essays, iii.287. 56. Erasmus, Adages II.ix.49, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, 86 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–93), xxxiv.109. 57. Proverbs, 4:27. 58. On Sidney’s boyhood leg trouble – the result of too much riding – see DuncanJones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet, p. 29, and on the fatal ‘broken thigh’ incurred on the battlefield at Zutphen, see ibid., chapter 12. Sidney would have been familiar with the image of the limping soldier from childhood since his uncle, Ambrose Dudley, the future Earl of Warwick, received a legwound at Le Havre in 1563, when Sidney was seven years old, from which he never fully recovered. Sidney seems to have been strangely prepared for his untimely fate, having previously composed a song entitled ‘La cuisse rompue’ (the broken thigh) which must have come in handy on his deathbed. See Greville’s (somewhat solemn) account of this scene, The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 82. Hager, by contrast, sees this as an example of Sidney’s ‘special kind of humour’, Dazzling Images, p. 28. 59. Bodies That Matter, p. 139. 60. In addition to ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ and ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, already footnoted – Freud’s most extensive theorizations of the topic – my account has also drawn on the following: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905, though subjected to much revision in later editions), in particular the opening chapter on ‘The Sexual Aberrations’; ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’ (1914); Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915); The Ego and The Id (1923); and ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’ (1924). 61. Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 14. 62. On the distinction between parody and the carnivalesque, see Julia Kristeva: ‘the word “carnivalesque” lends itself to an ambiguity one must avoid. In contemporary society, it generally connotes parody, hence a strengthening of

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63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric the law . . . The laughter of the carnival is not simply parodic; it is no more comic than tragic; it is both at once, one might say that it is serious. This is the only way that it can avoid becoming either the scene of law or the scene of its parody, in order to become the scene of its other’, from Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 80. Reiterating her opening proposition that ‘perversion always contains the trace of Oedipus within it – it is always organized to some degree by what it subverts’, p. 186. Theodor Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, trans. Margaret H. Beigel and Gertrud M. Kurth (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1941), pp. 145, 163; the following quotation p. 429 (Reik’s italics). See Peter Cosgrove, ‘Edmund Burke, Gilles Deleuze, and the Subversive Masochism of the Image’, ELH 66 (1999): 405–37, esp. pp. 429, 434. For a similarly ‘dialectical’ reading of what could be argued to be a quintessentially ‘masochistic’ text – Michel Leiris’ Manhood – see Candace D. Lang’s ‘Ecco Homo’, MLN 105 (1990): 690–706. Carol Siegel develops a dialectical, Foucauldian reading of the perversion in Male Masochism, although she does concede that, in their later works, Deleuze and Guattari model the perversion as ‘a resistance structured by official power but in deconstructive excess to it’, their vision allowing us to see ‘both the ways definitions of masochism serve conservative social interests and the ways its actual expression can disrupt them’, p. 19. Studlar, Realm of Pleasure, p. 37. See The Ego and the Id (1923), p. 33; ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924), pp. 159, 161; and ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ (1937), SE, xxiii. ‘Psychoanalytic paradigm’, from Silverman, Male Subjectivity, p. 203; ‘canonical thesis’ and ‘dominant dogma’, from Jean Laplanche, ‘Masochism and the General Theory of Seduction’, trans. Luke Thurston, in Essays on Otherness, ed. John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 197–213, esp. p. 204; ‘phallic hypothesis’ from Jacques Andr´e, ‘Feminine Sexuality: A Return to Sources’, trans. Julia Borossa, in Jean Laplanche and the Theory of Seduction, New Formations 48 (2002–3): 77–112, esp. p. 101. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 89. Freud, Three Essays, pp. 203, 233; idem, ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, p. 160. Paul Mann, Masocriticism (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. 25. Bersani, Freudian Body, pp. 111, 115. Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’, in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 173–209, esp. p. 198. For a dedicated attempt to theorize a kind of negative irony not contained by the Hegelian dialectic, see Søren Kierkegaard,

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74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

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The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). Kierkegaard also sees the ironist as in a state of perpetual hovering or floating and thus opts in the end not for the ‘heavy’, moralized Socrates who emerges from Plato’s dialogues but rather for the ‘light’, airy Socrates whom Aristophanes had wittily suspended from mid-air in his Clouds. On the distinction between dialectical irony and deconstructive humour, see Candace D. Lang, Irony/Humour: Critical Paradigms (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). Hager, Dazzling Images, p. 14. Edward Berry, ‘The Poet as Warrior in Sidney’s Defence of Poetry’, SEL 29 (1989): 21–34, esp. p. 24. Puttenham, Arte, p. 308. On the name-play that associates Philip Sidney with this ‘lover of horses’, see Hager, Dazzling Images, pp. 111, 113; and A. C. Hamilton, Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of His Life and Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 109. Margaret W. Ferguson in Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defences of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 153, 155. As You Like It, V.iv.103, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2nd edn, 1997). Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 107. For ‘Thebes’, see Apology, p. 124; for ‘this is play’, see Gregory Bateson, Steps To An Ecology of Mind (London: Intertext Books, 1972), p. 182. Harry Berger, Jr., Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance FictionMaking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 11–12. As Rosalie Colie puts it, the liar’s paradox presents the problem inherent in all self-referential operations: ‘it must be a Cretan who says that all Cretans are liars. If someone else were to formulate the statement, the paradox would dissolve into a simple affirmation, the truth or falsity of which could be more or less accurately tested’, Paradoxica Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 6–7. Lacan also discusses the split in the ‘I’ which the liar’s paradox effects: ‘the I of the enunciation [I am lying] is not the same as the I of the statement [I – am lying], that is to say, the shifter which, in the statement, designates him’, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 139. As Malcolm Bowie elaborates, ‘“I am lying” irreparably divides the subject who enunciates from the subject who is enunciated, as did Descartes’s “I think”’, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991), p. 114. ‘When first my lines of heav’nly joyes made mention, / Such was their lustre, they did so excell, / That I sought out quaint words, and trim invention . . . As flames do work and winde, when they ascend, / So did I weave my self into the sense. / But while I bustled, I might heare a friend / Whisper, How wide

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88. 89.

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Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric is all this long pretence! / There is in love a sweetnesse readie penn’d: / Copie out onely that, and save expense’ (lines 1–3, 13–18), in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1974), pp. 116–17, Herbert’s italics. For an ingenious attempt to articulate ‘the gaps and the whites’ – the metaphysical absence that haunts Astrophil and Stella – see Roger Kuin, Chamber Music: Elizabethan Sonnet-sequences and the Pleasure of Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 197–201. Elaborating a Barthesian ‘pleasure of the text’, Kuin’s book could well be seen to be a type of ‘masocriticism’. Thomas Roche sees the whole Petrarchan tradition as ‘ironic’ in this way in his Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences. See also D. H. Green, Irony in the Medieval Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Simon Gaunt, Troubadours and Irony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Alistair Fowler, Triumphal Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). ˇ zek writes of ‘We are dealing with a strict fictional formula’, Slavoj Ziˇ masochism, ‘with a social game of “as if ”’; ‘masochism confronts us with the paradox of the symbolic order qua the order of “fictions”: there is more truth in the mask we wear, in the game we play, in the “fiction” we obey and follow, than in what is concealed beneath the mask. The very kernel of the masochist’s being is externalized in the staged game towards which he maintains his constant distance’, in ‘Courtly Love, or Woman as Thing’, repr. ˇ zek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: in The Ziˇ Blackwell, 1999), pp. 148–73, esp. pp. 152, 153–54. This is emphatically not the Foucauldian ‘game of pleasures and powers’ which is all about outwitting your opponent and winning the game. This is a game, by contrast, in which the goals, as it were, have been removed, and which therefore relinquishes ‘mastery’. It is intriguing to note that, in the Elizabethan game of bowls, the ball to be thrown was known as a ‘jack’ or ‘master’ and the ball to be hit as the ‘mistress’, and that the OED cites Sidney as the first to use the latter word in this sense, albeit metaphorically: ‘Zelmane, using her own bias to bowl near the mistress of her own thoughts’, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 388. As I shall discuss in the following chapter, however, Zelmane no more hits her target in the New Arcadia than Astrophil does in Astrophil and Stella: in both cases, mastery of that ‘mistress’ is ever deferred. See also the comparison of love to a ball game in Book II of the New Arcadia, to be discussed in chapter 5 below.

chap t e r 3

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In Book II of the New Arcadia – at one of the relatively rare points in the narrative where the story surfaces into the present moment amid the extended circumlocutions, inset narrations, and tales within tales that largely make up the bulk of Book II – Zelmane (whose own body remains decorously veiled) sings a lengthy blazon on the beautiful Philoclea (who, having recently disrobed, is, together with her sister, Pamela, bathing naked in the river Ladon), giving us what is, on the face of it, a highly erotic scene between two women, one of whom is ecstatically praising the body of the other. This is not to deny that Zelmane is, of course, a highly ambiguous figure. At one level, what lies beneath her costume is none other than the all too male Pyrocles who has donned that disguise with the sole aim of gaining access to just such scenes as this. On the other hand, Sidney’s text goes out of its way to ambiguate such a figure and to problematize – or at the very least to qualify – any claim it may have to a straightforwardly heroic masculinity. The first time Pyrocles is presented to us – long before he has gone anywhere near an Amazon disguise – he is introduced as ‘a young man (at least, if he were a man)’, and, shortly after (under the name of ‘Daiphantus’), he is described as a figure who had ‘no hair of his face to witness him a man’ who had yet performed deeds ‘beyond the degree of a man’.1 The Amazon costume that, as Zelmane, he wears – at once masculine and feminine, concealing and revealing – seems no less designedly ambiguous than his personalized emblem depicting the distaff-wielding Hercules and the teasingly double motto, ‘Never more valiant’ (NA 69).2 Nevertheless, the feminine pronoun that Sidney’s narrator has insisted on using of Zelmane since the moment of her metamorphosis, not to mention the consciousness of the other characters present at the bathing scene (Miso, Mopsa, Pamela, and, shortly, Amphialus), all of whom believe her to be a woman, suggest that this highly erotic encounter is meant to be read as a scene between two women, and that it stages what one critic (alert to the possible anachronism of using such modern terminology but not wanting 89

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to beat about the bush) terms ‘lesbian desire’.3 The same could be said of any number of encounters between Zelmane and Philoclea – which, in the course of the New Arcadia, involve a great deal of touching and kissing – and not least Philoclea’s own agonized musings on the ‘impossible’ love that she feels stirring in her breast for her female friend. Nonetheless, ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’ singles itself out for particular attention because it – and the blazon form to which it belongs – privileges a number of themes which have far-reaching implications for the unfolding of a specifically male subjectivity: themes that include a certain attitude toward corporeality and the integrity (or otherwise) of the body, toward visibility and the power (or otherwise) of the gaze, and, concomitantly, toward the sexual and textual mastery which that gaze both performs and undermines. The iconic figure that stands behind every blasonneur and whose mythic story shadows every scene of voyeuristic looking and bodily partition (be it in a formal blazon or any one of the numerous applications to which that basic scenario could lend itself ) is that of Actaeon – the hunter whose stolen glimpse of the naked, bathing Diana results in his own punitive dismemberment as he finds himself transformed into the object of his own quarry and torn apart by his hounds – a story to which Sidney, by situating his blazon at a bathing scene and in ‘so privileged a place, upon pain of death, as nobody durst presume to come thither’ (NA 188–89), explicitly alludes. Insofar as ‘What tongue’ has elicited a critical response, Sidney’s poem has generally been found to be conventional – indeed, to be an ‘intensely conventional’ example of a genre that was already ‘one of the most conventional of conventions’ – and it was certainly a form to which Sidney had already turned his hand on numerous occasions – whether in the formalized context of Astrophil and Stella sonnets 9, 13, 32, 43, 52, 77, or song 1, or in the more casual, passing descriptions of Pamela in the Old Arcadia or of Urania, Parthenia, or Erona in the New – which implies that the enumeration of a beautiful woman’s hair, eyes, lips, breasts, hands, and so forth was, for him, simply the accepted vernacular of lyric and romance appreciation.4 Nevertheless, however conventional ‘What tongue’ may, in its purely formal aspects, be, Sidney’s ‘lesbianizing’ of the poem in the New Arcadia – which his insertion of the blazon into the bathing scene effectively amounts to – obviously poses a question. Blazons in which a man praises another man are, Jonathan Sawday notes, very rare (the obvious though highly problematic exception, to which we shall return, being Shakespeare’s Young Man sonnets, and even there the specific ‘blazon . . . Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow’ is explicitly rejected as inadequate and ‘antique’), and occasions on

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which a woman blazons a man (as, for example, in Mary Wroth’s Urania) ‘rarer still’; he does not even mention the possibility of a woman blazoning another woman.5 The closest analogue to Sidney’s scene, perhaps, might be the encounter between Viola and Olivia in Twelfth Night where the former, disguised as Cesario and acting on Orsino’s behalf, praises Olivia’s ‘red and white’ beauty only to have her ‘blazon’ ironically returned to her in parodic form: Olivia: O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted; I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labell’d to my will; as, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth. Were you sent hither to praise me? (I.v.239, 244–49)

‘This formal appropriation of a male genre’, remarks Sawday, ‘a blazoning competition which doesn’t quite take place between two women characters, serves to underlie the complex erotic negotiations of “mastery” and “submission” which the play seems intent on exploring’ (p. 202): a comment that could be applied, in its entirety, to the New Arcadia, although with the caveat that an important difference between the two scenes is duly registered. For, even if only at the purely enunciative level of Cesario’s words to Olivia, Shakespeare’s blazon nonetheless maintains the orthodox heterosexual form, however facetious the fiction and however transparent the fact that it is ‘really’ a woman who is praising another woman, and beneath that, of course, a boy-actor another boy. If, in Shakespeare’s scene, the orthodox masks the ‘perverse’, however, then in Sidney’s scene it is the other way round, for there it is ostensibly a woman who praises the body of another woman, and it is necessary to mine or excavate that narrative surface if anything resembling an orthodox scenario is to be restored, Zelmane’s ‘real’ identity as Pyrocles serving as the corrective (although, as noted above, any such restoration remains highly problematic and no less ambiguous, ultimately, than the multiple genderings that theatrical cross-dressing also allowed for). It is not that Shakespeare’s scene is any the less parodic than Sidney’s, but rather that Sidney’s scene makes a point of parading perversity on the surface: a surface that the scene’s physical situation (with its clothed and unclothed bodies, and the fetishistic attention it pays to fabric and to skin) and its textual location (emerging into the narrative present and into direct speech amid the composite layerings of inset narrative and reported speech that surround it) have already amply overdetermined. If one feature could be said to characterize the blazon form in general then it is perhaps its ambivalence.6 With its roots going back to medieval heraldry, on the one hand, and to the cries of street-hawkers on the

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other – both seeking to publish the qualities of what they represent, be it a family, a name, a property, or their own or their rivals’ wares – the blazon was, from the outset, simultaneously courtly and popular, visual and verbal, celebratory and vituperative. Although the use of the form to denigrate the ugly or disgusting aspects of the object described was later to be codified as the contreblason (Sidney’s ‘What length of verse can serve brave Mopsa’s good to show’, OA 30, NA 18, being one example), the blazon itself was, from the beginning, as capable of being turned to negative as to positive account (as Sidney, it appears, was well aware, repeating in the fifth song of Astrophil and Stella certain images – indeed, whole phrases virtually verbatim – from ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’ in order to reposition those former praises in a vitriolic attack on the poet’s mistress, now decried as a murderer, witch, devil, and so forth: ‘That speech falles now to blame, which did thy honour raise, / The same key op’n can, which can locke up a treasure’).7 For Mikhail Bakhtin, the blazon was ‘rooted in popular speech’ and, as such, it represented a carnivalesque disruption of the classic canon and of the ‘official’ ideology of the ruling elite – its potential for subversion was implicit in its very form – and, although it is hard to deny that Sidney’s Arcadia is anything other than courtly, it is perhaps suggestive to think of the blazon (along with the text’s other, equally ‘novelistic’ aspects) as serving in some way to ambiguate the characters’ aristocratic credentials and to cast doubt, indeed, over the text’s claims to high seriousness and epic closure.8 The duality which the blazon stages most insistently, however – and which has perhaps the greatest bearing on its relation to a specifically male subjectivity – is what Nancy Vickers, one of the most influential historians of the genre, has called a ‘dialectic between the scattered and the gathered, the integrated and the disintegrated’; and one place where this dialectic was played out most visibly was in the extraordinary specialization of the form that flourished as a poetic craze in France in the 1530s and that remained popular and highly fashionable there for a further three or more decades – the final flowering of an already tired tradition, now at its most selfconscious and, possibly, baroque – namely, the Marotic blazon, a vogue to which (as we shall see) the form if not content of Sidney’s poem explicitly alludes.9 Composing his Blason du beau t´etin in 1535, and following it up with a Blason du laid t´etin a year later, Cl´ement Marot playfully invited his fellow poets to add their own contributions to the genre by writing poems on similarly individuated parts of the female anatomy: a challenge to which obscure provincials no less that court poets of the highest reputation enthusiastically responded. The result, in the first instance, was the publication of a multi-authored collection of Blasons anatomiques in 1536

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(produced as an appendix to a French translation of Leon Battista Alberti’s Hecatomphile), and, subsequently, the publishing of ever-augmented collections, sequels, and re-printings throughout the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s (from 1543 detached from Hecatomphile and published in their own right), at its most extensive the collection exceeding sixty poems (including blazons and contreblasons) by sixteen or more poets, and evidently still finding itself marketable in later decades, the Blasons not seeing its final re-printing until some point between 1568 and 1572 (and we know, of course, that Sidney was in Paris in 1572).10 As historians of the genre consistently reiterate, what the Marotic blazon most dramatically stages is the dialectic between, on the one hand, the integrity of the masculine writing subject – called upon, in a competition entirely entr’hommes, to show off his poetic virtuosity and to demonstrate to others the superiority of his rhetorical prowess (Maurice Sc`eve was awarded the bays for a winning poem on the Eyebrow) – and, on the other, an increasingly disintegrated female body whose depersonalized and utterly objectified ‘parts’ the Blasons anatomiques allowed poets happily to trade among themselves in a perfect example of male homosocial exchange.11 This dialectic played itself out, moreover, in textual productions that went well beyond the highly specialized form of the Marotic blazon, for, as Wendy Wall observes, ‘the blazon serves as an intensification of the synecdochic mode of representing femininity that pervaded not just love poetry but also Renaissance sermons, legal codes, and historical narratives’.12 As she goes on to show, images of corporeality were also intimately bound up with strategies of literary self-presentation in the period, such that male writers – and particularly the authors of sonnet sequences – would routinely present their texts as female bodies ‘in order’, she writes, ‘to forge a new principle of authorization’ (p. 69), parading their own, definitively male, literary corpus (gathered, consolidated, ingenious, authoritative) in direct contradistinction to a feminized text (a loose gathering of individual poems, most often given a female name as its title, as Diana, Coelia, Phillis, Delia, Licia, Caelica, Fidessa, and so forth) which they could pruriently ‘open’ to the view and disclose to a voyeuristic readership of largely male eyes. Whatever form it assumed, however, it is generally agreed that behind every ‘blazon’ the figure that loomed was that of Petrarch: not because he perfected the form as such or even composed anything that could be identified as a single blazon on Laura (indeed, there is no complete portrait of her in the whole of the Canzoniere), but rather because, for that very reason, he took the principle of ‘scattering’ the lady’s parts to a new extreme (we only ever see Laura in pieces, in parts that the poet so objectifies,

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reifies, fetishizes – as eyes like stars, hair like topaz or gold, fingers like roses, ivory, or pearls, and so forth – that they bear little relation to a living, breathing body); and because, in identifying those scattered parts with his own ‘scattered rhymes’, he made of that principle of dismemberment a whole new literary ontology. For Nancy Vickers, the dialectic between scattered and gathered finds here – in the disarticulation of Laura’s body – its supreme articulation: ‘if the speaker’s “self” (his text, his corpus) is to attempt a unity, it would seem to require the repetition of his lady’s dispersed image’.13 Behind Petrarch, in turn, as Vickers and others concur, stands the figure of Actaeon: except that, enjoying the benefit of hindsight, and forewarned and forearmed by having read his Ovid in advance, Petrarch succeeds in avoiding his predecessor’s fate by countering and reversing the myth, pre-empting the latter’s horrible death-by-dismemberment by dismembering the goddess first – disobeying her injunction not to tell what he has seen by generating a great many words on the subject, and then proceeding to scatter her various body parts liberally across the poetic landscape.14 The ‘blazoning’ of female parts is, in this highly influential reading, thus conceived to be an essentially defensive gesture whereby the male poet neutralizes the threat posed by the female body by making female dismemberment the price to be paid for male sexual and textual autonomy; and, as a result, the view that Renaissance poets turned to the blazon form specifically in order to bolster their masculine power and ‘mastery’ has become something of a critical commonplace. For John Freccero, Petrarch’s treatment of Laura is ‘radically fragmentary’ in that his refusal to see the whole lady for the collection of her parts amounts to an idolatrous cult of the signifier – a divorce of signifier from signified so persistent that, detached from any ‘principle of intelligibility, [the] collection of signs threatens to break down into its component parts’.15 Nevertheless, this ‘emptying out’ of the sign in order to develop the fetishistic worship of a dazzling poetic surface that is entirely self-reflecting and selfmade is, Freccero argues, a calculated strategy on the poet’s part: the means by which Petrarch (thereby perhaps justifying his claim to be the first ‘modern’ poet) works toward the fashioning and creation of a poetic identity – an identity the job of whose poetry it is, ultimately, to monumentalize: for the laurel to be truly unique, it cannot mean anything: its referentiality must be neutralized if it is to remain the property of its creator. Petrarch makes of it the emblem of the mirror relationship Laura-Lauro, which is to say, the poetic lady created by the poet, who in turn creates him as poet laureate. This circularity forecloses all referentiality . . . One could scarcely suppose a greater autonomy. (pp. 26–27)

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What is striking about both this and the readings of the blazon tradition briefly surveyed in the preceding paragraph is the way in which the dialectic between the scattered and the gathered is, in every case, conceived of as being played out intersubjectively: that is, between a poetic subject, on the one hand (autonomous, monumental, masterly, lauro), and a poetic object, on the other (scattered, fragmented, in parts, laura): a dialectic which (as the grammatical differentiation in the Italian neatly demonstrates) rests on and perpetuates the gender binary. By contrast, other, and in some cases more recent, readings of Petrarch and of the principle of fragmentation which he bequeathed to Renaissance poetics shift to seeing this dialectic as being played out intrasubjectively – that is, not between the poet and his lady but, rather, within the poet himself: a move which takes as its point of departure a certain scepticism toward the gender binary and the model of ‘consolidated’ masculinity to which it so often seems to give rise. Thus Lynn Enterline argues, for example, that, whereas in Ovid (the source for so many of Petrarch’s images and narratives), the dialectic is very often played out ‘between the narrating subject and his erotic stories’, in the Canzoniere, by contrast, ‘a distance seems to surface within the poetic subject, pitting the self against the self’.16 In readings such as this, fragmentation is not seen as something that the poet projects onto woman with a view to stabilizing the masculine writing subject but, rather, as something that serves to query that supposedly ‘stable subject’ itself: a subject that is so often – if so often unconsciously – the avatar of critical readings of Renaissance texts, which is why its destabilization has profound implications not only for the writing subject but for the reading subject as well. For Marguerite Waller, as for Lynn Enterline, Petrarch’s project is precisely not to ‘produce the illusion of a stable subject’ but rather to disillusion and destabilize it: ‘sexism and misogyny as we know them, involving the objectification and exploitation of women to maintain the illusion of the sovereign (male) subject, cannot come into being when subjects are written and read as Petrarch reads and writes them’.17 For Giuseppe Mazzotta, too, Petrarch’s ‘poetics of fragmentation’ radically questions the myth of the centred self and reveals, conversely, that it is in the nature of selfhood to be perpetually in process and in crisis – the subject being an effect of language rather than a master of words, and, like language, motivated purely by desire: desire is a pure privation, a lack generated by man’s fallen state. Words and signs are generated from this lack and are hollow dislocations of it: the poet persistently attempts to achieve a formal adequation to desire and persistently fails because desire, in its uninterrupted movement toward totality, exceeds any formal adequation. For Petrarch, language is the allegory of desire, a veil, not because it hides a moral meaning but because it always says something else.18

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Words, like selves, have ‘no pre-established stability’ (p. 78) and can thus be broken down without compunction into their constituent parts – syllables, letters, sounds – in order to generate a whole new profusion of utterly disconnected signifiers: rather as, in sonnet 5, Petrarch fragments Laura into LAU, RE, and TA, denying not only the proper name but, by extension, every word he uses, the status of being a univocal, stable sign. Insofar as they are constituted in language, neither subject nor object, lauro nor laura, are in a position to lay claim to stability, and fragmentariness is therefore the condition of both and, indeed, of the poetry itself: ‘desire knows only shreds and fragments, even if plenitude is its ever elusive mirage . . . the unity of the work is the unity of fragments in fragments. Not even each fragment, each individual poem, may be said to possess a unity: each poem attempts to begin anew’ (pp. 78–79). Where for John Freccero, Nancy Vickers, and others, then, Petrarch represents a latter-day Actaeon who neutralizes the threat posed by the female body by fragmenting it first – effectively reversing Ovid’s myth – in a bid to stabilize and consolidate male poetic subjectivity (essentially a recuperative narrative), the critics whom I have been discussing here, Enterline, Waller, Mazzotta, and others, propose that, far from ‘treating’ Ovid’s story, Petrarch remains faithful to it: that is to say, he allows Actaeon to fall apart.19 For Enterline, for example, Petrarch is not a recuperated but is, rather, an ‘eternally divided Actaeon’: ‘Actaeon’s dismemberment becomes an emblem of his internal condition’.20 Any promised or apparent recuperation – the fact, for instance, that even the discourse of failure can be ‘enabling’ (p. 114) insofar as it generates a great many words on the subject – turns out to be no more than provisional for, ultimately, Petrarch stages the poet’s realization that his voice ‘will never recuperate the deferrals of which and through which he “speaks”’ (p. 116). As Enterline also suggests, moreover, few stories could be more apt than Actaeon’s for deconstructing claims on the part of the masculine writing subject to autonomy, mastery, and power: for this story of a man who is catastrophically dismembered at the sight of a naked female body anciently intuits the nature of language to be what more modern psychoanalytic parlance would term a ‘symbolic castration’ – that is, to be the effect of a cutting off, a separation, an absence or a lack that subtends every subject regardless of whether they are subsequently designated ‘female’ or ‘male’. The Actaeon story thus comes to serve as shorthand not for the ‘masterly’ male but rather for the illusoriness of that notionally stable, whole, unified masculine self, a self whose ‘mastery’ it (very economically) puts into question. ‘We are inevitably bereft of any masterful understanding of language’, writes Jane Gallop, in respect of this linguistic ‘castration’, ‘and can

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only signify ourselves in a symbolic system that we do not command, that, rather, commands us’.21 To return, then, to Sidney’s poem, it will be my aim in the pages that follow to investigate the extent to which this blazon could be said to adumbrate a similarly alienated and de-centred subjectivity. In many ways ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’ could be seen to play out both of the alternative readings of the blazon form that I have briefly described above: defensive and ‘masterly’, on the one hand, ‘scattered’ and self-divided, on the other. When it is divorced from its ‘lesbianized’ placement in the New Arcadia, for example – as it is in the Old Arcadia (which we shall come to shortly) or, indeed, in the numerous copies of the poem that exist in manuscript anthologies (it being, as Ringler notes, a favourite among Sidney’s contemporaries and more copied or quoted than any of his other verses) where it is completely removed from any narrative setting – ‘What tongue’ might, perhaps, be seen to revert to the more traditional blazon form, conventional and ‘orthodox’ in its statement of heterosexual praise (although, as we shall see, any apparent recuperation of the masculine writing subject that this might imply remains relatively short-lived). In the New Arcadia, the particular ambiguity that surrounds the identity, gender, and sexuality of Zelmane likewise allows for interpretations of the poem to swing this way and that: as a ‘heterosexual’ blazon authored by a prince, on the one hand, or a ‘lesbian’ blazon authored by an Amazon, on the other. Nevertheless, since it is Sidney’s ‘lesbianizing’ of the poem (a development unique to the New Arcadia) that makes a point of parading perversity and so of dislocating an epideictic norm that might otherwise have passed unnoticed, I should reiterate here that my thoughts on how the poem might most usefully be approached have largely drawn their inspiration from the work of Joel Fineman and in particular from his discussion of the way the traditional poetry of praise is parodied in Shakespeare’s sonnets. It is difficult to do justice here to the subtlety of Fineman’s thesis; very briefly, however, he argues that, in the sonnets addressed to the Young Man, Shakespeare works to reveal the fundamentally self-serving nature of the traditional praise-relation (where the praised object was classically understood to be a reflection, suitably idealized, of the praising subject) by literalizing what – given that that relation is essentially between two beings who are, to all intents and purposes, the same – is also the fundamentally homosexual nature of that relation. ‘The homosexual thematic developed in the sonnets addressed to the young man’, Fineman writes, ‘– where language, like the desire it mirrors, is “fair”, “kind”, and “true” – exploits the specular homogeneity endlessly repeated by the orthodox Renaissance sonnet, as

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though this kind of eroticized sameness linking idealizing lover to idealized beloved were the homosexual truth subtending the poetics of admiration from Beatrice onward’.22 Shakespeare’s move here is understood to be a strictly parodic one: that is to say, he actualizes this ‘homosexual truth’ in the Young Man sonnets in order to expose the narcissistically invested ‘full’ or ‘whole’ self – that particular preserve of the masculine writing subject – for the imaginary construction that it is. In Sidney’s case, of course, insofar as his poem stages a homosexual relation, then it is a scene between two women and not between two men. All the same, there is a case for seeing this way of parodying traditional epideixis as being a witty variation on the same theme, and it is certainly one that, as I shall argue in the last two chapters of this book, Shakespeare takes up in A Lover’s Complaint (the narrative poem that succeeds the Sonnets) and Donne, spectacularly so, in Sapho to Philaenis, where the parody of praise and the dismantling of the traditionally masculine writing subject are taken to whole new extremes. It is for this reason that I shall reserve a more detailed theorization of this strange male compulsion to play the lesbian for those later discussions; but that is not, however, to underestimate the radicalism of Sidney’s poem. On the contrary, I will argue here that the very swing between orthodox and perverse, gathered and scattered, hetero- and homosexual that ‘What tongue’, in its various settings, plays out, is no less unsettling of any stable subjectivity – including that of the reader – than the most outrageous flouting of norms. For Ronald Levao, it is a characteristic of the New Arcadia that it should return to ‘the problematics of the Old not with a heightened perspective, but with a mounting torrent of images that ultimately challenges any mastery, whether by protagonist, poet, or reader’; and, in his estimation, no scene in the New Arcadia challenges that mastery more than the bathing scene where the blazon takes place, this proving ‘perhaps the best example’ of the text’s tricky and subversive treatment of readerly expectations.23 Describing the scene on the banks of the river Ladon, and the multiple identifications to which that scene, and the characters in it, give rise, Levao argues that ‘it is at such moments that Sidney most fully indulges in the pleasures of the text, itself represented emblematically in the course of the Ladon’ (p. 221) – the river that Sidney describes as ‘not running forthright, but almost continually winding, as if the lower streams would return to their spring, or that the river had a delight to play with itself’ (NA 188) – a description, the critic goes on to suggest, that also calls to mind the Daedalian labyrinth that similarly led ‘in and out, and to and fro’ (p. 222), winding and doubling back upon itself like the river Meander. In its mazy meanderings and

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looping kinks, Sidney’s manifestly non-‘forthright’ river thus becomes not only the natural setting for the gender bending that goes on upon its banks, but also, as Levao seems here to suggest, a synecdoche of the New Arcadia as a whole, and not least of the way in which the text teases and plays games with the reader. In its restless oscillations to and fro, Sidney’s blazon plays out the dialectic between the scattered and the gathered, refusing to settle the matter one way or the other and thereby undermining any ‘readerly’ attempt to stabilize the meaning of the poem once and for all. This oscillatory movement has some suggestive parallels. If, for example, Sidney’s text is indulging here in what Levao calls the ‘pleasures of the text’, then that pleasure might perhaps approximate more closely to the masochistic model of sexual pleasure that Leo Bersani describes, where the organism works itself up into a state of pleasurable/unpleasurable tension solely in order to eliminate that tension in discharge or release – or to be ‘shattered’ into bliss – only to reconstitute itself or gather its scattered parts together in order repeat the whole process again. Something like that might approximate to the experience of reading Sidney’s poem as it, too, mimetically reproduces this altogether ambiguous pleasure/pain of/in a whole/shattered subject. At any rate, there is no doubt that oscillatory movement is, at every level, the New Arcadia’s characteristic mode. As John Carey notes, Sidney is addicted to such rhetorical tropes as antimetabole or synoeciosis which trace, in their typically figure-of-eight forms this same back-and-forth or looping motion: one that extends well beyond the rhetorical surface of the text to encompass both its geography (the winding Ladon, for example) and its personnel, who, in Carey’s words, ‘vacillate and oscillate helplessly’ throughout the narrative, this being the kind of physical movement that Sidney is ‘repeatedly drawn to and fascinated by’.24 It is just such habitual quaking and shuddering that afflicts the characters at the bathing scene, where Zelmane finds herself overcome with ‘quivering’ (NA 189) at the sight of the naked Philoclea, and the latter with ‘a pretty kind of shrugging’ (NA 189) at the coldness of the water against her skin. It is from this oscillatory movement, therefore – the trademark of the New Arcadia – that I take my cue in structuring the discussion that follows: one that seeks to trace the way in which Sidney plays with the ‘masterly’ subject (be it writer, narrator, character, or reader), now appearing to take that subject for granted, now to snatch it away, now allowing it to ‘consolidate’, now to scatter into parts. Any investigation into the subjectivity of ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’, therefore, must begin with the poem’s placement within the Old Arcadia – the latter preparing the way, as it were, for the highly

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ambivalent positionings in the New – although, at first glance, the blazon as it appears in the earlier narrative presents a scenario that could hardly be more different from the ‘lesbianized’ scenario of the later one. In the Old Arcadia, Pyrocles has, of course, also disguised himself as an Amazon (here, Cleophila), but at the point where the blazon enters the narrative he has long since disclosed his true identity to Philoclea and has broken into her bedchamber with a view to taking rapturous sexual possession. After a series of suitably titillating delays – recriminations, swoonings, ardent revivings, and so forth – Pyrocles lifts Philoclea in his arms and lays her on the bed, at which point, the narrator tells us, ‘there came into his mind a song the shepherd Philisides had in his hearing sung of the beauties of his unkind mistress, which in Pyrocles’ judgement was fully accomplished in Philoclea. The song’, he goes on, ‘was this’: What tongue can her perfections tell In whose each part all pens may dwell? Her hair fine threads of finest gold In curled knots man’s thought to hold; But that her forehead says, ‘in me A whiter beauty you may see’25

And so it goes on for a further hundred and forty lines, running lingeringly over Philoclea’s body from top to toe and back again, cataloguing a series of comparisons some of which (eyes like stars, skin like ivory, lips like rubies, cherries, or roses, teeth like pearls, and so forth) are wholly conventional, while others (likening her shoulders to leaded roofs, for example) are ingenious, to say the least. Situated at this point in the narrative (the end of Book III), the blazon marks a moment of ecstatic heterosexual consummation, the climax of the prince’s sexual adventures to date. Pyrocles has made it clear from the beginning that the whole aim of his love has been ‘enjoying’ (OA 23), and now that it comes to it there is no suggestion that he does not have what it takes or that, like the comically inept lovers of the epyllion tradition, he is ‘rude in love, and raw’: the following morning Dametas finds the lovers fast asleep in one another’s arms as after ‘mutual satisfaction’ (OA 273).26 Critics have consequently read the blazon as an extended articulation of Pyrocles’ phallic mastery, the poem’s visual appreciation of the female body standing in for the prince’s physical enjoyment of the same ‘in very deed’, in much the same way that, in its opening lines, the poem’s act of verbal appreciation turns out to be no less penetrative (indeed, with all those tongues and pens inserted into Philoclea’s ‘each part’, the female body becomes the object not only of the lover’s attentions but,

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as he shows her off to an imagined audience of admiring rivals, of multiple penetrations).27 As a surrogate for the sexual activity that is going on for the duration, the poem is, with its caressing touch and roving gaze, seen to have a clearly ‘intended erotic effect’, namely to produce a similar state of arousal in the (implicitly male) reader – a collective response that would serve to affirm the equation whereby the phallic ‘mastery’ of the male subject is predicated upon the opening, entering, and breaking of the female object.28 At the same time, the speaker naturally also asserts his own supremacy among this presumed group of male admirers, for this (already climactic) poem culminates in the apotheosis of his own ‘pen’, which now appears in transcendentalized form: Of whose high praise, and praiseful bliss, Goodness the pen, heav’n the paper is; The ink immortal fame doth lend. As I began so must I end: No tongue can her perfections tell, In whose each part all pens may dwell. (lines 141–46, OA 242)

As these worthy abstractions – which raise the poem from being mere jottings on a scrap of paper to a divine script blazed across the sky – articulate the classic statement of the epideictic poet whose eye/I, however fixated upon his lady, is always, ultimately, directed toward his own fame, so here the organ that assures Pyrocles’ sexual mastery of Philoclea’s body once again coincides with the instrument that describes it, the speaker’s ‘high praise’ (being no less elevated) redounding, therefore, to his own as much as to her glory: a claim, indeed, that critics seem to recognize when they describe the poem as a ‘masterpiece’ or ‘tour de force’.29 Any endorsement of the male subject’s sexual and textual mastery, however – which readings such as this might seem to imply – have the effect of taking the poem’s speaker at his word, more, perhaps, than might strictly be warranted by Sidney’s text. For, as Kathryn Schwarz has persuasively argued, in the context of the Old Arcadia narrative as a whole, any appeal to the ‘natural’ male body as that which lies beneath Pyrocles’ Amazonian disguise – a body that might appear to be put conclusively to the proof in the seduction of Philoclea – proves, and resolves, precisely nothing. Gynecia, for example, correctly perceives that Cleophila is ‘really’ a man, but the revelation of this fact – ‘the truth is I am a man’, Pyrocles baldly tells her (OA 204) – actually produces, as Schwarz puts it, ‘nothing at all . . . only the limited relevance of empirical facts’.30 Gynecia gets no closer to

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realizing her desires. Similarly, when Pyrocles first reveals his true identity to Philoclea, the effect on the latter is scarcely unambiguous, she being unsure, in her ‘divided mind’ (OA 121) whether to call this beloved object ‘Cleophila’ or ‘Pyrocles’, but preferring the former ‘for so I love to call thee, since in that name my love first began, and in the shade of that name my love shall best lie hidden’ (OA 121): a preference, incidentally, that is shared by the narrator who continues to use the female pronoun and name of Cleophila, regardless of Pyrocles’ revelation.31 In effect, comments Schwarz, Pyrocles’ declaration merely ‘enables Philoclea to confess her love for a woman’ (p. 187), and Sidney’s text seems to support this by comparing Philoclea’s astonished reaction to the discovery that Cleophila is a man to Pygmalion’s equally amazed realization that his female statue has come to life: ‘the joy which wrought into Pygmalion’s mind . . . was even such as, by each degree of Cleophila’s words, stealingly entered into Philoclea’s soul’ (OA 120). At the very moment where Pyrocles reveals himself to be a man, in other words, this metaphor seems to reverse the procedure by repositioning him as Pygmalion’s beloved, Galatea. As for the blazon, Schwarz argues that, far from endorsing any ‘triumph of manhood’, what the poem actually does is give us a portrait of feminine beauty that closely resembles the description of Cleophila when she first appeared (with her golden hair, her clothes and shoes revealing ‘the small of the leg’, ‘the foot’, and ‘the fairness of the skin’, OA 27), so that the device that seems decorously to veil Philoclea’s body during the seduction scene also veils that of Pyrocles, effectively ‘leaving us where we began: with an idealized feminine body that obscures the fact that we are looking at a man’ (p. 192). When Pyrocles makes love to Philoclea, furthermore, the symptomatic result of his action is not so much the triumph of his masculinity as the loss of his sword (which Dametas removes before the slumbering pair reawaken), as if, far from ‘re-heterosexualizing’ a potentially lesbian scene of desire, this sex act actually completes it, ‘answering the question of what women do in bed’ (p. 193): ‘the ability to perform a sexual act’, Schwarz adds, ‘seems curiously illegible as proof of sex itself: there is a gap in the reasoning that leads from “Cleophila has a penis” to “Cleophila is a man”’ (p. 195).32 If Pyrocles’ Amazonian disguise sets in train the comic confusions which, in the course of the Old Arcadia, the plot works to disentangle and resolve, in fact, the critic argues, the truth of his masculine identity ‘seems not to work as an answer or perhaps to answer the wrong question’ (p. 182), since what it demonstrates, above all else, is the constructed and performative nature of gender identity and the na¨ıvet´e, therefore, of any simple appeal to biology:

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the return of Pyrocles as Pyrocles is less an exposure of what is true than an expos´e of the need to know. The great revelation of The Arcadia is that the male body we have at the story’s end is the same one we have had from the beginning, mystified, contested, subject to revision. In turning to that body for narrative resolution, we find ourselves looking in the wrong place. (p. 181)

As it appears in the Old Arcadia, then, the blazon offers a model of phallic performance that can only be described as ambiguous: heterosexual, male, and masterly, on the one hand; female, lesbian, and perverse, on the other. Moreover, there is another respect in which the presentation of the poem in the earlier text could be seen to ambiguate masculine subjectivity further still, and this is the fact that, when it comes to Pyrocles’ great moment of ‘enjoying’, what comes into his mind is not a poem of his own composition but, rather, one that was written on a previous occasion by a quite different author – ‘the shepherd Philisides’ – Pyrocles here applying to his own situation words that the latter had written of his own (contrastingly less obliging) ‘unkind mistress’ (OA 238). In comparison to its presentation in the New Arcadia, where the poem emerges into direct speech from amid the multiple narrative layers that surround it, it is striking that, here in the Old Arcadia, the poem should come to us via a series of mediating frames, especially when the moment of sexual intimacy it celebrates (which is not in the New Arcadia, of course) might be seen to call for directness. Instead, Sidney chooses to distance the poem from that moment, locating it at the far end of a number of intervening events. After reciting the blazon, the narrator interjects: ‘but do not think, fair ladies, his thoughts had such leisure as to run over so long a ditty; the only general fancy of it came into his mind, fixed upon the sense of that sweet subject’ (OA 242). In other words, Pyrocles does not sing the blazon; he does not even remember it properly; rather, ‘What tongue’ comes to us as a text composed by a third party, vaguely recalled by the hero, and actually supplied by the narrator – as a result of which the speaking voice undergoes a three-way split. It is interesting to consider why this should be the case. It is possible that Sidney judged too direct a description of Pyrocles’ joys as inappropriate – as likely to encourage an overly positive response in the reader – when a veiled critique of what the prince and princess were up to was more what he had in mind. The distancing device could be seen, for example, to insinuate the same subtle ironies and oblique commentary as the description of the wholesome pastoral wedding that takes place immediately after the blazon episode, at the beginning of the Third Eclogues: here the shepherd Lalus pointedly wins his bride, Kala, ‘not with many painted words’, and weds her while ‘the greater persons [were] either sleeping or otherwise occupied’

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(OA 244–45). Besides, doubt over Pyrocles’ probity needs to be introduced at some point in order to dramatize the great moral dilemma of his arraignment in Book V. Nevertheless, Sidney could have kept all this and still have had Pyrocles author his own blazon: it would have made no difference to the potential irony of the situation for Pyrocles vaguely to recall a poem that he had composed at some earlier date on the body he has, after all, been obsessing about for pages. Yet Sidney chooses to attribute the blazon to someone else, the effect being to displace Pyrocles’ passionate thoughts onto a different place, a different time, and, more to the point, a different body. For all the blazon form’s obsession with particulars, the consequence of Sidney’s decision is radically to de-particularize, as if, in the prince’s hazy application of a poem that had been written about a different lady, basically any lip or eyebrow would do. Moreover, since Pyrocles recalls this song which Philisides had sung ‘in his hearing’ (OA 238), the latter’s unkind mistress was presumably not in situ at the time, so that this poem which marks Pyrocles’ sexual ‘enjoyment’ of Philoclea turns out not only to be split three ways but also to be haunted by a double absence, reproducing, as it does, the words of an absent poet about his absent mistress. As if that were not enough, Sidney attributes the blazon to Philisides, of all people – the Arcadia’s resident abject male. Had he wanted to displace Pyrocles’ love-making onto a different lover or a different lady, Sidney could have done so by ascribing the poem to any one of the shepherds or happier lovers in the narrative, yet of them all he selects Philisides, a character habitually associated with grief and loss. An exile who is as alienated from the shepherds and courtiers amongst whom he finds himself as he is from his own court, Philisides subsists in a more or less permanent state of paralysis and despair: he is first introduced in the melancholy pose that would set a trend for generations to come – ‘upon the ground at the foot of a cypress tree, leaning upon his elbow’ (OA 71) – and his tortured relation to his mistress is, by his own admission, one of ‘perpetual absence’ (OA 341). Indeed, Sidney departs from his source in order to drive home the peculiarly unrecuperable nature of Philisides’ loss, for where Sannazaro’s representation of various authorial figures in his Arcadia implies what one critic calls a ‘commitment to the pastoral as a regenerative mode of fiction’, Sidney counters this with ‘his own vision of desperate stasis’, his equivalent figure representing, rather, a ‘condition in which there is no solace in the country, no regeneration, no transition to a higher style’.33 Sidney’s decision to attribute ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’ to this character of verbal paralysis and blasted hope might seem, then, to accord very well with the radical ambiguating of masculinity that

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Pyrocles’ Amazon disguise also sets in motion: were it not for the fact that – in one of those dislocating and disconcerting lurches with which Sidney’s text serves to destabilize any final interpretation – this attribution could, simultaneously, be read in an entirely different way. For what the novelistic frames through which the blazon is mediated could also be shown to emphasize is that the poem has been circulated, in the first instance, among men: Philisides is said to have sung the poem in Pyrocles’ hearing, suggesting the familiar coterie setting of homosocial exchange, a model for which has already been provided in the competitive eclogues for which Arcadia is renowned. For all their pastoral gloss, Sidney makes it clear that the shepherds’ songs correspond to the essentially courtly habit of manuscript circulation, it being the shepherds’ practice, after their singing contests, ‘ever to have one who should write up the substance of what they said; whose pen, having more leisure than their tongues, might perchance polish a little the rudeness of an unthought-on song’ (OA 56). Such specifically literary practice binds the men together in a literate and artistic community, and it is within such a context that we are evidently invited to situate Sidney’s blazon. It is possible, after all, to interpolate a whole series of stages between the poem’s original composition and its final appearance on the page: first performed by Philisides and heard and admired by an appreciative audience, it was then, presumably, written down, passed around, copied, repeated, imitated, and memorized, before being remembered by Pyrocles and, finally, supplied by the narrator. That the blazon conforms to this heightened model of literary production – converting the ‘rudeness’ of a merely verbal outpouring to the finished article of ‘polished’ versification – is, moreover, suggested by the poem itself as it subordinates the inadequate organ of speech (‘No tongue can her perfections tell’, line 145, OA 242) to the superior instrument of writing (‘Goodness the pen’, line 142, OA 242). Moreover, the fact that it is, in this case, specifically a blazon that the shepherds and others have been circulating amongst themselves alludes to the kind of forum for male poetic display that the form seemed designed to promote (at least in its most recent manifestation in contemporary France), and to that extent the poem might be seen, perhaps, to restore the masterly writing subject that had otherwise been put into some doubt. In the context of such homosocial exchange, Sidney’s poem could be seen to align itself with a form that explicitly commodified woman as an object of exchange between men: indeed, since men circulate poems among themselves exactly as they circulate women, then the blazon form – which uniquely collapses the two (the golden lady and aureate verse being objects of equal value) – is, of all literary forms, the one that best exemplifies the circulations of

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male homosocial desire. When Pyrocles borrows for his own purposes a poem by another man about that other man’s mistress, it does not devalue Philoclea so much as confirm that all women are interchangeable as objects of desire. The fact that the poem’s detailed description of eyes, hair, fingernails, knees, and so forth, actually applies to a quite different body does not matter in the least: ‘What tongue’ is a one-size blazon that fits all. Similarly, where Pyrocles’ recollection of this second-hand poem might seem to haunt the blazon with a double lack (its original author and original lady both being absent), this need not compromise the integrity of the masculine writing subject so much as affirm that, as poetic objects, women are made and mastered by men. Another model here might be the April eclogue in The Shepheardes Calender where, for all his conspicuous absence from the scene (he has withdrawn, just like Philisides, out of love-melancholy), Colin Clout is still very much the author of the blazon of the Queen that is there detailed and which he has left on record to be circulated without him. The fact that the author is not physically present does not undermine his position at all, for, as Louis Montrose has argued of Spenser’s text, it only confirms the poet’s ability to reproduce the object of praise at will, and to garner the admiration of his fellows while he is at it.34 The trouble with this is that we run up against a basic inconsistency in the characterization of Philisides: either he is the narrative’s resident failure, definitively associated with unrecuperable loss, or he is a master poet performing aureate verse before an admiring male coterie and, like Colin Clout, able even in his absence to assert his authority as a writing subject. The latter portrait does not fit in very well with Philisides’ persona as an abject male, it is true, but it does make more sense of the claim that he is the author of ‘What tongue’: it is difficult, otherwise, to see how Philisides could have composed an erotic blazon, its vision of the naked beloved and its general tone of rapture being so out of keeping with his otherwise depressed and mournful utterances. This crux could seem, in fact, to epitomize the utter ambivalence of Sidney’s handling of male subjectivity in the poem. For, if Philisides is a picture of implosive and self-annihilating lack (which would certainly be consistent with his appearances elsewhere in the text), then the fact that Pyrocles should remember one of his poems at the point of making love to Philoclea might seem to undermine the ‘mastery’ of that moment in much the same way as his Amazon persona and female pronoun. If, on the other hand, Philisides is the masterly poet whose golden verse, circulated amongst his fellows, is what comes into the mind of this young buck as he prepares to make love to his mistress, then male ‘mastery’ might seem to be secure after all. Quite what a puzzle

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Sidney has created here begins to emerge when we consider what would have happened had he not brought Philisides into the picture at all. If the narrator had simply said that the song ‘came into Pyrocles’ mind’ and left it at that, for example, then no inconsistency would have crept into the characterization of Philisides, the last character in the world to have composed an erotic blazon. Either the attribution of ‘What tongue’ to him is an accident, a slip of the pen, Sidney’s apparent ‘affection for this song’ getting the better of him and inclining him attribute it – whatever the cost – to the character under whom he figures himself.35 Or (and I suspect this is the case) it is deliberate: Sidney sacrifices consistency and attributes the blazon to the most unlikely author imaginable precisely so as to leave the question of the ‘masterly’ male subject in the balance and to keep the dialectic between the gathered and the scattered, the orthodox and the perverse perpetually in play. Perhaps this should not surprise us too much, for the narrator has warned us from the beginning of the Old Arcadia, after all, that ‘there is nothing so certain as our continual uncertainty’ (OA 5). Sidney’s profound unsettling of the masculine writing subject in the Old Arcadia, then, sets the scene for its further destabilization in the New, where the blazon – now spoken in the first person by Zelmane, and before she has divulged the ‘truth’ of her identity to the object of the poem and of her desires – takes the querying of that subject to a whole new level. Nevertheless, as in the Old Arcadia, this interrogation continues to take the form of a restless oscillation to and fro between opposing terms – however increasingly extreme the lurches or dizzying the swings between the two – and it is appropriate, therefore, to start with those ways in which the New Arcadia seems (at first glance, at any rate) to re-heroize the masculine subject and to re-consolidate his gender identity, before looking at those that do the opposite. Thus many critics, for example, justify Pyrocles’ Amazon disguise here as a temporarily ‘homosexual’ means to a fully heterosexual end – a justification, indeed, to which Pyrocles himself has recourse when explaining to the dubious Musidorus that he determined ‘thus to disguise myself, that under that mask I might, if it were possible, get access’ to Philoclea (NA 80), otherwise debarred him as a result of Basilius’ sequestration of the royal family; and which is further supported by a number of analogues in the Amadis de Gaule cycle (Sidney’s sole source for the prince’s Amazon disguise) where, again, men don female costume specifically in order to gain access to the women they desire.36 In these readings, a man’s adoption of feminine dress represents less a relinquishing of his masculine identity than a classic ruse in the jostlings of male homosocial desire – a device by means of which, by going that extra

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mile, the wittiest male subject outdoes his rivals, wins the woman, and so carries off the prize. Pyrocles reassures the anxious Musidorus that ‘for all my apparel there is nothing I desire more than fully to prove myself a man in this enterprise’ (NA 74) – for in the New Arcadia, no less than in the Old, the aim of this whole cross-dressing project is still ‘enjoying’ (NA 75) – and, for one critic at least, this is evidence enough to prove that Pyrocles conforms to the type of male transvestite who, in the words of an eminent psychologist, ‘has no question that he is a male and that he wants to remain a male . . . An essential part of his pleasure is to know that while dressed as a woman he has a penis . . . He would never sacrifice his penis in order to become a “female”’.37 In readings such as this, Pyrocles’ transvestism positively enhances his masculinity (‘his dress adds to rather than diminishes his merely masculine virtue’); and there is a considerable body of opinion that holds that, as Zelmane, he is actually more rather than less heroic (more ‘martial and masculine’ than he might have been had he not taken on her identity), and that, where Cleophila in the Old Arcadia may possibly have been a compromised if not somewhat comic figure, then Zelmane in the New (in accordance with the revised text’s shift to a higher, more epic style) is an altogether more noble and honourable one.38 This might be illustrated, perhaps, by the episode (not in the Old Arcadia) in which Zelmane rides to the defence of Philoclea’s picture in the tournament that is set up by Phalanthus in Book I. Here knights are invited to compete with one another in order to prove and uphold the superior beauty of their respective ladies (a quintessentially homosocial enterprise), and Pyrocles, now doubly disguised – in a layering of gender identities worthy of the Renaissance stage – as Zelmane pretending to be the ‘Ill-apparelled Knight’, successfully defeats his rivals. The revelation – which comes when he removes his helmet – that this Knight is actually Zelmane uses this classic motif (an authenticating device that is to recur throughout the New Arcadia) to locate the Amazon in the position of the ‘true’ hero, thereby redeeming not just Philoclea’s picture but Pyrocles’ female disguise as well. The tournament has affinities with the later bathing and blazon scene, moreover, not only because Amphialus there adverts to it (being introduced to Zelmane for the first time, he recognizes her as ‘the same famous Amazon’ that defended Philoclea’s ‘title of beauty’, NA 196), but also because the specifically visual representation of Philoclea that Pyrocles has rushed to defend (not forgetting that a similar representation, of course – a picture of Philoclea in Kalander’s gallery – was what inspired his love in the first place) is akin to the similarly visual description of her beauties in ‘What tongue’. When it

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comes to the bathing scene and the blazon that Zelmane finally performs there, moreover, those critics who tend to emphasize the masculine body that is ‘really’ lurking beneath her disguise interpret the poem as the highest point in Pyrocles’ sexual predations yet. As the penetrator of this all-female sanctuary, Pyrocles conforms absolutely to the voyeuristic figure of Actaeon, and, in proceeding to scatter his lady’s ‘parts’ in the extended blazon that follows, he conforms still more specifically to the male blasonneur who recuperates this figure and deflects the punishment that was otherwise his due by dismembering his lady first.39 Indeed, Sidney is seen to go even further than these Petrarch-inspired blasonneurs in that he deflects this punishment not only onto the lady but, in addition, onto another male rival: for it is Amphialus (caught inadvertently trespassing on the scene) whom Zelmane attacks with her sword and, most symptomatically, wounds in the thigh. The effect is doubly to protect Pyrocles’ body from the threat of any similar kind of physical depredation, and the suggestion that his maleness is, as a consequence, gratefully preserved, is perpetuated by these readings which emphasize that, even if, in the New Arcadia’s bathing scene, the blazon does not simulate a sex-act as it specifically does in the Old, it nonetheless comes very close; and that the passionate outpouring of the poem in the later text corresponds rather pointedly to the arousal of a male member beneath those dissembling skirts. For, declining the princesses’ invitation to join them in the water, ‘having taken a late cold’ (NA 189), Zelmane is overcome with an excitement that can barely be concealed, and seems to sing the blazon, indeed, precisely in order to distract eyes away from the physical manifestation that such excitement can betray: like a chamber where a great fire is kept, though the fire be at one stay, yet with the continuance continually hath his heat increased, [Zelmane] had the coals of her affection so kindled with wonder and blown with delight . . . that taking up the lute, her wit began to be with a divine fury inspired. (NA 190)

By linking this divine rush of inspiration to the physical agitation of the poet who then proceeds to sing the blazon in a continued state of ecstasy, this passage gives, in its union of sexual and textual mastery, a particularly neat image of the phallus (even John Hoskins cites this passage as an example of ‘climax’).40 Moreover, even if Pyrocles’ aggressive masculinity is, for the time being, still under wraps, it does not remain so for long, for it is at the very same spot on the riverbank a short time later that (being found there weeping into the stream) he finally reveals all to Philoclea and discloses his true identity – within a matter of lines securing her promise of marriage and, with it, her position as an object of exchange within the patriarchal

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system of marriage. And, if these readings of the blazon seem to insist on appealing to the ‘natural’ male body as that which lies unfalsifiably beneath Zelmane’s deceptive skirts, then there are many occasions on which Sidney’s text seems to encourage just such a verifying move: as when, for example, Musidorus first sees Zelmane but soon perceives ‘indeed that it was Pyrocles thus disguised’ (NA 70), or in the constant references to Zelmane’s disguise as a ‘mask’ (NA 80, 87, 232) or as a mere ‘part’ (NA 82) or ‘act’ (NA 87) that she must play, and that a character like Gynecia is able to see through more or less from the beginning (see NA 123). On the other hand, Sidney’s text does not always deliver what it promises, and these encouragements to look to the ‘body beneath’ for the final verification of gender identity do not necessarily stabilize matters nor set the plot or the reader at rest. As often as not, such appeals leave us confronted not so much with the ‘truth’ as a series of ever more ambiguating veils, not the least of these being the narrator’s persistent use, with regard to Zelmane, of the female pronoun. What does it mean for a male body to be routinely referred to as ‘she’? The designation works constantly to problematize any reassuring sense that Zelmane is ‘really’ a man, or at the very least to hold in suspense what being such a ‘man’ might mean. In the passage just cited as providing evidence of the prince’s physical arousal at the sight of Philoclea’s naked body, for example, the narrator’s play of pronouns within the metaphor seems designed to put into question what has apparently just been implied – just as a close-kept fire ‘hath his heat increased’, so Zelmane ‘had the coals of her affection’ set alight (NA 190, my italics) – and, as the sentence proceeds, the female pronoun is used no fewer than ten times (‘her parts’, ‘her eyes’, ‘her wit’, ‘her voice’, ‘her wit’, ‘her hands’, ‘her panting heart’, ‘her feet’, ‘her body’, ‘her soul’, NA 190) in a grammatical barrage that does everything it can to undermine the supposed maleness of the aroused body being described. For Richard Levin, the designation of Zelmane as ‘she’ throughout the New Arcadia obliges us to think of her as a woman – indeed, he cites the passage just quoted as evidence that we are to consider the blazon episode as a ‘sexually charged incident . . . involving two women’ – and for Kathryn Schwarz ‘the narrator’s “she” is a speech act . . . a shift in gendered reference [that] not only describes a sex change but is one’.41 The appeal to Zelmane’s ‘natural’ maleness, therefore, no more restores the ‘truth’ or resolves matters in the New Arcadia than a similar treatment of Cleophila did in the Old, for gender identity is no less of a cultural construction or performance in the revised text than it was in the earlier one. Those critics who, in their interpretation of the New Arcadia’s blazon episode, make such an appeal

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to biologically gendered bodies, therefore, necessarily suppress the lesbian potential of the scene; and it is noticeable that, in order to do so, they have to override the narrator’s speech act and revert to calling Zelmane ‘Pyrocles’ and to bending the pronouns to suit. They argue, for example, that it is ‘the aroused Pyocles [who] sings an extended blazon detailing the beauty of his beloved’; or that ‘Pyrocles’ desire is displaced into the delivery of an extended blazon in which he carefully anatomizes Philoclea’; or even that ‘Zelmane composes a song that inventories his beloved’s anatomical parts’.42 If the first two examples effectively erase ‘Zelmane’ as an all too transparent fiction and re-write the scene as one of normative heterosexual desire between the prince and the princess, then the third shows with particular clarity the violence that needs to be done to Sidney’s text if a potentially homosexual scene is to be ‘corrected’ or normalized in this way. Since when was Zelmane ‘he’? To call her thus only serves to highlight the gender-ambiguity that Sidney has manufactured and carefully maintained throughout the New Arcadia by insisting that the Amazon is a ‘she’. As Peter Stallybrass suggests, it is ‘the imagined “truth” of gender’, ‘a fantasized biology of the “real”’ that modern critics are here guilty of imposing on a Renaissance culture that, by contrast, played with the relation between the signifiers of gender (prostheses, gesture, dress) and the ‘body beneath’ to ‘the point of their undoing’.43 When a boy-actor was playing a woman on the Renaissance stage, for example, and performing a scene that involved the removal of clothes (as in a bed scene, or, one might add, a bathing scene), exactly what ‘body beneath’ the clothes was revealed, and precisely what body did the audience – its gaze here explicitly mobilized – actually see? If the Renaissance stage demands that we ‘see’ particular body parts (the breast, the penis, the naked body), it also reveals that such fixations are inevitably unstable. The actor is both boy and woman, and he/she embodies the fact that sexual fixations are not the product of any categorical fixity of gender. (p. 77)

In this climate, Zelmane is no more a ‘he’ than, say, Desdemona, and her characterization could be seen to set in motion exactly the same ‘radical’ (p. 74) and ‘wild oscillation’ (p. 75) between male and female, or between sexual difference and sexual indeterminacy that, for Stallybrass, finds its quintessential dramatization on the Renaissance stage. With this is mind, the various propositions which, in the preceding paragraph, appeared to reestablish the masculinity of Pyrocles and the ‘truth’ of a male body beneath the disguise no longer seem so secure. When, for example, the helmet of the ‘Ill-apparelled Knight’ is pulled off to reveal Zelmane in the tournament

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scene, this classic device for unveiling authentic identity exposes no less mystified a ‘body beneath’ than countless such equivocal gender shifts (boys being girls being boys being girls) on the Renaissance stage. And if the tournament episode in general could be seen as a paradigmatic occasion for the exercise of male homosocial desire, then it is far from clear that the occasion is treated anything other than satirically, the wholly gratuitous nature of its instigator Phalanthus’ championship of his lady Artesia’s picture exposing the explicit ‘idolatry’ (NA 93) of the whole proceeding and so casting a pall over anything that may possibly have been considered ‘manly’ or ‘heroic’ about it (a pall that extends not only to the ‘Ill-apparelled Knight’’s defence of Philoclea’s picture but, also, I would suggest, to Pyrocles’ original act of falling in love at the sight of her portrait; an act, incidentally, to which I shall return). Nor can the other cases cited above as evidence of Pyrocles’ supposed ‘masculinity’ withstand any less scrutiny. The prince’s reassurance, for example, that ‘there is nothing I desire more than fully to prove myself a man’ (NA 74) never gets beyond this statement of intent (such ‘proof’ – if that is what seducing Philoclea means – being infinitely deferred beyond the confines of Sidney’s unfinished text), his words demonstrating more accurately, perhaps, the true nature of desire which, ever motivated by absence or lack, is destined never to satisfy or to prove anything ‘fully’, least of all male gender identity. Similarly, Pyrocles’ stated aim that the object of his self-imposed disguise is ‘enjoying’ (NA 75) comes back to haunt him later in Book II when Basilius, who has fallen in love with Zelmane, proposes just such a desired conclusion for himself: ‘enjoying those your excellencies wherein my life is upheld and my death threatened’ (NA 226). At first Zelmane is on the defensive – ‘“Enjoying”, quoth you? Now little joy come to them that yield to such enjoying!’ (NA 226 – a response that induces in the mortified Basilius the New Arcadia’s trademark ‘general shaking all over his body’, NA 227) – but she quickly turns the situation to her own advantage by suggesting that, in future, the king should use Philoclea as his ambassador in any such expressions of his love: ‘the same words in my Lady Philoclea’s mouth’, Zelmane tells him, ‘as from one woman to another . . . might have had a better grace, and perchance have found a gentler receipt’ (NA 227). The heterosexual ‘enjoying’ that may have been Pyrocles’ stated aim at the beginning of the New Arcadia here modulates itself into a scene of female (mediated, of course, via one of male) homoerotic desire. I also suggested above that the riverbank on which Zelmane blazons Philoclea’s ‘parts’ was the same spot on which Pyrocles was shortly to reveal himself (a moment also marked by the narrator’s similar blazon of her ‘each . . .

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part’, NA 230), thereby asserting the prince’s masculine privilege and the patriarchal hegemony by securing her agreement to marry him. A closer look at that locus, however, reveals a highly sexualized geography that does nothing to re-stabilize the gender of the characters in it. For, in the bathing scene, the river Ladon is described in a way that can only be described as gender-ambiguous: on the one hand, this river (which, as we have already seen, manifestly does not run ‘forthright’ and rather delights ‘to play with itself’, NA 188) is personified as a ‘wanton nymph’ forever slipping from the arms of the ‘loving earth’ that ‘fain would embrace it’ (NA 188); while, on the other, it is explicitly masculinized: ‘when cold Ladon had once fully embraced them, himself was no more so cold to those ladies; but as if his cold complexion had been heated with love, so seemed he to play about every part he could touch’ (NA 189). If the latter invites us to think of the blasonneur who is also playing with Philoclea’s ‘each part’ at the same time, then any masculinity that might be inferred by such an identification is necessarily offset by the image of the same river, a few lines earlier, as a wanton and self-pleasuring nymph. This gender-ambiguous geography disturbs the assumption that the relation between Zelmane and Philoclea can, in any straightforward way, be described as ‘heterosexual’, no less powerfully than the metaphor in the Old Arcadia which – by comparing Philoclea’s amazement at Cleophila’s sudden ‘metamorphosis’ into a man with Pygmalion’s similar astonishment at his statue’s transmutation into a living, breathing woman – effectively converted Pyrocles back into a woman again at just the moment where he finally revealed himself to be a man. In the New Arcadia, the same moment and metaphor now find themselves transferred to the revelation scene that takes place, only a short time after the blazon, on a spot that has, in the meantime, become thoroughly ambiguated: ‘and so, making the green bank the situation, and the river the prospect . . . [Zelmane] at length brought it forth’ (NA 230) that she is, in fact, none other than ‘Pyrocles, prince of Macedon’, at which point, ‘the joy which wrought into Pygmalion’s mind, while he found his beloved image was softer and warmer in his folded arms till at length it accomplished his gladness with a perfect woman’s shape . . . was even such as by each degree of Zelmane’s words creepingly entered into Philoclea’ (NA 231). Since the effect of this metaphor is, of course, not only to re-feminize Pyrocles but also to masculinize Philoclea, then any ratification of the heterosexual ‘norm’ that might seem to have been implied by the two proceeding to pass ‘promise of marriage’ (NA 233) is undercut by at least two ‘perverse’, homosexual scenarios (Pyrocles and Pygmalion; and Zelmane/Galatea and Philoclea). Philoclea’s symptomatic response to this

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discovery, indeed, is no less conflicted or oscillatory than either ‘Zelmane’ (whoever or whatever ‘she’ can now be said to be) or the self-doubling river Ladon, upon whose banks the whole scene is taking place: torn between doubt and belief, relief and astonishment, Philoclea is (this being the New Arcadia) overcome by ‘a shrugging kind of tremor through all her principal parts’ (NA 232). With the gender and sexuality of the speaker of ‘What tongue’ thus swinging about wildly between masculine and feminine, hetero- and homosexual – no less so than the ground upon which she/he stands and the object to whom she/he speaks – it becomes increasingly difficult to stabilize any interpretation of the poem and impossible to maintain that it is a purely ‘conventional’ blazon of heterosexual praise. This instability is exacerbated, furthermore, by the multiple identifications to which the episode lends itself – identifications whose overabundance and proliferation lead Ronald Levao to cite this scene above all others as exemplifying Sidney’s indulgence in the (possibly masochistic) ‘pleasures of the text’. If nothing else, these identifications serve to dramatize the dialectic between gathered and scattered which the blazon form sets in motion and which I have been endeavouring to trace in these pages. Thus, on the one hand, the setting of the blazon at a bathing scene explicitly alludes to the Actaeon myth; and those critics who choose to read Sidney’s poem as an instance of ‘defended’ masculinity find their interpretation supported by the speaker’s treatment not only of Philoclea but also of Amphialus, the intruder who stumbles in on the scene and whom Zelmane symbolically castrates with a wound in the thigh: ‘not only does Sidney’s dissembling hero pre-empt his own sparagmos by blazoning the members of his beloved, but he himself is permitted to visit part of Actaeon’s punishment on his arguably less guilty, and certainly less dissembling and disassembling, rival’.44 Indeed, the deflection of the voyeur’s punishment away from the blasonneur in this way could be said to be so successful that he is not so much a rescued Actaeon figure as a figure for Diana herself – less traumatized transgressor than vengeful goddess – an identification to which Zelmane’s disguise as a powerful female warrior obviously lends credence. On the other hand, this reading places its faith in an imaginary bodily ‘wholeness’ (whether that takes the form of a phallic woman, as here, or of there being a ‘real’ male body hiding behind those skirts, which amounts to the same thing) that Sidney’s text systematically puts into question. Thus, if Zelmane can be identified with Diana, or with a recuperated, ‘Petrarchan’ Actaeon, then she can also be identified with the bona fide Ovidian Actaeon who enjoys no such reprieve but is indeed dismembered, castrated, and torn to pieces before the goddess’s avenging

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eyes. In the passage that has already been cited as providing contradictory evidence of Zelmane’s possession of a penis (in Pyrocles’ supposed erection) or lack of one (in the barrage of female pronouns), the blazon’s speaker is not only gender-ambiguated thereby but is also, just like her/his Ovidian prototype, specifically broken down into ‘parts’: Zelmane . . . had the coals of her affection so kindled with wonder and blown with delight that now all her parts grudged that her eyes should do more homage than they to the princess of them; insomuch that taking up the lute, her wit began to be with a divine fury inspired, her voice would in so beloved an occasion second her wit, her hands accorded the lute’s music to the voice, her panting heart danced to the music – while, I think, her feet did beat the time – while her body was the room where it should be celebrated, her soul the queen which should be delighted. (NA 190, my italics)

The blasonneur, in other words, is here no less dismembered than the body whom she/he blazons, presenting us with a scenario not of a ‘gathered’ male poet and ‘scattered’ female parts but rather of scattered parts and scattered parts (most of the parts here listed, incidentally, reappear in the blazon that follows, so that Zelmane’s eyes, wit, voice, hands, and feet correspond to Philoclea’s eyes, grace, tongue, fingers, and ‘round clean foot’ (line 105, NA 194) in the poem; while the image of her body as a ‘room’ for the soul to inhabit recurs in the blazon’s account of Philoclea’s body as a ‘fair inn’ (line 139, NA 195) for the Graces to dwell in). Sidney makes a point, in other words, of emphasizing that it is not a whole, integrated, male subject who delivers this blazon but rather a gender-ambiguous conglomeration of different pieces (indeed, this passage makes it clear that the blazon is a product of the separate bits, orchestrated together), one set of ‘parts’ blazoning another set of ‘parts’, for this blasonneur is as anatomized as the body she/he extols. As this passage continues, moreover, Zelmane is broken up further still to become the passive, feminized text upon which (in a striking reversal of roles) it is actually Philoclea who writes the poem, the latter effectively inscribing her own blazon on the body of her blasonneur: for ‘so together went the utterance and the invention that one might judge it was Philoclea’s beauty which did speedily write it in her [Zelmane’s] eyes’ (NA 190), as if it were now Philoclea’s ‘pen’ (the princess once again positioned as a masculinized artist or Pygmalion-figure) that were inserted into Zelmane’s ‘parts’. Sidney’s poem thus dramatizes the same kind of radical collapse of the masculine writing subject that we find in the other poems considered in this book. Zelmane’s identification with this shattered Actaeon, moreover (which critics intent on preserving Pyrocles’ ‘mastery’

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tend to suppress), is also suggested by other hints within the text: firstly, for example, her role as voyeur is already set up in the introduction to the bathing scene where the princesses decide to go swimming and where ‘Zelmane out of her window espied them, and so stale down after them’ (NA 188); and, secondly, when it comes to her behaviour toward the intruder Amphialus, Zelmane does not, in fact, rush to the defence or (like Ovid’s Diana) respond with instantaneous rage but rather begins at first, in most un-Diana-like fashion, by looking this male figure up and down rather appraisingly (‘not without admiration’, NA 195), only fighting him when he refuses to return a small book of Philoclea’s that his dog had pilfered, and even then being sorry and ashamed of her actions ‘considering how little he had done’ (NA 197). If Amphialus’ symbolic wound marks him as the punished, castrated voyeur, then this statement seems to play down the seriousness of that fate and with it Zelmane’s supposed determination to maintain a ‘phallic’ integrity at all costs.45 These varying figurations of the Diana–Actaeon story undermine any bid that might be made on behalf of the blasonneur’s presumed masculinity, and indeed the latter is no further enhanced by the identification with a third figure in that story which Sidney’s text also allows for. For, in her role as worshipper, acolyte, and slave – as a female member of Philoclea’s entourage – Zelmane also conforms to one of the nymphs who, in Ovid’s narrative, officiate at the goddess’s ablutions and help protect her from the voyeur’s marauding gaze, although Zelmane proves no more efficient than the original nymphs in keeping male intruders away. Her role here might be seen to correspond to the fantasy that Philoclea turns over in her mind when musing on how she might enact what she perceives to be her growing desire for her female friend: ‘she would wish that they two might live all their lives together like two of Diana’s nymphs’ (NA 145). And it certainly alludes to the critically inaugural moment at the beginning of the New Arcadia when Pyrocles first falls in love with Philoclea’s portrait, her picture being the last in a series of paintings in Kalander’s art collection, the first of which is described as follows: ‘there was Diana, when Actaeon saw her bathing, in whose cheeks the painter had set such a colour as was mixed between shame and disdain, and one of her foolish nymphs, who weeping withal and louring, one might see the workman meant to set forth tears of anger’ (NA 15). It is far from clear that Actaeon is actually figured in this picture – since the image is said to represent the effect of his presence, Diana’s blush, rather than that presence itself – an omission which could be (and has been) read as a manoeuvre that puts the reader/viewer in the position of the male voyeur, but which could also be read as another of the

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many contributory factors that add up, in the course of the New Arcadia, to that figure’s progressive emasculation. If, as Pyrocles first looks at that picture – before he has even set eyes on the image of Philoclea – he directs a typical ‘male gaze’ at the naked female form, then at the same time he also, perhaps, puts himself in the position of the startled nymph: not a predatory man, not even a phallic woman, but a female subordinate, a mere servant or ancillary, powerless, ineffectual, and ‘foolish’ to boot. The speaking subject of ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’ thus undergoes a radical dislocation – a fragmentation into multiple parts – and is capable of being read, alternatively, as a man (Pyrocles), as a woman (Zelmane), as a phallic Actaeon (the recuperated, ‘Petrarchan’ Actaeon), as a castrated Actaeon (the shattered, ‘Ovidian’ Actaeon), as a phallic woman (Diana/Zelmane), and as a ‘castrated’ woman (foolish nymph). Meanwhile, the spoken object of the poem is similarly split apart – even if not quite to the same manic degree – for Philoclea, too, is capable of being read as a Pygmalion figure (male), as a Diana figure (a phallic female), and as an attendant nymph (a ‘castrated’ female). While the narrative does provide some scope, therefore, for regarding the relation between this subject and this object as a straightforwardly heterosexual one (a prince and a princess, Pyrocles and Philoclea), any such reading is also obliged to take into account the myriad alternative and ‘perverse’ scenarios which these multiple identifications in turn allow for: scenarios which must include, among the infinite number of possible permutations, a man blazoning another man, a phallic woman blazoning another phallic woman, and, and the far end, a castrated figure blazoning another castratee. Indeed, of all the possible positionings that Sidney’s playful allusions allow for, it is this last which he seems to foreground, since he goes to the trouble of not only gender-ambiguating the blasonneur (‘his heat . . . her affection’, NA 190) but also explicitly breaking her/him up into the body parts that are shortly to be blazoned in Philoclea. In other words, the subject/object relation that appears to be put in place at precisely the point of the poem’s enunciation stresses that it is a relation of parts to parts: ‘all her parts’ to ‘her . . . each part’ (NA 190). I stress this because it seems the best evidence yet that Sidney may indeed have been working here toward a parody of the traditional model of Renaissance praise, one that, as Fineman argues, was essentially a poetics of the same: ‘praise points here when it points there, and so we grow accustomed to a praising self whose “I” and “me” depend upon their correspondence to a praiseworthy “thou” and “thee”’, the result of this being ‘a laudatory poetry of ideally mutual admiration’ (p. 7), in which all the virtues of the praised object (beauty, perfection, repleteness, and so forth)

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are, at bottom, a reflection of the praising subject. What happens, however, when the ‘I’ and ‘me’ are pointedly dismembered before they speak to a similarly dismembered ‘thou’ and ‘thee’? Can the speech that follows still be thought of as praise? In Fineman’s account, Shakespeare parodies the fundamentally ‘homosexual thematic’ that the great tradition of Renaissance panegyric bequeathed him, first by literalizing it in the Young Man sonnets, and then, in the Dark Lady sonnets, by introducing a love-object who is manifestly not ideal. Sidney does not do precisely this – for there is little suggestion that Philoclea is anything other than ideal – but there is a possibility that he may also be perverting the tradition of praise, albeit in a slightly different way. For, in the first place Sidney’s ruse of disguising the enamoured Pyrocles as Zelmane clearly creates the opportunity for numerous occasions on which statements of praise for the beloved object can be ‘homosexualized’; and, in the second place, the fact that he thereby creates a scenario of female as opposed to male homosexual desire creates a situation in which, while there still remains scope for the lover and beloved to remain ‘phallicized’ (as Amazon and goddess), they can, at the same time, also be ‘castrated’ (in parts). At least one of the things that Sidney’s poem invites us to do, therefore, is to ask – if the tradition of Renaissance praise did indeed imply that the subject and object of that praise were, effectively, the same – whether that need necessarily mean that they both also had to be ‘phallic’; and, by extension, whether the condition of being ‘phallic’ need be the sole criterion of praise. What Sidney’s praise of parts by parts seems to suggest is that it was not; for what his blazon could be seen to parade is (at least the possibility of ) a masochistically pleasurable scene of mutual castration in which the state of dismemberment, in subject and object alike, is a cause for celebration and praise: a fairly perverse situation for the traditionally masculine writing subject to find himself in. Characterizing the tradition of Renaissance epideixis, Fineman emphasizes that its key metaphor is that of sight: ‘the poet is a seer, a vates, who speaks a visionary speech’ (p. 11); subject and object mirror and reflect each other, their relation being a definitively specular one, and praise is the poetics of an idealizing eye/I or of the ‘speaking picture’ because such motifs are in turn illustrations of ‘a reflexive reflection the circularity of which defines the literariness of a traditional poetic ideal’ (p. 11). It is this ‘poetics of a unified and unifying eye’, he argues, that Shakespeare parodies, substituting for it, in the Dark Lady sonnets, a ‘poetics of a double tongue’ (p. 15). Although again in not precisely the same way, Sidney too, I suggest, could also be seen to pervert this idealizing specularity in his blazon. For

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Pyrocles’ eye – insofar as it is first motivated to fall in love with Philoclea by seeing her portrait in Kalander’s gallery (an explicit rendition of ut pictura poesis) – has already taken in the painting of Diana where it has been positioned, alternately, as that of a male voyeur (the absent Actaeon, outside the frame) and as that of a female ‘voyeuee’ (the tearful nymph): giving us more a poetics of a ‘double eye’ than a double tongue, perhaps, in which one eye is penetrating and dry, while the other is penetrated and wet. Of all the different forms in which Renaissance epideixis manifested itself, the blazon – with its detailed survey of the bodily surface of another – exemplified this visual poetic par excellence, the one form that was understood to mobilize the ‘male gaze’ more powerfully than any other. But, in taking on that form and in appropriating it for the purposes of his own narrative, Sidney seems to refract that gaze, and to offer instead a more oblique and squinting perspective. It was specifically the visual aspect of ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’ that seems to have been what most struck George Puttenham, since he chose to classify Sidney’s poem under the heading of Icon, that is to say, ‘resemblaunce by imagerie or pourtrait, alluding to the painters terme, who yeldeth to th’eye a visible representation of the thing he describes and painteth in his table’.46 Puttenham does not, however, pick up on the potentially distorted vision of Sidney’s blazon, or, if he does, then he does his best to correct it; for it seems to me that the poem can be seen to exemplify both the scenarios – correct and astigmatic, orthodox and perverse – that, in his own meditations on the ‘iconic’ nature of poetry, Sidney sets out in the Apology for Poetry: For I will not deny but that man’s wit may make Poesy, which should be eikastike, which some learned have defined, ‘figuring forth good things’, to be phantastike, which doth contrariwise infect the fancy with unworthy objects; as the painter, that should give to the eye either some excellent perspective, or some fine picture . . . may leave those, and please an ill-pleased eye with wanton shows of better hidden matters.47

This passage appears to organize itself around moralized oppositions the like of which have been rehearsed elsewhere in the Apology – as in the distinction, for example, between ‘our erected wit [that] maketh us know what perfection is’ and ‘our infected will [that] keepeth us from reaching unto it’ (p. 101) – but, as discussed in the previous chapter, the seriousness of the apologist’s propositions is destabilized from the outset, and the masculine writing subject’s ‘wit’ and ‘will’ have therefore been put in play from the beginning. In much the same way, I suggest, ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’ could be seen as equally double and could be read, therefore,

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as simultaneously eikastike, on the one hand – a fine ‘speaking picture’ that properly mobilizes, as it ‘should’, the ideal and idealizing eye/I of the traditionally phallic praising subject (so much Puttenham picked up on) – and as phantastike, on the other: a ‘wanton show’ that perversely pleases an altogether different eye (an ‘ill’ and ‘infected’ one) that, on this occasion, belongs to a quite alternative, castrated, indeed a positively dismembered subject (this much, perhaps for reasons of self-investment, Puttenham, like other readers of Sidney’s blazon, declined to see). In the blazon as in the Apology, moreover, the same issue is left hanging in the balance: in defending poetry or on commending ‘parts’, what (if anything in these manifestly doubled scenarios) is being singled out for praise? If this seems a little far-fetched, then one might consider once again the spot on which Sidney very carefully locates the blazon in the New Arcadia: the river Ladon. Elsewhere in his narrative, Sidney draws his geography from maps of Greece and Asia Minor by Ortelius and Mercator, but here he departs from his normal practice by selecting instead a purely literary locale, the banks of the Ladon being the place, of course, at which Ovid sets the story of Pan and Syrinx. In a scene already densely Ovidianized, then, we are invited to see the blasonneur as figuring not only Actaeon, Diana, and one of Diana’s nymphs, but also, as he sings away on the riverbank about a sexual object that still eludes his possession, Pan. Pan, however, carries a distinctly dual aspect. On the one hand he is the instigator, god, and patron of pastoral poetry, so that making ‘What tongue’ issue from the mouth of a figure who resembles him and locating that moment at the legendary birthplace of pastoral poetry might appear to have the effect of presenting the poem as the acme of that form and, indeed, as a synecdoche of the New Arcadia (insofar as the latter is seen to be a pastoral) as a whole. Both Sannazaro and Spenser used the figure of Pan to promote the productivity and effectiveness of the pastoral poet who transmuted a state of empty-handedness and loss into pure poetic gold; and they also signalled that pastoral was the classic staging-post of the male writing subject intent on advertising his long-term laureate ambitions. On the other hand, insofar as the New Arcadia’s pastoral aspect could also be seen to reflect its author’s distinct lack of such Virgilian ambitions – a refusal to revise his text ‘upwards’ and determination, rather, to stay within what was more properly juvenilia and to keep to the originally ‘trifling’ nature of the earlier text – then an identification with Pan and his productions may seem less promotional after all. Indeed, it might hint at still another Ovidian tale: for the choice of pastoral over epic could be thought to conjure up the story of the foolish King Midas who, in judging a singing contest between

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the two gods, opted for Pan over Apollo – a lapse in decorum and good taste for which the god of golden poetry awarded him a pair of ass’s ears. A similar choice seems to accompany the altered presentation of the blazon in the New Arcadia: for where, in the Old, Pyrocles did not actually sing the poem (it merely ‘came into his mind’ (OA 238) as a purely cerebral event, in keeping with the text’s status as a distinctively literary production, the latter further enhanced by its circulation among an admiring male coterie), in the revised text, by contrast, the blasonneur most definitely sings (and, indeed, plays the lute and beats the time), making it, as a result, a wholly oral production. If anyone is said to ‘write’ the poem in the New Arcadia then it is Philoclea (or, more accurately, her beauty) who inscribes it in the eyes of the blasonneur, and not the latter who, ‘but as an organ, did only lend utterance’ (NA 190). The decision to present the poem as the verbal outpouring of an unthought-on song rather than as finished, polished, aureate verse might again be seen to emulate King Midas’ choice of the lesser over a higher form and so to court the possibility of suffering his ignominious fate. Certainly, the only substantial change that Sidney made to the text of the blazon when he transferred it from the Old to the New Arcadia seems to move in this direction, for if the Old Arcadia version subordinates the inadequate tongue to the hyper-efficient pen in its opening and closing couplets (in the first, ‘What tongue . . .’, lines 1–2, OA 238, and in the second ‘No tongue can her perfections tell, / In whose each part all pens may dwell’, lines 145–46, OA 242), then the New version seems to reverse these priorities, for there the final couplet again repeats the first two lines but this time with what can only be regarded, in the circumstances, as a significant difference: ‘No tongue can her perfections tell, / In whose each part all tongues may dwell’ (lines 145–46, NA 195, my italics). The effect of these revisions is to present the blazon as a spontaneous and fleeting utterance rather than as high art that is inscribed and immortalized forever on the eternal scroll of fame. Seen in this light, furthermore – as a Panlike figure who sings merrily away on the riverbank rather than as a more sober Apollo who might have composed a ‘higher’ and more statedly literary piece – Sidney’s gender-ambiguous blasonneur may also call to mind another ventriloquized figure, a be-skirted blabbermouth who also promotes speech over writing, who addresses her audience as fellow Midases, and who exposes the self-defeating nature of all self-praise: Erasmus’ Folly. And it is here, perhaps, that the double vision of Sidney’s blazon might be seen to find its ultimate source; the poem’s wholesale querying of praise, and its ceaseless oscillation between the serious and the playful, the orthodox and the perverse, the wit and the will, the erect and the infected having

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no better model than in this, the shifty and negative irony of the serio ludere tradition.48 When it comes, finally, to the actual text of Sidney’s blazon itself, these pendulum shifts to and fro continue to swing unabated, for, in its form as well as its content, ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’ persists in playing out this dialectic between having and not having, between ‘mastery’ and dispossession, just as thoroughly as the narrative context in which it finds itself. There are a number of ways, for example, in which the poem alludes directly to the Marotic blazon – that most recent and spectacular efflorescence of the form – and, in doing so, it aligns itself (in the first instance, at any rate) with the cult of the masculine writing subject which, in its explicit address to a male coterie and in its exercise of male prowess at the expense of female ‘parts’, the French blason anatomique had so visibly engineered. The rhetorical question that forms the opening gambit of Sidney’s poem – who can express the perfections of a body ‘In whose each part all pens may dwell?’ (line 2, NA 190) – is highly suggestive of the literary tradition in which numerous male pens had already been busily exercised in dwelling on individual female body parts, some of those parts, indeed, proving particularly receptive and, in some collections, being occupied not by one but by two or even three of those pens all at the same time (in the 1543, 1550, 1554, and 1568–72 editions of the Blasons anatomiques, for instance, two separate poets wrote about the ‘Dent’, two about the ‘Pied’, two about the ‘Cul’, and three – the implications do not need to be spelled out – about the ‘Con’). While Sidney’s poem eschews some of the more crudely masculinist aspects of the blason tradition (decorously skirting round these last two ‘parts’), it nonetheless aligns itself with the latter’s more idealizing not to say Neo-platonic articulations in being sure, like them, to include – as the intangible, spiritual element that unites and animates what would otherwise be a mere collection of limbs – mention of the beloved’s ‘grace’ (line 135, NA 195). Moreover, in selecting to write his poem in octosyllabic rhyming couplets – a form which, with two trivial exceptions, he was to use nowhere else – Sidney was adopting the chosen metre of the blasonneurs (Marot’s inaugural blasons on the beautiful and the ugly breast were both composed in this form, and it was recognized as the standard by contemporary theorists of the genre), and, given the well-known attention that Sidney paid to verse-form, such a decision is unlikely to have been accidental.49 By signalling his allegiance to the French tradition in this way, furthermore, Sidney could be seen not only to be joining in the competition but also to be seeking to win it – to be asserting his own superiority over his

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fellows in the time-honoured fashion – for, at 146 lines, ‘What tongue’ is noticeably longer than the norm.50 In choosing to blazon neither one particular body part nor (as he had in Astrophil and Stella sonnet 9, for example) the features of the face alone but rather the entire body from head to toe, Sidney also implies a certain comprehensiveness in his own appropriation of the female form (not being content with merely parcelling it out, he lays a positively imperial claim to the whole), while at the same time implying no less an imperiousness in his appropriation of the blazon form (presenting his poem as if it were the sum total of all the other blasons anatomiques combined). In the French tradition, moreover, only one poet had ventured to blazon a complete (albeit itemized) body and to address a poem to the Corps as a whole – and if, as has been suggested, this poet, although anonymous, was none other than King Francis I – then Sidney’s gesture in following suit might, again, speak to the assertion of his speaker’s imperial, masculine prerogative.51 It is as if, while individual subjects might enjoy their own separate ‘parts’, the king alone had privileged access to the whole, rather as the king’s range of vision became the perspectival centrepoint in the design of court masques, with the result that only he was in a position to see the spectacle in its entirety. The king, besides, commanded the bodies of his subjects and embodied in his own person the ‘social plenum’ of which those subjects were, in being members of that society, no more than mere ‘parts’ themselves.52 On the other hand, however – as is now to be expected – not even so imperious an assertion of masculine authority is capable of withstanding the restless oscillations that Sidney’s poem sets in motion, and not even this poet-as-king (any more than the Apology’s poet-as-Creator) is able to assert his control or stabilize the balance for very long. Indeed, the very respect in which Sidney’s blazon might have been seen to parade the supremacy of the male poet’s prowess – its identification with the French tradition placing it within a scene of definitively homosocial exchange – could also be seen, in turn, to be what works to undermine those same pretensions. As noted already, ‘What tongue’ proved one of Sidney’s most popular poems, its transcription in numerous manuscript anthologies suggesting, at one level, that the blazon enjoyed a healthy afterlife as the aureate verse of a premier poet which perpetuated the homosocial bond in being circulated, shared, and re-appropriated by an admiring coterie of educated and literate men (the gentlemen readers who jotted the poem down in their pocket books – with a view, presumably, to applying it to their own mistresses, and/or to impressing their friends – were, after all, reproducing to the letter the scene inferred from the Old Arcadia in which Pyrocles, via the narrator, did exactly the same). On the other hand,

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plucked from its narrative context in this way, ‘What tongue’ becomes in these manuscript miscellanies a mere anthology-piece, no longer part of an integrated whole but a detached and free-floating textual ‘part’ as discrete and isolable as the female ‘parts’ it blazons. As such, what is more, even its own status as a poetic entity stands in danger of coming apart, for the gentlemen jotters who copied out the poem for themselves evidently felt free to borrow, move, reverse, change, or omit lines as they saw fit, treating Sidney’s poem not so much as a hallowed whole than as a collection of verses that might be disassembled, reorganized, and generally chopped about at will, and thereby submitting the blazon itself to its very own principle of fragmentation.53 As for the content of ‘What tongue’, there too the dialectic between the scattered and the gathered plays itself out with equal vigour, swinging alternately back and forth between a presence that is ‘there’ at one moment and ‘gone’ the next; and, as in the preceding discussions, it seems appropriate to begin with those aspects in which the poem appears, in the first instance, to uphold and re-consolidate the masculine writing subject, before turning to those that spectacularly deconstruct him. For there are many ways in which Sidney’s poem appears to conform fully to the masculinist positions of the traditional blazon, not the least of these being its assumption that the female body is an object of consumption among men. The poet clearly signals his homosocial credentials by addressing the blazon to a specifically masculine client`ele: the curls of his lady’s hair are said to hold ‘man’s thought’ (line 4, NA 190), for example, and it is the same captives who are directly addressed as ‘you’ two lines later; while her waist is said to deplete ‘Men’s lives’ (line 66, NA 192). The fact that the lady’s eyelids forbid ‘each bold attempt’ (line 14, NA 191) marks her out as a common object of men’s visual, verbal, and sexual assault; and when it comes to the description of her private parts, although the blazon passes politely over them (eschewing the more salacious opportunities for bawdy that were enthusiastically taken up by the French Blasons du con and du cul), this very omission implies that the female genitals represent a ‘gap’ that needs to be filled. Thus Philoclea’s mons veneris is ‘Justly entitled Cupid’s hill’ (line 78, NA 193) and, as the favoured location where that ‘boy’ (line 83) – indeed, ‘master’ (line 79) of love – ‘doth sport’ (line 83), it is clearly conceived of as a place that is vacant or empty unless inhabited by a man, in much the same way that her body as a whole is depicted as a residence or habitation (see ‘towers’, line 49; ‘bowers’, line 50; ‘nests’, line 54; and ‘inn’, line 139) in which men and their ‘pens . . .’ or ‘tongues may dwell’ (line 2, NA 190; line 148, NA 195). Sidney’s blazon also conforms to the critical commonplace

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that the blasonneur praised his lady with no other end in view than to display his own rhetorical powers, her disassembled and reconstituted body providing the platform on which he might erect a poetic structure or verbal monument capable of dazzling all eyes. Given that this is an environment in which it is the work of art (rather than the lady or her body) that is fetishized – that this is an aesthetic world in which, as one critic puts it, the blasonneur is an ‘artisan tyrannique’, and where art, artifice, and a specifically masculine poesis are the recognized objects of cult-worship – then it is only natural that the poet-maker should advertize his own skill by regularly holding up for comparison the supreme productions of other crafts.54 Sidney’s comparison of his beloved’s knees to a ‘cunning painter shadowing white’ (line 98, NA 193), for example, is entirely within this tradition, as is the analogy he draws between her neck and the ‘sumptuous towers / Which skill doth make in prince’s bowers’ (lines 49–50, NA 192), in each case celebrating the superiority of a golden world of art over a brazen world of nature and so of conforming wholly to type: ‘the blasonneur’s work is that of a homo faber, reducing the female body to strokes of the pen through the creation of a textual pointillism . . . The text functions as a descriptive catalogue; it imitates, and indeed becomes, a construction, one that reveals, through its mass of words, the hand of the poet-architect’.55 It is with the same ‘skill’ and ‘cunning’ that this master-craftsman comes up with one of the more ingenious metaphors in the blazon, comparing the lady’s shoulders to ‘square royal rooves, / Which leaded are, with silver skin’ (lines 114–15, NA 194: his imperial ambitions once again in evidence here, as these royal and princely buildings are clearly designed to accommodate a king). The quality productions of other poets, of course, are also held up for admiration, the poet aligning himself with a tradition of specifically maleauthored and male-appreciated erotic poetry by declaring his confraternity with the acknowledged master of the form – ‘never shall my song omit / Her thighs (for Ovid’s song more fit)’ (lines 87–88, NA 193) – his mockmodesty not failing to put both songs on equal footing.56 The poet similarly positions himself within the great tradition of poetic praise, in order (in the best tradition) to surpass it: thus, when he claims that his lady’s eyes ‘even praise doth stain’ (line 16, NA 191), he effectively conjures, dismisses, and exemplifies the epideictic tradition in half a line. As Fineman notes, such classic expressions of inexpressibility – ‘to what can one liken a nonpareil? How to praise what passes praise?’ (p. 4) – allow the praising poet to set off his own ingenuity and to draw attention back to his own rhetorical procedures, as a result of which his praise becomes ‘a showy showing speech’

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(p. 6), as much a praise of praise as of anything else. This becomes explicit, in fact, in two other panegyric poems (the first in ‘Sapphics’) that Pyrocles/Cleophila addresses to Philoclea in the First Eclogues of the Old Arcadia (and to which ‘What tongue’ may be alluding here), the first of which offers up ‘due praise of her praise’ (OA 82), and the second a ‘song of praise her praise to solemnize’ (OA 84).57 On both occasions it is the lady’s praise – the poet’s words, that is – rather than the lady herself that is being celebrated, just as, toward the end of ‘What tongue’, it is not the lady herself but rather the poet’s ‘high praise’ of her (line 141, NA 195) that is actually to be blazed across the heavens with ‘immortal fame’ (line 143). As the specific object of such praise, moreover, the topic of beauty exercises the poet’s rhetoricity unlike anything else, for, as Roland Barthes writes, beauty ‘does not describe itself. Like a god (and as empty), it can only say: I am what I am’. The discourse of beauty can ‘do no more than assert the perfection of each detail and refer “the remainder” to the code underlying all beauty: Art. In other words’, he goes on, ‘beauty cannot assert itself save in the form of a citation . . . thus beauty is referred to an infinity of codes: lovely as Venus? But Venus lovely as what?’58 As lovely as the artist makes her, or as lovely as the poet says she is: for if beauty’s tropes are those of tautology (‘beauty is beautiful’) or of simile (‘as beautiful as . . .’), then it becomes the artist’s job to say what the beautiful is and to insert his own words or images into the blank that the comparison provides. Without such fashionings or articulations beauty would be invisible, mute, for beauty is the product of poesis and not the other way round. In the case of Sidney’s blazon, the beauty that the poet apparently sees is in fact the beauty that he describes (which is not the same thing at all), so that, although the focus might appear to be upon the other – her beautiful body – the poem keeps drawing us back to its own obsessively self-referring and self-generating rhetorical surface: signifiers restlessly bounce off and onto themselves in the absence of any external or ‘objective’ signified. In his quest to find a vocabulary with which to describe his lady’s beauty, for example, Sidney’s blasonneur can find no better way than simply to repeat the comparatives and superlatives of words he has already used: thus Philoclea’s hair is ‘fine threads of finest gold’ (line 3, NA 190); her forehead is ‘whiter . . . Whiter . . . more white’ (lines 6–7, NA 191); her nose and chin are ‘pure ivory . . . No purer’ than her ears (lines 27–28); the tip of her ear ‘no jewel needs to wear’ because ‘The tip is jewel of the ear’ (lines 35–36, NA 191); her ribs are also ‘white . . . More white’ (lines 68–69, NA 192); the small of her leg is ‘a smallest small’ (line 103, NA 194) and also ‘More white than whitest’ bone (line 104); the ‘Graces’ impart to all her parts a ‘special grace’ (lines 134–35, NA 194–95);

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and her body as a whole is the ‘fair inn / Of fairer guests’ (lines 139–40, NA 195): in sum, Philoclea ‘doth even beauty beautify’ (line 137). The same almost obsessive move toward repetition recurs in the poet’s collapsing of signification into puns, as when he says that her ‘waist’ is so-called because ‘it doth waste / Men’s lives until it be embraced’ (lines 65–66, NA 192), or that he is taken ‘back unto her back’ (line 109, NA 194). What might look, however, like the emptiest kind of repetition – a radical paucity of the material at the poet’s command – could actually testify to the sheer force of his statement: his enunciation that the lady is ‘fine’, ‘white’, ‘graceful’, ‘fair’, ‘beautiful’, and so forth, is alone what makes her so and what provides the common ground for all further and future comparisons; it is his say-so and nothing else that declares what is ‘worthy beauty’s fame’ (line 59, NA 192). An entirely self-contained and self-referring object, the lady is the poet’s verbal icon par excellence, his idol, the stunning product of his pen; her beauty is what he announces the beautiful to be, no more no less: a circularity with which we are all too familiar and on which Sidney’s blazon seems to insist as its self-reflexivities and mini-tautologies eddy round and round within the larger structure of a poem that ends by repeating (almost) the same lines with which it began. Against all this, however, we have to set the fact that the body of the blasonneur has already been gender-ambiguated and fragmented into multiple parts from the beginning. The various elements that come together to sing the blazon are not, moreover, restricted to the passage in which the blazon is introduced, for they go on to make guest appearances within the poem itself. The divided body of the blasonneur – that mere ‘organ’ (NA 190) through which the song passes – does not re-constitute or re-consolidate itself in the course of the poem, that is to say, but continues, in the form of detached limbs or body parts, to appear even there: thus it is the poet’s ‘tongue’ (line 1, NA 190) that struggles to express the inexpressible, and ‘My tongue’ that tells what fancy sees (line 94, NA 193); it is her/his ‘eye’ (line 51, NA 192) that travels down Philoclea’s throat to gaze on her breasts, and her/his ‘wretched eye’ (line 138, NA 195) that is bewitched by her beauty; and it is her/his ‘knees’ (line 93, NA 193) that bend at the sight of her knees.59 In fact, the poem is awash with body parts, for it is not just the poet’s knees but ‘all knees’ that are said here to bow in awe, just as it is not only the poet’s eyes but the eyes – ‘Your eyes’ (line 32) – and, indeed, ‘the voice’ (line 33, NA 191), of the general reader as well. Nor can this general reader any longer be assumed to be male, for where the ‘you’ of line 6 specifically addressed ‘man’s thought’, that of lines 31–32 – ‘. . . if you gaze / Your eyes may tread a lover’s maze’ (NA 191) – is gender neutral, as is the ‘one’

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(line 67, NA 192) that shortly after gazes on Philoclea’s ribs. Statements that may, in a different context, have been taken as confident expressions of the masculine ‘I’ and his assured possession of the female and of the blazon form are necessarily compromised by the ambiguous gendering of Sidney’s blasonneur: thus the ‘I’ (line 49, NA 192) that contemplates the lady’s neck, for example, or the ‘I’ (line 84, NA 193) that is reluctant to leave her genitals, or the first person singular that lays claim to ‘my song’ (line 87, NA 193), ‘my muse’ (line 109, NA 194), ‘my woes’ (line 120, NA 194), and ‘my first love’ (line 122, NA 194) is as female as it is male, and belongs as much to Zelmane as it does to Pyrocles. The fact that it is, to this extent, a female ‘eye’ (line 51) that wanders down Philoclea’s chest ‘to espy / The lively clusters of her breasts’ (lines 52–53, NA 192) mobilizes the female gaze as efficiently as the more traditional blazon form mobilized the male one, especially given that, as a ‘trifling’ courtly romance, the Arcadia was primarily addressed to an audience not of male but of female eyes: ‘for severer eyes it is not’.60 The conventional ‘heterosexual’ reading of the blazon, in fact, once again proves incapable of withstanding the alternatively homosexual scenarios that Sidney’s decision to put the blazon in Zelmane’s mouth gives rise to, and, as before, pronouns provide the key: for toward the end of the blazon the speaker remarks, ‘Thus hath each part his beauty’s part’ (line 133, NA 194, my italics), as if this female body were actually made up of individual masculine limbs. The gender-ambiguity that attaches to Zelmane clearly attaches to Philoclea as well, and in the face of such pronominal confusion, the heterosexual reading breaks apart into a myriad perverse scenarios that include, as well as a female poet looking at female parts, a male poet looking at male ones. It is one of these parts, in fact, that is depicted as piping up and speaking on its own behalf at the beginning of the poem: ‘But that her forehead says, “In me / A whiter beauty you may see”’ (lines 5–6, NA 190–91): at this point it is not the poet who speaks as such but rather the lady’s eloquent forehead; so that what was presented, a moment ago, as the sheer power of masculine statement to declare what ‘whiteness’ or ‘beauty’ was turns out, on closer inspection, to be the poet ventriloquizing a rather talkative part of the lady’s anatomy. But whether that part is a ‘she’ or a ‘he’ remains open to question, as, of course, does the voice that is doing the ventriloquizing. As we shall see in the following chapter, there is a comparable moment in Ralegh’s Ocean to Cynthia where the masculine writing subject undergoes a similar fragmentation into multiple (and voluble) female speaking parts; and it is almost as if, in these wholesale dissolutions of that subject, the aim is to demonstrate its illusory function – its status as an imaginary

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construction – once and for all. Certainly, Sidney’s poem seems to look ahead to the collapse of that subject – to the dissolution of the poet-maker, of that proud artist figure – that Barthes saw as being ultimately what the blazon form enacted. For while ‘the blazon expresses the belief that a complete inventory can reproduce a total body’, he argues, ‘as if the extremity of enumeration could devise a new category, that of totality’ (p. 114), it also exposes the risibility of such a project and, in the end, the unrecuperable emptiness of words: once reassembled, in order to utter itself, the total body must revert to the dust of words, to the listing of details, to a monotonous inventory of parts, to crumbling: language undoes the body, returns it to the fetish. This return is coded under the term blazon. (p. 113)

The dream of totality is the dream of repleteness, the dream of metaphysics, the dream of the signified at the end of the chain of signifiers, the dream of the body behind the striptease or of the phallus beneath the skirts: it is the promised end, the promised land ‘glimpsed at the end of enumeration’ (p. 114) but never arrived at, never reached. In Sidney’s case, the fact that his blazon makes such a spectacular bid for totality (by comparison, as we have seen, with contemporary articulations of the form) while it is, at the same time, put into the mouth (not to mention other parts) of a spectacularly ‘castrated’ and dismembered blasonneur, seems to exemplify this dynamic with particular neatness. And if, as Fineman suggests, the praise-relation of traditional Renaissance epideixis habitually faced one ‘whole’ self off against another – each as perfect, beautiful, and ideal as the other – then the fact Sidney is giving us here a blazon of parts by parts would seem to support the suggestion that, like Shakespeare in the Sonnets, he too is setting out to parody that supposedly ‘full’ self and radically to interrogate its claims to repleteness, substance, and power. For when this blasonneur looks into the mirror of self-praise what she/he sees is not a mirage but the truth, not the ‘full’ or ‘whole’ self but a corps morcel´e, a body that is fragmented and cut up, that is in bits and pieces, and that manifestly does not have a phallus. Or rather, to put it more accurately, what the poet and reader see, with their now ‘double’ eye, is an image of that ideal self – of that ‘statue in which man projects himself’ – that is now distorted and refracted to the point of being irrevocable and unrecognizable.61 This fragmented body thus has much to tell the masculine writing subject about himself, and it seems fitting, therefore, to end by looking at what one particular part – perhaps the most appropriate one – might ultimately have to say to him:

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At one level, the image of the locked mouth is, of course, entirely conventional – the double rampart of the teeth being, for babblers and speakers of folly, the last point of restraint – and it summons here a whole homiletic tradition that routinely contrasted the ideal, circumspect tongue with the vitia linguae: a panoply of verbal excesses and vices that included loquacity, vainglory, swearing, lying, backbiting, and idle talk.62 Equally conventional is the isomorphic relation that is implied, firstly, between these parts that ‘never part’ – this mouth, with its two ‘lips’ firmly closed – and the genitals of the chaste female body to which it belongs; and, secondly, between the contrastingly active tongue of the speaker (energetically engaged in praising this mouth) and the membre virile with which he would penetrate that body. The image would seem, that is, to support the conventional, ‘heterosexual’ reading of the blazon; and, certainly, at a comparable point in the Old Arcadia, it is the closed lips of the sleeping Pamela – under which were her teeth, ‘those armed ranks, all armed in most pure white, and keeping the most precise order of military discipline’ (OA 201) – that directly stir up Musidorus’ desperate lust and make him attempt to rape her. When this otherwise conventional image occurs in the New Arcadia, however, and within the context of Zelmane’s blazon of Philoclea, any such ‘heteronormative’ reading is predictably destabilized, for what is ‘there’ one moment – an aroused prince, a male body, a penetrative organ – is ‘gone’ the next, as an apparition, a mere inference, a cultural construction. As the poet’s wagging tongue sings long and loud of Philoclea’s still and silent one, it does not so much masculinize or re-phallicize the blasonneur as ironize her/him: for the hyperactive organ that praises a quiet tongue ‘Whence never word in vain did flow’ necessarily condemns itself as foolish and its own productions as correspondingly ‘vain’. So long as silence is golden this is panegyric’s weak point: the point where epideixis undoes itself, where any praise must end up being a praise of folly, and where the greatest honour

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that the writing subject could pay its praiseworthy object would be an awed and imitative silence.

NOTES 1. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 7, 42. 2. ‘What does it mean?’ asks Stephen Orgel, ‘That Hercules is never more valiant than when he performs the tasks of Omphale? . . . Or . . . [that] Hercules will never more be valiant? The emblem embodies the traditional moral ambivalence of the Herculean hero’, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 79– 80. 3. Kathryn Schwarz, Tough Love: Amazon Encounters in the English Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 40, 185, 186. Richard A. Levin is similarly forthright in ‘What? How? Female–Female Desire in Sidney’s New Arcadia’, C 39 (1997): 463–79, commenting that ‘we are to think of this sexually charged incident as involving two women, not a woman and a man disguised as a woman’, p. 472. 4. ‘intensely conventional’, Schwarz, Tough Love, p. 192; ‘the most conventional of conventions’, Nancy J. Vickers, ‘Members Only: Marot’s Anatomical Blazons’, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 3–21, esp. p. 5. 5. Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 201; Shakespeare’s sonnet 106, from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore-Evans et al., 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1997). 6. Mikhail Bakhtin, for example, uses the words ‘ambivalent’ and ‘ambivalence’ constantly in his discussion of the blazon in Rabelais and His World, trans. H´el`ene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968). See also Julia Kristeva, ‘The Bounded Text’, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), pp. 36–63. 7. Astrophil and Stella, v, lines 17–18. 8. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 427. 9. Nancy J. Vickers, ‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme’, CI 8 (1981): 265–79, esp. p. 272. 10. For the fullest and most accurate account of the Marotic blazon and its complicated publication history, see Alison Saunders, The Sixteenth-Century Blason Po´etique (Bern: Peter Lang, 1981). 11. See, for example, Nancy J. Vickers, ‘“The blazon of sweet beauty’s best”: Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 95–115; and Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), chapter 7.

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12. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 68. 13. Nancy J. Vickers, ‘The Body Re-membered: Petrarchan Lyric and the Strategies of Description’, in Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1982), p. 102. 14. See also Leonard Barkan, ‘Diana and Actaeon: The Myth as Synthesis’, ELR 10 (1980): 317–59; and Carla Freccero, ‘Ovidian Subjectivities in Early Modern Lyric: Identification and Desire in Petrarch and Louise Lab´e’, in Ovid and the Renaissance Body, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 21–37. 15. John Freccero, ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics’, in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 20–32, esp. p. 29. 16. Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 93. 17. Marguerite Waller, ‘Historicism Historicized: Translating Petrarch and Derrida’, in Historical Criticism and The Challenge of Theory, ed. Janet Levarie Smarr (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp. 183–211, esp. pp. 197, 203. 18. Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 60, 75–76. 19. If the first set of readings might be thought to correspond to what Roland Barthes, in his own radical meditation on the blazon form in S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), terms the ‘readerly’ text – that is, one that is bound to a ‘classical metaphysics’ (p. 76), that develops a cult of art and the artist, of the master and the ‘masterpiece’ (p. 115), that sees literature as ‘replete’ (p. 200) because, there, ‘meaning recuperates everything’ (p. 201), and that sees criticism as the ‘mastery of meaning’ (p. 174) – then these revisionist readings of Petrarch and the blazon form might, by contrast, be considered as showing a greater affinity to the ‘writerly’ text: the ‘text’, that is, which ‘demolishes any criticism’ because it is plural, open, and ‘novelistic’ (p. 5): ‘this form is not unitary, architectonic, finite: it is the fragment, the shards, the broken or obliterated network – all movements and inflections of a vast “dissolve”, which permits both overlapping and loss of messages’ (p. 20). I shall return to Barthes later on. 20. Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body, pp. 23, 93. 21. Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 20. 22. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 17, quoting from sonnet 105. See also his formulation p. 256: ‘it is as though homosexuality were the secret truth of all ideal and idealizing desire from Dante onwards’. 23. Ronald Levao, Renaissance Minds and Their Fictions: Cusanus, Sidney, Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 216, 220.

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24. John Carey, ‘Structure and Rhetoric in Sidney’s Arcadia’, in Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed. Dennis Kay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 245–64, esp. pp. 259, 260. 25. Lines 1–6, OA 238. When quoting ‘What tongue’ hereafter, I shall use sequential line numbers that refer to the poem as a whole, and in each case give the page reference for the citation, from OA or NA where appropriate; I will not use the page-specific lineation given by Robertson (for OA) or Skretkowicz (for NA). 26. ‘Rude in love, and raw’ from Hero and Leander, Book 2, line 61, in The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn, 1981). 27. The phallic associations of the opening lines have been especially noted by Dorothy Jones, ‘Sidney’s Erotic Pen: An Interpretation of one of the Arcadia poems’, JEGP 73 (1974): 32–47; ‘in very deed’, from Clare Kinney, ‘The Masks of Love: Desire and Metamorphosis in Sidney’s New Arcadia’, C 33 (1991): 461–90, esp. p. 467 (referring here to OA). 28. Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Exhibiting Class and Displaying the Body in Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia’, SEL 37 (1997): 55–72, esp. p. 65. 29. Jones, ‘Sidney’s Erotic Pen’, p. 47; Edward Berry, The Making of Sir Philip Sidney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), p. 85. 30. Schwarz, Tough Love, p. 181. 31. If Philoclea eventually readjusts to Pyrocles’ male identity, Schwarz notes, then ‘the narrative does not’, Tough Love, p. 201, since it perpetuates the speech-act that has designated Cleophila as ‘she’ from her first appearance (see OA 27 for the narrator’s rationale of this), suggesting, in the critic’s mind, that it is much ‘easier to invent an Amazon than to make one disappear’, p. 182. 32. As a neat example of this, note the slip that Berry inadvertently makes when he describes the sex scene in the Old Arcadia as consummating the ‘love between Pyrocles and Cleophila [sic]’, The Making, p. 85. 33. Berry, The Making, p. 98. 34. See Louis A. Montrose, ‘The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’, in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Parker and Quint, pp. 303–40; and ‘“Eliza, Queene of shepheardes”, and the Pastoral of Power’, in Renaissance Historicism, ed. Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. Collins (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), pp. 34–63. 35. Berry, The Making, p. 86. See also Ringler, ed., Poems, p. 410, who notes that ‘Sidney worked over this poem more carefully than he did any of his other pieces’, internal evidence suggesting that ‘he added to or revised it on at least four different occasions’. Quite what motivated what Berry calls Sidney’s ‘obvious pleasure in the song’, p. 86, remains, of course, an open question. 36. See John J. O’Connor, Amadis de Gaule and its influence on Elizabethan Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1970). 37. Winifred Schleiner, ‘Male Cross-Dressing and Transvestism in Renaissance Romances’, SCJ 19 (1988): 605–19, esp. p. 611, citing Robert J. Stoller, Sex and Gender (New York: Science House, 1968), p. 180.

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38. Elizabeth Dipple, ‘Metamorphosis in Sidney’s Arcadias’, PQ 50 (1971): 47–62, esp. p. 57. 39. See Kinney, ‘Masks of Love’, pp. 463–68; and Wall, Imprint of Gender, pp. 212– 14, both of whom explicitly model their reading of Sidney’s blazon on Vickers. 40. John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935), p. 13. 41. Levin, ‘What? How?’, p. 472; Schwarz, Tough Love, p. 185 (although the latter is referring to OA). 42. Lamb, ‘Exhibiting Class’, p. 64; Kinney, ‘Masks of Love’, p. 463; Wall, Imprint of Gender, p. 213. Valerie Traub similarly plays down the potential for lesbianism that Zelmane’s relation with Philoclea creates by referring to her as ‘in actuality, the crossdressed male knight Pyrocles’, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 286. For that reason, perhaps, she makes no mention of the blazon or of the bathing scene – a surprising omission in a book about Renaissance literary lesbianism. I myself, of course, suggested in the preceding paragraph that Zelmane was ‘really’ Pyrocles, though only for the purposes of the argument. 43. Peter Stallybrass, ‘Transvestism and the “Body Beneath”: Speculating on the Boy Actor’, in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 64–83, esp. pp. 77, 72, 70. 44. Kinney, ‘Masks of Love’, pp. 464–65. 45. For a similarly ‘perverse’ rendering of the Actaeon story, see Gaveston’s fantasy of a masque in which a boy playing Actaeon is torn apart by another boy playing Diana: ‘Sometime a lovelie boye in Dians shape . . . Shall bathe him in a spring, and there hard by, / One like Actaeon peeping through the grove, / Shall by the angrie goddesse be transformde, / And running in the likenes of an Hart / By yelping hounds puld downe, and seeme to die’ (Edward II, I.i.61, 66–70); ‘Such things as these best please his majestie’ (line 71), Gaveston goes on, perhaps because this ‘homosexualized’ version of the story allows for the masochistic enactment of a scene of castration: one that Sidney’s scene could also be argued to pull off here. 46. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. G. D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 243. 47. An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), p. 125. 48. See also Barkan, ‘Diana’, pp. 349–59, for whom the sublime aspects of the Actaeon myth find their obverse in the grotesque bathos of the figure of Actaeon-turned-fool: the be-horned Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the ass-headed Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream being the Shakespearean exempla he discusses. Barkan also discusses the humanist ironies that the figure of the wise fool encapsulates, ibid., p. 359 n.65. 49. Sidney’s only other uses of this form are in the eight-line eclogue ‘We love, and have our loves rewarded’ (OA 57–58) and in the similarly brief epitaph to Argalus and Parthenia, ‘His being was in her alone’ (NA 399–400).

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50. Marot’s original blazon of the beautiful breast, and Sc`eve’s winning poem on the eyebrow were both a little over thirty lines, longer contributions to the genre extending to a little over eighty or ninety lines. 51. Vickers, ‘Members Only’, p. 4. 52. ‘With a clarity now hard to recapture’, notes Francis Barker of the sixteenthcentury understanding of the social hierarchy and structure, ‘the social plenum is the body of the king and membership of this anatomy is the deep structural form of all being in the secular realm’, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 31. 53. BM MS Sloane 1925, for example, transcribes lines 35–36, 95–96, 125–26, 123– 24, 73–76, 65–66, 37–38, and 21–22 only and in that order; BM MS Add.27406 contains the first four lines only; and BM MS Egerton 2421 the last four lines only, written upside down (although leaves that may have contained preceding lines have been torn out): see Ringler, ed., pp. 557, 555. 54. Albert-Marie Schmidt, Po`etes du XVIe si`ecle (Paris: Editions de la Pl´eiade, 1964), p. 293. 55. Lawrence D. Kritzman, The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 97. On the blasonneurs’ cult of a specifically masculine poesis, see also Jeffrey Persels, ‘Masculine Rhetoric and the French Blason anatomique’, in High Anxiety: Masculinity in Crisis in Early Modern France, ed. Kathleen P. Long (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2002), pp. 19–35. 56. Alluding to Ovid, Amores I.v.22 (‘How large a legge, and what a lustie thigh’, in Marlowe’s translation). 57. Sidney, of course, removed the Eclogues from the New Arcadia, although they were reinstated in later published versions of the romance: the first of these two poems appeared in both the 1590 and in the 1593 ‘composite’ Arcadia; the second only in the latter. 58. Barthes, S/Z, pp. 33–34. 59. Compare the Blason de la Cuisse by Jacques le Lieur (in the 1536–7 edition and in all subsequent sixteenth-century editions of the Blasons anatomiques) in which the blazoned thigh is said to move the admirer’s eye, breast, mouth, and hand, and ultimately to make all other thighs want to run towards it. Vickers, notes the way the subject/object division is ‘extremely slippery in this text’, ‘Members Only’, p. 11. 60. From Sidney’s dedicatory letter addressed to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, NA 506. 61. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977), p. 2. 62. See Mark D. Johnston, ‘The Treatment of Speech in Medieval Ethical and Courtesy Literature’, Rh 4 (1986): 21–46.

chap t e r 4

Abjection and melancholia in The Ocean to Cynthia

Awkward and egregious, Ralegh’s poem sits oddly within the canon, a troubling anomaly that confounds certainties, refuses to conform to type or expectation, and stubbornly fails to answer the questions that it raises. Apart from the authorship of the single holograph manuscript – the one thing that is not in doubt – there is virtually nothing else about the poem that commands universal assent. What is this poem, heavy with marginal and interlinear markings that is yet written in Ralegh’s ‘best’ hand: a rough draft or presentation copy, a discarded fragment or an ostentatious case of the mannerist non-finito?1 Are its notorious syntactical obscurities the sign of work in progress, dashed off in the heat of the moment, or the products of a masterly ambiguity designed with every intention of making it look that way?2 The title – ‘The 21th and laste booke of the Ocean to Scinthia’ – obscures more than it clarifies: for, although the water/moon motif was long a part of Sir Walter’s personalized iconography with Elizabeth, it is, as many critics complain, neither developed nor stabilized within the poem and, with its abrupt transitions from subject to object, positive to negative, is characterized only (if not inappropriately) by its fickleness and fluid mutability.3 The trompe l’œil numbering of the title mutely poses the existence, fictional or otherwise, of a preceding twenty books (or ten or five, depending on how the ambiguous numeral is read), inviting speculation about the relation of part to whole without ever satisfying it.4 While many, perhaps most, place the poem around the crisis of 1592 when Ralegh was thrown into the Tower for having secretly married Elizabeth Throckmorton, a gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber, the narrative that reads the poem as a simple statement of atonement and redress, however compelling, is not (as we shall see) unmotivated, and equally cogent arguments have been mounted for dating the poem earlier or later, in some cases even after 1603.5 The truth is there is no external evidence for dating the poem accurately at all. Categorizing it as an elegiac lament, C. S. Lewis found Cynthia, like Gray’s Elegy, ‘one of those few poems in which the decasyllabic quatrain 136

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is the right form’; but, although earlier editors followed suit by dividing the poem into four-line stanzas as its pentameter cross-rhyme would seem to invite, its multiple metrical irregularities and missing or extra lines militate against any confidence in assigning the poem a given form or genre.6 These irregularities aside, Cynthia takes the same form as Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (1595), the poem in which Spenser memorialized his meeting with Ralegh in Ireland in 1589 and made one of several mentions throughout his work to a Raleghan ‘Cynthia’ poem, here described as ‘all a lamentable lay, / Of great unkindnesse, and of usage hard, / Of Cynthia the Ladie of the sea, / Which from her presence faultlesse him debard’ (lines 164–67).7 But, although Spenser’s sentimentalized picture of harmonious poetic reciprocity (‘He pip’d, I sung; and when he sung, I piped’, line 76) mystifies precisely who gave inspiration to or imitated whom, either way Ralegh’s poem cannot be said to mirror back the pastoral fiction of Spenser’s poem in any straightforward way. While it certainly contains pastoral elements – not least in the framing sequence that begins with the speaker mourning ‘sheapherds cumpanye’ (line 29) and ends with him releasing his flocks and returning home to his heart, a derelict sheepfold – too many other generic indicators intrude (epic similes, dramatic devices, narrative or historical modes) to warrant any conclusive classification. Generic confusion, indeed, seems somewhat endemic: although Spenser’s various testimonies to a ‘Cynthia’ poem – now elegy (‘lamentable lay’), now eulogy (‘thy faire Cinthias praises’) – seem sufficiently contradictory to lead some to conclude that they cannot refer to the same poem, or at least not to the poem as we have it, the latter contains contradictory elements enough not to rule out the possibility that Spenser was merely registering, in his scattered remarks, a response to the poem’s generic oddity.8 The responses of modern critics record a similar uncertainty as they variously describe Cynthia as a ‘fevered elegy’, a ‘dark’ or ‘winter pastoral’, a ‘collage of incomplete sonnets’, resorting finally (and, perhaps, rather defeatedly) to a compromise statement of what Ralegh’s poem can at least safely be said to be not: ‘Cynthia is not ultimately . . . like any conventional poem of the period’, there is ‘nothing like it elsewhere in Elizabethan poetry’, and what it offers is something profoundly ‘alien to the Tudor aesthetic’.9 There is a sense, sometimes voiced explicitly, that this strange and difficult poem is somehow not sufficiently ‘manly’, not in keeping with the dashing figure Ralegh cut as national hero and character extraordinaire – a tension similar to that felt between Sidney’s posthumous reputation as Protestant legend (with all its ideals of manly honour and martial prowess) and the comparative ‘frivolousness’ of his literary productions, except that,

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in Ralegh’s case, the contrast between his meagre poetic output and the aggressive virility of his life-long self-fashionings (the daring young soldier in Ireland, the Captain of the Queen’s Guard, the piratical adventurer, the colonizer and intrepid explorer overseas), quite apart from his Republican apotheosis as a martyr to Stuart despotism, is only the more marked.10 Indeed, truncated and fragmentary, Cynthia might stand as a synecdoche for what his editors have long pointed to as the larger ‘reckoning with loss’ that haunts the Ralegh canon, the ‘curious impermanence’ that appears to have affected everything he did; for, while Ralegh was listed among those whose refusal or failure to circulate, disseminate, or one way or another make ‘publicke’ their ‘preserued dainties’ was cause for complaint from the beginning, a particular (almost pointed) carelessness toward his own poetry and the resulting paucity of his literary ‘remains’ has repeatedly struck scholars as exceeding that of even the most casual of occasional court versifiers.11 This sense of shortfall – a perceived gap between what might have been expected of a great man and the rather slim reality – has over the centuries given rise to what Ralegh’s most recent editor Michael Rudick calls a ‘felt need’, a ‘powerful desire’ on the part of Ralegh scholars to compensate, the result being various editorial strategies that aimed to bulk out the canon to a size and solidity felt to be commensurate with a hero’s status or, in the case of Cynthia, to extrapolate from the one book that did ‘survive’ a magnum opus of up to 15,000 lines that would match in ambition and scope the great national epic on which Ralegh bestowed his patronage: The Faerie Queene.12 Even when it is assumed (as is now generally the case) that no ‘lost’ books ever existed, Cynthia still falls prey to the recuperating strategies that have been touched on elsewhere in this book, the poem being presented (once placed within the instrumental Petrarchanism peculiar to the Elizabethan court) as a model of pragmatic, even ‘utilitarian poetics’ whose aim was nothing less than to promote and advance the interests of the masculine writing subject and to affirm his agency and power – in this case, stating it baldly, to restore Ralegh to the position he had enjoyed as Elizabeth’s favourite.13 Since the efficacy of the bid depended on the conviction of the performance, then, by means of a trope with which we are becoming familiar, no posture of surrender could be too low, making Ralegh’s poem – noted for the extremity of its self-abasement – in Louis Montrose’s estimation, ‘perhaps the most remarkable example’ of calculated reversals of this kind.14 Ralegh was certainly no stranger to this dialectic. It was in the Tower in 1592 that he staged one his most histrionic performances, the sight of the Queen’s barge from his prison window prompting from him a consciously

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literary display of extreme love mania – ranting, raging, struggling with his gaoler, and the like – such that, as his kinsman and fellow poet Sir Arthur Gorges carefully put it in a letter to Robert Cecil, ‘I feare S:r W. Rawly; wyll shortely growe [to be] Orlando furioso; If the bryght Angelyca perseuer agaynst [hyme] a l[y]tt[le] lon[ger]’, adding the all-important rider: ‘I could wyshe hyr Ma:tie knewe’.15 The logic of this little incident is all too clear: the more excessive the performance the more powerful its impact and the greater its chances of success in getting through to Elizabeth if not mollifying her and bringing her round. Nevertheless, there is something about Cynthia that is resistant to such neat restitutions, some quality peculiar to the poem itself – a mood of dejection so intense, a sense of loss so irrecuperable or of a hopelessness so unrelieved – as to seem, in the eyes of many readers, somehow beyond redemption; as if the syntax of the poem were deemed to be too broken, its presentation too chaotic, sketchy, and unrevised, to allow even for it to be passed off as a dazzling literary simulation of mental collapse, so rescuing the competence of the writing subject that way.16 The poem’s odd and disquieting negation – indeed, its positive dereliction – of the masculine writing subject has elicited different explanations but, whatever the reasons adduced, there remains a sense that the dialectic which might, in different circumstances, have been called upon to rehabilitate the abject male is in this particular case strangely redundant not to say inoperable. Thus for some Cynthia stages the emptiness constitutive of all human language and desire, but where it could be argued that words come forth to compensate for if not to ‘master’ an originary loss, Ralegh’s poem refuses any such recovery and parades only ‘the inevitability of frustrated desire and linguistic failure’.17 For others the poem records the unsettling experience of complete powerlessness in the face of Tudor absolutism, but where in happier times the Petrarchan dialectic might have allowed the courtier-poet to reverse these roles, by making Elizabeth the ‘subject’ of his text, such minimal recuperations counted for nothing when pitched against the brute reality of a state power of and to which the prisoner languishing in the Tower was all too visibly subject. With no amount of literary posturing capable of reversing Elizabeth’s abrupt termination of the Petrarchan game, Ralegh’s poem could be nothing but inert and ineffectual, its only recourse the interminable repetition of its own ‘gestures of impotence’.18 In Cynthia, it seems, this impotence is for once not to be redeemed, the masculine writing subject not to be restored to power; for, in whatever different ways, these various critical readings register a response to what is essentially the same problem, namely that there is something about this poem (be it internal or external to the text) that is determined

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to escape any optimistic dialectization, something not to be so contained, a degree of negativity that defies synthesization, a surplus or residue that somehow leaks out from or spills over even the most ambitious of critical totalizations. One result of this is the sense of struggle – of the difficulty in arriving at any interpretation of Cynthia deemed satisfactory – that numerous readers of the poem have left on record: frustration, disappointment, disorientation, bewilderment, bafflement, and torment being just a few of the reactions which that experience has been said to evoke.19 Yet it is precisely here, where one writing subject confronts another and finds the encounter in truth a little testing, that our interest quickens: for if the habitual recuperation of the abject male carried with it a certain (if unconscious) self-investment and identification on the critic’s part, then any acknowledgement of failure in this regard, or of dissatisfaction at the very least – a concession that this difficult text is not ultimately to be mastered, ‘explicated’, contained or controlled – is capable of telling us as much about the poem as it is about ourselves. Since Burckhardt, investigations into the Renaissance subject have been motivated by the desire for self-discovery – by a quest for the origins of a recognizably ‘modern’ self – and it was largely optimistic nineteenth-century conceptions of the latter that led to flattering portraits of the Renaissance ‘individual’ as an omnicompetent uomo universale. More recent investigations, however, find the early modern subject reflecting back a fissured, divided, and radically de-centred self; and, just as Joel Fineman locates in Shakespeare’s Sonnets the inauguration of an unmistakably modern subjectivity, so critics seem to find in the dark glass of Ralegh’s poetry a similarly broken, depleted vision of themselves. Certainly, it has long been a critical commonplace to hail Ralegh as a ‘modern’ and Cynthia as a Wasteland avant la lettre.20 Stephen Greenblatt was truer than perhaps he knew when, describing how he had been struck as a young graduate student by the ‘uncanny modernity’ of Ralegh’s poetry, he put his finger on the element – at once unsettling, foreign, unheimlich yet strangely familiar – that continues to haunt both that poetry and readings of it.21 The ruffled, discomfited, sometimes frankly pained reception with which the poem has met is not, therefore, a problem to be apologised for or a difficulty to be explained away so much as a starting point, a critical symptomatology that provides – in the very experience of being at a loss, of having scholarly certainties confounded, of finding normal generic classifications wanting – the clearest indication yet as to what the poem’s project is: to stage the dissolution of the writing subject. Responses to Cynthia – whose collective frustration might amount to a kind of critical despondency – could

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then be taken not as an experience of failure or defeat but as a hint that the poem is above all else an exercise in melancholy: rather as theorists of melancholia (classically afflicted by the condition of which they write precisely because of the tendency of their material to sprawl out of control and to swamp even the most ambitious of taxonomies) end up by telling us more rather than less about the topic in hand.22 Likewise, the struggle critics have in defining this seemingly shapeless, unformed, still embryonic bundle of lines – what one calls ‘a poem, or at least a lump of poetry, madre d’oro’ – need not be taken as a sign of weakness or incapacity so much as a clue that the poem is nothing less than an essay in abjection.23 Melancholia and abjection prove particularly suggestive when related to Ralegh’s poem, first because the formula of something not lost (the definition, however reductively put, of melancholia) so aptly seems to fit this poem in which Cynthia – although mourned as absent, gone, the sun set, the moon no longer in orbit – is, in the poem’s excessive, obsessive, and lingering lament so patently not parted with; and second because the formula of something not detached or separated (the definition, again reductively put, of abjection) seems to correspond so well to a poem that disconcertingly merges and blurs any neat boundaries the reader might have hoped for, and stages, within a territory ambiguous and still unmarked, an ongoing crisis of differentiation. This diagnosis is not to brand Ralegh’s poem or readings of it as pathological or sick. ‘Healthy’ mourning, where object-loss is fully achieved and the freed ego allowed to move on to other objects is not – any more than the ‘clean and proper’ subject whose ego boundaries are pristine and intact – presented here as a ‘norm’ or even as a realizable possibility (melancholia and abjection being the rule), so much as hypothetical constructs which, since Freud, theorists have proposed in their attempts to map out an aetiology of the subject. Where success as a speaking being is predicated on a primary loss, on agreeing to lose an object that is, in the final analysis, the mother, where the ability to handle if not to ‘master’ signs is made conditional on that momentous renunciation which – in ushering the subject into the symbolic – is the origin of all future sublimations, the foundation of all culture, civilization, science and art, then any disturbance in that inaugural process, any refusals or disavowals of that loss, any resistances to or reluctances in separating from the mother/child dyad will manifest themselves in disturbances in the subject’s speech. Although the complete mastery of signs – what ‘linguistics describes in terms of “competence” and “performance”’, as Julia Kristeva puts it – is no more than a theoretical postulate, every utterance to some extent carrying in its dynamic, its

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rhythms, its pressure to speak, vestiges of that presymbolic fusional state not quite lost, nevertheless, communicability provides an at least notional benchmark from which to gauge any deviations, even if it is these that, in their subtle modulations, and measurable only in degrees, in turn define that from which they depart.24 Critics need not then claim any particular model of efficiency for themselves in order to mark departures from a minimally accepted level of sense-making, and it is precisely such departures that Ralegh’s poem manifests in such abundance, its disruptions of the symbolic order (even if not described as such) being the one thing on which everyone is agreed. Reading after reading comments on the wildness and anarchy of the poem’s syntax, ‘chaotic’, ‘complex’, ‘strained’, ‘broken’, ‘confusing’, ‘ambiguous’, ‘disjointed’, and ‘deranged’ being only a few of the words used to describe it.25 Philip Edwards speaks for many when he calls the poem an ‘elliptical jumble’ in which ‘sentences are left hanging in the air, verbs without subjects, subjects without verbs, relative clauses with no possible antecedents’.26 An affront to common logic and grammaticality, Cynthia ‘mocks the attempts of commentators to explicate it’ and ‘defeats readers in search of syntactical clarity and regularity’.27 Which is not to say that the poem is meaningless, a merely random collection of signs: its power to communicate is remarkably effective at times. The symbolic is not abolished: indeed, it is strictly necessary, but only as the grid or mesh through which any stretchings, crumplings, or puncturings of meaning can be registered to a more or less marked degree – confusing shifts in argument or changes of subject, abrupt lurches from image to discontinuous image, great crescendos that end in silence or non sequitur. The symbolic is the vehicle of its own disruption, the only medium through which ‘semiotic’ energies and pulses can vibrate and be heard even as they threaten to overflow or engulf it. Commenting on the early passage (lines 73–103) in which the poet mobilizes three extended similes (the still-warm corpse, the feeble green of winter growth, the dying momentum of a disused water-wheel) in order to compare his own writing, as it ebbs away, growing ever more faint, to the hopeless task of trying to finish by nightfall a universal history begun only at twilight – a single sentence sustained over thirty lines by the same falling, rolling cadence that, in relentlessly driving the phrases on and on, enacts the very hopelessness of closure it describes – Jane Hedley comments: ‘these are the rhythms of a self-focused consciousness, disengaged from practical verbal behaviour – the delivery of a message, the prosecution of an argument. The sentence itself comments on the distance between discourse that acquiesces in the achronic, obsessively cyclical rhythm of the inner life and the sort of discourse that would be needed

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to produce “the story of all ages past”’ (line 102).28 Here, as in so many of the poem’s rambling utterances, it is rhythm not sense that dictates the sentence’s surge and flow, the way the phrases pile up, sink down, change course mid-stream. Sense is not absent but it is subordinated, ‘pragmatic’ speech – speech that would posit, explain, persuade – yielding to rhythmic drives that, presymbolic and ‘maternally connoted’, disrupt symbolic functioning to a point where, bordering on excess and stretching patience if not credulity, they produce a discourse that immediately registers as deviant: ‘poetic’, barbarous, strange. That the linguistic competence of the masculine speaking subject is affected, not to say seriously perturbed, by his failure to lose or to separate from a female object is, at any rate, the way in which the poem presents matters, indeed from its opening lines: Sufficeth it to yow my joyes interred, in simpell wordes that I my woes cumplayne, Yow that then died when first my fancy erred. joyes under dust that never live agayne: If to the livinge weare my muse adressed, or did my minde her own spirrit still inhold, weare not my livinge passion so repressed, as to the dead, the dead did thes unfold, sume sweeter wordes, sume more becumming vers, should wittness my myshapp in hygher kynd. but my loves wounds, my fancy in the hearse, the Idea but restinge, of a wasted minde, the blossumes fallen, the sapp gon from the tree. the broken monuments of my great desires, from thes so lost what may th’affections bee, what heat in Cynders of extinguisht fiers? (lines 1–16)

If momentarily (and not helped by the notoriously obscure punctuation of the manuscript) the ‘I’ and ‘you’ of the first three lines might seem to map straightforwardly onto the two figures of the title – Ocean addressing Cynthia with a simple tale of male errancy and female mortification, ‘Yow that then died when first my fancy erred’ – any such stability in subject/object relations soon proves illusory as it becomes evident that the speaker is addressing not (or not only) Cynthia but a part of himself: his buried joys.29 With an opening ambiguity that, as Rudick notes, might stand for many to follow, an address ostensibly pitched by a masculine subject at a feminine other thus rapidly opens out into a heavily interiorized soliloquy in which the speaker withdraws into the solitary confinement of

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his own mind and turns to commune not with an external object (Cynthia is, in fact, not to be addressed in the second person once throughout the course of the poem) but with allegorized fragments of his own divided psyche: a situation similar enough to that of Shakespeare’s Richard II, who likewise populates an empty cell with his own thoughts, as to suggest to some that, without any necessarily direct influence or imitation, Cynthia (and ‘My boddy in the walls captived’ where much the same happens) must have been written while Ralegh was in the Tower.30 Clearly an object has been lost, something or someone has died, but this turn inward (which is to characterize the whole of the rest of the poem) figures that loss as not external but internal to the self – as if it has been taken inside and installed within – so that instead of standing at the graveside, as it were, burying and mourning a departed Cynthia, the speaker’s own self opens up as a gaping grave-mouth in which not only are his joys buried but a whole host of items whose all-too-obviously ‘castrated’ status – love’s wounds, a wasted mind, fallen blossoms, disappearing sap, broken monuments, and so forth – make identification with the lost female object inescapable. Moreover, these objects are not being mourned by the speaker himself but by further personifications into which that self of his has been split – personifications which are, again, explicitly feminized (‘my muse’, line 5; ‘my minde’, line 6, their keening lament in keeping, perhaps, with the claim to speak only in ‘simpell wordes’) – so that within a few lines the apparently stable enunciative position of the opening ‘I’ has broken down into multiple fragments and the masculine speaking subject (now a surprisingly populous collection of feminine parts) has suffered more or less total subjective collapse.31 Although wholly elegiac in material, mood, and tone, therefore, Ralegh’s poem does not participate in the long and painful process by means of which the ego comes to de-cathect a lost object – the ‘work’ of mourning which traditionally linked the elegy as a poetic form with other funerary practices (formulaic expressions of grief and musicalized laments, elaborate burial rites, processions, games, and the like) that ritualized and so facilitated the ego’s gradual withdrawal from what it had lost enabling it, in time, to move on to form new and different attachments. As Peter Sacks has suggestively argued, the making of elegy itself was anciently understood to be a part of this process, the prototypes of Apollo and Pan mythopoetically linking the origins of poetry (and not just the origins but, in the laurel and the panpipes, the poet’s ongoing and continued productivity) in each case with a completed act of mourning: that is, with the successful ‘letting go’ of a once desired and beloved woman. The poet-gods are ‘successful mourners’

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because they tie the work of mourning to the work of art, their poetry becoming a figurative or aesthetic compensation for the object lost: a ‘substitutive turn or act of troping that any mourner must perform’.32 Ralegh’s poem, by contrast, positively rejects such ‘mourning work’ [Trauerarbeit]. Like Alcyon, the sorrowful widower in Spenser’s Daphna¨ıda (1591), the griever’s very inconsolability is taken as an indication of the superior quality of his love.33 Later on in Cynthia the speaker insists that, while such a process of recovery and renewal might suit other lesser mortals, his own love is too deep, his loss too catastrophic to admit of any cure: And though thes medcines worke desire to end and ar in others the trew cure of likinge the salves that heale loves wounds and do amend consuminge woe, and slake our harty sythinge the[y] worke not so, in thy minds long deseas (lines 417–21)

In these terms, Cynthia emerges as a textbook case of what, in distinguishing it from the curative work of ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ mourning, theorists classically differentiate as melancholia: the pathological state where (whether through an actual death or through loss of a more ‘ideal’ kind such as the severing of an emotional tie or the ending of an affair) the object is not relinquished – and love for it not extinguished – but preserved, re-absorbed within the ego and there allowed to play on forever in an internalized (and essentially narcissistic) romance: ‘my sowle the stage of fancies tragedye’ (line 144).34 In choosing to disavow rather than to survive its losses, the ego identifies with the object so that instead of having lost something extraneous it is the ego itself that comes to be depleted and impoverished. Any ambivalence that may have existed in the love-relation – any sense, for example, that the object might be hated or reproached for having disappeared – is similarly internalized so that the ego comes to turn upon itself as unworthy and lacking: whence the marked diminution in self-regard, the loud self-reproaches and masochistic self-reviling that (absent in even the most painful mourning) are melancholia’s defining characteristic. The ‘loves wounds’ (lines 11, 419) that Ralegh’s speaker finds buried within himself and that he later refuses to ‘amend’ thus strikingly anticipate Freud’s account of melancholia as a chronic condition which – in absorbing libido and inhibiting new relationships – acts on the ego like a physical illness, an ‘internal haemorrhage’ or an ‘open wound’.35

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The consequences for the masculine speaking subject are, predictably, dire. ‘Fancy’ – the party guilty of murdering those much-lamented joys – is one of several words (like ‘invention’ and ‘conceit’) that are used throughout the poem to refer to the speaker’s linguistic powers and poetic productivity. Within the specific context of the Renaissance understanding of mental functioning, ‘fancy’ refers to one of the three chambers of the brain where Imagination (as distinct from Reason and Memory) is housed – that is, the power to conceive, invent, create, conjure and dream up images – a faculty whose errancy, moral dubiousness, and liability to stray from truth and propriety into ‘all that fained is, as leasings, tales, and lies’, as Spenser put it, is here conflated with a roving and specifically masculine eros: ‘Yow that then died when first my fancy erred’ (line 3).36 By line 11, however, and as a direct result of the melancholy mechanism of identification, this same fancy has died – ‘my fancy in the hearse’ – and finds itself lying alongside the buried joys and other ‘castrated’ objects: a collapse of subject into object, masculine into feminine, that Katherine Duncan-Jones for one finds bizarre not to say grotesque.37 The prospects for the masculine speaking subject show no signs of improving as the poem proceeds: Lost in the mudd of thos hygh flowinge streames which through more fayrer feilds ther courses bend, slayne with sealf thoughts, amased in fearfull dreames, woes without date, discomforts without end, from frutfull trees I gather withred leves and glean the broken eares with misers hands, who sumetyme did injoy the waighty sheves I seeke faire floures amidd the brinish sand, all in the shade yeven in the faire soon dayes under thos healthless trees I sytt a lone wher joyfull byrdds singe neather lovely layes nor phillemon recounts her direfull mone, No feedinge flockes, no sheapherds cumpanye that might renew my dollorous consayte while happy then, while love and fantasye confinde my thoughts onn that faire flock to waite no pleasinge streames fast to the ocean wendinge the messengers sumetymes of my great woe but all onn yearth as from the colde stormes bendinge, shrinck from my thoughts in hygh heavens and below. (lines 17–36)

There is a momentary rallying as, out of the pluralized fragments (‘thes so lost’, line 15) the ‘I’ briefly re-consolidates as the subject of ‘Lost in the mudd’

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and a series of active verbs (‘I gather . . . and glean’, ‘I seeke’, ‘I sytt’), and a landscape that is recognizably that of pastoral elegy, with its stark binaries of dearth and plenty, briefly promises to situate and contextualize the speaker. But any such stabilization is short-lived, for the pastoral world is summoned only to be summarily dismissed and a string of negatives (‘neather . . . nor . . . No . . . no’) drives home the fact that this landscape is eerily silent and the speaker totally alone. This is no Shepheardes Calender where plaints, however dejected, might be shared and admired among a community of poetic colleagues: here not only do the birds fail to sing their ‘lovely layes’ but not even ‘phillemon recounts her direfull mone’. This abyssal landscape, that is, lacks even lack, even Philomel’s story of mutilation and rape – and, if this might conjecturally be taken as a reference to Ralegh himself (the ‘sommers Nightingale’ being Spenser’s honorific for his patron), then the fact that Philomel does not sing puts the poem under the signature of selferasure as well as of negation.38 The speaking subject is silenced, his former poetic productions now finished and done with, his ‘dollorous consayte’ as dead as ‘my fancy in the hearse’ and never to be renewed. Moreover, in an ambiguity that is entirely typical of the poem, ‘ocean’ (line 33) can be read either as object – that is, as the female beloved who is no longer in receipt of his poetic productions, the ‘pleasinge streames . . . messengers sumetymes of my great woe’ – or as subject: that is, as the speaker himself who is no longer filled up or replenished by his own work. There is a sense that, where the speaker might once (along with a courtly male coterie) have taken pride and pleasure in his own productions, regardless of whether they reached Elizabeth or not, he now denies himself even that consolation for everything has dried up and he is suffering instead from the blank of writer’s block and the total paralysis of non-production.39 The reason why it is the specifically masculine writing subject that is so affected is that, whatever the particular circumstances of the loss (whether an actual death or a parting of the ways, and, if the latter, then who left whom and why), the experience of melancholia replays earlier oedipal losses that were foundational in the construction of subsequent masculine gender identity – and it is this larger story, I would argue, rather than any local relations between a courtier and his queen, that Cynthia is really about. As writers like Judith Butler and Lynn Enterline have accustomed us to see, it was Freud’s reflections on the subject of melancholy identification that came to reveal an inherent contradiction lying at the core of masculinity. In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), the melancholy ego had been described as unable to part with its losses, and as clinging to them, preserving them, taking and holding them within in ways that were clearly

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registered as pathological and disturbed. By the time Freud was writing The Ego and the Id (1923), however, this process of identification had come to be described as an habitual if not normal stage in ego-development: the ego was now seen to be a ‘precipitate’ of such object-losses, the latter going in large part to make up that ego’s ‘character’.40 This shift was to have serious implications for the theory that had placed oedipal renunciations at the foundation of masculine gender identity: for the requirement that, in order to become a ‘man’ (where that is assumed to mean taking up position within the dominant heterosexual order) the little boy must give up his first love-object, the mother, and identify with his father, was now fatally compromised. Freud even speculates that the loss of sexual objects demanded by culture might be possible only on the condition of such identifications, in which case the boy will ‘lose’ the mother, as he is required to do, but only (on the model of melancholy identification) by not losing her and by identifying with her and installing her within himself instead. Lying at the very heart of being a ‘man’, therefore, is ‘being’ a woman. Male gender identity comes to depend on the boy identifying with a figure that will, as Enterline writes, ‘be signified to him as lacking parts, as a mutilated version of himself. Even within the strictly heterosexual terms that limited the scope of Freud’s own hypotheses of primary bisexuality’, she goes on, ‘masculinity is an odd construct indeed’: ‘the only mechanisms available for negotiating the losses necessary to the cultural regulation of desire produce a fissured, contradictory “ego” that saves itself, maintains itself, at the price of the very unity and disposition demanded of it’.41 No longer distinct from one another, the mother- and father-identifications fuse together as mutually complementary, and the ‘negative’ Oedipus complex is no longer a structure to be repressed or overcome if that boy is to achieve a ‘normal’ heterosexual masculine identity – the ‘positive’ complex, that is – but is integrally compounded with the latter, a constitutive part of the ‘more complete’ complex which, in being made up of two interrelated parts, renders the achievement of any simply ‘masculine’ gender identity an insoluble contradiction. In the chapter of The Ego and the Id where he discusses these matters, Freud’s tendency is to try to simplify or straighten out the elements that his own theory has entangled and confused, the ‘simplification or schematization’ (p. 33) of the Oedipus complex being defended as ‘often enough justified for practical purposes’ (p. 33). Although he concludes that the motherand father-identifications are ‘in some way united with each other’ (p. 34), for example, he continues – if only for the purpose of clarifying a topic otherwise ‘so complicated’ (p. 31) – to present them as if they were mutually

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exclusive: thus the dissolution of the Oedipus complex is said to result, for the boy, in ‘either an identification with his mother or an intensification of his identification with his father’ (p. 32, my italics). By the next page this either/or has reverted to an and – ‘at the dissolution of the Oedipus complex the four trends of which it consists will group themselves in such a way as to produce a father-identification and a mother-identification’ (my italics) – but the tendency to promote the ‘positive’ over the negative complex (thereby denying their mutual entanglement) still persists: ‘the father-identification will preserve the object-relation to the mother which belonged to the positive complex and will at the same time replace the object-relation to the father which belonged to the inverted complex: and the same will be true, mutatis mutandis, of the mother-identification’ (p. 34). Presenting as alternatives identifications that are, in practice, mutually complementary, allows Freud to single out the latter outcome as ‘the more normal’ (p. 32) – and the means by which the boy will ‘consolidate’ (p. 32) his masculinity – thereby (if only for the sake of his argument) simplifying the more complex and contradictory picture which in fact shows that masculinity is necessarily accompanied by a mother-identification and the ‘negative’ complex from the start. In a similar way – and again explicitly in order ‘to simplify my presentation’ – Freud reduces the complex combination of parental identifications that go to make up the ego’s ‘character’ by separating out as the origin of the ego-ideal (the element which enables the ego to criticize itself, to measure its own shortcomings and to aspire to self-improvement) the identification with the father, at a stroke gendering all that is ‘higher’ in human civilization and culture as male. Thus, in the first instance, Freud describes the origin of the ego-ideal as being the child’s ‘identification with the father in his own personal prehistory’, something he initially glosses as an identification ‘with the parents’; only then does he proceed, ‘in order to simplify my presentation’, to discuss simply ‘the identification with the father’ (p. 31).42 If melancholia internalized not only the lost object but also ambivalence – so that any reproaches that would have been levelled against the object come to be levelled against the ego itself – then Freud’s move here is to separate out the part of the ego that hates from the part that is hated and to map these subject/object positions onto the two differentiated identifications for all the world as if it were the father-identification (a stern conscience, the rigorous superego) that were hating the mother-identification (melancholy’s ‘open wound’): a move that effectively restores the gender binary that his own theory of ego-formation had, almost in spite of itself, deconstructed. It is not difficult to see how Freud uses the pretext of presenting a complex case with

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simplicity and clarity in order to rescue the masculine writing subject: otherwise, he says, it is ‘so difficult to obtain a clear view’ of these entangled identifications, ‘and still more difficult to describe them intelligibly’ (p. 33). The demands of theoretical order and coherence thus become the means by which Freud seeks to restore a clear and unambiguous definition of male sexual identity and to save it from the morass into which, if left unchecked, his own theory would threaten to drag it. Insofar as this strategy fails to contain the complexity, subtlety, and ambivalence which the same theory argues for, however, so the ambiguities and irresolutions within Freud’s own account – as they leak and spill out from theoretical constraint and escape the theorist’s best efforts at mastery and control – in the end come to act out the insoluble dilemma that masculinity is, making (as critics so often find) the aporias in the Freudian text ultimately more revealing than the propositions. Freud is undone by his own imagery for, ‘as the metaphor of consolidation suggests’, Butler writes, ‘there are clearly bits and pieces of masculinity to be found within the psychic landscape, dispositions, sexual trends, and aims, but they are diffuse and disorganized, unbounded by the exclusivity of a heterosexual object choice’.43 These elements are not to be organized – indeed, it is the nature of masculinity to resist such organization, one result of this being the deleterious effects on their various writing projects that we have been tracing here. If Freud’s troubled account thus mimes the structural impossibility of being a ‘man’ – where that is taken to mean adopting any straightforward kind of gender identity – then in different but not dissimilar ways, as it parades its own symbolic collapse, it is masculinity as a continued state of irresolution, as a paradox that is not to be solved, as an ongoing drama of crisis that is also staged by Ralegh’s poem. It is easy to see what is going on, then, when – in the first of several restitutions no less abortive – Ralegh abruptly changes tack in the next section and does his best, after the opening scene of well-nigh total obliteration, to rescue the masculine writing subject; easy to understand why this attempt should take the form, specifically, of restoring the subject/object positions that the first thirty-odd lines of the poem had so horribly entangled: Oh, hopefull love my object, and invention, Oh, trew desire the spurr of my consayte Oh, worthiest spirrit, my minds impulsion Oh, eyes transpersant my affections bayte Oh, princely forme, my fancies adamande Devine consayte, my paynes acceptance, Oh, all in onn, oh heaven on yearth transparant

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the seat of joyes, and loves abundance Out of that mass of mirakells, my Muse, gathered thos floures, to her pure sences pleasinge out of her eyes (the store of joyes) did chuse equall delights, my sorrowes counterpoysinge Her regall lookes, my rigarus sythes suppressed Small dropes of jo[i]es, sweetned great worlds of woes one gladsume day a thowsand cares redressed. (lines 37–51)

The cluster of such terms as ‘invention’, ‘conceit’, and ‘fancy’, make it plain that the speaker is once more referring to his own imaginative powers – his ability to write and to create poetry. And, while we would be guilty of over-simplification ourselves if we did not register that the ambiguous ‘her’ of lines 46 and 49 could (as Rudick notes) refer equally to Cynthia or to the Muse, this does not annihilate the speaker in the same way that the similar ambiguity surrounding ‘ocean’ at line 33 had done: for, where there neither the female beloved nor the poet himself any longer enjoy his former poetic productions (these having dried up), here both are said to do so. The Muse that ‘gathered thos floures’ from that ‘mass of mirakells’ (a good example of the over-valuation of the love-object) has, in the past, produced works ‘to her pure sences pleasinge’: as enjoyable, that is, to the poet who wrote them as to the queen for whom they were written, and not surprisingly so since the sovereign writing subject is here asserting his own instrumentality in creating the cult of the Virgin Queen in the first place, and, in the words of Louis Montrose, it is ‘one of the supreme pleasures available to the subject of power . . . to impose upon the fictions whose enforced acceptance signifies his subjection, the marks of his own subjectivity’.44 These poetic productions, moreover, are signified here as being specifically masculine, for the overriding theme of these lines and of the next few that follow is the directional flow of the speaker’s love, the force and energy of which is explicitly sexualized. Thus, from line 57 – ‘The honor of her love, love still devisinge’, his imagination, that is, still creating new and inventive ideas – the speaker describes how he came up with a ‘contrarye consayte’ (line 58): sometimes to worship his sublime love-object (‘her aspiringe’, line 59), and sometimes, in order to put his love to the test (‘to try desire, to try love severed farr’, line 62), to experiment with what the troubadours might have called ‘love from afar’. In both cases, however, love is described as an irresistible force of attraction: ‘when I was gonn shee sent her memory / more stronge then weare tenthowsand shipps of warr / to call me back’ (lines 63–65). Whether Cynthia is the compelling force

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that drawes the speaker to her – as the earlier images of being his ‘bayte’ and ‘adamande’ had also suggested (lines 40, 41) – or whether the force and drive emanates from the speaker himself (as ‘spurr’ and ‘impulsion’ had argued, lines 38, 39), either way, the movement is in one direction only: from male to female.45 Modern psycho-linguistics might describe this in terms of the metonymic dynamic of desire which, driven and motivated by the loss of the original love-object, pushes to fill the vacuum opened up by that loss with an endless series of signifying chains that are necessarily inflected as phallic. Renaissance writers would not have used such terms, but they might have styled it as an example of energia, that is, as the power of rhetoric to persuade and move the hearer – a term that Puttenham links with the ‘force’ and ‘violence’ of rhetorical persuasions, and that Sidney (who as the first to use the word in English) links specifically with love poetry and with the ‘forcibleness’ of the male poet in communicating his feelings to his mistress, the aim being, as it was for Astrophil, that she will ultimately yield him her ‘grace’, that is, her sexual favours (one thinks, too, of the efficacy of Donne’s ‘masculine persuasive force’).46 As with the errant ‘fancy’ of Cynthia line 3, this section of Ralegh’s poem clearly conflates the speaker’s ‘invention’ and ‘conceit’ with a specifically masculine eros.47 Cynthia is the source of the speaker’s creativity, the inspiration for his poetry, precisely because she is, for the time being, safely back in the position of object (‘Oh, hopefull love my object, and invention’, makes the two virtually synonymous), this objectifying of the female other having served, from the beginning of Western philosophy at least, as the ground from which to secure a stable male subjectivity. In addition to the ubiquitous Neo-platonic imagery, a series of Petrarchan commonplaces are also mobilized – ‘Such heat in Ize, such fier in frost’ (line 69) – in order to keep woman in her place as the object of a desiring and therefore speaking male subject, the stability of this positioning being alone what ensures the ‘mastery’ of the latter over the former.48 It is beginning to become clear, then, why some critics are so drawn to the historical narrative that reads Cynthia as an account of relations between ‘the Queen and the Poet’, and why so many see the poem as having self-evidently been written during 1592, the historically dramatic crisis of that story. There is a tendency to quote passages such as ‘when I was gonn shee sent her memory . . . to call me back . . . to leve my frinds, my fortune, my attempte / to leve the purpose I so longe had sought’ (lines 63–67) as internal ‘evidence’ for actual historical events – Ralegh’s exploratory Virginia voyages, for example, or the abortive expedition to Panama from which Elizabeth did recall him in 1592 – so as to make it easier to situate the poem within a scenario that tells of relations between

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two clearly differentiated personnel: an adventurous Elizabethan seadog, as it were, and his jealous royal mistress. Which is not to say that Cynthia is not concerned with relations between a courtier and his prince, nor to rubbish the 1592 date. Rather, it is to look a little more suspiciously at what might motivate that dating and at what might compel scholars (otherwise so cautious in assigning definitive dates to sixteenth-century manuscript texts) to adopt it relatively uncritically. One reason for this reading’s appeal, it could be argued, is that (however unconsciously) it restores the gender binary, stabilizes subject/object positions, and differentiates clearly between masculine and feminine identifications – rather as Freud’s musings in The Ego and the Id had done – thereby saving the masculine writing subject from the catastrophic depredations he is forced to suffer elsewhere in the poem and allowing him (in the form of the masterly theorist or appreciative critic) to live to write another day.49 Any such ‘consolidation’, however, is doomed to failure. The poem moves straight on in the next section to the passage mentioned earlier in which a single sentence is stretched out over thirty torturing lines, subordinating symbolic efficiency – ‘the delivery of a message, the prosecution of an argument’ – to the priority of ‘semiotic’ pulse and rhythm. The three extended similes that describe the warmth, life, and motion that strangely remain in things otherwise inanimate or dead could, moreover, be seen as very precise renderings of the state of abjection.50 Indeed, this next section refers back to the opening lines of the poem that had opened up a similarly ambiguous space between the living and the dead, radically blurring the boundaries between the speaker and the object he mourned. Although the poem had presented itself there as a speech between the dead and the dead – ‘as to the dead, the dead did thes unfold’ (line 8) – it is, more strictly, a speech between beings who, while not exactly alive, are at the same time also curiously undead (those joys, ‘interred’, ‘under dust’ and ‘never [to] live agayne’ are, after all, still capable of being addressed, and the speaker, though mortally wounded and fading fast is nonetheless still speaking). As with the later section, so the opening lines share a similar preoccupation with what remains behind even after something or someone has died or departed – ‘the Idea but restinge, of a wasted minde’ (line 12) – a peculiar quality that, while not quite life itself, is nevertheless a ghostly imitation or vestige of it. The opening lines had also (and again like the later passage) posed a rhetorical question: if this poem were a dialogue between the living and the living (as in normal symbolic functioning) then ‘sume sweeter wordes, sume more becumming vers, / should wittness my myshapp in hygher kynd’ (lines 9–10); but since it is instead an abject utterance between two beings

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whose subject/object status has been thoroughly eroded, then what kind of style can be expected – ‘from thes so lost what may th’affections bee, / what heat in Cynders of extinguisht fiers?’ (lines 15–16). As Greenblatt notes, from the very first lines of the poem ‘Ralegh confronts the problem of style’.51 The use of comparatives here (‘sweeter’, ‘hygher’, ‘more becumming’) suggests that the poem’s own register of symbolic disruption – of stylistic deviations from some generic norm – might serve as the gauge by which to measure the degree of its abjection: its own aliveness or deadness.52 In any case, the later passage poses exactly the same question: what kind of writing can proceed from something or someone who is neither strictly dead nor alive but who occupies an ambiguous borderland between the two? As a ‘boddy violently slayne’ retains some warmth (line 73), as winter earth still produces ‘sume green’ (line 80), and as a disused mill-wheel continues for a last few shuddering revolutions to ‘go rounde uppon the beame’, so he too, the speaker goes on, writes something that is equally lifeless and yet uncannily undead: So my forsaken hart, my withered minde widdow of all the joyes it once possest my hopes cleane out of sight with forced wind to kyngdomes strange, to lands farr of addrest Alone, forsaken, frindless onn the shore with many wounds, with deaths cold pangs inebrased writes in the dust as onn that could no more ... as if when after Phebus is dessended and leves a light mich like the past dayes dawninge, and every toyle and labor wholy ended each livinge creature draweth to his restinge wee should beginn by such a partinge light to write the story of all ages past and end the same before th’aprochinge night (lines 85–91, 95–103)

A single theme sustains this passage – the halfway state between existence and extinction. The speaker still writes, though ‘as onn that could no more’; he has not finally gone, disappeared into silence, but he is going; he is not properly dead but, ‘with deaths cold pangs inebrased’, he is dying; the sun has not fully gone down but still the light is fading. The image of trying to complete ‘the story of all ages past’ in a few fleeting moments registers not only the hopelessness of the situation but the impossibility of closure: the point is not only that the project can never be completed but crucially

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that it can never end (something the poem hints at, perhaps, by missing the line after ‘and end the same before th’aprochinge night’ that ought to have rhymed with ‘past’). This writing cannot succeed but it cannot stop either: it persists in this permanent twilight zone, in a state of living death, of continued impossibility, of a failure to separate or differentiate that is altogether abject. Naturally enough, the feminine identifications of the opening lines here surface again, for the speaker’s melancholy condition arises from his reluctance or inability to shed the woman for whom he grieves. Although critics see ‘the story of all ages past’ as looking ahead ‘inevitably’ to Ralegh’s later magnum opus, The History of the World, in fact the figure that produces the story at this stage is explicitly feminized – ‘my withered minde / widdow of all the joyes it once possest’.53 As this lonely figure remains ashore while her hopes sail away ‘to kyngdomes strange, to lands farr of addrest’ it is difficult not to see her as a latter-day Dido, seduced and abandoned by the epic principle of masculinist, imperial expansion that was embodied in Aeneas. Where, in the preceding section, the speaker had identified himself with such heroic ambitions – ‘To seeke new worlds, for golde, for prayse, for glory’ (line 61) – here he identifies with the tragic suicide who was left behind, and it is she who ‘writes in the dust’ and composes the endless ‘story of all ages past’ that the poem records.54 In a pattern that is beginning to emerge as regular if not somewhat rhythmical, in the next section that follows on from this the poem pulls back from the brink of subjective collapse and briefly attempts to restore the masculine writing subject once again: as before by mobilizing Neo-platonic metaphors. Cynthia is the sun radiating heat and light; she is (in one of the few passages where the Ocean/Cynthia motif actually stabilizes) the moon exerting its force over the waves: ‘what stormes so great but Cinthias beames apeasd’ (line 118). The apparent restitution of subject/object positions here is perhaps what allows critics to read the lines that follow – ‘Twelve yeares intire I wasted in this warr / twelve yeares of my most happy younger dayes’ (lines 120–21) – as straightforwardly documenting the history of Ralegh’s past relations with Elizabeth, prompting them to go back to the archives and to start counting the years.55 But any such consolidation of roles again proves deceptive. ‘Wasted’ here can be read not only as a transitive but as an intransitive verb – that is to say, the speaker not only wasted all that time: for a period of twelve years he himself also wasted away or (as Rudick glosses it) ‘deteriorated, lost strength, was consumed’.56 This idea – which is repeated in the following line, ‘butt I in them, and they now wasted ar’ (that is, both the speaker and the years are shrunken and emaciated) – fits in with the images of an infinitely protracted fade-out that

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had appeared both in the preceding section and in the opening lines. And, as there, so here the poem again asks what will be the style, the literary production of such a creature so grievously diminished, so close to death but yet not quite completely gone? What kind of speech will emerge from that ambiguous, borderline state? Although the poem comes up with the answer ‘sorrow only’ (line 123) there is, in fact, something more – namely (and interestingly conflated with that sorrow) the poet’s own words, here quoted back at him from the refrain to ‘Like truthles dreames’: ‘of all which past the sorrow only stayes’ (‘So wrate I once’, the speaker goes on, ‘and my mishapp fortolde’, making it plain that the self-citation is quite conscious). It is not only sorrow that stays, therefore, but the poet’s own past words that now come back like revenants to haunt him. No longer referred to grandiosely as ‘thos floures’ that once pleased Queen and Muse, his former poetic productions – now detached, broken up, and out of context – are conjured as mere dregs, as an old tidemark which is all that remains of a life now over and experiences long gone. The poem’s preoccupation with the dubious category of phenomena that uncannily linger on even after life and energy have departed here transfers itself to the speaker’s own productions as they are now seen to float back like ‘flotsam and jetsam’ or like a drowned corpse – still in evidence but only as detritus or waste, as something not yet buried, disposed of, or parted with once and for all.57 What follows in the succeeding section, then, is the dissolution of anything that may briefly have stabilized or consolidated in the preceding lines, as subject/object positions, masculine/feminine identifications, or ‘Ocean’ as a male courtier and Petrarchan writing subject once more succumb to the process of wasting away: ‘so did my joyes mealt into secreat teares / so did my hart desolve in wastinge dropps’ (lines 134–35). A gush of metaphors details the transition from solid to liquid as the speaker metamorphoses first into stone that weeps, then into icicles that melt, and finally into great ‘heapes of snow’ that turn into cataclysmic floodwater: then fludds of sorrow and whole seas of wo the bancks of all my hope did overbeare and dround my minde in deapts of missery (lines 140–42)

The ‘eyes of my minde’ that had, in good Neo-platonic fashion, contemplated Cynthia’s ‘beames’ at line 108 now convert, in a paradox Donne would have enjoyed, to eyes that drown themselves weeping. ‘My minde’ (line 125), ‘my hevy minde’ (line 128) is thoroughly re-feminized as it mourns and utters its keening lament once more.58 Indeed – as its own tears threaten

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in turn to drown itself – so this ‘minde’ seems to revert to type as a female complainant, the scene of a woman weeping into water and thereby ‘applying wet to wet’ being one of the most iconic images in the genre of Renaissance female lament.59 Moreover, as that mind becomes not only a river but a drowned river to boot, so it presents itself as something suitably ambiguous and paradoxical – its own definition as effaced, its own distinctiveness as eroded as are its banks or borders: is a river more or less a river for being flooded? I mention this because perhaps the most significant aspect of the poem’s ubiquitous ocean and water imagery is not that it stabilizes anything (the identity of ‘Ocean’, for example) but rather the opposite. That is to say, the imagery enacts (in what many critics sympathetically dub the poem’s ‘ebb and flow’, its ‘tidal drama’) what has been emerging as the rhythmic movement of the argument as it drags back and forth, without rest or resolution, from consolidation to collapse to consolidation to collapse.60 As it mimes the regular movement of the ocean waves or of floodwaters as they rise and fall, so the poem draws attention (as also in the image of the drowned river, here, or of the figure left ‘onn the shore’ or seeking flowers ‘amidd the brinish sand’, lines 89, 24) to those ambiguous border territories – beach, strand, shoreline, riverside, water’s edge – that, now wet, now dry, now sea, now land, replicate those frontiers – equally uncertain, fragile, diffuse, maternal – that similarly come and go in the critical process by which one body separates from another ‘in order to be’, and that are daily sensitized and ambiguated as the body works ceaselessly (and no less uncertainly) to maintain its ‘clean and proper’ boundaries amid the internal rhythm of its own secretions, expulsions, and flows.61 These same undulations between an ‘achieved’ masculinity, on the one hand, and its collapse into non-differentiation, on the other, continue to wash back and forth through the remaining 400 or so lines of the poem, and, although space forbids discussing these in the same degree of detail, the aim is to have mapped out in the preceding pages some rough markers that may serve to point the way forward in what follows. The classic ruse of trying to rescue the masculine writing subject by means of objectifying the female other, then, continues as before, only now (in a way that disturbs the poem’s status as eulogy and, for some, rules out the possibility that it was ever intended for Elizabeth’s eyes) with an unmistakable misogynistic edge, as Cynthia is increasingly blamed for the speaker’s plight. Her ‘change of fantasye’ (line 210) is now said to typify ‘the affections of her kynde’ (line 211) – the errancy of ‘fancy’ that was hitherto an attribute of the masculine eros is from now on to be transferred to the feminine – and woman is evoked (in ways sufficiently traditional to cause no great surprise)

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as embodying the very principles of inconstancy, cruelty, and deceit. In a section that has the sententious ring of a thousand Tudor laments, Ralegh conjures the image of a laboriously diverted stream that, in uncontrollably reverting to its old course, destroys in one short hour the ‘arections’ (line 230) and ‘labors’ (line 235) of the masculine, civilizing hand: ‘such is of weemens love the carefull charge’ (line 228).62 The emphasis, moreover, is on the way in which this feminized force of Nature erases such masculine work without trace, destroying not only a man’s productions but all sign of their ever having existed: ‘nor any marke therof ther douth indure’ (line 236), a point that is obsessively reiterated in the lines that follow (‘nor any shew or signe’, line 240; ‘no signe remayneth’, line 244a) and that leads up to the accusation that all the speaker’s previous actions and ‘tokens’ of love (line 263) are now utterly ‘forgotten’ by his fickle mistress (line 254), quite ‘rased out and from the fancy rent’ (line 259).63 It is only a small step, of course, from this devouring, engulfing, and suffocating Nature to the maternal object that is blamed for all of man’s misfortunes and, sure enough, in its bid to re-invigorate the masculine writing subject by warding off this maternal horror, the poem does not hold back from converting this narrative into what Enterline calls the ‘(culturally all too familiar) story about sons and mothers’.64 From line 319, for example, in the most extended version of an image that recurs elsewhere in the poem, the speaker presents himself as the unjustly rejected offspring of a cruel mother: ‘But I unblessed, and ill borne creature . . . that drew yeven with the milke in my first suckinge / affection from the parents brest that bare mee / have found her as a stranger so severe’ (lines 319, 322–24). The breast as a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ object is starkly differentiated in terms of a simple binary – ‘a Lion then, no more a milke white Dove’ (line 328) – rather as, elsewhere in the poem, ‘her perrellike brest’ (line 392) is either the source of all plenitude and bliss from which he has been brutally cast out, or the teat that ‘the gentell Lamm, though lately wayned’ finds unsatisfyingly dry (line 71, though one might ask what a weaned lamb is doing still playing ‘with the dug’, line 72).65 In another passage where Cynthia is castigated for being a bad mother, the speaker describes how his ‘prime yeares and infancy of love’ (line 169) were cruelly undeceived when what he had thought to be her ‘marvelous perfections’ (line 193) turned out instead to be ‘the parents of my sorrow’ (line 194), thereby confirming the promptings of ‘strong reason’ (line 173) that had warned him of the emptiness and secondariness of the merely phenomenal world, here (with the accusation being levelled at Cynthia’s now only ‘seeminge bewties’, line 177) firmly associated with the feminine. What he once believed to be ‘A vestall fier that burnes, but never

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wasteth’ (line 189) proved to be no more than ‘thos flames that rize / from formes externall’ (lines 175–76), a shift that, in transferring the imagery of wasting and decay from the subject to the object of love leads, in a later section, to what is perhaps the poem’s most grandiloquent defence of the masculine subject. From line 295 it is no longer the love-object that is eternal, divine, the source of all beauty and perfection, the light and heat to which he is irresistibly drawn but the speaker’s love itself – the masculine energy that, set against the foil of feminine unreliability and fickleness, now comes to embody the cosmic (and, of course, all too phallic) principle of durability and constancy: ‘my love is not of tyme, or bound to date / my harts internall heat, and livinge fier / would not, or could be quencht, with suddayn shoures’ (lines 301–303). The concept mooted back in the opening lines of ‘the Idea but restinge, of a wasted minde’ (line 12) which that and other parts of the poem had emphasized as the merest flickerings of a life all but put out, is here grandly resurrected as a Platonic Idea, the eternal spark that is immune to all temporal change and decay. The speaker scorns the possibility that his love may have been tainted by any worldly considerations such as ambition or self-interest – he claims to love equally ‘the bearinge and not bearinge sprayes’ (line 306; rather disingenuously if the poem is going to be read as a document of relations between Elizabeth and this once lavishly rewarded favourite) – going on in the next breath to assert, in a fantasy of omnipotence if not megalomania, that his love, like the divine, rises above any merely human perception of variability or change: ‘erringe or never erringe, such is Love’ (line 311): an amazing repudiation of the charge of errancy, that is now laid squarely at Cynthia’s door. This then leads straight onto the passage in which the speaker presents himself as the babe thrust cruelly from the breast – ‘But I unblessed, and ill borne creature . . .’ (line 319) – making this defensive strategy of shoring up the masculine subject by means of reviling a female and maternal object quite explicit. It need hardly be said, however, that these strategies to recuperate the masculine writing subject turn out to be no more successful than before. Stung at the thought that he – this model of masculine constancy – should have been cast by Cynthia as the party guilty of ‘error’ (line 338) and made ‘th’exampell in loves storye’ (line 334), the speaker determines to re-write that story in his own self-justifying terms, and – in a catalogue of stock devices enough of which derive from elsewhere within Cynthia itself or from other poems by Ralegh to amount to self-quotation – he goes on to recall how he had formerly represented her as the icon of beauty and perfection: ‘natures wounder, Vertues choyse / the only parragonn

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of tymes begettinge / Devin in wordes angellicall in voyse / that springe of joyes, that floure of loves own settinge / Th’Idea remayninge of those golden ages / that bewtye bravinge heavens, and yearth imbaulminge’ (lines 344–49).66 As before, it is specifically as a writing subject (who stakes his reputation on the power and success of his own poetic productions) that the speaker attempts to recuperate his position, and the figure addressed at line 351 – ‘such didsst thow her longe since discribe’ – is none other than the competent, controlling male writer who is exerting his power, as Louis Montrose might put it, ‘over the representation he has made’.67 As on every other occasion where the masculine writing subject attempts to rally, however, his efforts end only in disaster and there is a sense of thudding inevitability as he collapses all over again, his fall this time being only the more vertiginous for the heights to which he had been raised. As before when the speaker’s grandiose allusion to his own poetic ‘floures’ (line 46) had culminated in his identification with a widowed figure who ‘writes in the dust’ (line 91) and a mourning figure who ‘wrate what it would’ (line 146), or when the citation of one of his own lines of poetry turned out to be but a fragment ‘cast ashore by some previous agonizing undulations of the ocean’, so here masculine literary production is again evoked only in order masochistically to self-destruct.68 For the point that this next section makes is not that Cynthia turns out to be mere external ‘form’ after all, as opposed to a Platonic ‘Idea’ (the same charge levelled against her as at lines 173–200), but rather that the speaker’s own poetry turns out to be no less false or fleeting. It is not that Cynthia is not as he described her (a selection of quotations provided) but that his description itself will not endure – an acknowledgement that reverses the perpetuitymotif otherwise so characteristic of Renaissance laments where the one thing that is guaranteed to survive universal destruction and decay is the poet’s own work. This speaker’s productions, by contrast, are no golden monuments in verse but, by his own admission, utterly pointless endeavours that are therefore doomed to extinction: Butt what hath it avaylde thee so to write shee cares not for thy prayse, who knowes not thers Its now an Idell labor and a tale tolde out of tyme that dulls the heerers eares a marchandize wherof ther is no sale (lines 355–59)

As at lines 33 and 221, the image of the stream returns as an emblem of selferasure as, once again, the labours of the masculine writing subject are lost

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without trace: ‘thy lines ar now a murmeringe to her eares / like to a fallinge streame which passinge sloe / is wount to nurrishe sleap, and quietnes / So shall thy paynfull labors bee perusde’ (lines 362–65). What follows is an extended repetition of this essentially pointless drama, the speaker going on to deny his ‘error’ (line 371) and ‘offence’ (line 374) in the full knowledge that doing so is ‘all vayne’ (line 375). Thus, ‘fancye’ (line 376) – now once more the masculine eros that had been inspired by Cynthia’s beauty – is revived and defended as the cosmic principle of phallic constancy, and a whole series of superlatives are mobilized to impress upon the reader (who is being lulled to sleep by these very lines) that the speaker’s love is beyond compare: ‘Yet greater fancye bewtye never bredd / a more desire the hart bludd never nowrished / her sweetness an affection never fedd / which more in any age hath ever floryshedd / The minde and vertue never have begotten / a firmer love, since love on yearth had poure / a love obscurde, but cannot be forgotten / to great and stronge for tymes Jawes to devour’ (lines 376–83). This love ‘cannot dye’ (line 389), it ‘shall ever last’ (line 390), time ‘never cann untye’ it (line 391), for he ‘Whose life . . . / whose joyes . . . / whose hart . . . and whose mind’ (lines 392–94) were once centred on Cynthia, and ‘who was intentive, wakefull, and dismayed . . . / who longe in sylence served, and obayed’ (lines 396, 398), he whose love neither change nor age nor ‘natures overthrow’ (line 401) nor sickness nor deformity nor ‘wastinge care, or weeringe wo’ (line 403) nor words nor malice nor worldly ambition nor anything else ‘can so desolve, dissever, or distroye’ (line 409) is, finally, defended as embodying the undying Platonic essence: ‘the essentiall love, of no frayle parts cumpounded’ (line 410). Except that, not only does the precise referent of the long ‘Whose . . . who . . . which’ sequence that runs from line 392 to 406 and that culminates in this great assertion remain uncertain (as Rudick asks, is it ‘love’ at line 382, or ‘thes thoughts’ at line 390?),69 but the grammatical subject of this marathon sentence – that began at line 376 and is still to be completed – is also missing: that is to say, for the purpose of clarifying what the poem deliberately obscures, it was I who inserted into the paraphrase above the ‘he’ that the sentence itself, so much of it in the passive mode, makes conspicuous by its absence. It is typical of the poem that, at precisely the point where he protests the firmness of his love and the durability of his words, the masculine speaking subject should quietly disappear; just as it is that this great statement of an essential love that is ‘of no frayle parts cumpounded’ should, in the very next lines, break down into the same component parts (taking us back to the similar catalogue of buried, ‘castrated’ items listed in the opening lines):

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The masculine subject ends up in pieces once again, just as he had done when, first embarking on this pointless exercise of trying to persuade Cynthia after her final judgement had been delivered, he compared himself to the scattered limbs of the executed corpse after it had been hanged, drawn and quartered: ‘the lymes devided, sundred, and a bleedinge / cannot cumplayne the sentence was unyevunn’ (lines 342–43). It is appropriate, then, that in the next section the speaker should describe his state specifically as a case of melancholia, for what follows is the passage in which he scornfully dismisses the work of mourning – that is, the gradual detachment of libido from the lost object that may well prove to be ‘the trew cure of likinge / the salves that heale loves wounds and do amend / consuminge woe’ (lines 418–20) – as suitable only for those ‘others’ (line 418) whose love is evidentially so much shallower than his own. Indeed, their paltry affections are summoned purely to point up the comparison: the fact that their love can be successfully mourned is indication enough of its slight nature, of its attachment to mere form or outward show – ‘externall fancy tyme alone recurethe’ (line 422) – as opposed to his fancy, the essential and enduring quality of which he has been protesting for the last 250 lines. And, while such feeble love lasts only as long as its object – ‘stayes by the pleasure, but no longer stayes’ (line 425) – the speaker goes on, by contrasting what stays on within his own heart, to describe his condition in terms of an absolute fusion or merger between subject and object:70 But in my minde so is her love inclosde and is therof not only the best parte but into it the essence is disposde (lines 426–28)

This refusal to detach from the object and determination both to hold on to it and to glory in the attachment is, of course, typical of melancholia, and the speaker as good as admits this when he goes on – in a series of mystical metaphors that detail the perfect union between ‘mind’ and ‘love’ (or masculine subject and feminine object) – to acknowledge that an eternity of love is almost necessarily an eternity of suffering: ‘Oh love, the more my wo, to it thow art / yeven as the moysture in each plant that growes / yeven as the soonn unto the frosen ground / yeven as the sweetness, to th’incarnate rose / yeven as the Center in each perfait rounde’ (lines 429–33, my italics). That such conceptual inseparability should, however beautiful,

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also be a cause of suffering and pain is further confirmed when this last image of centre and circle looks ahead to what is arguably the most resonant image in the entire poem: Yet as the eayre in deip caves under ground is strongly drawne when violent heat hath rent great clefts therin, till moysture do abound and then the same imprisoned, and uppent, breakes out in yearthquakes teringe all asunder, So in the Center of my cloven hart, my hart, to whom her bewties wear such wounder Lyes the sharpe poysoned heade of that loves dart which till all breake and all desolve to dust thence drawne it cannot bee . . . (lines 450–59)

Critics have objected that the image of love’s dart here is ‘a terrible anticlimax’, ‘a clich´e even in Ralegh’s time’, but it is, I would argue, a perfect image of the condition and consequences of melancholy identification.71 Resolutely not lost, the love-object remains trapped within, embedded in the subject’s psyche in a union that, no matter how desperately it is clung to or how passionately it is glorified, also spells for that subject a permanent state of self-schism and gender crisis. Indeed, the image of the heart ‘cloven’ by love’s dart encapsulates the gender paradox of a masculine subject who finds himself, as a result of his feminine identifications, penetrated and castrated at the same time. No image could better express the complex of melancholia that Freud himself would metaphor as an ‘open wound’; and it allows Ralegh (at line 456 clearly exploiting the ambiguity of ‘wounder’ which his habitual spelling of ‘wonder’ makes possible) to describe the condition of the masculine subject as one of perpetual woundedness, thereby substantiating the imagery of bodily dismemberment and disintegration that – from those ‘loves wounds’ buried in the opening lines – extends right through the course of the poem.72 This condition, furthermore, is not (or not only) that of a particular individual who may have suffered some devastating blow or some courtier who has lost the Queen’s favour, but of every masculine subject insofar as the process of melancholy identification which installs the mother within problematizes at source the formation of any stable, ‘consolidated’ gender identity. This is why, however painful it may be, that state is not open to amelioration: for if identifying with the mother is, as Freud would imply, a condition of losing her, then mourning her ‘healthily’ is not an option and masculinity is a complex that is structurally incapable of resolution. That ‘dart’ may fatally ambiguate the sexuality of

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the masculine subject, but the alternative – removing it – results in what the image of an explosion of epic proportions signals as an existential annihilation that is well-nigh unthinkable.73 To be a man might entail being wounded, shattered, castrated, penetrated, and broken, but the alternative is not to be ‘healthy’, more ‘manly’, or ‘whole’ – it is to cease to be. It is not surprising, then, that ‘cumplaynts cure not’ (line 476) – neither the generalized tears that ‘do butt allay / greifs for a tyme, which after more abounde’ (lines 476–77) nor the more specifically literary production of a complaint poem (which is no more capable of reaching resolution that ‘the story of all ages past’ was capable of closure) – for the speaker’s condition is not one that admits of cure. His works are destined for the same blank end as before – ‘my labors weare desayte’ (line 465), ‘to seeke for moysture in th’arabien sande / is butt a losse of labor’ (lines 478–79) – for it is the constitutive feature of his condition that he is unable to differentiate the clear boundaries that would make for symbolic ‘competence’ (however notional a postulate that may be) and must resign himself instead to symbolic disruption. As if to emphasize the speaker’s state of abjection at this point, a metaphor intervenes that conjures up once more that ambiguous border territory that exists between land and sea: here the ‘bancks’ against which a ‘trobled ocean’ beats (line 484). The presiding imagery of this otherwise obscure passage is that of landmarks being removed (tall cedar trees, Hero’s lamp) leaving the male mariner or swimmer (in this case, Leander) floundering. The failure to achieve landfall or to come safely to port is, in the circumstances, a particularly apt image of the failure to separate land from sea. As the tides are no more going to cease their perpetual motion than the border territories of beach or shoreline are going to cease being ambiguous, so masculinity is no more going to arrive on ‘land’, that is, be ‘consolidated’ or resolved. And, as the poem stages this drama of masculine differentiation in the rhythmic and masochistic pattern of a story about losing and failing to lose, so, appropriately enough, it rolls all this out in a single sentence that, as Jane Hedley observes, ‘epitomizes the movement of the whole’:74 Shee is gonn, Shee is lost, shee is found, shee is ever faire (line 493)

‘Thus home I draw’ (line 509). The speaker announces an end at last, but – even back within the generic familiarity of pastoral elegy with all its paraphernalia of derelict sheepfolds, broken staffs, and abandoned pipes – this is no simple homecoming: ‘every foot, olde thoughts turne back myne eyes’ (line 510), ‘my steapps ar backwarde, gasinge onn my loss’ (line 514): a

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posture that is surely reminiscent of Orpheus. If ‘home’ is anywhere for this poet then it is perhaps at the most ambiguous border territory of all – the twilight zone between the worlds of the living and the dead. The beloved woman is lost for good, but because his eyes and steps – indeed, the very ‘feet’ of his verse – are ever straining back towards her, this Orpheus is incapable of letting her go and so of surfacing into the light. He is not, like Apollo or Pan, a ‘successful mourner’. But then, as Peter Sacks suggests, the fact that the latter ‘are, after all, gods, may tell us something of Ovid’s pessimism regarding the difficulty of their task’.75 Ralegh’s speaker – who, in his state of perpetual woundedness and dismemberment, recalls the ultimate fate of the Orphic poet whose scattered limbs continued to sing as they floated downstream – may not be a god, but he tells of the condition of mortal poets and men. NOTES 1. A ‘complete inventory’ of these markings is given by Ralegh’s most recent editor, Michael Rudick, in The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition (Tempe: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999), pp. 158–59. In Sir Walter Ralegh (London: Longman, 1953), Philip Edwards follows Ralegh’s earlier editor, Agnes Latham, in discussing the poem as an intermediate draft transcribed from an earlier but still unfinished copy. That Cynthia figures the ‘artful disorder’ of the mannerist aesthetic is developed by A. D. Cousins in ‘The Coming of Mannerism: The Later Ralegh and the Early Donne’, ELR 9 (1979): 86–107, esp. p. 96. 2. That Cynthia as we have it was written hastily and impulsively is suggested by Joyce Horner, ‘The Large Landscape: A Study of Certain Images in Ralegh’, EC 5 (1955): 197–213, and by Michael L. Johnson, ‘Some Problems of Unity in Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Ocean’s Love to Cynthia’, SEL 14 (1974): 17–30. The most sustained argument for Ralegh’s exploitation of Empsonian ambiguity in the poem is Donald Davie’s ‘A Reading of “The Ocean’s Love to Cynthia”’, in Elizabethan Poetry, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1960), pp. 71–89, although Steven W. May makes a similar case for Ralegh’s ‘calculated artistry’ in Sir Walter Ralegh (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), p. 49, as does Stephen Greenblatt in Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973). 3. On ‘Water’ as Elizabeth’s nickname for Ralegh, playing on both his West Country pronunciation and on his extensive maritime exploits and interests, see Walter Oakeshott, The Queen and the Poet (London: Faber, 1960), p. 26. Horner gives the longest account of the mismatch between the title of Ralegh’s poem and its content. Greenblatt is one of a number of critics who find the fluctuating nature of the ocean/moon imagery in the poem appropriate rather than inappropriate: Ralegh, pp. 86–87; see also Gerald Hammond, ed.,

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4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric Sir Walter Ralegh: Selected Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 10; and Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 148–49. Most critics now agree that the title was intended to create the illusion of a ‘much longer but quite imaginary work, the better to grace [Ralegh’s] protestations of eternal love for Elizabeth’, May, Ralegh, p. 45. On the numbering of the poem, most now concur that it should be read ‘one and twentieth’, the case being conclusively made by Stacy M. Clanton, ‘The “Number” of Sir Walter Ralegh’s Booke of the Ocean to Scinthia’, SP 82 (1985): 200–211. Most editors and critics accept the 1592 date. Alexander M. Buchan, however, argues for 1589, relating the poem to an earlier if obscure episode when Ralegh may have fallen into some disfavour and had to absent himself from court for a time; see ‘Ralegh’s Cynthia: Facts or Legend’, MLQ 1 (1940): 461–74. Katherine Duncan-Jones, by contrast, argues that the poem was written after Elizabeth’s death and during Ralegh’s imprisonment under James between 1603 and 1612. She concedes, however, that, of the external evidence available for dating the poem conclusively, ‘the most honest position to adopt finally may be that of Ralegh’s own Sceptic, who “doth neither affirm, neither denie any Position”’, ‘The Date of Ralegh’s “21th: and last booke of the Ocean to Scinthia”’, RES ns 21 (1970): 143–58, esp. p. 144. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 520. The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). ‘Yet till that thou thy Poeme wilt make knowne, / Let thy faire Cinthias praises bee thus rudely showne’, dedicatory sonnet to Ralegh, appended to the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene. For Spenser’s other references to a ‘Cynthia’ poem by Ralegh, see ‘that sweet verse, with Nectar sprinckeled, / In which a gracious seruant pictured / His Cynthia, his heauens fairest light’ (FQ III Proem iv), and the Letter to Ralegh in which he refers to ‘your owne excellent conceipt of Cynthia’, all references to The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977). For the most thorough account of the discrepancies between Spenser’s various mentions of a ‘Cynthia’ poem, see Kathrine Koller, ‘Spenser and Ralegh’, ELH 1 (1934): 37–60. ‘fevered elegy’, Edwards, Ralegh, p. 102; ‘dark pastoral’, Robert E. Stillman, ‘“Words cannot knytt”: Language and Desire in Ralegh’s The Ocean to Cynthia’, SEL 27 (1987): 35–51, esp. p. 39; ‘winter pastoral’, Horner, ‘Large Landscape’, p. 201; ‘collage of incomplete sonnets’, Johnson, ‘Some Problems’, p. 29; ‘not . . . like any conventional poem of the period’, Duncan-Jones, ‘The Date’, p. 158; ‘nothing like it elsewhere’, Edwards, Ralegh, p. 102; ‘alien to the Tudor aesthetic’, Cousins, ‘Coming of Mannerism’, p. 94. On the specifically masculinist values of the Protestant Sidney–Essex faction, see Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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On the discrepancies between Sidney’s posthumous reputation and his literary ‘toys’ see the essays by Dennis Kay, Alan Hager, and Katherine Duncan-Jones in Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism, ed. Dennis Kay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). ‘reckoning with loss’, Rudick, The Poems, p. xvi; ‘curious impermanence’, Latham ed., The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2nd edn, 1951), p. xiv, who also comments on Ralegh’s carelessness and notes that ‘it is strange that the work of a poet who ranked so highly among his contemporaries, and whose name acquired a romantic fascination for posterity, could have been lost almost completely’, p. xxiv. George Puttenham includes Ralegh among the ‘crew of Courtly makers . . . who haue written excellently well as it would appeare if their doings could be found out and made publicke’, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. G. D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 61. In jottings made at the end of Speght’s Chaucer, Gabriel Harvey asks ‘when shall we tast the preserued dainties’ of Ralegh and other court poets, Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. MooreSmith (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), p. 231. ‘felt need’, ‘powerful desire’, Rudick, The Poems, pp. xvii, xix. Prompted by Thomas Warton, a belief arose that Ralegh may have written under the subscription ‘Ignoto’, causing his late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century editors substantially to augment the canon with numerous Ignoto poems drawn from Elizabethan and Jacobean manuscript anthologies. The calculation that a ‘complete’ Cynthia might have constituted a grand poem of 15,000 lines was proposed by Edmund Gosse in ‘Sir Walter Ralegh’s “Cynthia”’, The Athanaeum nos. 3036 and 3037 (2 and 9 January 1886): 32–33, 66–67; Koller hypothesizes the existence of ten ‘lost’ books, ‘Spenser and Ralegh’, pp. 53–54, as does Muriel Bradbrook, The School of Night (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. 5. ‘Utilitarian poetics’, Steven W. May, Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts (Asheville: Pegasus Press, 1999), chapter 4. Greenblatt argues that Ralegh’s court poetry served ‘to fashion a self-enhancing courtly identity’, Ralegh, p. 60. Louis A. Montrose, ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form’, ELH 50 (1983): 415–59, esp. p. 441. MS Ashmole 1729, fol. 177, cited in Helen Estabrook Sandison, ‘Arthur Gorges, Spenser’s Alcyon and Ralegh’s Friend’, PMLA 43 (1928): 657–58. Michael Rudick speaks for many when he says that ‘throughout the poem, the finality of loss remains unmitigated by any subsequent curative moments’, The Poems, p. li. Stillman, ‘“Words”’, p. 42. Marion Campbell, ‘Inscribing Imperfection: Sir Walter Ralegh and the Elizabethan Court’, ELR 20 (1990): 233–53, esp. p. 250. Frustration, disorientation, and bewilderment: Greenblatt, Ralegh, pp. 92, 87; disappointment: Latham, The Poems, p. xxxi; bewilderment, Davie, ‘A Reading’, p. 85; bafflement: Edwards, Ralegh, p. 106 and Duncan-Jones, ‘The Date’,

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20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric p. 148; torment: Peter Ure, ‘The Poetry of Sir Walter Ralegh’, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama: Critical Essays by Peter Ure, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1974), pp. 237–47, esp. p. 245. Donald Davie’s essay makes the most extensive comparison between Cynthia and Eliot’s poem. Latham also comments on Ralegh’s ‘oddly modern turn’, The Poems, p. xxxi. Stephen Greenblatt, Learning To Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 2; what this meant at that time, he goes on, is that ‘certain passages reminded me of “The Wasteland”’. The paradigm of the melancholy theorist of melancholy is, of course, Robert Burton, whose vast work struggles to reduce a still vaster subject to order: ‘The Tower of Babel never yielded such confusion of tongues, as this Chaos of Melancholy doth variety of symptoms’, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1948), pp. 337–38. On this as the perennial condition of the theorist of melancholy, see Jennifer Radden, ed., The Nature of Melancholy: from Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 8, 51. Horner, ‘Large Landscape’, pp. 206–207. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 87. ‘Chaotic’, Edwards, Ralegh, p. 105; ‘complex’, ‘strained or broken’, Greenblatt, Ralegh, pp. 86, 90; ‘strained’, Johnson, ‘Some Problems’, p. 22; ‘confusing’, ‘ambiguous’, Campbell, ‘Inscribing Imperfection’, pp. 239, 241; ‘disjointed’, May, Elizabethan Courtier Poets, pp. 47, 48; and ‘deranged’, Davie, ‘A Reading’, p. 85. Edwards, Ralegh, pp. 77, 105. Hammond, ed., Ralegh, p. 10; Campbell, ‘Inscribing Imperfection’, p. 239. Jane Hedley, Power in Verse: Metaphor and Metonymy in the Renaissance Lyric (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), p. 131. See also Davie’s comment on this passage: ‘surely this impetus which so slowly and uncertainly gets the sentence into motion, which, having moved it at last, still rocks back hopelessly upon its starting-point, positively enacts in the reader’s mind just what it says’, ‘A Reading’, p. 87. Rudick proposes that the MS punctuation – which places a period at the end of line 3 – be retained in order to keep this ambiguity open. Duncan-Jones argues for a more literal reading in which ‘Yow’ refers to Cynthia and indicates that she/Elizabeth has actually died (i.e. the poem was written after 1603). On Ralegh’s habits of punctuation, both in the Cynthia holograph and elsewhere, see Carlo M. Bajetta, ‘Ralegh’s Early Poetry and Its Metrical Context’, SP 93 (1996): 390–411; and Malcolm B. Parkes, Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992), pp. 111–12. On the analogy with Richard II, see Greenblatt, Ralegh, pp. 93–95. On the syntactical ambiguity of the opening lines, Marion Campbell comments: ‘subject merges into object, by a confusion of pronouns which suggests both selfdivision and enforced solipsism’, ‘Inscribing Imperfection’, p. 238. For Rudick ‘this is an example that can stand for many others in which there is more

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31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

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than one way to construe the syntax’, The Poems, pp. 159–60, and indeed such pronominal confusions are endemic throughout the poem. ‘My boddy in the walls captived’ is the poem immediately preceding Cynthia in the holograph MS. ‘Mind’ is generally feminized throughout Cynthia; in Latin mens is a female noun, but it is worth noting that Astrophil’s ‘mind’, for example, is explicitly masculine (see sonnets 19, 44), as, implicitly, is his ‘Heroicke minde’ (sonnet 25). Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 6, 5. Alcyon, of course, represents Ralegh’s kinsman, Sir Arthur Gorges, Spenser’s elegy commemorating the latter’s sorrow at the death of his wife, Douglas Howard. Although, as Jennifer Radden notes, the distinction between mourning and melancholia was an ancient one, it will be evident from what follows that, as with many other contemporary writers on melancholy, I am drawing most heavily on the psychoanalytic model developed first in Freud’s essays ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), and The Ego and the Id (1923) and subsequently by Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, and by Julia Kristeva. ‘Internal haemorrhage’ from Freud, Extracts from the Fliess Papers, Draft G ‘Melancholia’ (1895), SE i.205; ‘open wound’, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, xiv.257; see also ‘painful wound’, ibid., p. 258. Spenser, describing the chamber of Phantastes where ‘idle fantasies doe flit’, The Faerie Queene, II.ix.50, 51. As Stillman notes, ‘“Words”’, p. 44, ‘“fancy” is an important word in the poem’ and is loaded with the same ‘equivocal moral potential’ that Sidney attributed to the imagination in An Apology for Poetry. Duncan-Jones, ‘The Date’, p. 152: ‘it is grotesque to show the killer dead as well as the victim’. For the ‘sommers Nightingale’ see Spenser’s dedicatory sonnet to Ralegh prefacing the 1590 Faerie Queene. As part of the standard repertory of pastoral elegy, Philomel appears in the November eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender (line 141). As E. K. notes in his gloss to the latter, the reference was also popularized by Gascoigne’s ‘Complaynt of Phylomene’ in The Steele Glas (1576) – a volume for which Ralegh wrote a commendatory poem and from which he no doubt derived the alternative spelling of the name (see also the reference to ‘Philumena’ in ‘The prayse of meaner wits’, Ralegh’s second sonnet in praise of The Faerie Queene). The conceit of Philomel/Philomen falling silent was popular with Ralegh, recurring in ‘If all the world, and Love were yonge’: ‘As Philomel becometh dombe’ (line 7). Ralegh seems to have been exploiting the ambiguity of the relation between the ocean and its feeding streams, his prototype being, perhaps, the bleak prognostication in Ecclesiastes where the natural flow between river and ocean is set within the gloomy context of the pointlessness of all human endeavour: ‘vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? . . . All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not

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40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again’ (1.2, 3, 7). Contrast Spenser’s somewhat more optimistic, if loaded, model of this natural cycle as a circular or reciprocal relation, in the Proem to Book VI of The Faerie Queene: ‘Then pardon me, most dreaded Soueraine, / That from your selfe I doe this vertue bring, / And to your selfe doe it returne againe: / So from the Ocean all riuers spring, / And tribute backe repay as to their King’. On Ralegh as the fount of poetic ‘streames, that like a golden showre / Flow from thy fruitfull head’ to the admiration of his fellow poets, see again Spenser’s dedicatory sonnet to Ralegh (lines 9–10). Freud, The Ego and the Id, SE xix.29, 28. Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 22, 23. For a discussion of melancholy identification that extends beyond the ‘strictly heterosexual terms’ of the Freudian account, see also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990); eadem, ‘Melancholy Gender/Refused Identification’, in Constructing Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 21–36; and eadem, Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993). The more complex definition of this ‘father of personal prehistory’ is, of course, the area that Julia Kristeva has made her own special domain, especially in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 60. Louis A. Montrose, ‘The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’, in Literary Theory / Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 303–40, esp. p. 331. According to Davie, Ralegh exploits ‘an ambiguity crucial to the Elizabethans in the word “love”, meaning (a) the energy towards the object, (b) the object of the energy’, ‘A Reading’, p. 76. Later he cites this passage of Cynthia as ‘perhaps the best proof’ of how Ralegh was exercised by this ambiguity, ibid., p. 81. See Puttenham’s discussion of energia in The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 141– 43; also Sidney, Apology for Poetry, p. 138. For a further discussion, see Neil Rudenstine, ‘Sidney and Energia’, in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul Alpers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 210–34. Donne’s famous phrase will be subject to greater scrutiny in chapter 6 below. In Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1989), S. K. Heninger, Jr., notes the interchangeability of the Elizabethan terms ‘invention’ and ‘conceit’. In Elizabethan usage, ‘conceit’ signified ‘that which is conceived in the mind, a conception, notion, idea, thought’ (OED) and derived from the Platonic notion of an act of sexual congress taking place between male form and female matter (materia/mater). As Rudick notes, ‘“hopefull love” is the object of the poet’s desire and the subject of his poetry’, The Poems, p. 160. On the way in which ‘the subject’s relation to the object was that of mastery or would-be mastery’ in classical and Renaissance philosophy and in such cultic studies of the early modern subject as those

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49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54.

55.

56. 57.

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by Jakob Burckhardt and Ernst Cassirer, see the introduction to Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 3. See also the discussion by William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden who comment that Cassirer’s ‘metaphysical subject . . . stands in the presence of an object and reflects upon the security of its conceptual mastery over this object’, The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 75. An exception should be made here for Marion Campbell who, though she presents a historicist reading of the poem and argues for the 1592 date, does so explicitly in order to not to recuperate the masculine writing subject but to argue instead for the way the poem stages a ‘destabilizing of subjectivity’, ‘Inscribing Imperfection’, p. 250. On the basis, that is, of Kristeva’s definition: ‘it is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4. For Kristeva the corpse is the ultimate in abjection, ‘a border that has encroached upon everything’, p. 3, and that blurs the boundary between ‘the inanimate and the inorganic’, p. 109. Greenblatt, Ralegh, p. 85. A test-case here might be the way, according to Kristeva, a writer like C´eline communicates abjection ‘through style’, style being, in his own words, ‘“a certain way of doing violence to sentences”’, Powers of Horror, pp. 133, 203. Stillman, ‘“Words”’, p. 37. See also Edwards: ‘we cannot help looking to the time ahead when Ralegh does really begin to write “the story of all ages past” in the gathering gloom of his last years in the Tower’, Ralegh, p. 114. The image of desertion recurs in Ralegh’s ‘Like truthles dreames’, lines 5–6: ‘My lost delights, now cleane from sight of land, / Have left me all alone in unknowne waies’. This poem was clearly on Ralegh’s mind as he goes on to quote from it at line 123. Most notably Oakeshott, The Queen and the Poet, chapter 2 passim; but see also Latham, The Poems, p. xli; Koller, ‘Spenser and Ralegh’, p. 57; Buchan, ‘Ralegh’s Cynthia’, p. 466; Duncan-Jones, ‘The Date’, pp. 155–56; Davie, ‘A Reading’, p. 74; and May, Elizabethan Courtier Poets, p. 46. Horner’s comment is perhaps salutary: ‘it is a weakness of the poem that it invites this treatment. The myth, the pastoral fiction is not maintained. Life breaks in – “Twelve yeares entire I wasted in this war . . .” and the scholars begin measuring the years’, ‘Large Landscape’, p. 205. Rudick, The Poems, p. 161. Stillman, ‘“Words”’, p. 45. See also Campbell’s comment on these lines: ‘the quotation erupts into the poem, fracturing its surface and drawing attention to its own textuality . . . we are made forcibly aware that this is not a seamless text but one cobbled together from bits and pieces of earlier writing. Quotation is thus annexed into the rhetoric of fragmentation’, ‘Inscribing Imperfection’, p. 241. That this tendency to self-quotation seems to have the specific effect

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58.

59.

60.

61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric of disconcerting the critic is suggested by Duncan-Jones, who comments that this is ‘one of many characteristics of Ralegh designed to baffle scholarship’, ‘The Date’, p. 148. If, formerly, it was a widowed mind that ‘writes in the dust’ (line 91), then what follows is said to be the unmediated utterance of a similarly feminized ‘hevy hart’ (line 147) that ‘wrate what it would’ (line 146) without ‘reason’ or ‘consayte’ (these having been differentiated as masculine) but in such a way as to bear witness to its suffering: ‘thyne own mourning thoughts’ (line 149). Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint, line 40. That Ralegh’s ‘imagery of self was protean in its significance, characterized by a fluidity which was conventionally associated with the feminine rather than by the solid, fixed (and more masculine?) significations’, see Berry, Of Chastity and Power, p. 148. On the ‘ebb and flow’ of the poem’s meaning and imagery, see Davie, ‘A Reading’, p. 77; Johnson, ‘Some Problems’, p. 28; Stillman, ‘“Words”’, pp. 37, 44; and Berry, Of Chastity and Power, p. 150. The phrase ‘tidal drama’ is Johnson’s, ‘Some Problems’, p. 20, n.5. Hammond refers to the poem’s ‘tides of passion’ and uses the image of a ‘wave of passion’ breaking on an epigrammatic line, Ralegh, p. 10, exactly as Edwards does, Ralegh, p. 121. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 10. It is difficult to resist Kristeva’s image of the non-differentiated state from which the melancholy ego fails fully to emerge as ‘oceanic’, ‘an “oceanic void”’, a ‘lethal ocean’, Black Sun, pp. 19, 29, 30, even though she is, in these last two examples, citing a case of specifically female melancholia. The image derives ultimately from Freud who uses it to describe the sensation certain individuals claim to feel when their ego is merged with some higher power such as God. In Freud’s analysis, this ‘oceanic feeling’ can be traced back to ‘an early phase of ego-feeling’, Civilization and its Discontents (1930), SE xxi.72. Berry draws out the sexual connotations of ‘arections’, Of Chastity and Power, p. 151. Compare Spenser, The Faerie Queene, II.xi.18: ‘Like a great water flood, that tombling low / From the high mountaines, threats to ouerflow / With suddein fury all the fertile plaine, / And the sad husbandmans long hope doth throw / A downe the streame, and all his vowes make vaine, / Nor bounds nor banks his headlong ruine may sustaine’. The passage describes the near-fatal assault of Maleager on Prince Arthur, and the latter’s rescue (in stanzas 29–30) by his squire, Timias, Spenser’s figuration for Ralegh. If Spenser is alluding to the Ocean to Cynthia here, then he may be emphasizing its attempt to recuperate rather than to drown the masculine subject at this point. Enterline, Tears of Narcissus, p. 19. The reference to the breast as a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ object alludes, of course, to the theories of Melanie Klein. See in particular her essay ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’ (1935), which links the child’s introjection of the breast as good/bad object to Freud’s theory of melancholia; these ideas were to be developed in her essay on ‘Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States’ (1940), both in ‘Love, Guilt and Reparation’ and Other Works 1921–1945, ed. Hanna Segal (London: Virago, 1988).

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66. Several of these commonplaces recur in Ralegh’s ‘Now we have present made’ (especially the comparison of Cynthia to ‘A flowre of loves own planting’, line 5), prompting Rudick to go against Oakeshott in dating this poem earlier than Cynthia. For references internal to Cynthia, compare ‘angellicall’ with ‘angellike’ (line 112), ‘springe of joyes’ with ‘springe of bewties’ (line 185), ‘Th’Idea remayninge’ with ‘the Idea but restinge’ (line 12), and ‘imbaulminge’ with ‘imbalmed’ (line 116). 67. Montrose, ‘The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text’, p. 320. 68. Stillman, ‘“Words”’, p. 45. 69. Rudick, The Poems, p. 163, where he adds ‘the essentiall love’ at line 410 as another possibility. 70. The line ‘stayes by the pleasure, but no longer stayes’ is unrhymed and floats between the preceding and succeeding quatrains, its metrical redundancy perhaps serving to emphasize the uncanny quality of those things that linger on even after a death or a loss. The ambiguous character of that which remains behind even after death might be embodied in the contradictory meanings of the verb ‘to stay’: on the one hand, ‘to stop, halt, cease, arrest activity’ (the older of the two meanings) and, on the other, ‘to remain, survive, persist, continue’. Ralegh exploits this ambiguity throughout the poem: see also, for example, ‘Butt stay my thoughts, make end’ (line 474). 71. Horner, ‘Large Landscape’, p. 203; Johnson, ‘Some Problems’, p. 24. 72. See also ‘Shee gave, shee tooke, shee wounded, she appeased’ (line 56), ‘woundinge my mind’ (line 58), ‘with many wounds, with deaths cold pangs inebrased’ (line 90), ‘wounded vassalls’ (line 197), and ‘loves wounds’ (line 419), as well as the endemic images of bodily disintegration such as: ‘my joyes and hopes lay bleedinge on the ground’ (line 163) and the image of the executed corpse (at lines 342–43) mentioned above. On Ralegh’s spelling of ‘wonders’ see, for example, ‘natures wounder’ (line 344) and ‘Yet have these wounders want which want cumpassion’ (line 201). Hammond, Ralegh, p. 283, ponders whether to modernize the latter to ‘wonders’ but, in the light of line 197, desists so as to keep the ambiguity open. 73. As May notes, Ralegh, p. 51, Ralegh draws this image from the description of Aeolus’ cave of winds in Aeneid i.52–59. The fact that these winds are released at the command of Juno in order to destroy Aeneas may add to the sub-text that associates such catastrophe with a maternal figure. 74. Hedley, Power in Verse, p. 128. Of the same line Philip Edwards comments: ‘some have taken this as the turning point of the whole poem, but it is not so. His denial is a momentary, irresistible ejaculation, expressing the division in his mind that has been present throughout the poem’, Ralegh, p. 122. 75. Sacks, The English Elegy, p. 6.

chap t e r 5

Feminine identifications in A Lover’s Complaint

A Lover’s Complaint – the poem published as an end-piece to the 1609 Quarto of the Sonnets – has to be the most abjected part of the Shakespeare canon: slighted, sidelined, passed over, ignored, and not only by a tradition that, rightly or wrongly, has bestowed a higher critical value on the plays than on the poems, but even by an earlier readership that, if the popularity of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece is anything to go by, prized their ‘mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare’ more highly as a poet than as anything else.1 In marked contrast to the narrative poems (which went through numerous editions throughout Shakespeare’s lifetime and the seventeenth century, inspired hosts of enthusiastic imitations, and, in the case of Venus and Adonis at least, received more allusions than anything else Shakespeare wrote), A Lover’s Complaint – which, John Benson’s bowdlerized 1640 edition of the Sonnets aside, was not to appear in print again until published by Edmond Malone in 1780, and to which not a single contemporary reference or response has survived – left not a ripple and sank without trace. And, if current popular and scholarly interest in the Sonnets might be thought to make up for the relative neglect of the lyrics in the seventeenth century (there were fewer allusions to the Sonnets than to any other of Shakespeare’s works, the only exception being A Lover’s Complaint), then such compensation, if that is what it is, has not extended as far as the latter, publications on the Sonnets currently outnumbering those on the Complaint by a ratio of hundreds to one. When the poem is addressed, furthermore, it leaves its readers exercised, chary, and somewhat bemused: put on the spot by a poem that challenges norms and fails to conform to expectations of either Shakespeare or the genre. What causes dismay is not only the poem’s syntax and diction – which, like that of the Ocean to Cynthia, strikes everyone as difficult and strange (‘perplexing’, ‘complex’, ‘contorted’, ‘tortive’, ‘errant’, ‘obscure’, ‘dense’, ‘compressed’, ‘unfamiliar’, ‘curious’, and ‘odd’ being just a few of the words used to describe it) – but also its imagery, its presentation of character, its narrative structure, its 174

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ending, its genre, and its tone.2 There is a general charge of obscurity, this ‘abstruse and virtually unexplicated’ poem that is ‘hard to understand and difficult to love’, that ‘does not read easily’ and even ‘verges on impenetrability’, being said to ‘deepen the issues without quite clarifying them’ and to be more ‘ambivalent’ than – indeed, to have ‘abandoned the forceful clarity of’ – the other narrative poems, and generally to induce in the reader a state of ‘unease’.3 One critic alone describes the poem and various aspects of it as ‘most peculiar’, ‘extraordinary’, ‘mysterious’, ‘astonishing’, ‘complicated’, ‘bewildering’, ‘perplexing’, and ‘strange’.4 Indeed, the clearest indication that the poem somehow riles its readers – managing to tantalize and to frustrate them at the same time – is the fact that the word used to describe it more than any other is ‘enigmatic’. This sense of the poem as maverick and strange, moreover, periodically breaks out into doubt over who wrote it, for A Lover’s Complaint has a long history of authorship debate. Although the poem was championed by Malone (who found evidence of Shakespeare’s hand everywhere in it), its Shakespearean credentials were disputed by Hazlitt, doubted from the middle of the nineteenth century, and vigorously rejected early in the twentieth when the poem was attributed to the Rival Poet of the Sonnets, and, by extension, to George Chapman. Although energetic efforts were made from the 1960s to restore the poem to the canon, the question has recently been thrown open again, stylometric tests developed in part to gauge the authenticity of ‘A Funeral Elegy by W. S.’ having cast renewed doubt on that of A Lover’s Complaint; the most recent candidate to be proposed as its author is John Davies of Hereford.5 For my purposes, however, the question of who wrote A Lover’s Complaint seems less important, or less interesting at any rate, than the fact that the question should get asked at all (let alone so often). In what follows, therefore, I am not so concerned with the claims of this or that candidate or with the merits of a particular case as with what this strained and sometimes dismissive reaction has to say about A Lover’s Complaint itself. For there is clearly something about this poem that troubles, that undermines confidence and certainty and exercises suspicion and doubt; for every time the authorship question is decided in favour of Shakespeare uncertainty breaks out again, drawing readers back to reconsider the old problem and to worry it obsessively like an unhealed scar. For although on the face of it there are no external reasons for doubting that ‘A Lovers Complaint BY WILLIAM SHAKE-SPEARE ’ – as the drop-title announces the poem in the Quarto – is his (no more substantive grounds, that is, if these are stylistic alone, for doubting this than, say, for doubting that Ralegh wrote the Ocean to Cynthia), the internal properties of the poem that register as

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quirky and odd nevertheless urge with particular insistence that this question of authorship and authenticity be addressed. And, for some readers, these properties are anomalous enough for what is unusual or untypical to shade into what is ‘un-Shakespearean’ as if, while the ‘problem’ – whatever that is – cannot be solved or made to go away, it can at least be firmly separated from Shakespeare’s name. A notional benchmark of propriety is brought into play here: some norm or expectation against which what is experienced as different or excessive is implicitly being measured. And with this comes a sense of something endangered, of a need to protect and preserve, as if the imperilled object were the iconic image of the writing subject as Master Poet, and as if notions of authorial self-consistency and orthodoxy were somehow at stake. From this perspective, the poem’s long relegation to the margins begins to look a little more motivated than accidental, more defensive than benign – not so much a polite indifference as an embarrassed aversion of the gaze. There is no doubt that the general air of dubiousness that hangs over the poem has contributed in good measure to its long-term neglect. Judged difficult, doubted, or denied: in none of these scenarios, it seems to me, does the poem meet with an entirely neutral response. At best a source of unease, at worst something to be cut away or effectively disavowed, A Lover’s Complaint has been treated as a problem, as something that draws quantities of cathexis to it like a hystericized limb, a chronic complaint of the Shakespeare corpus that, whatever action is taken, it seems, remains stubbornly resistant to cure. In this respect, the reception history of A Lover’s Complaint has much in common with that of the Sonnets: for the compulsive re-ordering, re-presenting, and ‘straightening’ of those poems is now read as a ‘hysterical symptom’ – a complex response to their culturally disturbing representation of love between men and a felt need to deny, apologise for, or one way and another accommodate it.6 Except that, if the editorial history of the Sonnets can be seen to symptomize the ‘moral panic’ induced in earlier generations of readers by the prospect of the heterosexual, ‘manly’ Shakespeare under threat, then whatever it is in A Lover’s Complaint that unsettles and perturbs evidently possesses a still greater power to alarm – the reception it has met with being more akin, perhaps, to the ‘similar panic when the cry goes up that Throne and Altar are in danger’ identified by Freud in his essay on ‘Fetishism’ – since Shakespeare’s involvement in this poem is perennially thrown into doubt (no matter how elusive the proof ) while, however energetically imputations of homosexuality to Shakespeare may have been rejected in some quarters, it was never seriously suggested that the Sonnets were not his.7

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This disturbing effect that A Lover’s Complaint has on its readers may have something to do with the form to which it belongs: a sub-genre of the complaint tradition in which the speaker is a solitary woman who laments her mistreatment at the hands of a faithless man. The locus classicus here is Ovid’s Heroides, a text in which fifteen women from the historical and mythical past appeal to and berate the male figures that have variously abused, seduced, raped, betrayed, neglected, forgotten, but at all events abandoned them. Although Ovid’s text had long drawn poets and writers to it – it has been described as ‘probably the most popular classical poetry of the later Middle Ages’ – it seems to have held a particular fascination for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, prompting George Turbervile’s translation of 1567 (which went through five editions by 1600) and inspiring analogues and imitations by Surrey, Churchyard, Gascoigne, Spenser, Lodge, Daniel, and Drayton, to name but a few.8 Heroines had been depicted, of course, and the voice of passionate female lament heard in many texts before or alongside the Heroides, but the particular form that Ovid developed – a sequence of epistles in each of which the female speaker’s interior monologue is laid bare like a confession overheard – allowed for the sustained articulation of a feminine moi, an extended exploration of female subjectivity that was new and different enough to make Ovid’s boast in the Ars amatoria that he ‘first invented this art, unknown to others’ be generally accepted as justified.9 What is important here, however, is the very distinct way in which that female subjectivity is presented: for in the Heroides women are not defined, as they so often are in the Metamorphoses, by a sexual role that positions them as the recipients of male desire, ‘interpellated’ as female subjects (as Lynn Enterline suggests) by a phallic god intent on rape.10 Rather, the Heroides define women very specifically in relation to lack. That is to say, whatever the individual variations between one woman’s story and the next, each finds herself in the position of having been deserted. It is not betrayal or mistreatment that prompts their complaint as such but, specifically, abandonment. They would not complain, or not in the epistolary format which is by definition directed to an absent addressee, if the man in question, however heinous, were actually present. As the one thing that unites them all, abandonment is the defining feature of their condition, indeed, of their femininity – for they are heroines insofar as they have been left, cut off from the men whose loss or departure it is their sole function to bemoan. Moreover, this desertion is represented as an absolute condition: there is no question, for example, of these women looking about pragmatically for a replacement, nor of there being any recuperation, rescue, or redress. The women’s state is one of utter

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dereliction (which is why it lends itself so often to the metaphor of the city ruined and sacked), and when some, like Medea, Ariadne or Briseis, are, in addition, displaced from family and home, their condition of exile – their loss of father and fatherland – only drives home the fact that what they are bereft of is their menfolk. The Heroides, in other words, rather insistently define the female condition as privatory: all the complainants are presented as women who have lost – and lost for good – something that, in the form of a suitor, lover, husband, or beloved, they once possessed, and that loss is the definition of their femininity.11 From this perspective, it is not very difficult to see that, in this context at least, woman is defined according to the formula of castration. What is remarkable, however, is that, as in the other poems considered in this book, the male poet here identifies with this position. Having defined woman as ‘castrated’, the form of female complaint allows – indeed, invites – the male poet to enter into that subjectivity so defined, to occupy that position at some length, and, in impersonating the woman’s role and ventriloquizing her voice, fully to experience her ‘condition’. Moreover, the fashion for appending a female complaint to the end of a sonnet sequence – of lashing Ovid to Petrarch, as it were – which Samuel Daniel inaugurated when he published Delia and The Complaint of Rosamond together in a single volume in 1592 and which set a trend many would follow in the 1590s and beyond (a trend to which it is now generally accepted that Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint belong) only serves to point up the comparison and to reinforce the fact that something rather extraordinary is going on.12 For the contradistinction between the two forms – a Petrarchan sequence in which the male voice traditionally lacks his Lady’s love and pleads for ‘favours’, followed by a female complaint in which a woman, seduced and abandoned by her treacherous lover, her chastity and reputation gone, laments the consequences of just such a gift – is not only, as is often remarked, designed to counterpoint one with the other, the latter passing critical, ironic comment on what precedes, but it also works (issues of the ‘double standard’ often coming in here) to organize the binaries of before and after, cause and effect, clearly along gender lines. That is to say, the juxtaposition of ‘male’ and ‘female’ complaint has the effect of differentiating between two kinds of lack. While one, even when elevated by the Petrarchan lover into a ‘virtual poetic ontology’ is still, at least theoretically, conditional and temporary, dependent upon the Lady’s ‘grace’ – the man could be content, if only ‘the deare She’ would give in to his demands – the other, by contrast, is irreversible and irrecuperable, not so much conditional as a permanent condition.13 It is an indication of the discomfort that critics

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feel with this transition, perhaps, that they continue to find the verses that traditionally mark this switch-point or cross-over between these male and female ‘I’s – the light, bawdy anacreontics that intervene between the sonnets and the complaint – irrelevant, baffling, obscure, and in some cases (Shakespeare being one of them) non-authorial.14 And, although Shakespeare’s Sonnets are not, of course, Petrarchan in any straightforward sense, nevertheless A Lover’s Complaint is structured in such a way – with the seduced girl, as she reminisces about her case, citing the very pleas her seducer successfully used to persuade her – as to incorporate the male complaint within her own, making comparison between the two unavoidable. It has been suggested, in fact, that this may have been Shakespeare’s belated attempt to incorporate Petrarchanism into a text that otherwise ‘notably lacked’ the voice of heterosexual male longing; and there is no doubt that, whatever the rationale, the 1609 Quarto – with its numbered sonnets, intervening anacreontics, and female complaint – follows the ‘Delian’ tradition to the letter.15 A clear differentiation between male and female complaint – and between the male and female conditions – is, in any case, the way the seduced girl in the poem presents her situation, comparing the tears with which her seducer finally conquers her with those that she sheds in the aftermath of her seduction: ‘our drops this difference bore: / His poisoned me, and mine did him restore’.16 Female complaint thus defines femininity as a state of abandonment – a condition brought on, it implies, by a woman having lost or been parted from the phallus she once possessed – and, as a literary form that allows the poet to take up that woman’s lament, to identify with her expression of suffering and loss, it provides him with an opportunity to play the part of castration. This puts female complaint into an interesting alignment vis-`a-vis masochism, furthermore, since masochism stages the scenario in which a feminine identification – the mark, of course, of the negative Oedipus complex of the boy – is defiantly paraded. Since the form of female complaint gives the poet a part to play, a role to perform, and an imagined fantasy scene in which to masquerade, it is perhaps all too obvious to say that the phantasmatic of the genre is masochistic: not only because it so clearly exemplifies the heterocosmic impulse or involves reproducing experiences of suffering and loss but, most specifically, because it puts the man in a feminine position exactly as masochism situates the male subject in the role of being ‘castrated, or copulated with, or giving birth to a baby’.17 Since, as suggested in chapter 2, masochism is (of all the perversions) in most radical conflict with society’s dominant fiction, flying in the face of the pleasure principle and undermining the demands of the superego and

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of civilization, then this may go some way towards explaining why Ovid’s Heroides, the foundational text of a genre that depicts irrecuperable loss and seems to relish the experience of passive suffering without end, has so often been perceived as oppositional and subversive (it has been described as ‘unheroic’, ‘antigeneric’, ‘anticanonical’, ‘nonhierarchical’, and ‘nonpatriarchal’), at odds with both the Aristotelian law of action (which states that a work of art must bring a sequence of events to their natural and logical conclusion) and with Virgilian epic (which presents that action as linear, teleological, and progressive).18 Not only that, but as a form that deals with the experience of being – or, certainly, of having been – sexually used and abused by a man (in some cases explicitly as the victim of sexual violence), female complaint once again brings out into the open the inner content of masochism that is generally repressed – the male masochist’s core desire, that is, to be sexually loved by the father – a content that is, as a rule, veiled over, even if not very convincingly, by the dominatrix of the classic masochistic scene. In those texts, therefore, where the poet identifies directly with a woman who has suffered sexually at the hands of a man, these disguises drop away, the effect being to actualize the unconscious wish behind the masochistic beating fantasy: ‘my father is beating/loving me’. Thus Lynn Enterline, for example, is able to read The Rape of Lucrece as not only allowing the male narrator, through his identification with Tarquin, to take the place of the one who can have Lucrece (which, since it puts him in the place of a rapist, is bad enough, even though this is the ‘culturally sanctioned direction’ of male desire), but also, more scandalously still, as putting him – through his identification with Lucrece – in the ‘far less admissible place of being the one who can have Tarquin’.19 The shameful but erotic sub-text of this poem, that is, whispers a desire for homosexual rape. This story, Enterline goes on, ‘might be the distortion or dissimulation that allows a prohibited pleasure a way of emerging . . . the narrator can be the one who wants Tarquin only by taking a detour through one who resolutely does not want him’ (p. 185). Not all female complaints deal with rape, of course, and Lucrece has a troubled reception history of its own as critics have struggled to classify the poem and to gauge the extent to which it conforms to or deviates from the complaint tradition. All the same, the issues it brings out into the open give some indication as to why a literary form that allows male poets to identify with specifically female sexual suffering should have the potential for such serious if not explosive consequences. And, again, it may go some way towards explaining why the genre – however loosely defined – has, in terms of literary history, met with such resistance, being denied any formal terminology (‘male-authored

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female complaint’, John Kerrigan’s descriptive term, being the best currently available), and being ignored, overlooked, blanked out, one could almost say institutionally suppressed by the authorities and guardians of the canon, in spite of the fact that, endemic and universal, the literature of female abandonment has existed since poetry began and has crossed centuries, continents, and cultures.20 From this perspective, indeed, the awkward reception with which A Lover’s Complaint has been met seems only a small part of a larger picture, a local symptom of a deeper and longer-lasting unease. All the same, these speculations do not entirely account for the strained response with which the poem has met, nor fully absorb its potential for subversion, for throughout this discussion one thing has remained in place and has (albeit with differing degrees of self-consciousness) been quietly affirmed, and that is the gender binary: the assumption that there are ‘men’ and ‘women’, ‘male’ authors and ‘female’ voices, and that these – however challengingly they may encounter, exchange, and overlap with one another – nevertheless remain two, distinct positions from which the players start out and to which they ultimately return. This derives in large part from the model that is used almost ubiquitously in discussions of female complaint – namely, that of ventriloquism (for one critic, indeed, female complaint is ‘the paradigmatic ventriloquized text’) – for to see the genre as one in which a male subject ‘assumes’ a female subjectivity – dons a woman’s sexual identity and performs her gender role – is necessarily to keep sexual difference in play; to see the form as an act of ‘cross-voicing’ or ‘crossdressing’ is to imply that, whatever potential that ludic space may open up for the destabilization of gender norms, the exchange still takes place between positions otherwise, and of themselves, relatively recognizable, stable, and secure.21 Even where the emphasis is on the way ventriloquized texts radically deconstruct and collapse gender norms, putting into question what we might have thought we meant by the terms ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘female’, or ‘male’, those norms are still at some level presupposed even if only as a cultural fiction there to be interrogated and undermined. The characteristic move in John Kerrigan’s Motives of Woe, for example – one of the most detailed studies of A Lover’s Complaint and the tradition to which it belongs – is to set up gender stereotypes as commonplace and banal, to show how female complaint then scrutinizes and complicates them, only then (at least as far as A Lover’s Complaint is concerned) to reinstate those stereotypes as the rule from which the exceptions depart. And while this move allows the critic to keep open the literary possibilities for the most abject of masculinities in other texts – in Richard Barnfield’s Affectionate Shepherd,

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for example, or in The Fair Ephelia, or in Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard – it also serves, at the same time, to protect and preserve A Lover’s Complaint from them. Thus, however much the male author/narrator in the latter poem might be undercut by a powerful female voice (not least one complaining of male perfidy), he remains, in Kerrigan’s reading at least, ultimately in control: it is he who, with cool detachment, is watching, framing, staging the scene. This pattern is repeated when the male author/narrator is again shown to be discredited and undermined, only then to be reaffirmed as phallic: as an overhearing figure who invades female space and intrudes upon female suffering, the male author/narrator (and, by implication, reader) is put in the same position as the very seducer whom the girl laments (and while some texts register a scruple at compromising him in this way, A Lover’s Complaint is not one of them). Throughout this reading of the poem, the male author/narrator remains in the position of subject (looking at, ventriloquizing) as opposed to object (looked at, ventriloquized), as a result of which the poem’s ‘overarching’ (p. 38) and ‘controlling’ (p. 39) perspective remains definitively ‘male’ (p. 38); and where that control really is threatened – mainly by the poem’s unprecedented refusal to close the frame and to return the reader (whose ear has been bent by the female complainant for some 259 lines) to the male ‘I’ who first introduced her (‘down I laid to list the sad-tuned tale’, line 4) or to the old man to whom she divulges her tale – the girl and her words are characterized in such a way (as raging and emotional, as ‘frippery’, as ‘on the edge of incoherence’, with ‘more than a hint of absurdity’ lying in the girl’s ‘“O” this, and “O” that’, which leads to ‘potentially ludicrous overtones of orgasmic excess’, p. 51) as to make it difficult to deny that a certain amount of gender stereotyping is still in play. Even when it critiques and interrogates the gender binary, therefore, criticism on female complaint can unobtrusively reproduce it, the ‘difference’ (line 300) that the girl in the poem posits between the teardrops, his and hers, finding itself naturalized as sexual difference, dispositions and features supposedly ‘female’ and ‘male’ coming to divide along all too familiar lines (subject/object, agent/victim, and so forth). Complaint gets gendered as feminine, for example, because abandonment leaves ‘women in a more grievously trapped circumstance than is true of their masculine equivalents’.22 With difference thus biologized once more – projected back squarely onto the body – it is easy to see how female complaint, far from subverting the dominant fiction, can actually be seen to uphold if not reinforce it. It is from this perspective, indeed, that female complaint can come to be read as a vehicle for ‘patriarchal didacticism’, as a calculated

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ploy on the part of men to oppress women by demeaning, admonishing, criminalizing, and stigmatizing them, colonizing their authentic voice and speaking on their behalf.23 From this perspective, again, men can be seen to masquerade as women specifically in order to empower themselves, the act of ‘writing the text of female “experience”’ providing them, as Wendy Wall puts it, with ‘the structural ground for asserting poetic mastery’.24 According to this reading, male poets are shown to compose female complaint – to insert themselves into the position of a clearly differentiated female other – with the sole aim of furthering their own careers and of fashioning themselves as serious male authors. In particular, it is argued that the Renaissance tradition of appending a female complaint to a sonnet sequence allowed male poets to distance themselves from the lightweight ‘toys’ of courtly love (the kind of thing that could end up leaving women in such a predicament) in order to present themselves as contrastingly grave and weighty writers worthy of attention and fame (in this reading, for example, A Lover’s Complaint is said to help Shakespeare ‘validate a new authorial identity’, p. 259). ‘The female respondent becomes one of the doubles that the writer uses . . . to introduce his own authority through masquerade. The fallen woman’s critique becomes a central part of the architecture of poetic authority, as it establishes an acceptable idiom through which the new poet can be presented and formally contained’ (p. 260). Any potential that feminine identification may have had to disturb the gender binary, to undermine the dominant fiction, or to subvert male authority, can thus ironically find itself turned on its head. And, if playing the woman is seen as a strategy for boosting a specifically masculine authority, then – by means of a reversal with which we are now familiar – no position can be too low, that of the utmost dereliction (being an abandoned, violated, dishonoured woman coming pretty close to the mark) being merely a ruse to recuperate the masculine subject all the more completely. In this light, female complaint can seem a vehicle not so much for collapsing sexual difference or for exploring the fields of androgyny, homoeroticism, polymorphous perversity and the like, but, on the contrary, for cementing the biological division of gender – however ‘tactically’ or ‘strategically’ – and for restoring the masculine writing subject to a position of mastery and power. If this recuperative narrative is to be avoided, therefore, and questions of abjection and masochism – which I believe the text invites – are to be fully investigated and explored, a different approach seems to be called for: one that instead of containing and domesticating the text’s potential for subversion, will try to account for its abidingly ‘enigmatic’ quality. And for this a clue is to be found within the poem itself. The opening lines – which

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announce a ‘plaintful story’ (line 2) and a ‘sad-tuned tale’ (line 4) – clearly identify the poem’s allegiance to the complaint tradition and invite us to assume that the letters and other objects which the weeping girl is casting into the metonymic stream on whose banks she sits are, as would be entirely conventional, those of the faithless lover who has deserted her. This assumption, moreover, is personified in the figure of the old man (himself the classic figure of the senex who has withdrawn from the court to a life of contemplation and retreat) who soon enters the scene and, like the reader or critic, ‘desires to know’ (line 62) and ‘desires’ to hear (line 66) the cause of her grief. Given his former experience ‘Of court, of city’ (line 59), it is quite logical that he should be presented as assuming that the scenario before him conforms to the generic expectations of courtly complaint. Yet, however acutely this old philosopher may have ‘observ`ed’ (line 60) the ins and outs of courtly life and love, he turns out – if that is his assumption – to be wrong; and it is a sign, perhaps, of his being out of place – of his not being in the poem or tradition he thought he was in – that he does not reappear again, and that the ending that he (and we) might well, following the complaint tradition, have expected – in which the girl dies of a broken heart, say, and the old man, having prepared for her a modest grave, weeps ‘wise tears in a passage of concluding pathos’, as one editor speculates – is, in the event, shown up as being trite and banal by comparison with the strange and unsettling ending that we actually get.25 That A Lover’s Complaint is departing from convention here and overturning all expectation is suggested by something that, along with John Kerrigan, although for different reasons, I think is ‘of the greatest significance’: the fact that the girl is not, as it happens, discarding the favours of her former lover but, rather, those of other women.26 How this (which neither the old man nor the reader expected) came to be is the burden of the story that she proceeds to tell in the long speech that follows. This unusual scenario demands inspection, and, on looking more closely at the objects that the girl is weeping over, what is immediately striking is (even allowing for hyperbole) their quantity – ‘A thousand favours’ (line 36), ‘many’ (lines 43, 45), ‘yet more’ (line 47) – and their diversity: ‘papers’ and ‘rings’ (line 6), a ‘napkin’ (line 15), favours of ‘amber crystal and of beaded jet’ (line 37), ‘folded schedules’ (line 43), rings of ‘gold and bone’ (line 45), ‘letters’ (line 47), as well as (as she proceeds with her story further items get added to the list) ‘tributes’ of rubies and pearls (line 197), ‘talents of their hair’ (line 204), ‘deep-brained sonnets’ (line 209), ‘trophies’ (line 218), ‘similes’ (line 227), and a ‘device’ (line 232). All these, it transpires, are love-tokens that were originally given to the youth by other women

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and then passed on by him to the girl. The first thing to notice about this multitude of objects, apart from the fact that they originate with women, is – and it is a point on which the poem is emphatic – that they are all objects that signify: that is to say, they are all, to that extent, texts. The ‘napkin’, for example, is embroidered with ‘conceited characters’ (line 16) and ‘silken figures’ (line 17) that the girl reads (‘often reading what contents it bears’, line 19); the ‘folded schedules’ are similarly ‘perused’ (line 44); the rings of gold and bone are ‘posied’ (line 45), that is, inscribed with rhymes or mottoes; and the letters ‘penned in blood’ (line 47) with ‘lines’ (line 55) and ‘contents’ (line 56) that she reads and tears. As for the various jewels – amber, crystal, jet (line 37), rubies and pearls (line 198), a diamond (line 211), an emerald (line 213), a sapphire and opal (line 215), locks of hair entwined with gold (205), and so forth – these belong to a long history of lapidary symbolism and are to be treated as signifiers loaded with meaning. Emeralds and opals, for example, were traditionally believed to cure weak sight, so presumably the women originally sent them to the youth meaning either that he should see them and their love more clearly and/or that their sight had been dazzled by him. The pearls and rubies, moreover, set off a chain of signification. As synecdoches of the women who sent them, they are signifiers of signifiers – the ‘bloodless white’ (line 201) of the pearls ‘figuring’ (line 199) the women’s pallor which in turn signifies the ‘Effects of terror’ (line 202), ‘grief’ (line 200), ‘pensived and subdued desires’ (line 219), while the ‘encrimsoned mood’ (line 201) of the rubies stands for the women’s blushes, themselves ‘aptly understood’ (line 200) as signs of either ‘dear modesty’ (line 202) or ‘affections hot’ (line 218). Should there be any doubt about the signification of these metaphorical objects (the youth offers all these to the girl as ‘similes’, line 227) they come attached (see ‘annexions’, line 208) with more straightforwardly literary texts: that is, with ‘deep-brained sonnets’ that ‘did amplify’ (line 209) and ‘blazon’ (line 217) – the specifically rhetorical and literary senses being implied here – their intended meaning. In this respect, the jewels have an affinity with the ‘device’ (line 232) that was given to the youth by an infatuated nun and which, although not specified as such, was presumably some combination of image and text as would have been familiar from the tradition of emblembooks and courtly imprese. The objects which the girl throws into the stream, then – having read and perused their contents, sighed and wept over them, and then torn, broken, cracked, or rent them – are, emphatically, all texts; and the poem suggests that in each case they derived originally from women. The question has been raised whether the youth himself might not have written directly to the girl

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and have authored at least some of these missives, her exclamation, ‘O false blood, thou register of lies!’ (line 52), for example, being cited as evidence that the ‘letters sadly penned in blood’ must have been composed by the seducer whose faithlessness she here laments.27 Yet, although we know from her own testimony that the youth is capable of seducing as much by written words as by speech – she found his ‘characters and words’ (line 174) equally deceiving – these apply, in the context, specifically to persuasions that he had directed at others. And, even here, there remains the possibility that these ‘characters’ with which he wooed former mistresses might, in turn, originally have been sent to him by earlier paramours still – his habit of passing on second-hand favours being, as we shall see, an unfailingly successful seductive ploy – a possibility that opens up an interesting scenario of infinite regress as the origin of those letters is pushed back ever further into the poem’s murky narrative past (that this question of whether or not the youth wrote the letters rehearses the similar question of whether or not Shakespeare wrote A Lover’s Complaint should not, in the circumstances, go unnoticed). The letters could as easily have been written by women as by the youth: they are tied up with silk, the same material with which the ‘napkin’ was embroidered, and although letters in that period were typically sealed with wax and silken thread, the use of the unusual technical term ‘sleided’ (line 48, meaning silk that has been separated into individual threads), and the associations this rare word has when used elsewhere, might suggest that these letters were written, wrapped, and sealed by female hands.28 The poem, in fact, seems to taunt us with the undecidability of the issue, making great play of the enigmatic and indecipherable nature of these texts, the contents of which remain teasingly hidden from us and ‘sealed to curious secrecy’ (line 49).29 As far as the girl in the poem is concerned, in any case, there is no incontrovertible evidence that the youth has ever written to her directly at all; the emphasis, rather, is that the objects he gives her have all been inscribed – ‘posied’, ‘penned’, amplified, blazoned, and so forth – by women. In line with this goes the distinct impression that this windy boy prefers to speak than to write, the stress throughout being specifically on his verbal skills.30 He is described, for example, as ‘maiden-tongued’ (line 100), as the possessor of a ‘subduing tongue’ (line 120), as skilled in ‘arguments’ (line 121), in ‘question deep’ (line 121), in ‘replication prompt’ (that is, in repartee, line 122), in ‘dialect’ (that is, in the art of dialectic or argumentation, line 125), and in ‘passions’ (that is, in passionate speeches, lines 126, 295). Those who fall for him imagine ‘what he would say’ (line 132) not what he would write, and it is his winning speech that the girl recites to the old man. The youth’s ability to move and persuade (‘To make

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the weeper laugh, the laugher weep’, line 124), to captivate an audience that is dazzled by what it sees and hears, to use deception (see especially lines 302–15) and disguise (he did ‘livery falseness’, line 105, and wear the ‘garment of a grace’, line 316) all add up to the impression that he is above all else a consummate actor (he even knows, where necessary, how to act as a convincing audience, ‘to weep at woes, / Or to turn white and sound [i.e. swoon] at tragic shows’, lines 307–308). What we have here, then, is a situation in which, contrary to expectation, a female complainant responds to texts most if not all of which are by women; a scene in which women write and women read, where these texts (‘many’ and ‘deep’) both derive from and end up in women’s hands; a scenario in which, to be specific, these texts that are being written, sent, passed on, and read are ones that address and importune, blazon and praise a beautiful man. Put this way, the poem rather strikingly reverses the more familiar scheme of things in which male poets write elaborately conceited Petrarchan poems to and about beautiful women and circulate them among themselves. What gradually unfolds in A Lover’s Complaint, that is to say, is a scene of female ‘homosociality’ in which the structure that clearly manifests itself in the practices of male coterie writing (where poems about or addressed to women are designed to establish a relation – even if mainly a competitive one – with other men) is reproduced, only here, of course, the other way round.31 The two situations are not, it is true, exactly parallel, since here the exchange of texts is mediated by the youth: it is he who passes them on to the girl (as proof of his desirability) and not the women themselves (as proof of their ability), they being presented – albeit through the distorting lenses of the youth’s words which are, in turn, reported by the girl – as expressing their desire for him in ‘good faith’ rather than as aiming directly at showing off or dazzling a fellow rival. But the basic model remains the same. Although it is the youth who markets himself – he who raises his own price by passing on the accumulated capital of others’ love as ‘tender’ (line 219) and ‘combin`ed sums’ (line 231), he who circulates himself – he nevertheless remains a commodity, an item of value that is exchanged, as the poems about him are, between women. The poem thus reproduces the structure basic to homosocial relations: that is, a triangle in which an ostensibly heterosexual relation, however ardently expressed, is accompanied by if not subordinated to a homosocial one. And it is that homosocial relation between women on which A Lover’s Complaint rather unexpectedly insists. The temptation at this point might be to suggest that this reversal recuperates women, turning them from passive victims to active agents who are in control of their situation, able to assert their rights and

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to speak as desiring subjects, empowered to write and to read each other’s ‘deep-brained’ sonnets. To do this, however, would still be to preserve the gender binary and thereby to limit the scope of the poem’s radical potential for subversion; and, while it might allow women to appropriate male power and to take back for themselves privileges otherwise denied them, it is still to keep the masterly writing subject very much in play (now only a female rather than a male one), thus bringing the abjection and castration of that subject – the masochistic choice of suffering over pleasure, of being exquisitely ‘shattered’ over being whole – no nearer to being understood. My aim in the remainder of this chapter, therefore, is to consider how, in this poem at least, homosocial relations can be shown to dismantle mastery and to play havoc with sexual difference, and I propose to do this by looking in turn at two aspects of the homosocial relation: identification and desire. Insofar as members of the homosocial group see themselves and one another as desiring subjects and take their identity from that, the homosocial relation is necessarily an identificatory one. And, insofar as the ties that join those members to one another are no less close, affective, homoerotic, indeed, for being competitive and rivalrous, it is also a model of desire. The distinction between identification and desire is to some extent an artificial one since, as is increasingly being noted, the two are intimately connected, the step between desiring what others desire and desiring those others being but a small one. Although they will merge and blur with each other throughout the discussion, therefore, I will in what follows take identification and desire in turn if only for the purposes of organizing the argument and of giving due space to the considerations that are raised by each. The girl’s primary relation, then, is one of identification: before she desires the youth she identifies with those who desire him, and any relation she comes to have with him is mediated from the outset by the fact that he is already in relation with others. She desires him not for himself but because he is desired of others – it is their desire and nothing else that motivates her own – and this, indeed, is the burden of the long speech she makes by way of explanation to the old man who seeks to know the ‘grounds and motives’ (line 63) of her woe: the content of most of lines 71–147 – the first part of her speech – is an account of how she came to fall for the youth in the first place. For what she details – in describing the reactions of a besotted community, ‘the general bosom’ (line 127), that is ‘enchanted’ (line 128) and ‘bewitched’ (line 131), driven to an erotic frenzy, prompted to speculation and debate, moved to laughter and tears by this male equivalent of Zuleika Dobson – is not so much the youth himself, his particular attractions and charms, as the devastating effect these have on

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others. If her description is anything to go by, this is ultimately of greater concern to her than the youth himself – who always remains a somewhat distanced figure, pedestalized and seen from afar – the important thing, it seems, being not so much the boy as the vantage point from which he is seen: that is, her identification with those others who are so enthralled. Her descriptions of the youth thus periodically slide over to descriptions of those who are looking at him: ‘Each eye that saw him did enchant the mind’ (line 89), ‘Many there were that did his picture get / To serve their eyes’ (lines 134–35). Right from the start, the girl sees the youth through others’ eyes, viewing him from the position of the admiring audience with which she has already identified, relating herself not to him, in the first instance, but to those others who are held in fascinated thrall. And although these include men as well as women – since this youth (like that of the Sonnets – a connection that has not gone unnoticed) appeals to ‘sexes both’ (line 128) – the group with whom she identifies most particularly are his female admirers, those who ‘Sweetly supposed them mistress of his heart’ (line 142). That she has already identified with this group before he even approaches her or begins to woo is suggested by an image that has struck several editors and commentators as in need of explanation: the youth’s beauty was such, she says, that he had ‘maidens’ eyes stuck over all his face’ (line 81). If in looking at him what she is primarily doing is looking at others looking, then it makes sense that what she sees there is not so much his good looks as the looks of the other women gazing thereon. Her relation with him, that is, comes to be overshadowed by what prompts and structures it: her relation, in the first instance (conscious or otherwise), with the other maidens. This, moreover, explains the point and content of the next part of the girl’s story (lines 148–77) in which she describes how, unlike those others, ‘some my equals’ (line 148) with whom she otherwise identifies, she did not yield straight away but held out for a while and defended her ‘honour’ (line 151) from the youth’s advances. For the purpose of this narrative delay – which creates a space within which the youth has to court her, persuade her, and win her round, the ultimate weapon in his armoury being the lovetokens he has received from others – is less to impress us with her virtue than to demonstrate the compelling force of her identification. Critics have struggled to explain why, right from the start, the girl is described as a ‘fickle maid’ (line 5), but if she has identified herself with the youth’s other admirers from the beginning, then the description is wholly appropriate. Ironically, her ‘resistance’ merely provides an opportunity for proving her complete susceptibility to his ploy. For, if she identifies with the youth’s other devotees, then his tactic of giving her the love-tokens he had previously received from them only confirms and validates that prior relation. That is

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why his ruse works – why, indeed, it cannot fail – for it was this identificatory relation with the other women that initially established him as an object of longing and the existence of such tokens of devotion that aroused her desire in the first place. The girl, in fact, more or less admits this when she tells the old man that she knew the youth’s devious tactics all too well but went on desiring him all the same: she ‘knew the patterns of his foul beguiling’ (line 170), ‘patterns’ here referring both to examples of those he had already deceived and to his particular mode of beguilement. It is as if she knew that he had persuaded others as he would persuade her, by exploiting their mutual identification, but that she was as helpless as they. To this extent, the girl is pre-persuaded, already in love, although in a more complex way, perhaps, than Kenneth Muir suggests when he says that she had ‘fallen in love with him before he began to woo’.32 For she responds to the youth in the way that she does because she is already in identificatory relation with the doting women. The girl does not need to be persuaded by the youth because – insofar as she identifies with these women and sees herself as one who desires him – she has already been persuaded of his desirability by them. The seducer’s trick succeeds so well because, by putting the women who collectively adore him in touch with one another, he is effectively closing the loop – or, more accurately, the triangle – that structures homosocial desire. While some find it odd, therefore, that the youth should approach the girl by referring to his previous conquests, in the light of the bond that exists between the women, it makes perfect sense to do so and, indeed – insofar as it taps into this powerful (if not necessarily conscious) relation – it explains why the girl should find it so irresistible. That is why she insists to the old man that she had no choice in the matter and that her fall was inevitable (‘whoever shunned by precedent / The destined ill she must herself assay?’, lines 155–56); why she argues that anyone like her, or like the others, would have been so persuaded (‘who, young and simple, would not be so lovered?’, line 320); and why (in a move that is, in the circumstances, entirely logical, even if some have taken exception to it on moral grounds) she says that she would do it all again: ‘Ay me, I fell; and yet do question make / What I should do again for such a sake’ (lines 321–22):33 O that infected moisture of his eye; O that false fire which in his cheeks so glowed; O that forced thunder from his heart did fly; O that sad breath his spongy lungs bestowed; O all that borrowed motion, seeming owed, Would yet again betray the fore-betrayed, And new pervert a reconcil`ed maid. (lines 323–29)

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For one critic, that anyone ‘with even a modicum of logic and a minimal knowledge of human behaviour’ should succumb to the youth’s persuasions – let alone go into the situation with their eyes open and knowingly be prepared to repeat the whole experience – seems ‘unbelievable’.34 But to the extent that it demonstrates the identificatory relation between the women and the homosocial bond that subtends their heterosexual desire, it seems psychologically all too plausible – a shrewd, even compelling depiction of the wayward workings of human desire. Moreover, the youth’s tactic has worked not only with this particular girl but also, conceivably, with the entire group. The possibility suggested earlier that he may have used the same trick on the very women with whom the girl identifies – that he may have given them each others’ love-tokens or those of supposedly earlier lovers still – seems, now, ever more likely. If so, he would have succeeded with them as smoothly as with the present girl because they, too, are in the same position – all madly identifying with one another – that being precisely the situation he is exploiting. Indeed, there is no one who does not desire him in this way, no love for him that is not mediated by an existing relation with fellow rivals, for the prospect of there ever having been one originating, ‘authenticating’ passion for him and him alone recedes ever further into the fictional past to become nothing other than the illusion by means of which he panders himself. As with collective hysteria over a celebrity or a media icon, the youth is never desired directly or for ‘himself ’ but only as the deflected object of others’ desires – he is the mediatory relay (albeit a crucial one) that allows desire to circulate between his adoring fans. That this, indeed, is the model of desire that the poem presents – a triangulated structure in which the heterosexual relation is to some extent also a homosocial one – is reinforced by the repeated emphasis on the sheer quantity of women who are enamoured of him – ‘Many there were’ (line 134), ‘So many’ (line 141), ‘Among the many’ (line 190), ‘many a several fair’ (line 206), ‘all these hearts’ (line 274). Such a multitude of devotees can only suggest a model in which desire is produced and proliferated by identification with others. And, although the youth singles out the infatuated nun as a particularly notable example of his success, the poem is not structured in such a way as to suggest that the girl is moved to love him by identifying with this single conquest alone. Rather, the poem works to create a sense of collective frenzy – a crowd of numerous, mostly undifferentiated others, all spurred on to desire the youth by one another. Indeed, not only is an entire community shown to be united in the same mutual identification: the very environment gets caught up in the hysteria and comes to be identified as a desiring woman itself. Thus, the girl finds herself in a landscape that is not only populated

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by figures like herself – she being one ‘afflicted fancy’ (line 61) among many ‘wounded fancies’ (line 197), ‘proofs new bleeding’ (line 153), ‘broken bosoms’ (line 254), and so forth – but that is also, by means of transferred epithets (the river’s ‘weeping margin’, line 39) and the pathetic fallacy (the ‘concave womb’, line 1, of the resounding hill and its ‘sist’ring vale’, line 2; the ‘world’ of the poem being stormed by the girl’s sighs and tears, ‘sorrow’s wind and rain’, line 7) in danger of being personified as a clamorous woman itself, the entire locality metamorphosing into a choric complainant that threatens finally to disappear once and for all into a vanishing, echoing voice. This has some interesting consequences for our interpretation and understanding of the poem. To begin with, it re-orientates any pre-existing notions we may have had about its genre or, indeed, about the genre of the complaint form more generally. For if the girl identifies with the other desiring women (and they with one another), then to be a desiring woman is her (and their) heart’s desire. She (and they) want to want the youth – on that rests their whole identity. Instead of seeing the girl as a tragic victim who has been abandoned and is therefore ‘complaining’ about it, the poem invites us rather to see her as someone who has exactly what she desires – which is to be someone who desires – that being her position, after all, from beginning to end. She does not, that is, seek to change her situation any more than a crowd of screaming fans are calling for urgent assistance. Like them, the girl wants and chooses to be in that state and, indeed, works it up to a fine pitch. ‘Big discontent’ (line 56) is paradoxically what contents her, the state of privation, lack, ‘castration’, her masochistic mode of choice.35 She means it when she tells the old man that it gives no ‘satisfaction to our blood / That we must curb it upon others’ proofs’ (lines 162–63) because, insofar as she identifies with the ‘proofs new bleeding’ (line 153) of the youth’s previous conquests, she positively desires to ‘bleed’ like them – that to her is ‘sweet’ and ‘good’ (line 164). Callous as it might seem, the youth’s statement of his former mistresses – that ‘They sought their shame that so their shame did find’ (line 187) – is, in the light of this more complex vision of desire, largely true. A hint that this is the correct reading, moreover, is to be found once again in the fate of the old man. Old-fashioned and possessed, perhaps, of a simpler or more benign understanding of human motivation and desire, he bustles in and, full of good intentions, assumes that the girl wants to alleviate her pain, offering to ‘assuage’ her ‘suffering’ (line 69) and so to effect some curative change to her condition. That the girl does not actually want this and that his understanding of the situation is therefore largely off-target is suggested by the fact that he completely

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disappears, never to close the frame. The old man’s disappearance leaves space for a darker and more compelling depiction of human desire – one, indeed, more in keeping with the Sonnets (the later ones, at any rate) – in which heterosexual desire is complicated and triangulated by homosocial identification, and in which it is (for that reason) irrational, insane, obsessive, perverse, driven, self-destructive, addictive, masochistic in a compulsively repetitive way, wholly immune from considerations of worth or desert or from the pursuit of happiness or satisfaction, but no less irresistible for that. The speaker of the Sonnets, like the girl of A Lover’s Complaint, ‘well knows’ the heaven that leads to this hell (sonnet 129) but remains as incapable of shunning it as she. In a recent article on Ovid and Shakespeare, Gordon Braden has suggested that the most fitting epigraph to the Sonnets might come not from the ‘ameliorative end’ of the Metamorphoses, but rather from the lips of one of Ovid’s most famous complaining heroines, Medea: ‘I see the better and approve it’, she cries, describing her fateful passion for Jason, ‘but I follow the worse’.36 The same desire for desire – the same compulsion to choose the worse over the better, pain over pleasure, guaranteed separation and loss over marriage and a ‘happy ending’ – could make this the right epigraph for A Lover’s Complaint as well, were that poem not, in articulating the same message more or less to the letter, itself the true epigraph for the Sonnets that the critic perhaps is looking for. There is no doubt that the girl and women in A Lover’s Complaint are presented as being driven to repeat their painful experiences. Indeed, if the poem is about anything it is about repetition: its landscape is littered with women who have succumbed (and, as an echoing voice, that landscape exponentially reduplicates their story a thousand times); and, in a way that has seemed so baffling to many, the particular speaker maintains that she would do it all again, go through the same painful experience any number of times. As Heather Dubrow notes (citing sonnet 129 again), repetition of this kind both ‘writes and is written by erotic desire’ because it demonstrates how ‘that impulse is never finally satisfied and hence never finally controlled – “Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme”’.37 In the case of A Lover’s Complaint, desire is necessarily repetitive, structurally incapable of resolution or closure, because the poem specifically activates the homosocial triangle by means of which desire circulates between its three elements – the women, the youth, and the girl – round and round without end. As Colin Burrow comments, there is ‘no escaping from a loop in which someone is desired for having treated others so badly that they longed for him, and no escape from the consciousness that when you have been abandoned by him too that might make him even more desirable’.38

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Hence the circularity of A Lover’s Complaint – the sense that it never seems to get anywhere, to change or achieve anything – which has led to complaints about the poem’s ‘pointlessness’ as critics are obliged to admit that, unlike more openly homiletic and thereby conventional examples of the complaint tradition, A Lover’s Complaint is bound by no such didacticism and ‘promulgates no forthright moral’; the desire for an ethical reading that would wind up the story, redeem the wrong done, and satisfy readerly expectations finding itself here well and truly stumped, silenced and seen off as effectively as the old man.39 Attempts on the part of the reader to introduce the moral standpoint which the poem so conspicuously leaves out – such as the ‘unremitting Christian outlook of the Renaissance’ that one critic brings in to try to adjudicate the situation – seem as out of place as the old man, and fail not only to make sense of the poem but somehow to do justice to it as well.40 While Lucrece, Burrow notes, manages to ‘break out of the potentially endless process of complaining’ (p. 145) by taking her own life, there is no such promised end for the girl of A Lover’s Complaint, who goes on and on and keeps the cycle repeating itself indefinitely. Where Lucrece protests loudly, both before and after the rape, her suicide being the ultimate refusal of the way she has been treated, the girl and women of A Lover’s Complaint positively court and invite such mistreatment. If Lucrece, at great length and in no uncertain terms, says ‘no’ to what happens to her, then the girl and women of A Lover’s Complaint say ‘yes’, ‘more’, and ‘again’, not to being raped, of course, but certainly to being seduced. In her reading of The Rape of Lucrece, Lynn Enterline suggests that Shakespeare is critiquing the male homosociality of the more traditional Petrarchan scenario – where men commodify woman and trade her between themselves – by asking what that woman as subject might have to say about such violent objectification. But if Shakespeare’s ‘ethical inquiry’ (p. 156) into Petrarchanism seeks in part to recuperate woman by giving her a voice and a subjectivity otherwise denied her, then A Lover’s Complaint (unsettling the desire for ethical readings once again) puts a new and disturbing angle on the whole scene. For although the poem turns conventional homosociality on its head by making it a man who circulates as the object of female desire, it neither ‘recuperates’ that man by making him protest against such objectification (quite the reverse), nor does it ‘empower’ the women by making them active agents, the wilful mistresses of their own erotic desire: on the contrary, they are shown to choose dereliction and abandonment every time.41 Or rather, if this reversal does position the women as subjects, then the poem reveals that subjectivity to

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be the very opposite of masterly – that is, as wilfully self-destructive, and superbly, exquisitely masochistic.42 It is not surprising, then, that critics seeking an ethical reading of A Lover’s Complaint should find themselves at a loss, for what emerges is that the poem presents a view of human motivation and desire that is profoundly at odds with all that might seem logical or reasonable, let alone ethical, and that it promulgates the strange but undeniable reality that Freud found himself having to confront – namely, that human beings are not necessarily driven by gain, greed, or self-interest but, as often as not, by impulses that are obviously harmful, self-destructive, and masochistic, a clinical and all too observable fact that forced Freud to the conclusion that, peculiar as it may seem, ‘there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat which over-rides the pleasure principle’.43 Since the masochistic impulse remained, even to Freud, ‘mysterious’, ‘incomprehensible’, ‘obscure’, and ‘puzzling’, it no longer seems so strange that A Lover’s Complaint should, as noted earlier, so often have been described in similar terms; in which case, ‘enigmatic’, the epithet applied to it more frequently than any other, might now be seen as an apt descriptor – as indicating the poem’s depiction of a truly masochistic subjectivity and desire – rather than as the faintly disgruntled response of readers who feel they cannot get to the bottom of it and sense that the poem is somehow withholding something from them.44 It seems to me, in fact, that A Lover’s Complaint is best understood if it is seen as a text that looks ahead to recent developments in psychoanalytic theory – developments which suggest that an originary masochism is constitutive of all human subjectivity. Indeed, the poem begins to make sense when it is seen to anticipate recent suggestions that the figure of the seduced girl might, perhaps, be the prototype of all human sexuality, ‘male’ no less than ‘female’, for according to these speculations, ‘feminine’ masochism is not some weird perversion, a distinct pathology which afflicts a few, nor even a sub-category within a slightly wider field (one that includes, classically, ‘erotogenic’ and ‘moral’ masochism as well), but is, rather, the fundamental point of origin in the psychic history of all human beings. In this account, the figure of the seduced girl comes to exemplify the foundation of all subsequent psychic development, in men as well as women, because, in the words of Jacques Andr´e, it ‘presents a privileged affinity with the originary position of seduction of the child vis-`a-vis the adult’.45 Like the seduced girl, the child too is situated as the passive recipient of a sexuality that comes to it from the outside in the form of enigmatic, untranslatable messages from the other, a sexuality that is intrusive and exogenous, penetrative and

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traumatic, that breaks in upon and ‘shatters’ the child into subjectivity and sexuality alike. It is interesting to note, incidentally, that – although present at the very foundation of psychoanalysis in Freud’s early analyses of female hysterics, and still evident to some extent in the 1919 essay on masochism, ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ – this possibility of a primary masochism, of an early ‘femininity’ as the putative origin of all later human psychic and sexual development, came to be subjected to no less a repudiation, no less an institutional ‘blanking out’ in later Freud than that suffered by the literary genre of female complaint. The scene of female homosociality that A Lover’s Complaint unfolds, then, has much to say about the position of the women in the poem, for they now seem less the victims of a heartless brute than a group who are bound together in a willed and self-chosen masochistic identity. It also has something to say, furthermore, about the women’s attitude to poetry, metaphor, and art. For if the youth is a mere pretext – the mediatory relay for the interpersonal relations that exist between them – then it no longer seems so surprising that the women should all fall for someone who is so openly callous and wicked. As a means to an end, the youth was never desired for himself or on his own merits (nor was anyone under any illusion that he was) because he was never really the object of interest or attention at all. Some critics register a sense of outrage at the youth’s blatant manipulations and assume that the writer of the poem is as appalled and horrified as they. As the girl (along with her fellow sufferers) is a ‘victim’ of the youth’s false praise and empty rhetoric, so the author of the poem is taken to be delivering a devastating critique of such falseness – a lesson powerful enough, in one case, to orientate the critic’s interpretation not just of A Lover’s Complaint but of the Sonnets as well, the entire sequence now seen, in the light (or, rather, the shadow) cast back over it by the concluding complaint, to be a bitter warning against the ‘mendacity of metaphor’ and the ‘perils of invidious hyperbole’. This reading – which sees Shakespeare as a scrupled poet who, ‘alert to the ethical implications of his art’, warns against the power of metaphor to falsify – seeks to redeem the situation by restoring what is real and true, the essential ‘nature of things’ that lies behind the deceptive surface of smoky words.46 The narrative of A Lover’s Complaint, however, suggests that the girl and women of the poem are not so deceived. As the girl confesses to the old man, ‘further I could say this man’s untrue, / And knew the patterns of his foul beguiling . . . Saw how deceits were gilded in his smiling, / Knew vows were ever brokers to defiling’ (lines 169–70, 172–73), and no doubt the other women would have added their own voices to hers, in the same collective conviction. The

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implication, in other words, is that the women knew the youth’s dastardly tactics all too well but went on desiring him all the same. They were never deceived by his false vows; they never believed the content of his words – least of all his transparent claim never to have loved ‘Till now’ (line 182). Never under any illusion about the falseness of his words, they allowed themselves, rather, to be moved – stirred to a passion, no less – precisely because those words were specious and empty and never pretended to be anything otherwise. What galvanizes the women is specifically the surface and not the content of the youth’s words. The situation might be compared to an episode similar enough to have struck one critic at least as being a likely analogue or source for A Lover’s Complaint, namely the story of Dido and Pamphilus in Book II of the New Arcadia.47 There, too, a group of women are driven to erotic frenzy by a callous youth who manipulates them in exactly the same way as the youth of the complaint: in ‘the stirring of our own passions’, explains Dido, the inamorata who speaks for herself and the other unfortunates, ‘there lay his master’s part of cunning, making us now jealous; now envious; now, proud of what we had, desirous of more; now giving one the triumph to see him, that was prince of many, subject to her; now with an estranged look making her fear the loss of that mind which, indeed, could never be had’ (NA 238). As with their fellows in A Lover’s Complaint, moreover, these women were never deceived by Pamphilus – they were fully apprised of his faults from the beginning, never thought he was anything other than a worthless, exploitative deceiver – and yet, enigmatic though it might seem, that did not warn them off him in the least; quite the opposite. ‘And, which is strangest’, Dido continues, ‘I must confess even in the greatest tempest of my judgement was I never driven to think him excellent, and yet so could set my mind both to get and keep him as though therein had lain my felicity – like them I have seen play at the ball grow extremely earnest who should have the ball, and yet everyone knew it was but a ball’ (NA 238). Quite apart from exemplifying with peculiar neatness the homosocial situation in which, as a mediatory relay for relations between women, the man finds himself passed around like an object from one to the other, the image of the ball-game also suggests much about the women’s attitude to fiction and art. For the women here, like those of A Lover’s Complaint, never doubt that the ball is ‘but a ball’, but that does not motivate them any the less to enter with full gusto and enthusiasm into the spirit of the game. They ‘believe’ in the youth’s words, that is, in the same way that an audience or readership of poetic fictions ‘believes’ in poetic fictions that never made any claim to be true – that ball that ‘was but a ball’ having echoes, after all,

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with that stage-play door marked ‘Thebes’ that a theatre audience is no less willing to accept for the duration, no matter how clear they are that it is not Thebes. In which case, the women of A Lover’s Complaint might seem less the tragic victims of a vile seducer than the all too willing players and spectators of a tragic play (the masochistic heterocosm once again). Rather than seeing the poem as an attack on metaphor that belies the inner truth or essential reality of things ‘in themselves’, then, it is possible to see it as an experiment (for good or ill) in the power of fictions if not to teach or to delight then most certainly to move. The scene of female homosociality that gradually unfolds in A Lover’s Complaint thus subverts norms and expectations in several ways. Where we might have expected a single woman bemoaning her fate, her situation redeemed if not by personal salvation then at least by the poem’s delivery of some wise counsel – a fine moral message in its parting words – what we actually get is a team of women bound together in complicit, masochistic identity who, heedless of warnings, are determined to go on playing the game (indeed, wise counsel seems only to spur them on: ‘For when we rage advice is often seen / By blunting us to make our wits more keen’, lines 160–61). In the way it defies the pleasure principle, thereby subordinating pleasure to pain, closure to repetition, and in the way it undermines the metaphysics of ‘presence’ (any presumption that meaning or a ‘point’ might inhere within or behind the screen of words) thereby subordinating truth to fiction, content to surface, seriousness to play, this scene of feminine identification goes a long way towards explaining the egregiousness of the poem and the prickly reception with which it has been met.48 It is in order to go further still, however – to account in full for the poem’s radical potential and to consider ways in which it might be seen to put mastery into question, to dismantle the gender binary, even to defy theorization and to flout critical thinking altogether – that, in what remains of this chapter, I shall turn to that other aspect of the homosocial relation, one that, although already touched on in much of what has gone before, I have reserved for a full discussion until now: desire. For although some critics, anxious to establish a ‘redemptive’ reading of the poem, have sought to recuperate the girl by seeing her as a ‘strong’ woman, a modern, liberated type who is to be congratulated for making ‘a conscious decision to follow the force of her desire’, it is by no means clear that, unconsciously, at any rate, her desire is only – or even predominantly – heterosexual.49 On the contrary, the relation in which she seems engaged most intensely, immediately, and powerfully is that complex knot comprising mutual rivalry, treachery, imitation, and identification that ties her to the youth’s other mistresses, and indeed they

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to one another, the whole group being bound together by ties as intimate, close, and affective – homoerotic, no less – as any that might have united their male counterparts in the traditional model of male homosociality with which we are more familiar. Another critic, again with a ‘redemptive’ reading in mind, sees the girl’s relation with other women and with the feminized landscape in which she finds herself as effecting a ‘sympathy of woe’, the girl joined by Echo – as Lucrece is joined by Hecuba and Philomel – in a sisterhood that offers mutual support and relief and aims to redeem the duplicitous rhetoric of devious male seducers.50 But the relation between the women in A Lover’s Complaint is, I suggest, neither so sisterly nor so innocent; and, although it does not open up a scene of overt lesbianism (for that we shall have to wait for Donne’s Sapho to Philaenis), the poem nevertheless accompanies its story of heterosexual seduction with a powerful undertow of homoerotic attraction and desire. When the girl looks at the youth, for example, her view of him is so conditioned by her prior relation to his previous conquests that her gaze is met, as has already been noted, not by his but by these other ‘maidens’ eyes’ (line 81). When she looks at the youth, in other words, what she actually sees is other girls: young, beautiful, smooth, ‘maiden-tongued’, his curls like ‘silken parcels’ (line 87), the youth presents a highly feminized object of desire. He is regularly described in terms that are usually reserved for women – the compliment that he embellishes his adornments rather than the other way round, for instance (lines 114–19) traditionally being related to female beauty. The conceit that Love made a ‘dwelling’ in the youth’s ‘fair parts’ (lines 82, 83) also fits in here. The commonplace – conventional enough when applied to the female beloved (as, say, when Stella’s heart is said to be Cupid’s ‘room’ in Astrophil and Stella sonnet 43) – is here, unprecedentedly, reversed: the ‘iconography of love’, in the words of one critic, is ‘being turned inside out’.51 For here Love is feminized – ‘She was new lodged and newly deified’ (line 84), the inhabitant, that is, is Venus not Cupid – so that when the girl gazes on the youth it is the erotically invested body of a woman that she sees and admires. Moreover, since the girl is one of a group of women bound together in identificatory relation, she is not just describing her own experience: arguably, all the women see him in the same way – as a woman. Seen in this light, the youth himself is but a decoy, a means by which the women can come to be in relation with other women, their noisy desire for what the others desire being in truth only camouflage for something that is never very far away: their desire for one another. There is a point in the poem, indeed, where the youth – as mediatory relay for the circulation of this homoerotic desire – almost seems to drop out of view altogether,

200 Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric to leave the women communicating directly with each other. As the girl recounts it, the youth handed her the love-tokens of her fellow rivals with these final words: Now all these hearts that do on mine depend, Feeling it break, with bleeding groans they pine, And supplicant their sighs to you extend To leave the batt’ry that you make ’gainst mine, Lending soft audience to my sweet design, And credent soul to that strong bonded oath That shall prefer and undertake my troth. (lines 274–80)

The youth is still peddling his old ‘economic’ argument here – that the accumulated capital of others’ desire for him should so raise his price as to increase the girl’s desire for him exponentially (this is the same argument that Venus tries on Adonis – and no more successfully, it has to be said – when she tells him that ‘I have been wooed, as I entreat thee now, / Even by the stern and direful god of war . . . Thus he that overruled I oversway`ed . . . O be not proud, nor brag not of thy might, / For mast’ring her that foiled the god of fight’, Venus and Adonis, lines 97–98, 109, 113–14). But at the same time the youth so minimizes if not erases his own place within the circulation of texts and of desire as to expose the real purpose of the homosocial relation, which is, at bottom, to put the fellow combatants, rivals, poets, lovers, in intimate touch with one another. For the picture that these lines allow us briefly to glimpse is one in which desiring women are in direct communication with other desiring women, supplicating each other with ‘sighs’, propositioning each other with ‘bleeding groans’. This, indeed, puts an interesting new gloss on those mysterious ‘letters sadly penned in blood’ which the girl appears to revile – ‘O false blood!’ – for if, as now seems more possible, they were actually written not by the desiring youth but by the desiring women and in some peculiar way (made possible by the youth’s mediation) addressed to her, then her exclamation may have as much to do with the mutual involvement and betrayal that binds her to her fellow rivals as it has to do with any relation she has or had with the youth himself, her relation to the women being as close if not closer than anything she might have experienced with him.52 The reason why this scene of female homoeroticism is so radical is that it takes us beyond the transgressions of even the negative Oedipus complex. I suggested earlier that in the tradition of female complaint the poet defines woman as ‘castrated’ – abused, seduced, abandoned, and so

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forth – and then identifies with that position. In line with masochistic fantasy, this allows the male poet to activate and rehearse his negative complex – that is, the structure in which he identifies with his mother, ‘behaves like a girl’, and desires to be sexually used by the father – as in The Rape of Lucrece, for example, where, alongside the apparently more gendercompatible identification with Tarquin, the narrator can also be seen to identify with Lucrece, thereby putting himself in the classic masochistic position of a woman who is violently loved/beaten by a man. As a libidinal position this is transgressive enough since it realizes and literalizes what is normally repressed – what, as a ‘construction of analysis’, Freud had to re-insert as the core ‘phase 2’ of the masochistic fantasy sequence – namely, ‘my father is loving/beating me’. But in those cases where, as in A Lover’s Complaint, the poet identifies with a female figure who in turn desires other women, the male subject is no longer – or not only – exercising his negative complex: somehow or other he is also contriving to insert himself into the negative complex of the girl. This completely scotches the model by which transgression, subversion, and perversion have been theorized hitherto – that is, as ‘negative’ or counter-identifications that cut across and destabilize culturally sanctioned ‘positive’ ones. As an example of how psychoanalytic theory can find itself nonplussed when faced with such unorthodox situations, one might recall what happens in chapter 5 of Kaja Silverman’s Male Subjectivity at the Margins where, in the course of discussing male masochism, she turns briefly to the classic beating fantasies reported, according to Freud, by his female patients. For these fantasies, which routinely position the female subject as a boy who is being beaten by the father or a father-surrogate, all converge around one thing: ‘a narcissistic investment in a subject-position which it would be transgressive for a man to occupy’, she writes, ‘but which is almost unthinkable for a woman, since it implies an identification with male homosexuality’ (p. 203). What we find in A Lover’s Complaint, I am suggesting, is exactly the same situation only the other way round: a male subject identifying with female homosexuality. The reason why identifications of this kind should fall ‘so far outside the social pale’, she goes on, is that ‘even what generally passes for “deviance” is held to a recognizable and “manageable” paradigm, i.e. to one that reinforces the binary logic of sexual difference, despite inverting its logic’ (p. 203). Thus, when a woman fails to ‘identify with a classically female position, she is expected to identify with a classically male one, and vice versa in the case of a man. The female version of the beating fantasy’, Silverman concludes – and here we might add the male identification with female homoeroticism that A Lover’s Complaint turns up – ‘attests to the

202 Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric desire for imaginary variations that fall outside the scope of the psychoanalytic paradigm’ (p. 203). Transgressive as it is, then, the negative Oedipus still has its place: as that which counters and runs contrary to the positive complex, it may thoroughly destabilize the latter – inexorably shadowing the heterosexual imperative with homosexual inclinations and so forth – but in theoretical terms it is stable and secure, you could almost say, in its very oppositionality, fixed and locked into position. In these other scenarios, however, where subjects stray beyond what is marked out for them as culturally transgressive or perverse – their own negative complex – into what is transgressive or perverse for someone else, we are in uncharted territory: for the man who identifies with female homosexuality, or the woman with male homosexuality, occupy positions that are no longer locatable as simple cross-identifications. However complex – indeed, infinite – the permutations the ‘complete’ Oedipus complex allows for (with boys and girls both identifying with and desiring mother and father, to produce masculine men, feminine men, masculine women, feminine women, and so on and so forth) in these new scenarios oedipal structurations become increasingly blurred as distinctions between boy and girl, male and female, homo- and heterosexual, identification and desire begin to slide out of control and threaten to dissolve altogether. Silverman, it has to be said, struggles to re-contain the theoretical chaos her argument has potentially unleashed, doing her best to gather the whole question back into the recognizable and ‘manageable’ paradigm she has effectively deconstructed (for example, by unselfconsciously restoring the sexual difference that has just been demolished: there is ‘an ineluctable difference at work here’, she observes, ‘since it is clearly not the same thing, socially or even psychically, for the girl to be loved/beaten by the father as it is for the boy’, p. 204). She does this, presumably, to re-assert some kind of order over a topic that otherwise threatens to get out of hand, to enable the ‘unthinkable’ to be brought back under control and to be rigorously re-thought and theorized. She thus pulls back from the more radical position that her own argument opens up in order to preserve the theoretical paradigm with which she started out – ‘perversion always contains the trace of Oedipus within it – it is always organized to some degree by what it subverts’ (p. 186) – effectively putting masochism back in a box, re-containing it as a ‘perversion’ of the norm, and re-domesticating it as the ‘negative’ of the positive.53 But the genie is out of the bottle; and, in the trouble this scene of ‘perverse’ perversion causes the theoretician we might perhaps see an illustrative parallel with A Lover’s Complaint. For, as it ventures beyond the ‘social pale’, beyond any structure that is recognizably oedipal to a position that exceeds even the most

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convoluted of oedipal couplings or cross-couplings, so the poem’s scenario of a man identifying with female homosexual desire takes its readers to a place where the ‘psychoanalytic paradigm’ is stymied and the theorist (like the old man, once again) once more baffled and at a loss. In fact, A Lover’s Complaint goes even further in a radical direction than I have here made out. For to say that the poet/narrator identifies with the negative Oedipus complex of the girl is still to some extent to explain the situation – however ‘unthinkable’ – in oedipal terms. It is to imply that what the male subject identifies with is the girl’s original identification with her father and her subsequent sexual orientation towards women: that is, it is still to keep identification and desire separate, still to operate within a broadly heterosexual framework. As the female masochist who inserts herself into the negative complex of the boy identifies with his feminine identification and so arrives at a version of femininity, albeit one ‘borrowed’ and ‘radically denatured’ (p. 204) by this complex detour, so, according to this model, the male subject who inserts himself into the negative complex of the girl identifies with her masculine identification and is, thus, still in touch with a version of masculinity however bizarrely distorted it might have become in the process. But this is not, actually, what happens in A Lover’s Complaint, and although I suggested a moment ago that there the poet/narrator enters into the negative complex of the girl, this was more a fac¸on de parler than a strictly accurate statement of the case. For there is, in fact, no indication that the girl and women in the poem are masculinized, no suggestion that any covert ‘lesbianism’ between them might derive from a masculine identification, and no hint that they desire each other as if they were ‘men’ desiring women. In other words, their mutual desire, such as it is, cannot, ultimately, be explained – or explained alone – as being the product of their negative complex. Something else is going on. It might clarify matters at this point to compare Venus and Adonis: for although the male object of desire in that poem is similarly feminized (like the youth, Adonis too is young, beautiful, girlish, smooth, and so forth), there Venus is in sole command of the field: there are no other female figures in the vicinity for whom Adonis might serve as the displaced object of lesbian desire. As we have seen, however, the landscape of A Lover’s Complaint positively teems with them, so that we are invited if not encouraged to interpret the feminized male body in this way in the complaint as we are not in the epyllion. Besides, big, red, and hard, Venus is obviously – even comically – masculinized, so that although traditional gender roles are reversed, the relation between the couple still falls clearly within the heterosexual paradigm, with a masculinized subject desiring a feminized object.

204 Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric In A Lover’s Complaint, by contrast, nothing is masculinized. On the contrary, the girl and women remain feminine – ‘masochistic’ and ‘castrated’ – throughout, and are closely identified not with the youth or with other men but, as suggested above, with one another. Indeed, the poem seems strangely determined not just to denature masculinity but to eliminate it altogether. Male figures are either absent (the youth, for example, has long gone) or present so tenuously as soon to vanish into thin air (like the old man or the narrating ‘I’). Instead we are given a field populated by women (indeed, the landscape itself threatens to become one of them), and – as they identify with each other as desiring subjects and see in the youth a version, however idealized, of themselves – a very female scene (even, perhaps, an exclusively female scene) of desire. As an example of the way identification and desire can so spectacularly collapse into one another and slip between otherwise distinct heterosexual structures and the ‘manageable’ oedipal paradigm, another case presents itself here which – although deriving from a quite different context and remote in every way from the late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century poem – nonetheless presents, in its basic triangular structure, affinities enough to make it an interesting analogue and point of comparison. I am referring to the dream of the abandoned supper party that was reported to Freud by one of his female patients and recorded by him in The Interpretation of Dreams.54 Briefly, the scene involves a triangle between a witty butcher’s wife, her husband, and her attractive female friend – a friend she is relieved, in the dream, not to be inviting to supper. Discussing the numerous interpretations which this dream – ‘one of the primal scenes of psychoanalytic interpretation’ – has thrown up, starting with Freud, Diana Fuss shows how they all, in their different ways, read it as a scene of more or less oedipalized identifications (positive or negative).55 The butcher’s wife, for example, is seen either as identifying with her female friend (thereby wanting to be the woman whom her husband desires – a classic case of ‘hysterical identification’ in Freud’s view); or as identifying her own desire with her friend’s desire for her husband (thereby wanting to be a woman who desires a man); or as identifying with her husband (thereby wanting to be a man who desires a woman).56 As Fuss points out, however, in all these readings identifications and cross-identifications remain structured along a heterosexual axis, as if it were impossible to conceptualize homosexuality except as the inverse or ‘negative’ of heterosexuality, or as if lesbian desire can only come about when a woman identifies with a man. For her own part – and this is where a comparison with A Lover’s Complaint begins to seem apt – Fuss asks whether there might not be situations in which female

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homosexual desire could bypass the masculine altogether and whether, if the wife does identify with her husband here, that need necessarily mean a masculine identification (might the wife not, for example, be identifying with her husband’s feminine identification, that is, with his desire to be the female friend?). The wife’s sexual jealousy – her fear that her husband might be attracted to her friend – would thus function as a ‘disguised declaration of the very opposite suspicion’: that she is attracted to her friend. Fuss asks, in other words, whether it might not be possible to imagine a scenario of feminine-identified lesbianism – one in which female homosexuality need not be mediated by any prior identification with maleness – and, while allowing for differences in context, her own interpretation of the story might be seen to have some interesting parallels with A Lover’s Complaint: ‘this narrative of identification and desire’, she writes, ‘might easily be read as a story of “between women”, with the butcher [or our youth], at most, a convenient identificatory relay for a socially prohibited lesbian desire’ (p. 31). Apt as it is, however, this explanation does not provide a final answer – a longed-for solution to the ‘enigma’ – for, as Fuss herself concludes, even her own interpretation is but one of many re-tellings, but another re-casting of a story that demonstrates, ultimately, a ‘powerful resistance to interpretative mastery’, for this flighty tale, that impishly eludes capture, refuses finally to submit to anyone’s last word. If there is any story to be told, she comments, then it is rather the capacity of narrative to generate yet more narrative, to proliferate for ever without end: ‘the critical desire for a readable and concise ending to the story of the butcher’s wife – not only to the dream but to Freud’s interpretation of the dream – paradoxically defers closure and keeps the story open to further rereading’ (pp. 31–32). In much the same way, A Lover’s Complaint also dodges conclusion and, as we have seen, weaves in and out, teasing the reader and defying efforts to make sense of it or to pin it down, the critical desire to ‘redeem’ the poem with some ethical reading that would at last provide a moral or a message or a point being routinely denied satisfaction until criticism itself comes to be caught up in – and fiendishly compelled to repeat – the same open-endedness, circularity, and failure to arrive anywhere that the poem taunts it with. And the reason for this is simple enough. The reader, critic, or theorist is never in a position to ‘master’ stories of this kind – to rationalize or explain them once and for all – because they obviate critical logic and run rings round basic habits of thought. The psychoanalytic paradigm (a ‘recognizable’ and ‘manageable’ one, at least) strives to keep identification and desire apart. So long as the two are dichotomized and kept mutually exclusive – so that identifying

206 Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric with the parent of one sex necessarily involves desiring the other, and vice versa, the twin poles of the Oedipus complex – then positions can be clearly located as negative and positive, and sexuality can be theorized as hetero- or homosexual, as ‘normative’ or ‘perverse’. But where, as here, identification and desire refuse to keep to their allotted positions and instead slide out of control to converge with and ultimately to collapse into one another, there the situation confounds not just ‘legitimated’ sexual identities – if these are the heterosexual norm – but ‘inverted’ ones too. Here we stray into territory where traditional psychoanalytic theory is at sea, its recognized landmarks gone and its classifications duly confused – to a place where (to use Judith Butler’s examples) a woman might find the ‘phantasmatic remainder of her father in another woman or substitute her desire for her mother in a man’, in which case a certain ‘crossing’ of hetero- and homosexual identifications and desires takes place; or where a man might ‘identify with his mother, and produce desire from that identification’, in which case, if he desires a man or a woman, is his desire ‘homosexual, heterosexual, or even lesbian?’.57 It is just such grey areas that the dream of the abandoned supper party or A Lover’s Complaint show up: men and women identifying wildly, simultaneously, and illogically with each other’s masculine and feminine identifications. Where identification and desire prove so friable, so apt to blur into one another, we are no longer dealing with recognized deviations – with masculine women or feminine men, for example – but with situations that, while definitely out of line, can neither be identified as strictly ‘negative’ nor theorized as ‘perverse’. Contravening the paradigm, such situations fall outside the Oedipus altogether, outside the schema regulated by difference, proving ‘unthinkable’, as Silverman proposed, because they defy logical thought and its principle of non-contradiction giving instead ‘complex crossings of identification and desire which’, to quote Butler again, ‘might exceed and contest the binary frame itself’ (p. 103). Such radical contestations, however, have an important – indeed, a crucial – part to play, for they are not, after all, restricted to a single poem or to an individual neurotic patient. On the contrary, the field of human practice in all its diversity offers up examples enough, for there are lives led, relationships conducted, roles assumed, positions held, that do not necessarily conform to any ‘theorizable’ subjectivity; the world is ‘densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the “unlivable” is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject’ (p. 3). In other words, such non-systemizable and non-categorizable positions, Butler suggests, constitute the realm of all that is ‘unthinkable’ – illogical, illegible, non-viable, incoherent – all that must be excluded and repudiated (abjected is her word) in order for the ‘thinkable’, the theorizable

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and coherent, to emerge. This abjected domain is not, importantly, the opposite of the other – ‘for oppositions are, after all, part of intelligibility’ – rather it is the ‘excluded and illegible domain that haunts the former domain as the spectre of its own impossibility, the very limit to intelligibility, its constitutive outside’ (p. xi). As such, it provides the contours, the backdrop, the set of infinite possibilities, the ‘discursive limits’ and constitutive constraint without which ‘coherent’ positions could not emerge – whether they are a coherent heterosexuality or a coherent homosexuality, a coherent gay or a coherent lesbian identity, or within that the coherent ‘butch’ or coherent ‘femme’, or even a coherent masochistic identity. It is a crucial point, as Laplanche and Pontalis observe, that a subject’s identifications, ‘viewed as a whole’, in no way constitute a ‘coherent relational system’.58 It is in the nature of identifications to multiply, overlap, and contradict one another, so that conforming to a coherent, recognized gender identity, even a socially transgressive one (being a ‘masochist’, for example, or a ‘pervert’) is at the price of repudiating the myriad identifications and identifications with identifications that do not conform to the paradigm – all those ‘abjected spectres’ (Butler, p. 113) the like of which A Lover’s Complaint or the dream of the abandoned supper party throw up. Coherence is thus maintained only at the cost of a subject’s complexity, at the price of those ‘crossings of identifications of which it is itself composed’ (p. 115), an unwarranted – and ultimately unsuccessful – reduction and simplification of the ‘multiply constituted subject’ (p. 116), which is what every subject is. For every living, desiring being is constituted by this range of ‘illogical’, repudiated possibilities, constrained ‘by not only what is difficult to imagine, but what remains radically unthinkable’. ‘In the domain of sexuality’, Butler continues, ‘these constraints include the radical unthinkability of desiring otherwise, the radical unendurability of desiring otherwise, the absence of certain desires, the repetitive compulsion of others, the abiding repudiation of some sexual possibilities, panic, obsessional pull, and the nexus of sexuality and pain’ (p. 94).59 It is just such positions, I have been arguing, that A Lover’s Complaint experiments with and explores – masochistic, repetitive, driven, obsessive, playful, painful, contradictory, illogical, impossible, unthinkable, unethical, and obscure. The poem brings to the fore those spectral identifications that are otherwise repudiated – that lurk beyond the edges of binary thinking or on the outside of the psychoanalytic paradigm – so that it is no longer (or no longer only) a question of the ‘male’ poet identifying with the figure of an abandoned woman, whatever possibilities that might open up for experiencing ‘castration’ or for activating a classic masochistic fantasy, although that would have been transgressive enough. Rather, the poem goes

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further still, acknowledging and accessing the range not only of forbidden but of excluded and abjected identifications, making present elements from the whole welter of dispositions which – however disallowed, however in excess of what can comfortably or ‘manageably’ be theorized – nonetheless, in their very repudiated aspect, form the material from which all subjectivity must emerge. More than revealing an abject male who positions himself as an abandoned woman, as the masochistic victim of male sexual predations, the poem also actualizes the male poet’s own abjected identifications – what it means for a man to ‘be’ a woman who wants to ‘be’ and to ‘have’ other women who, in their turn, want to ‘be’ and to ‘have’ other women – the result being resolutely to deconstruct any notion of identity that we might have started out with. Lifting the curtain on the multiple identifications that go to make up every one of us, the poem radically problematizes any pre-existing ideas of gender identity – of a ‘male’ poet, or, for that matter, of a ‘male’ or a ‘female’ reader – giving instead a scene in which multiply constituted subjects are left contemplating one another. Any pre-conceived notion of masculinity – of the poet/narrator who voyeuristically intrudes or who frames and so controls the scene – vanishes like a chimera, the old man and the narrating ‘I’ finding themselves ‘swept away’, as John Kerrigan complains, to leave the poem, denied their wise, parting words, ‘on the edge of incoherence’.60 This is an incoherence that certainly puts paid to any readerly or critical mastery – any attempt to finalize or to explain what is going on – but it is also one that acknowledges the maximal range of identificatory possibilities that being able to tolerate such ‘incoherence’ can allow for. And this, finally, may go some way toward accounting for the poem’s enduringly enigmatic quality: its uncanny power to fascinate and to repel, its persistent refusal to fit or to conform, its pointed ability to pique and to irritate, and its capacity to raise the very questions which it will always refuse to answer. NOTES 1. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598), in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904), ii.317. This chapter represents an expanded version of my ‘The Enigma of A Lover’s Complaint’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Michael Schoenfeldt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 426–40. 2. ‘perplexing’, ‘complex’, Katharine A. Craik, ‘Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint and Early Modern Criminal Confession’, SQ 53 (2002): 437–57, esp. pp. 441, 437; ‘complex’, John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’ (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 10; ‘contorted’,

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4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

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John Kerrigan, ed., The Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 389, John Roe, ed., The Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 73, and Ilona Bell, ‘“That which thou hast done”: Shakespeare’s Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint’, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), pp. 455–74, esp. p. 455; ‘tortive and errant’, Kerrigan, Sonnets, p. 12 (citing Troilus and Cressida, I.iii.9); ‘obscure’, Charles Knight (1841) cited in Hyder E. Rollins, ed., Shakespeare: The Poems, New Variorum Edition (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1938), p. 586, and Bell, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, p. 471; ‘dense’, Bell, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, p. 455; ‘compressed’, Colin Burrow, ed., The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 139; ‘odd’, Roe, Poems, p. 73, and Robert Giroux, The Book Known as Q: A Consideration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), p. 213; ‘unfamiliar’, ‘curious’, Roe, Poems, p. 73. ‘abstruse and virtually unexplicated’, ‘hard to understand and difficult to love’, Bell, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, p. 455; ‘does not read easily’, Roe, Poems, p. 73; ‘verges on impenetrability’, Craik, ‘Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint’, p. 437; ‘deepen the issues without quite clarifying them’, ‘ambivalent’, Roe, Poems, pp. 67, 66; ‘abandoned the forceful clarity’, Kenneth Muir, ‘“A Lover’s Complaint”: A Reconsideration’, in Shakespeare the Professional (London: Heinemann, 1973), pp. 204–19, esp. p. 218; ‘unease’, Roger Kuin, Chambermusic: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Pleasure of Criticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 85, 86. Thomas P. Roche, Jr., Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequences (New York: AMS Press, 1989): ‘most peculiar’, pp. 440, 456; ‘extraordinary’, p. 441; ‘mysterious’, p. 441; ‘astonishing’, p. 442; ‘complicated’, p. 444; ‘bewildering’, p. 445; ‘perplexing’, p. 457; and ‘strange’, pp. 441, 444, 448, 454, 458. See Ward E. Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza, ‘Glass Slippers and Seven-League Boots: C-Prompted Doubts About Ascribing A Funeral Elegy and A Lover’s Complaint to Shakespeare’, SQ 48 (1997): 177–207; and Brian Vickers, ‘A rum “do”: The Likely Authorship of “A Lover’s Complaint”’, TLS 5 December 2003, pp. 13–15, who puts the case for John Davies of Hereford. Peter Stallybrass, ‘Editing as Cultural Formation: The Sexing of Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Schiffer, pp. 75–88, esp. pp. 77, 86. ‘moral panic’, ibid., p. 77; ‘similar panic’, Freud, ‘Fetishism’, SE xxi.153. Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 35. Ovid, Ars amatoria, 3.346: ‘Ignotum hoc aliis ille novavit opus’, in The Art of Love, and Other Poems, ed. J. H. Mozley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929), p. 142. Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 33. ‘The typical situation of the heroine is private in a double sense’, notes G¨otz Schmitz in The Fall of Women in Early English Narrative Verse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990): ‘she is deprived of the hero’s (and

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12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric often all other) company, and she is concerned with personal affairs’, ibid., p. 24. Since Katherine Duncan-Jones made the case in ‘Was the 1609 Shake-Speares Sonnets Really Unauthorized?’ RES 34 (1983): 151–71, it is now generally accepted that the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint belong to the same ‘Delian’ tradition. Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body, p. 15. Katherine Duncan-Jones speaks for many when she admits that she ‘cannot explain why these writers felt it appropriate to “sign off” their sonnet sequences with lightweight Anacreontic poems’, ‘Was the 1609’, p. 169. See Burrow, ed., Complete Sonnets and Poems, p. 143. A Lover’s Complaint, lines 300–301, Burrow’s edition to be cited throughout. Freud, ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ (1924), SE xix.162; masochism is thereby ‘an expression of the feminine nature’, he adds p. 161; see also ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’ (1919), where male masochists are said to ‘invariably transfer themselves into the part of a woman’, SE xvii.197; as well as Freud’s discussion of masochism being perceived as ‘truly feminine’ in ‘Femininity’ (1933), SE xxii.116. On femininity assuming the status of a ‘subjective conviction’ for the male masochist, see Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 209. I use ‘phantasmatic’ here in the sense defined by Laplanche and Pontalis as a ‘structuring action’ that ‘should not be conceived of merely as a thematic’ but as a ‘dynamic, in that the phantasy structures seek to express themselves, to find a way out into consciousness and action . . . constantly drawing in new material’, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), p. 317. On the Heroides as ‘unheroic’, see Schmitz, Fall of Women, pp. 26, 60; as ‘antigeneric and anticanonical’, and as ‘nonhierarchical and nonpatriarchal’, see Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 32, 47. Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body, p. 185. Kauffman, for example, argues that this literature has been ‘disparaged or repressed by the structures of official thought from Ovid onward’, Discourses, p. 22; and Lipking, that the ‘standard literary histories offer no explanation’ of it, that it has been ‘suppressed or accused of illegitimacy’, ‘continues to be ignored by critics and other authorities’, and has been subject to ‘stigma or censorship or even public burning’, Abandoned Women, pp. xvi, 2, 29, 227. Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 140. Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, p. 8. See also Bell: ‘Being a woman, the female complainant is far more vulnerable (as the “concave womb” of line 1 hints) than the sonnet speaker’, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, p. 468. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices, p. 141. While registering the charge of essentialism, Harvey nonetheless follows Irigaray in maintaining a strategic or ‘tactical essentialism’ throughout, on the grounds that ‘women and men (and their respective voices) are not politically interchangeable’, ibid., p. 13.

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24. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 252. 25. Roe, Poems, p. 72. 26. Kerrigan, Sonnets, p. 17. 27. In his gloss to line 56, Roe notes that the force of the girl’s accusation of ‘false blood’ at line 52 indicates that ‘the young man must be their author’. Richard Allan Underwood concurs, in Shakespeare on Love: The Poems and Plays. Prologomena to a Variorum Edition of A Lover’s Complaint, SSEL 19 (1985), p. 65, as does Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare, National Poet-Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 240–41, whose reading of the poem depends on the youth’s authorship, the latter being a figuration, as he sees it, of Shakespeare’s own self-identification with such a poet. 28. In Pericles IV.Chorus.21, ‘sleided silk’ occurs in the context of the specifically female textile arts, and in Troilus and Cressida V.i.31, the related ‘sleave-silk’ (meaning raw, unwoven fibres) is used as an insult to the feminized Patroclus, Achilles’ ‘masculine whore’ (line 17). 29. ‘The poem plunges its readers into a world where interpretation is all’, comments Burrow: ‘objects have a high emotional charge to the characters in it, but since the meaning of those objects depends on prior stories to which readers of the poem are not fully party those objects remain to them darkly laden with hidden significance’, Complete Sonnets, p. 141. See also Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, p. 46, who also emphasizes that these texts remain ‘unread’ and ‘unglossed’. 30. As if to add to the sense of the youth’s breeziness, the girl’s blazon on his charms twice associates him with the wind (see lines 86 and 103). For an extended discussion of the breath – anima, l’aura – as a figure for the fragility and waywardness of the poetic voice in Ovid, Petrarch, and their followers, see Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body, pp. 49–74. In this context, see also the youth’s reference to the ‘airy scale of praise’ (line 226), in which, according to Kerrigan’s gloss, praise is dismissed as ‘“breezy”, “insubstantial” rhetoric’. It is a central part of Cheney’s argument that the youth represents both a poet and a playwright – a figure who authors not only ‘deep-brained sonnets’ but also ‘tragic shows’ (line 308) – both literary forms being shown by the poem to be dangerously specious or false in their persuasions. 31. For the classic statement on male homosociality, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 32. Muir, ‘A Reconsideration’, p. 216. 33. Roche, for example, finds this ending ‘astonishing’, ‘unlike any of the other complaint poems’, and in ‘open defiance of conventional morality’, Petrarch, p. 442; for Vickers, too, it reflects a ‘rejection of rational ethics’, ‘A rum “do”’, p. 15. 34. Roche, Petrarch, p. 452; Vickers also finds the success of the youth’s tactic a ‘psychological improbability’, ‘A rum “do”’, p. 13. 35. On this see Shirley Sharon-Zisser, ‘“True to Bondage”: The Rhetorical Forms of Female Masochism in A Lover’s Complaint’, in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s

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36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric A Lover’s Complaint, ed. Shirley Sharon-Zisser (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 179–90. ‘video meliora proboque, / deteriora sequor’, Metamorphoses vii.20–21, ed. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), p. 342. See Gordon Braden, ‘Ovid, Petrarch, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems, ed. A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 96–112, esp. p. 109. Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 36–37. Burrow, Complete Sonnets, p. 146. ‘pointlessness’, ‘no forthright moral’, Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, p. 50. See also Roe, Poems, p. 72: ‘the narrative denies its reader the expected conventional d´enouement. The maid’s last-line confession, that the injury and her response to it seem destined to recur perpetually even if circumstances could be repaired, removes any possibility of a gesture towards formal consolation and insists on the power of betrayal as an ultimate statement.’ Cheney finds the conclusion of A Lover’s Complaint problematic because of the way ‘it uses poetry to challenge one of the dominant projects of Shakespeare’s plays . . . [namely, that] we become fully human only through compassion for the other’; the ending of the poem thus constitutes ‘the most baffling denouement in the canon’, Shakespeare, p. 263. Roche, Petrarch, p. 443. I for one remain unconvinced by Roche’s suggestion that the old man opens up, in both the Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, ‘the possibility of Christian love’, ibid., p. 454. James Schiffer, for example, sees the girl ‘trapped in an endless circularity that includes both remorse and masochistic ecstasy’, ‘“Honey Words”: A Lover’s Complaint and the Fine Art of Seduction’, in Critical Essays, ed. Sharon-Zisser, pp. 137–48, esp. p. 144. Enterline’s reading does in fact allow for this, since the subjectivity Shakespeare accords Lucrece is shown to be self-alienated and self-dispossessed: ‘in a deeply Ovidian exploration of the tenuous, alienating conditions of self-authorship, Shakespeare’s Lucrece explores an author’s eccentric, dislocating place in his “own” language through a woman’s “uncertain” and “untimely” voice and writing’, Rhetoric of the Body, p. 180. Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), SE xviii.22. ‘mysterious’, ‘incomprehensible’, ‘obscure’, from ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’, SE xix.159, 161; ‘puzzling’ from Lecture 32 on ‘Anxiety in Instinctual Life’, in New Introductory Lectures (1933), SE.xxii. Discussing Freud’s description of masochism as ‘enigmatic’ in this essay, Jean Laplanche notes that ‘an enigmatic question is one in which the enigma has a function in the very content of the question, and not merely in its form’, ‘Masochism and the General Theory of Seduction’, in Essays on Otherness, ed. John Fletcher (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 197–213, esp. p. 201. Laplanche’s notion of enigma – in the form of the ‘enigmatic’ signifier or message – is, of course, central to his thesis about the primary relation between child and adult, that

Feminine identifications in A Lover’s Complaint

45. 46.

47.

48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

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message being ‘enigmatic’ because unconscious on the part of the adult who sends it and untranslatable on the part of the child who receives it. On this, see his discussion of ‘A Child is Being Beaten’ and the replaying of such enigmatic messages in masochistic fantasy, in ‘Interpretation between Determinism and Hermeneutics: a Restatement of the Problem’, in Essays on Otherness, pp. 138– 65. Jacques Andr´e, ‘Feminine Sexuality: A Return to Sources’, in Jean Laplanche and the Theory of Seduction, ed. John Fletcher, New Formations 48 (2002): 77–112, esp. p. 111. Kerrigan, Sonnets, pp. 18, 23, 29, 23; for Kerrigan, the narrator of the poem stands by in ‘appalled fascination’ at the youth’s deceptions, ibid., p. 17. Cheney finds in the poem ‘a critique of literary production in which both men and women are complicit in an economy not merely of cultural shame but also of artistic sham’, Shakespeare, p. 244. See also Roe who finds that the poem stares at the situation it depicts in ‘bemused, appalled fascination’, Poems, p. 67. Roche and Vickers also protest at the immorality of the situation throughout their interpretations of the poem. See Joan Rees, ‘Sidney and A Lover’s Complaint’, RES 42 (1991): 157–67. While, for Rees, Sidney eventually provides a redemptive conclusion to this episode and clarifies the moral issues that it raises, ‘Shakespeare does neither’, ibid., p. 166, this refusal to provide a moral to the tale being what makes the poem ultimately ‘enigmatic’, ibid., p. 167. Although a number of critics have commented on the ‘awkward humour’ of A Lover’s Complaint (Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, p. 65), and seen it as a parody or satire of the complaint form (Underwood, Shakespeare, pp. 44, 60) and as a ‘joke’, however bitter or black (Underwood, Shakespeare, p. 100; Giroux, The Book, pp. 210–11), these readings all have a ‘corrective’ force as if the poem’s playfulness had an overall moral point (to mock absurdity, pretension, and so forth). Contrast James Schiffer’s more abyssal reading of the seduction of the poem as ‘a kind of game, with its own rules and character roles’, ‘“Honey Words”’, p. 138. Bell, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, p. 469. See also Craik, who argues that, whereas most male-authored female complaints serve to incriminate the ‘sexually assertive woman’, ‘Shakespeare’s A Lover’s Complaint’, p. 450, this poem does not do so but presents her, rather, in a sympathetic light. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 79. Roche, Petrarch, p. 445: ‘I can think of no other poet’, he adds, ‘who makes love feminine in such a circumstance’. ‘The argument has come full-circle’, complains Roche, ‘in that the woman is now being supplicated by those very women from whom she was so different at the beginning’, Petrarch, p. 452. In fact, the poem works to emphasize the similarities between the women and the repetition of their respective experiences and situations. The argument comes ‘full circle’, and the texts circle back to their beginning, I would suggest, precisely because desire is circulating, via the youth, between the women. Take, for example, the figure Roche calls a

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54. 55. 56.

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric ‘most mysterious nun’, ibid., p. 441. Here we have a woman who starts out chaste, autonomous, self-contained who then becomes a woman who desperately desires: she writes a text or composes a ‘device’ that ends up in the hands of a woman who, similarly, starts out chaste, autonomous, self-contained and who, too, then becomes a woman who desperately desires. In an example such as this, the poem reduces the homosocial relation to its barest, most minimal structuration. The youth, as supposed object of desire, drops away – his role being nothing more, in the final analysis, than that of mediator – while the women are left arousing desire in one another. Roche finds the nun ‘most mysterious’, perhaps, only because, structurally speaking, she is basically the same as the girl, the poem’s subordination of development, difference and closure over circularity, sameness, and repetition being precisely what rattles this particular critic. In his provocative essay on The Rape of Lucrece – ‘Shakespeare’s Will: The Temporality of Rape’ in The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare’s Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 165–221 – Joel Fineman has some interesting and, in the circumstances, not irrelevant things to say about such repetitions and the ‘uncanny’ way in which a letter seems to come back to the person who sent it, this being his formula for the distinctively new literary subjectivity Shakespeare developed in his poems and plays: ‘a sender who receives his message back in an inverted form (inverted by the movement of re-turning or re-versing repetition) describes the way in which all Shakespeare’s strong literary characters acquire their specifically psychologistic literary power’, p. 200. In her conclusion to this chapter Silverman again retreats from the more radical position she had opened up in order to re-contain masochism and restore the sexual binary of the ‘psychoanalytic paradigm’: thus ‘masochism in all of its guises is as much a product of the existing symbolic order as a reaction against it. Although in its masculine variants it shows a marked preference for the negative over the positive Oedipus complex, it nevertheless situates desire and identification within the parameters of the family’, Male Subjectivity, p. 213. Her argument, I suggest, is straining to go further than she here allows it. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, SE iv.147–51. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 28. The readings summarized here refer, respectively, to: Freud’s in The Interpretation of Dreams (‘hysterical identification’, p. 149); to Lacan’s in ‘The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power’, in Ecrits: A Selection, ed. and trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1977), pp. 226–80; and to Catherine Cl´ement’s in ‘No Caviar for the Butcher’, in her The Lives and Legends of Jacques Lacan, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 103–47. Fuss also considers an interpretation of the dream by Cynthia Chase in which the wife’s identification with her husband represents a pre-oedipal identification with the phallic mother.

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57. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 98–99. 58. Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, p. 208. 59. Thus Stephen Whitworth finds that Shakespeare’s poem gestures ‘in the direction of the analytically unthought or unimagined’, ‘“Where Excess Begs All”: Shakespeare, Freud, and the Diacritics of Melancholy’, in Critical Essays, ed. Sharon-Zisser, pp. 165–77, esp. p. 174. 60. Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, p. 51.

chap t e r 6

The lesbian phallus in Sapho to Philaenis

If Sidney flirts with male lesbianism in the frisson-laden antics of the Arcadia, and if Shakespeare develops its radical potential in the feminine identifications of A Lover’s Complaint, then Donne seems to face it full on in Sapho to Philaenis where, as if impatient with any coy hints or innuendos, he sweeps away all concessionary narrative frames and writes what is generally acknowledged to be the first unambiguously lesbian love poem in English. The poem would invite inspection on those grounds alone: what positively forces it on our attention, however, is the sheer unlikelihood that it should have been Donne who wrote it. For the poem obliges us to square its passionate utterance of female homosexual longing with a poet who is otherwise known – in the estimation of his modern readers no less than in that of his contemporaries – as a byword for phallic masculinity. This is the poet, after all, whose speaker more commonly asserts an insistent heterosexuality; who claims it is ‘the greatest Staine to mans estate / . . . to be calld effeminat’ (unless, that is, ‘effeminat’ is redefined to describe a man who loves ‘womens ioyes’, one, that is, who is actively heterosexual); and who rejects the ‘softnesses of Love’ that Dryden considered more suitable for amorous verse for an implicitly ‘hard’ philosophizing and for harsh rhythms that batter the ear of reader and addressee with what he styles his words’ own ‘masculine persuasive force’.1 This famously self-defining phrase draws on a humanist tradition that routinely differentiated between a ‘virile style’ – dense in content and lean, plain, rough, in a word ‘manly’ in expression – and a lush, over-ornamented, ‘feminine’ way of writing, such as the verses ‘as smooth, as soft, as creame’ that Jonson, for example, would scornfully attribute to ‘Womens-Poets’.2 It was the same gendering of style that Donne’s contemporaries recognized and alluded to when they favourably compared his ‘masculine expression’ with the ‘soft melting Phrases’ of the poets whom he left far behind, and when they figured him as the vigorously heterosexual lover whose untimely death had left Poetry and Invention sadly ‘widdowed’, or whose love lyrics might be described as 216

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the uncircumcised ‘Fore-skinne of thy phansie’.3 And it was in the same vein that later readers would single Donne out for his ‘manly Wit’ (Warburton), his ‘manly harmony’ (Coleridge), and ‘“manly” style’ (C. S. Lewis).4 The speaker’s ‘masculine’ words parade their pointedly persuasive force, moreover, because, as Lorna Hutson has recently argued, in the course of the sixteenth century the primary field for the exercise of masculine endeavour shifted from the practice of arms to the practice of speech – the ability to persuade, to change minds, to master the literary and textual arts newly valorized by a humanist education in logic and rhetoric – with the result that speeches of persuasion (and above all, in the literature of the time, in speeches of courtship designed to persuade women) opened up a whole new field for the exercise of a specifically masculine agency.5 This may be one reason why, in the poems of serious passion no less than in the lighter libertine lyrics, Donne is so often seen as rejecting the ‘whining Po¨etry’ of Petrarchanism – whose ‘toyes prevaile not’ – in favour of a scene, as ‘masculine’ in deed as it is in word, in which the persuasion to love has been only too successful and sexual conquest is celebrated with frank enjoyment.6 For some critics, Donne’s refusal of the Petrarchan mode is so distinctive a signature that, on those occasions where there might be a hint of that mode’s distinctive features – self-division, self-abasement, over-idealization of the other – there are sufficient grounds for doubting that the poem is his. Helen Gardner, for example (quietly eliding the poet with the speakers of his poems), is categorical: ‘Donne is never abject before his mistress’. Instead, she argues, his Elegies afford an ‘overwhelming impression of masculinity’ and are unmatched for their ‘masterful vigour’.7 Other critics follow suit, sometimes presenting Donne’s decisive break with Petrarchanism in unselfconsciously masculinist terms, claiming that it was, for instance, the poet’s ‘aggressive masculine self-assertion’ that did away with Petrarchanism’s cult of frustration and ‘impotence’.8 Yet this is the poet who, in Sapho to Philaenis, expresses in the marked solipsism of Sapho’s aching, echoing words – which, in the absence of her beloved, she addresses solitarily to her own image in the mirror – a state of loneliness and deprivation that is striking even for a poet otherwise no stranger to articulations of separation or loss. Moreover, if, as Barthes was later to suggest, ‘in any man who utters the other’s absence something feminine is declared’, then in choosing to write a Heroidean epistle – his one attempt at the genre – Donne selects the form that fleshes out and literalizes this tendency, not simply taking up the position of a figure who is reduced to ‘nothingnesse’ and ‘emptinesse’ by loss, as in, say, ‘A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day’, but identifying these specifically with the female condition

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and, in actively taking on a woman’s role, voicing the abandonment and dereliction that we have seen is typical of the female complaint poem.9 Moreover, Donne goes further in emphasizing his overall feminization of the scene by insisting that this female voice is a homosexual one. In Donne’s most obvious source for his poem – the fifteenth epistle of the Heroides – Ovid had effectively re-heterosexualized the legendary poetess of Lesbos by reducing her former homosexual escapades to a youthful phase, now left firmly behind, and by subordinating these to the implicitly more ‘mature’ satisfactions of heterosexual coupling; it is the latter that, in lamenting the absence of her beloved Phaon and passionately urging his return, she seeks to restore. Donne, by contrast, pointedly reverses Ovid’s sequencing of events by re-casting his Sapho’s heterosexual experiences – her love for Phao – to an earlier and now definitively closed past (‘Such was my Phao a while, but shall bee neuer’, line 25) and by subordinating these to the lesbian embraces she subsequently enjoyed with Philaenis; it is the latter that she now passionately seeks to recover. By restoring Sapho to a fully homosexual articulation (taking the trouble, it seems, to consult Sappho’s own lyrics, recently made available in French and Dutch editions), Donne effectively demotes the phallus/penis, denying it the implicitly restorative, compensatory role that Ovid’s re-orientation of Sappho’s sexuality had potentially allowed for.10 This tendency to de-emphasize the penis, indeed, persists throughout the poem, for the only other male figure to be mentioned – the ‘softe Boy’ (line 31) whom Sapho suspects might be ‘playing’ with the absent Philaenis – is hardly a phallic figure but is rather, in his youth, his softness, and in the barely pubescent status signified by his coming beard, marked out as the type of the androgynous young male love-object, if not as the ‘passive’, junior partner in the classical model of male homosexual relations. Moreover, the description of his beard (such as it is) as the site of unwanted ‘daly change’ (line 34) associates with the male physique the bodily changeableness and mutability that was otherwise culturally coded as feminine. With the phallus/penis consigned to history, feminized, or banished to the margins of the poem, a space opens up for the account of a sexual coupling that explicitly excludes it: ‘Hand to strange hand, lip, to lip none dennies / Why should they brest to brest or thighs to thighs?’ (lines 49–50). In describing the sexual encounter between two female bodies, furthermore, Donne eschews – or perhaps resists – the opportunity to re-introduce the ‘missing’ penis by masculinizing either Sapho or Philaenis; and this in spite of an insistent classical and humanist tradition that cast one or the other as a monstrous ‘tribade’ who made up for the deficiency of her sex by strapping to herself ‘cunningly contrived instruments of

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lechery’ and who took the ‘superior’ position in love, mounting her partner as if she were a man.11 In Donne’s poem, by contrast, where the whole emphasis is on non-penetrative sexuality and on the symmetry and equality of the two lovers, neither of whom seeks to dominate or subdue the other, we have what might rather be considered as a scene between two ‘femmes’.12 That anyone at the turn of the seventeenth century should openly represent female homosexuality in this way would be remarkable enough. That it should be a poet otherwise notorious for his parade of phallic masculinity has caused more than one critic to stop in their tracks. What was Donne doing? Both in comparison with existing treatments of female homosexuality and within the context of Donne’s own work, Sapho to Philaenis has repeatedly registered as odd, as an aberration that demands to be explained (‘anomalous’, ‘exceptional’, ‘unprecedented’, ‘unusual’, ‘singular’, and ‘extraordinary’ are typical of the words used to describe it).13 In this respect, the poem resonates with a number of the texts already discussed and indeed, among the various responses it has elicited, there are many that are coming to seem familiar. General uncertainty over what to make of the poem surfaces, for example, in a continuing vagueness as to its genre, critics struggling to categorize what is ‘neither elegy, nor song, nor sonnet’ as, variously, a ‘Heroicall epistle’, a ‘verse letter’, an ‘anti-elegiac epistle’, and a ‘verse elegy in semiepistolary style’.14 For many critics the poem does not lie comfortably but continues to unsettle and shock, even sympathetic readers reporting ways in which it stretches their credulity and exercises the power to stir, startle, and surprise. For others, the poem’s blank refusal to fit in with expectation is enough to cast doubt over its authenticity and, in spite of manuscript and publication evidence to the contrary, to question whether it is Donne’s at all: Helen Gardner, for example, finds it ‘difficult to imagine him wishing to assume the love-sickness of Lesbian Sappho’, and, being ‘unable to recognize in the poem any characteristics of Donne’s style’, denies that he could have been its author.15 Where critics do acknowledge the poem to be Donne’s (now the generally accepted view), there is a tendency to re-introduce somewhere into the picture – in accounts of the poem’s overall purpose or reception, for example – the phallus that it otherwise seems so determined to remove. Thus some readings see Donne’s depiction of lesbian lovemaking as straightforward pornography designed to service male masturbatory fantasies and hence to appeal directly to a male coterie: one critic, for example, regards Sapho as a ‘masterwork’ of this genre.16 This reading appears to draw strength from a series of early verse letters exchanged between Donne and the Woodward brothers, Rowland

220 Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric and Thomas, that suggestively figure the relation between the male friends as the ‘joining’ of their respective Muses – a ‘mistique tribadree’ that clearly uses lesbianism to thematize a homosocial if not a more blatantly homosexual exchange.17 Even those readings which argue that Donne’s depiction of lesbian love in Sapho is intended to be sympathetic rather than salacious can, in asserting the very exceptionality of such a representation, find themselves inadvertently proving as the general rule an overarching sexism and phallocentrism that is normalized even as it is deplored.18 Other readings, while acknowledging the general dephallicization that Sapho to Philaenis seems to entail, nonetheless disavow Donne’s personal involvement in and identification with such a scene by (directly or otherwise) re-allocating the phallus to the poet, thereby leaving his reputation for ‘masculinity’ unimpaired if not positively enhanced in the process. Several critics, for example, view Sapho as an exercise in phallic competitiveness in which Donne not only aimed to out-do his contemporaries (both fellow Inns men and other poets on the continent) in the collective ‘sport’ of turning out modern versions of the classical genres, but to do so decisively by engaging in poetic combat with none other than the acknowledged master, Ovid himself.19 These readings see Sapho as Donne’s bid to out-master Ovid – as his witty re-take on Heroides 15 – so that what might initially have appeared as a radical treatment of lesbianism soon lapses back into phallocentric attitudinizing and the poem becomes instead an aggressively appropriative if not colonizing act in which the male poet inserts himself into the woman’s role, inhabits her body, ventriloquizes her voice, and follows the initial act of literary violation which Ovid’s epistle represented with an ego-driven version of his own, effectively performing on the body of Sappho’s verse what amounts to a kind of literary gang-rape.20 Even those readings in which Donne’s representation of lesbian love is deemed sympathetic – as an unprecedented attempt to enter into a fully feminine experience – seem sufficiently constrained by the fact of the poem’s masculine signature to be able to figure that attempt only in terms of impersonation or ventriloquism: terms that leave the gender binary, ascribed to fully bodied, anatomically distinct ‘male’ and ‘female’ subjects, implicitly intact (if Donne set out with the intention of ‘looking through Sappho’s eyes’, comments one critic, he ends up only ‘looking over her shoulder’).21 In such accounts, Donne’s poem is repeatedly presented as a mere ‘thought experiment’ or ‘“what if” imagining’, as if the most that could be expected were that, in donning Sappho’s persona for a while and simulating her supposed sexual experiences, the male poet could briefly enter into and empathize with her alien sexuality before reverting to his ‘native’ masculinity.22

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One of the most prevalent ways of reading the poem is (while respecting the boldness of Donne’s attempt in approaching the subject of lesbianism at all) to see it as an exercise in specifically masculine self-promotion. Thus many readings see in the homology of the two female bodies that reflect one another (Sapho and Philaenis, or, in the absence of the latter, Sapho and her own image in the glass) a damning sameness that militates against hierarchy, difference, and metaphor, thereby rendering the speaker’s utterance necessarily tautologous, repetitive, and insignificant.23 The fact that, as Sapho herself declares, their lovemaking leaves ‘no more signes . . . / Then fishes leaue in streames, or birds in aire’ (lines 41–42), is used to confirm the sterile and narcissistic nature of her speech as well as of their sexual relation. ‘The love of a man’, by contrast, ‘may be sinful, but at least it signifies, so it aligns itself with culture and history . . . for he leaves behind a trace of himself in his progeny – the growing seeds that he has sown and tilled’.24 In such accounts, Sapho is interpreted as a negative example and her utterance characterized in terms of its failure – to represent, to signify, to exercise force – a failure that serves as a foil against which to offset the proper utterance which (hierarchical, metaphorical, gendered as male) Donne is said ultimately to endorse and uphold. Moreover, even those readings that go furthest in seeking to claim for Donne’s poem a radical modernity – by suggesting that, in breaking out of the gender binary, Sapho aims to go beyond phallogocentrism, beyond difference, beyond the symbolic order, in order to articulate an alternative mode of utterance such as that envisaged by certain modern feminist thinkers – they too end up hedging their bets by emphasizing the very strict parameters within which such an attempt might be possible. Thus, while she concedes that, in certain parts of the poem, Donne may press against ‘the limits of the thinkable’, Heather Meakin judges that, in others, he does not and that ultimately he therefore fails to ‘step across the threshold’, instead falling back into the dualistic, hierarchical mode of binary thinking in which the phallus is, once more, re-affirmed, and where, indeed (notwithstanding the profound questioning to which it has been subjected), the phallus/penis equation re-appears quite un-dented, those sections of the poem being read as a straightforward response to ‘male performance anxiety’ and as designed to ‘compensate for the anticlimax of detumescence’.25 William West, another such critic, argues that the poem requires a ‘double reading’, once as Sapho’s and once as Donne’s poem, and that the former – radical, alternative, revolutionary as it may be – cannot be accessed, let alone appreciated and understood, unless it is set alongside the latter that frames and contains it: ‘Donne’s complex layering of levels of legibility valorizes female discourse and opens up a space in which such

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rigorously non-metaphorical language can appear, but finally cannot do so without setting it into a metaphorically established frame that gives it a meaning and connects it to familiar masculine forms of knowledge’.26 That critics should formulate their responses to Donne’s poem in this way is not, perhaps, very surprising. Indeed, one could almost say that the obligations which critics themselves are under to ‘signify’ and to make substantial contributions of their own to ‘knowledge’ (those who are sympathetic to Sapho no less than those who are hostile) more or less require them to take up a position that in some way distances or, at the very least, differentiates itself from a voice that otherwise seems to claim, justify, if not to celebrate its own lack of ‘signes’.27 This might explain, in fact, why it is that those readings which are, in every other respect, so different from one another – whether they see Donne’s treatment of lesbianism as positive or negative, utopian or conservative, compassionate or condemnatory, sympathetic or selfish – nonetheless all seem to end up speaking from the same place. Thus even those readings which are most friendlily disposed toward Sapho and most impressed by the poem’s radical potential to challenge and disrupt the patriarchal order, conclude by distinguishing Sapho’s voice from Donne’s and by retaining the latter (even if they do not restore it to unqualified mastery and control) as an integral part of the picture: so that, at the very best, the poem can only be interpreted ‘both ways’, Sapho’s ‘alien, non-metaphorical language’ being readable only ‘alongside and within [Donne’s] male language’, or the poem’s gestures toward the kind of alternative mode of existence and relation such as that advocated in Irigaray’s This Sex Which Is Not One being, ultimately, inseparable from its ‘desire for the absolute, for mastery over time and space which constitutes a phallogocentric economy’.28 There is no question, even in these feminist accounts, of having one without the other. For, inevitably, the strongest case to be made in favour of Sapho’s alternative, ‘signless’ speech must itself be constructed from a secure position within the system of signification – it is from this vantage point alone than any ‘other’ logic can be identified as such, and in this position therefore that the critic must situate him- or herself (hence the tendency, in readings such as these, to conceive of the poem spatially and to present it as framed or contained ‘within’ the system of signification whose borders it might press against but which it never quite succeeds in getting ‘outside’ or ‘beyond’). I do not say this in any spirit of facile objection: after all, that spaces ‘prior to’ or ‘in excess of’ the symbolic economy are only accessible from (if not recursively produced by) that economy is – with all its implications for feminist theory and for the articulation of an ´ecriture feminine above all – a dilemma well known and

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much rehearsed. I ask the question, rather, in order to reiterate the very specific implications it has for attempting to theorize ‘perverse’ masculinities or indeed any scene in which phallic masculinity seems to be under some kind of erasure. The problem emerges at its most acute when, as in these and other examples, the signifying order is explicitly masculinized and the phallus as master signifier is conflated with the male organ. This not only has the effect that the position which the critic takes up as a writing subject – one with a remit to make sense, to construct logical arguments, to contribute meaningfully to knowledge, and the like – is thereby gendered male. It has consequences, in turn, for the kind of writing subject that, in their interpretation of literary texts, the critic then goes on to construct. That is to say, the critic’s own investment in an authoritative, meaningful, sovereign voice can find itself exerting undue influence on his or her account of the poet in hand, the latter being recuperated, where necessary, in order to reflect that sovereign mastery all too flatteringly back. As I have suggested in previous chapters, this remains the most serious block to the present endeavour – an obstacle that, if not insuperable, nonetheless stands in the way of straightforwardly theorizing perverse masculinities – for that critical self-investment must, at however basic a level, be at variance with any move that might be made to deconstruct the position of phallogocentric sovereignty: a move that, in order to be effective, requires the critic to relinquish, or at least be prepared to put on hold, his or her own claims to mastery and control. The fact that, however different in their politics and approach, the various critical responses to Sapho to Philaenis should contrive, one way or another, to re-introduce the phallus/penis onto the scene and to recuperate Donne (with whatever qualifications) as the sovereign male writing subject without whose imprimatur any alternative mode of speech or relation is, finally, not to be contemplated, marks it out as another exemplum of the issue which this book sets out to explore. Given that, institutionally and professionally, critics are required to be competent writing subjects who are manifestly in control of their significations – who are able to mount logical arguments and to contribute significantly to the knowledge economy – and given that, in practice, this means aligning themselves to some degree (whatever the compromises this entails) with phallogocentric speech if not attitudes, then one might be tempted to pause for a moment and to reconsider the ‘manly’ Donne who features so consistently in readerly accounts from the seventeenth century onwards, and, insofar as it raises the question, to ask whether that figure might bear the traces of the critic’s own self-image, or, to put it another way, to ask how much of the critic might be visible if not directly then at the very

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least as shadowed in the aura that surrounds this very distinct figure. That is to say, if critics are called upon to be sovereign writing subjects who are in full command of their field, then to what extent might that sovereignty, that command, be precisely what they project onto their image of ‘Donne’? And, by the same token, to what extent does the ‘Donne’ whom they so often produce – the aggressively heterosexual, self-assertive, phallic figure with examples of which this chapter began – confirm the phallus/penis equation and so naturalize ‘having’ the phallus (the ability to signify) as an attribute of the male? In other words, to what extent might the relation that pertains between the reader and the poet (and, more specifically, between the literary critic and the ‘manly’ Donne) best be understood as a mirrorrelation – as the Lacanian mirror-relation, to be precise – in which one party projects onto the other a perfection and completeness which is then conferred back upon themselves, their own experience of fragmentation and disunity thereby being disavowed in the process? Might the jubilation of the child as it identifies with its own image in the mirror not be at least detectable in the determination of one critic, for example (and he is not alone), to disavow the discontinuous and contradictory nature of Donne’s poetic corpus and, against the odds, ‘to see Donne whole’?29 Might the critic not here be attributing to the poet something that he would ideally claim for himself, establishing between the two a mutually corroboratory (if not anaclitic) relation in which the critic’s own status as a writing subject is supported and preserved, even enhanced, because propped up on that of the Author? Moreover, as is often pointed out, this relation can all too easily slide into a ‘specifically masculine narcissism’ since the specular gaze – which privileges the male body, with its externalized and visible genitalia, as ‘complete’ or ‘whole’ – can (and in the Lacanian scheme arguably does) come to naturalize the male organ as the site and token of control, thus elevating ‘the phallus’ to its role as the ‘privileged signifier that appears to control the significations that it produces’; in which case, in their projection of an explicitly ‘manly’ Donne, critics could (whether they are male or female is, of course, quite insignificant), once again, be seen to be laying claim to the same privileged endowment for themselves.30 Is it legitimate to ask how much critics might have invested in projecting such a Donne, a Donne whose writings are described as ‘the most enduring exhibition of the will to power the English Renaissance produced’; a figure who is no less masculine for being (according to the standard formula) ‘anxious’, his very assertiveness, determination, will to succeed, vaunting ambition, heroic over-reaching, and so on and so forth, however defensive, being explained, justified, and in some cases naturalized by means of an

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easy psychologism that recuperates such vulnerability – be it the insecurities of the bedroom or the terrors of social exclusion – and turns the writer’s failures and shortcomings to creative and poetic account?31 (It is much the same question, incidentally, that Marguerite Waller and Jonathan Crewe ask when, sceptical of such critical self-investments and alert to their political and feminist implications, they critique the unconscious masculinism that is implicit, as they see it, in certain readings of Wyatt – another author long awarded the dubious honour of being called ‘manly’). Is it within bounds to ask how much the critic might have invested in projecting a Donne who is always in control, whose self-presentations as the abject Petrarchan lover or the insecure hanger-on, where they do exist, are understood (according to the reversal with which we are familiar) in terms of a calculated strategy or ‘transaction’: so that, in ‘Twicknam Garden’, for example, Donne is said to transform himself into a lover ‘in order to surmount the humiliating fact that he is no more than a beggarly dependant’, thereby redeeming harsh reality and so regaining ‘his manhood’; or, in ‘The Canonization’, to compensate for his socially inferior position by exercising ‘intellectual and rhetorical mastery over his coterie readers’; or, in the self-styled ‘impotency’ of one of his most grovelling begging letters, to develop a fiction by which ‘his nothing is converted into something’; or, in the Sermons, to present himself as ‘totally submissive so that he may gain a place in the world’?32 If the portrait of this Donne seems less neutral than motivated – more the product of a certain wishful projection than of a strictly objective critical (indeed, self-critical) detachment – then one might ask to what extent such readings could be seen to be engaged in a kind of love-affair with the ‘manly’ Donne, and whether, as such, they might constitute one of what Stanley Fish styles the series of ‘critical romances’ which, albeit in different ways, contrive always to cast Donne as the hero.33 For if it can be argued that the critic to some extent fashions the poet in his or her own image – that he or she cannot avoid projecting onto the writing subject of their study an idealized portrait (full, centred, commanding, whole) of themselves – then a love-affair might not seem so far-fetched a designation, insofar as what that term points up is the fundamentally narcissistic nature of any such relationship. Moreover, like a love-affair, this relation may well feel as if it could go on for ever, for – since it can only flatter the critic’s ego, enhance their status as a writer and perpetuate an idealized image of themselves – it no doubt feels wholly satisfactory on all counts and leaves no reason (other than troublesome demands to theorize perverse masculinities) to upset the equilibrium or break the spell, and little incentive to theorize Donne, or anyone else for that matter, in any other way. The fact that

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the projected image of completeness, control, perfection, mastery, and so forth is, of course, wholly illusory – a mere fiction – is betrayed in the very nature of this ‘Donne’ who strides the pages of certain biographies, editions, and critical accounts, the lionized ‘monarch of wit’ who carries all before him subduing women and readers alike with the power of his words’ ‘masculine persuasive force’. If this figure seems something of a caricature then that is largely because that is exactly what it is – an invention, an imago – for this ‘Donne’, largely the product of speculation, a concoction or amalgam drawn from the various speakers of the poems, is, like the vision of perfection which the child sees in the mirror, wholly imaginary, and no less a fiction, no less a literary creation than the ‘Jack Donne’ of the poet’s own inventing. Yet the fictional nature of this ‘personality’ often finds itself being disavowed – sometimes explicitly so – and the character endowed, instead, with the voice not of any persona or rhetorical mask but, rather, of Donne himself, of Donne ‘the man’ (the ‘Donne’, for example, whom Helen Gardner insists is ‘never abject before his mistress’): an eliding of poet and persona that, often going un-remarked, has the effect of creating a continuous, unified, self-identical, fully bodied, irreducibly biographical writing subject with whom the critic can all too readily identify.34 Again, I do not say this in any spirit of dull objection, nor even to claim here any kind of individual exemption or excuse. Rather, as in previous chapters, my aim is to treat symptomatically if not diagnostically the range of critical responses that a poem has elicited in order to gauge what those responses may have to tell us about the poem in question and how they might suggest ways of assessing it. The discussion so far has been intended, therefore, to orientate an approach to Sapho to Philaenis (to which I now, somewhat belatedly, return) and to prepare the way for the following question: could the general stir that the poem has caused be a result of the fact that it disturbs or threatens the otherwise satisfactory (or satisfying, at any rate) mirror-relation that exists between the critic and the ‘manly’ Donne, rippling the face that is reflected back in the water with potentially catastrophic results? In this respect, Helen Gardner’s response might indeed turn out to be the most revealing if only because, in rejecting the poem outright, it takes the most extreme position. Could the critic in fact have been writing more truly, or more tellingly, than perhaps she knew when she banished Sapho from the Donne canon on the grounds that she could not ‘imagine’ Donne wishing to assume the love-sickness of Lesbian Sappho, or that she could not ‘recognize’ in the poem any of the distinctive characteristics of Donne’s style? Could it not be that the poem was capable of causing such offence precisely because it interfered with – indeed,

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exposed – a narcissistic relation that, in idealizing the writer and in mobilizing the (specifically visual) pleasures of identification and recognition, is essentially a deception and to that degree strictly imaginary? Could it not be that the critic felt compelled to banish the poem, to disavow its troubling effects, because it blocked, thwarted, or even deconstructed what she was used to: the habitual, happy relation in which the kind of Donne whom she was able to imagine and recognize (presumably the ‘overwhelmingly’ masculine one against whom the author of Sapho is judged and found to be wanting) simply could not be made to work here? Moreover, Gardner is not the only one whose expressions of concern about the poem testify eloquently to exactly what the poem is felt to threaten or put in jeopardy. In an essay on the mirror-imagery that is, after all, endemic in Donne, G. R. Wilson notes that the mirror in Sapho is ‘clearly not the same’ as that in the ‘normal love poetry’, notwithstanding the fact that it is, strictly speaking, more literally a mirror for reflecting two anatomically identical bodies as opposed to two anatomically different ones.35 In another case, James Holstun castigates Sapho for the sterile and narcissistic nature of her relation with Philaenis – as an indictment of which, he argues, Donne ‘sees to it that [she] cannot create proper poetry’ – and goes on to contrast the ‘successful mirroring’ and ‘proper reflection’ which, because it restores sexual difference, hierarchy, and the masculine prerogative, he approvingly finds in other, heterosexual poems.36 In examples such as these, it could be argued, the mirror-relation in Sapho registers as not ‘normal’ or ‘proper’ – in a word, as perverse – to the extent that it que(e)ries the critics’ accustomed narcissistic relation to Donne, and so refuses to reflect back their wonted image of themselves. What I am suggesting, in other words, is that Sapho causes consternation because, one way or another, it explodes the (ultimately self-serving) narcissistic and imaginary relation between the literary critic and the ‘manly’ Donne.37 And it does so, I would venture to add, by offering what is, in effect, a parody of that relation. For the bond between Sapho and Philaenis has, on the face of it, much that is in common with that relation. It is idealizing – much of the poem is concerned with praise and with the determination to express ‘how faire thou art’ (line 15). It is emphatically a relation between two equals – Sapho’s insistence on the exact resemblance of the two lovers (as perfect as the bilateral symmetry that obtains within a single body) makes it plain that it is precisely the relation of parity and similitude on which her passionate expressions of love for and idealization of the other are grounded: ‘My two lips, Eyes, thighes differ from thy two / But soe as thine from one another doe / And oh noe more’ (lines 45–47).

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It is even literalized as a mirror-relation – it is because they share the same anatomy that she and Philaenis may truly be said to reflect each other, their similarity being such that, in the absence of one, the mirror-image of the other can serve as a fair substitute: ‘Mee in my glasse I call thee’ (line 55). The mirror-relation between Sapho and Philaenis is, however, different from that between the critic and the ‘manly’ Donne in one crucial respect – and it is this which seems to cause so much trouble – namely, that here that otherwise familiar, narcissistic relation is shown to exist between two subjects who are, explicitly, not phallic; or rather, to use the precision for which the situation calls, the poem shows that relation to exist between two subjects neither of whom is endowed with a penis. The expedient of, basically, feminizing that relation, although simple enough in itself, is utterly transformative in its effects insofar as it throws the entire phallus/penis equation into doubt – and with it the masculine privilege enshrined in the appropriation of the phallus as master signifier – and so, for good or ill, brings a whole series of predictable destabilizations in its wake. It is here, therefore, that Judith Butler’s notion of the ‘lesbian phallus’ might most usefully be brought into play: for if, as she suggests, the Lacanian notion of the phallus is ‘that which controls significations in discourse’, then ‘the lesbian phallus may be said to intervene as an unexpected consequence of the Lacanian scheme, an apparently contradictory signifier which . . . calls into question the ostensibly originating and controlling power of the Lacanian phallus, indeed, its installation as the privileged signifier of the symbolic order’.38 The ‘lesbian phallus’ is emphatically not a substitute male organ (a dildo, for example) with which a homosexual woman might supplement her sex, for to suggest as much would merely be to perpetuate the phallus/penis equation that it radically throws into question (and here I would reiterate the point that Donne resists the opportunity to ‘tribadize’ either Sapho or Philaenis and instead chooses to present them as two ‘femmes’). Rather, as a logical contradiction – as a ‘contradictory signifier’ – the lesbian phallus is that which effectively divorces the phallus from the penis and so asks why the privileged signifier should require ‘that particular body part to symbolize, and why it could not operate through symbolizing other body parts’ (p. 73) – one thinks here of Sapho’s ‘lips, Eyes, thighes’, and so forth. ‘The viability of the lesbian phallus’, Butler goes on, ‘depends on this displacement. Or, to put it more accurately, the displaceability of the phallus, its capacity to symbolize in relation to other body parts or other body-like things, opens the way for the lesbian phallus, an otherwise contradictory formulation’ (p. 84); ‘precisely because it is an idealization, one which no body can adequately approximate, the phallus is

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a transferable phantasm, and its naturalized link to masculine morphology can be called into question through an aggressive reterritorialization’ (p. 86, Butler’s italics). In questioning the viability of the ‘Lacanian scheme’ – and, specifically, the much-debated issue of Lacan’s complicity or otherwise in forging the phallus/penis equation – Butler’s intervention thus invites us to see Sapho, if not other poems by Donne, in a potentially radical new light. For where a critic like Antony Easthope, for example, can give an explicitly Lacanian reading of Donne’s poetry – and can show how a text such as ‘To His Mistress Going To Bed’ exemplifies the narcissistic relation in which the ‘object is idealized and so able to give back to the subject a perfected image of itself’ and so perpetrates the illusions of the mirror-stage and with it the myths of a congratulatory phallicism and masculine self-regard – Butler’s alternative, ‘post-Lacanian’ scheme, by contrast, can show Sapho to be doing exactly the opposite (with explosive implications for a certain definition of art): not perpetuating the illusion (which any understanding of art as ‘social phantasy’, that is, as ideology or as wish-fulfilment, would entail), but, rather, exposing that illusion and revealing it to be a fraud.39 That something rather revolutionary might indeed be going on in Sapho to Philaenis could be substantiated, moreover, by comparing it with Shakespeare’s Sonnets, or at least with Joel Fineman’s (similarly radical) reading of the same, for Shakespeare’s Sonnets are shown there to be just as concerned with the illusory and narcissistic nature of the imaginary mirror-relation. As Fineman sees it, the specific object of Shakespeare’s parody was what had by then come to dominate the scene of European literary lyric – indeed, to be ‘the master model of poetry per se’ – namely, the tradition of Renaissance epideixis and, as its most famous exemplar, the typical Petrarchan sonnet, in which the poet’s exorbitant praise of his beloved was designed, at bottom, to reflect back glowingly upon himself, such praise being, in Fineman’s words, ‘an objective showing that is essentially subjective showing off’: the showing to advantage, that is, of the writing subject as ‘a full self, present to itself, or potentially so’.40 Within this tradition, the relation between subject and object, lover and beloved, is at root a reciprocal one – mutually admiring, mutually idealizing, mutually corroboratory – with the result that ‘we grow accustomed to a praising self whose “I” and “me” depend upon their correspondence to a praiseworthy “thou” and “thee”’ (p. 7). It is in the Young Man sonnets in particular, Fineman argues, that Shakespeare not only works to reveal the fundamentally self-serving nature of this traditional praise-relation, but that he literalizes the fundamentally homosexual nature of this relation: hence ‘the homosexual thematic developed in the sonnets addressed to the young man – where language, like the desire it

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mirrors, is “fair”, “kind”, and “true” – exploits the specular homogeneity endlessly repeated by the orthodox Renaissance sonnet, as though this kind of eroticized sameness linking idealizing lover to idealized beloved were the homosexual truth subtending the poetics of admiration from Beatrice onward’ (p. 17). (Although Fineman does not explicitly extend this relation to include that between the literary critic and the poet about whom he or she writes, the structure of that relation is, I would argue, basically the same: that is to say, if traditional epideixis was designed, ultimately, to reflect back well on the praising poet – who sees himself in the perfections of the other he has made – then the same relation can also find itself being duplicated in that between the literary critic and the image of the poet they have created, thus confirming, as suggested above, that that relation can indeed be envisaged as a kind of love-affair or ‘critical romance’). It is in the parody of the Dark Lady sonnets, however, that Shakespeare goes on to expose more radically the illusions and self-investments implicit in the traditional praise-relation, for there – where the speaker is confronted with a love-object who, dark and promiscuous, is, in contrast with Petrarchanism’s Chaste Fair, manifestly, not ideal – the mutually admiring specular relation can no longer hold and the narcissistically invested ‘full’ self is exposed as an illusion: one consequence of this being the invention of a new, ‘modern’ subjectivity (or such is Fineman’s large claim), one in which constitutive lack and symbolic castration are finally acknowledged and not disavowed. Donne does not do exactly this in Sapho to Philaenis, although he does experiment with what Fineman calls the ‘paradox of praise’ (p. 2) – that is, with the mock encomium – in poems such as ‘The Anagram’ and ‘The Comparison’; and, in Sapho’s struggles to express ‘how faire thou art’ (line 15) and to find that with which she can suitably ‘compaire’ (line 16) her beloved, he does, as we shall see, demonstrate familiar Shakespearean concerns with ‘proud’ and ‘false compare’. However, without suggesting any direct influence or link (that Donne was responding to Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Shakespeare to Donne’s poem, a possibility which the uncertainties of dating either forbids) I am minded to ask, nevertheless, whether (like Sidney in the New Arcadia blazon) Donne might be offering in Sapho his own witty variation on the theme: that is, whether, in exposing the same ‘homosexual truth’ that subtends the traditional praise-relation not so much by following it with desire for an object that is un-ideal but rather by transposing the ‘poetics of admiration’ from a scene of male to a scene of female homosexual appreciation, he is effecting something rather similar: the thorough deconstruction of the ‘full’, ‘whole’, narcissistically invested self. If, in the Young Man sonnets, Shakespeare exposes the ‘specifically

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masculine narcissism’ that accrues on the penis/phallus equation – where perfection, and above all the demonstrable ability to master and control significations (to write ‘golden’ poetry, no less) elides ‘having’ the phallus with having a penis, so that the scene must necessarily, logically, be one between two ideal-because-male subjects – then Sapho unfolds its own joke at the expense of phallic supremacy, its own devastating parody of phallogocentrism, by thematizing exactly the same relation (an idealizing one between two subjects who are pointedly the same and whose specular nature is literalized in an encounter with a mirror) but with one small yet crucial alteration: on this occasion those two subjects are female. When put alongside Shakespeare’s Sonnets in this way, the simple (in its own way, even slight) variation that Donne works in Sapho to Philaenis could be seen, all the same, to strike no less powerful a blow at masculine narcissism and at the pseudo-satisfactions of the traditional praise-relation: for here, firstly, praise manifestly does not entail attributing phallic ‘wholeness’ (the ‘addition’ with which Nature ‘pricked . . . out’ Shakespeare’s Young Man in sonnet 20) to the other and by extension to the self, quite the reverse (although the troubling effects that this will have on the standard similes and metaphors of traditional epideixis will come to register in the struggles Sapho finds she has in praising her beloved); and, secondly, the ability to control meaning, to exercise power over words, to master significations, to compose aureate and fame-garnering verse – in other words, to have the ‘phallus’ or whatever it is that enables signification – is, in the case of Sapho’s literary production, quite evidently no longer the special attribute of a person endowed with a penis. At this point Judith Butler’s notion of the lesbian phallus once more seems germane. ‘If a lesbian “has” [the phallus]’, Butler writes, then ‘it is also clear that she does not “have” it in the traditional sense’ (within the phallogocentric tradition, that is, in which the phallus is elided with the male organ), as a direct consequence of which ‘her activity furthers a crisis in the sense of what it means to “have” one at all’ (p. 88). Instead, Butler goes on, the ‘phantasmatic status of “having” is redelineated, rendered transferable, substitutable, plastic; and the eroticism produced within such an exchange depends on the displacement from traditional masculinist contexts as well as the critical redeployment of its central figures of power . . . If what comes to signify under the sign of the phallus are a number of body parts, discursive performatives, alternative fetishes, to name a few, then the symbolic position of “having” has been dislodged from the penis as its privileged anatomical (or non-anatomical) occasion’ (p. 89). If, in its scene of lesbian praise and erotic exchange, Sapho to Philaenis is indeed seen as parodying and so exposing the narcissistic

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myths and phallic self-investments that lie at the bottom of the traditional praise-relation, moreover, then it could be seen to have considerable consequences not only for the cherished image of the ‘manly’ Donne but also for an issue that continues to resurface in Donne studies and that still has not been laid to rest: the old question of Donne’s relation to Petrarchanism. For the poem could suggest (pace Helen Gardner and others) that Donne is rejecting Petrarchanism not because its scene of unsatisfied desire is too unmanly, ‘impotent’, or ‘abject’, but, rather, because its scene of selfcongratulatory poetic and phallic mastery is based on a lie, or, to put it another way, because Petrarchanism is not abject enough. Finally, if this is what is going on in Sapho to Philaenis, then it becomes clearer just why the poem has caused the stir that it has, even (or, perhaps, especially) where that stir has taken the form of refusing the poem’s authorial status altogether. For the response that the poem has occasioned is, I would argue, the result not of any local prudery – of scruples that might belong to a particular time and place regarding the representation of lesbian love – but of something much more serious and, to the literary critic, of far more immediate concern. If the object of Donne’s parody (like that of Shakespeare) is basically the competent writing subject whose possession of the master signifier is, as in phallogocentrism generally, shored up on its time-honoured equation with the male organ – that endowment being perpetuated both in the idealizing relation between poet and beloved that exists in traditional epideixis, and, by extension, in the equally admiring relation that can exist between reader and poet in some literary criticism – and if the aim of Donne’s poem (like that of Shakespeare) is to explode the dedicated illusions upon which any such claim to competence or mastery must, finally, rest, then it is hardly surprising that critics should rally as a man and rush to the defence, for this strikes right at the heart of, among other things, the whole literary critical enterprise. The various responses which Sapho has elicited could be read, therefore, as so many defensive tactics that are designed to dodge, parry, or fend off the poem’s several moves – as so many disavowals, in short – which is why, as noted earlier on, however much they may vary in their content and approach, the critical responses to Sapho are, at another level, all doing fundamentally the same thing: from, at one end, Gardner’s outright denial of the poem on the grounds that it does not conform to the ‘overwhelming impression of masculinity’ she finds elsewhere, through to those who acknowledge the poem to be Donne’s but who deny that his phallicism is in any way impaired by it, to those who, at the other end, concede the poem’s profound scepticism toward traditional patriarchal values but end up, all the same, by framing or

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containing it within a ‘phallogocentric economy’ and ‘familiar masculine forms of knowledge’. Seen as so many disavowals, these responses are, however, all the more revealing for pinpointing precisely what it is that the poem is felt to endanger or put under threat – which is, in every case, the phallus, or rather the politically and historically loaded approximation that elides the phallus with the penis. It is because the critical responses so clearly locate what the poem is perceived to jeopardize that I have structured this chapter (like some others) in the way that I have, not approaching the poem directly but attending, in the first instance, rather to its secondary effects, for what the poem is really up to is, arguably, nowhere more visible than in the refusals and disavowals to which it has given rise. Sapho to Philaenis presents its speaker, then, in a state of radical dispossession – stripped bare, bereft, deprived – and as missing not only her beloved (something the conventions of elegiac epistle make it safe to assume) but, more specifically, and as the opening lines spell out, the poetic powers to which she was once able to lay confident claim: Where is that holy fire which verse is said To haue, is that enchantinge force decayd? (lines 1–2)

For the opening words come to list not the people departed or places left behind that might have been expected of more traditional ubi sunt lament but, rather, a series of linguistic properties and literary abilities of which the speaker complains of being progressively depleted: first, the ‘holy fire’ of inspiration, that divinely originated energy or rush of power that comes to poets (especially in their role as prophets or bards) as it were from the outside or from an externalized Muse; and, second (and the choice of word, with its associations elsewhere in Donne’s poetry with a specifically masculine agency, is not insignificant), the ‘force’ which that power habitually brings with it but which is now, strangely, ‘decayd’. Described as ‘enchantinge’, moreover (from Latin cantare, to sing), this ‘force’ alludes to the legendary powers of the Orphic bard – the ability to overpower Nature itself, to move even senseless stones and trees – a mythological association which the next two lines go on more fully to substantiate: Verse, that drawes Natures woorkes from natures law Thee her best work, to her worke cannot draw (lines 3–4)

This allusion to Orpheus is, as Heather Meakin notes, ‘of central importance’ (p. 112) to the poem, not only because it connects two figures in

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whom heterosexuality turns to homosexuality but also because it forges a genealogical link between two figures whose poetic ability – or persuasive ‘force’ – is famously, dramatically, destroyed (his body torn apart by the Maenads, Orpheus’ dismembered head, as well as his lyre, float down the river Hebrus and out to sea, only to wash up on the shore of Lesbos). Sapho’s declaration that her verse ‘cannot’ do what once it did – that is, that it can no longer exercise its wonted Orphic power to ‘draw’, in the sense both of moving objects (as Orpheus ‘drew’ [ducit] the natural world toward him)41 and of depicting or representing them (as in the tradition of ut pictura poesis) – could thus be read as a statement of what the consequences of a loss of poetic power might be. Characterizing this failure in terms of a competition between two personifications, one of which, ‘Verse’, loses out to the other, ‘Nature’, Sapho introduces a binary relation between two alternative modes of production: on the one hand, ‘Natures woorkes’, traditional shorthand for the manifest, phenomenological world, and, on the other, the ‘worke’ of Verse, that is, the poesis by means of which, in Sidney’s classic articulation of the same binary, the poet makes things ‘either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew’.42 But where, in her former capacity as vates or Orphic bard, Sapho was once able to exert the impressively superior force of the one over the other and so to overcome ‘natures law’, she now finds that the roles are reversed and that Verse – incapacitated and disabled – is on the losing side, or is unable, at any rate, to maintain the superiority that may once have been claimed for her (thus, when Philaenis is described as ‘her best work’ the ambiguity – that of Verse or of Nature? – is deliberate, making the assumption, critical to Renaissance if not to classical poetics, that art improves upon and civilizes a brutish nature no longer, with any confidence, possible to uphold). Moreover, by presenting both her personifications as female, Sapho ensures that her binary cannot be structured along gender lines: that is, Sapho’s ‘Verse’ cannot be differentiated from ‘Nature’ in the same way, for example, that Sidney’s poet, with his ‘erected wit’ (p. 101) and the ‘vigour of his own invention’ (p. 100) implicitly can. Instead, as a figure who mirrors Nature in her femininity (and the parallel with Sapho and Philaenis has not gone unnoticed), this Verse finds her otherwise vaunted ‘worke’ duly compromised, reduced to the same level as, if not lower than, that of her rival. The poem could thus be seen to begin with what amounts to a dedicated assault on poesis. The ‘holy fire’ that is missed in the opening lines, for example, is after all only something that verse ‘is said / To haue’: ‘is said’, presumably, in other verse, thus opening up the prospect of infinite regress – of verse upon verse – whose self-sustaining claims to property or possession (to the ownership, that is, of ‘fire’ and ‘force’) are thereby telescoped away

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into nothingness. This assault on poesis, moreover, continues relentlessly over the next ten lines: Haue my teares quencht my old Poetique fire? Why quencht they not as well that of desire? Thoughts my mindes creatures often are with thee, But I their maker want their libertie; Only thyne Image in my hart doeth sitt, But that is wax, and fires enuiron itt. My fires haue driuen, thine haue drawne it hence; And I am robd of Picture, Hart, and sence; Dwells with mee still myne irksome Memorie Which both to keepe and loose griues equallie. (lines 5–14)

By distinguishing between ‘my old Poetique fire’ on the one hand, and another kind of fire, ‘that of desire’ on the other, Sapho introduces a second binary sufficiently similar to the last (in that the difference between the two elements is once again blurred by their similarity) that we seem invited to map the one onto the other – holy and poetic fire onto Verse, and the fires of eros or desire onto Nature – this distinction, much like the other, collapsing or being compromised at the very least because it names as ‘desire’ that which propels speech but also ensures that it is empty rather than full. Not unlike the speaker in Ralegh’s Ocean to Cynthia, Sapho then goes on to personify her own mental productions – the ‘Thoughts’ that populate an otherwise deserted scene – as ‘my mindes creatures’ (the use of this last word in the specific sense of ‘that which is produced by, or owes its being solely to, another thing; a result, product, or offspring of anything’, antedating the OED’s earliest citation by several decades and, as such, marking the need to emphasize these thoughts’ distinctly ‘made’ or fashioned character). These ‘creatures’ have a life of their own, however, and, in evading her control, undermine the power of their creator who – although she draws attention to her act of poesis by naming herself as their ‘maker’ – at the same time reiterates her powerlessness in that capacity by complaining that, while she is forced to stay behind and endure the absence of her beloved, her thoughts ‘often are with thee’. Indeed, as Philaenis seems to exert a kind of magnetic pull over these productions – an ability to draw them away from Sapho and toward herself, or away from Verse and toward Nature, to continue the analogy – so she effects a further parody of the Orphic relation which had traditionally operated the other way round. In much the same way, Sapho’s ‘Image’ of Philaenis – the artistic representation which, in the most conventional way possible, she had engraved in her heart – also submits to the same force of attraction, deserting its maker for its prototype: ‘My fires

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haue driuen, thine haue drawne it hence’. Thus, in a reciprocal attraction of like for like, Sapho’s ‘fires’ (presumably here the fires of eros that remain undecayed and un-quenched) join forces with those of Philaenis, with wholly destructive consequences for the artistic representation that her ‘old’ fire, holy and poetic as it was, had once made. The ‘Image’ she once harboured in her heart, no less than the ‘Thoughts’ she once harboured in her mind, thus drift and melt away, leaving Sapho in what she appropriately describes as a state of utter dereliction – ‘And I am robd of Picture, Hart, and sence’ – deprived, in turn, of her artistic representation, its location, and the power to reproduce it or any other. The only thing to which Sapho can still lay claim – that ‘Dwells with mee still’ – the one possession still remaining to her, is ‘myne irksome Memorie’, the nostalgic recall of past happiness with Philaenis that constitutes much of what remains of the poem. Yet even this proves an ambiguous and double-edged possession, as ‘irksome’ to keep (since it serves only to remind the speaker of what she has lost) as it is to lose, since it only adds to the cumulative losses of which she complains. In the first fourteen lines of the poem, then, Sapho unfolds a litany of things once possessed and now lost, a series which, if listed in order (first, the ‘holy fire’ of poetic inspiration; and then, in turn, the persuasive or enchanting ‘force’ of song; poetic production or the ‘worke’ of Verse; the ‘old Poetique fire’ of inspiration again; the thoughts or ‘creatures’ of the poet-maker’s mind; the graven ‘Image’ of the beloved she has fashioned; and, finally, the ‘Picture’ of the same she has harboured in her heart) all add up very pointedly to one thing, namely, poesis: the ability to make or create, in general, and to write poetry, in particular. Moreover, by presenting his Sapho in a state of decline, as one who has lost the powers she formerly possessed and whose specifically poetic abilities have since been incapacitated, ‘quencht’ and ‘decayd’, Donne’s poem refers back analeptically to the way things once were – that is, to the abiding reputation which the original Sappho enjoyed (among classical and humanist authorities alike) as a literary genius who was famed for her rhetorical skill and held in the highest esteem: Plato had hailed her as the Tenth Muse; Aristotle had called her wise and honoured (‘although she was a woman’); Longinus had cited her as an exemplar of the sublime; Catullus had found her a worthy object of imitation; and Horace, referring specifically to her metrical skills, had famously described her as ‘mascula Sappho’, as being, that is, not a weak and feeble woman but, in the poetic art, the equal of men.43 Since it is such powers – her ‘fire’ and implicitly masculine ‘force’ – that Donne’s Sapho complains of having lost, it is almost as if he is setting out to emasculate this august and venerable figure; something, moreover, that

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a comparison between Donne’s poem and Ovid’s treatment of Sappho in Heroides 15 seems, in turn, to corroborate further still. For, although Ovid’s Sappho latter also laments her failing powers – ‘nec mihi, dispositis quae iungam carmina nervis, / proveniunt’ (‘Nor can I fashion aught of song to suit the well-ordered string’) – and although she also laments the loss of her beloved (as the genre of elegiac epistle, of course, requires her to do), she does not question her poetic abilities to the self-annihilating degree that Donne’s Sapho does; indeed, the fact that, for all her professions of incapacity, Ovid’s Sappho goes on for over two hundred lines makes it harder to deny that such professions constitute the formulaic articulation of the inexpressibility topos that was, as standard, designed principally to show off the poet’s prowess.44 Where what Heather Meakin describes as the ‘undirected interrogative’ (p. 111) of Donne’s opening lines communicates the confusion and instability of his Sapho, the opening of Ovid’s epistle, by contrast – which is directed squarely at Phaon as object and addressee – is altogether more assertive, posing as a direct challenge or demand that the reader of these lines recognize their author – ‘Ecquid, ut adspecta est studiosae littera dextrae, / Protinus est oculis cognita nostra tuis?’ (‘Tell me, when you looked upon the characters from my eager right hand, did your eye know forthwith whose they were?’, lines 1–2) – a statement of the speaker’s confidence in her distinctive style, her signature, her name, her reputation, her genius, and her status as ‘Poetria Sappho’ (‘Sappho the Singer’, line 183) that is reiterated constantly throughout the poem, but that finds no match in Donne’s epistle. These differing presentations of Sappho as, respectively, in possession or not in possession of poetic mastery, moreover, may also be seen to relate to what is, after all, the most salient revision that Donne made to the Sappho he inherited from Ovid, namely, his restoration of her homosexuality. For in Ovid, of course, Sappho is presented as a heterosexual figure who has decisively supplanted her youthful lesbian amours with her later love for Phaon, and is presented, indeed, as attributing her own prized genius specifically to her male lover: ah quanto melius iungi mea pectora tecum quam poterant saxis praecipitanda dari! haec sunt illa, Phaon, quae tu laudare solebas, visaque sunt totiens ingeniosa tibi. nunc vellem facunda forem! dolor artibus obstat, ingeniumque meis substitit omne malis. non mihi respondent veteres in carmina vires; plectra dolore iacent muta, dolore lyra. (lines 191–98)

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[Ah, how much better for my bosom to be pressed to yours than headlong to be hurled from the rocks! – the bosom, Phaon, of her whom you were wont to praise, and who so often seemed to you to have the gift of genius. Would I were eloquent now! Grief stops my art, and all my genius is halted by my woes. My old-time power in song will not respond to the call; my plectrum and my lyre lie silenced by my grief.]

In a move that serves to emphasize Ovid’s decision actively to reheterosexualize his heroine, Sappho then proceeds to invoke her past and now-rejected lesbian lovers – ‘Lesbides, infamem quae me fecistis amatae’ (‘Lesbian daughters whom I have loved to my reproach’, line 201) – calling on their aid to help return her Phaon to her, and, with him, her genius, indeed, her role as vates: ‘efficite ut redeat; vates quoque vestra redibit. / ingenio vires ille dat, ille rapit’ (‘Accomplish his return; your singer, too, will then return. My genius had its powers from him; with him they were swept away’, lines 205–06). That is to say, Ovid’s Sappho sees her poetic ability and genius as reflected not in her former girlfriends (who are now somewhat despised) but rather in her male lover; and she presents the restoration of that poetic ability and genius (something which, she suggests, is in the interests of the entire community) as poignantly dependent on his return. In other words, Sappho’s statement here could be seen first, as mobilizing the narcissistically invested mirror-relation between an idealized object and an idealizing subject that characterizes traditional epideixis (Phaon once praised her and named her a genius), and, second, as implicitly attributing a compensatory and restorative function to the phallus (since it is this alone that can restore the once satisfactory circulations in which Phaon’s praise of her genius can in turn generate her praise of him). In this respect, Sappho to Phaon may seem to conflict with, or at any rate to problematize what could otherwise be seen as the radicalizing agenda of the Heroides as a whole, where, as discussed more fully in the preceding chapter, an identification with abandoned, ‘castrated’ female figures was argued, rather, to dismantle or at least to dislocate male pretensions to ‘mastery’. The unique situation created by Sappho’s original homosexuality, however, makes Ovid’s decision to heterosexualize her – that is, to present the phallus as potentially restorative when he could, at least in theory, have avoided doing so by keeping Sappho homosexual (or by writing his own ‘Sappho to Philaenis’, as it were) – seem, in the circumstances, to be something of a normalizing move. Thus, while Linda Kauffman, for example, endeavours to fit Sappho to Phaon into the same radical schema that she otherwise sees the Heroides promulgating – the wholesale undermining of patriarchal, imperial, Augustan (in a word, phallic) values – by suggesting that Sappho provided

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Ovid with ‘clues to alternative models’ of desire, she does nothing with the fact that, in re-heterosexualizing this figure, Ovid effectively normalizes what could potentially have been his most radically ‘alternative’ heroine yet.45 Certainly, the oddness of Heroides 15 – the sense that somehow it differs from and is not entirely in keeping with the other epistles – has historically registered in its complex transmission (for many centuries it was treated separately from the others, its authenticity, indeed, held in doubt); and it has also been suggested by many critics that Sappho differs from Ovid’s other heroines in that she, uniquely, was an author in her own right and that, as such, she may have posed a more direct challenge to which the male poet was invited to rise, or to have offered an impressive identification which was more likely to secure writerly ‘mastery’ than to undermine it. In the long run, Ovid’s stance on Sappho – too complex and multi-layered a topic to be embarked on in any detail here – is probably best characterized as ambivalent, as if the figure of the abandoned poetess allowed him to rehearse both the positions of derelicted ‘castration’ and of poetic ‘mastery’ at one and the same time (rather as Sidney does in ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’). The point, however, is to draw attention to the fact that, in firmly restoring his Sapho to her originally homosexual status, Donne eschews what could be taken – whatever the complexity of the final result – to be any such normalizing move. By insisting that it is a female and not a male lover whom his Sapho loves and lacks, Donne effectively removes the phallus from the scene and thereby denies it an even implicitly or theoretically restorative role. Thus if, as a number of critics have noted, lines 195–98 of Ovid’s epistle are those to which the opening of Donne’s poem seems most closely to allude – with his Sapho’s lament for her failing powers echoing that of Ovid’s Sappho for her ‘old-time power in song’ – then they are also those that mark most emphatically the difference between the two, and that indicate just how radical Donne’s revisionary tactic of lesbianizing, or de-phallicizing, Sappho really is. For while – in presenting his Sapho as stripped of her former ‘fire’ and ‘force’, as missing her wonted genius, as a ‘mascula Sappho’ emasculated – Donne seems to be suggesting that what she has lost is the phallus (or what Judith Butler calls ‘the privileged signifier that appears to control the significations that it produces’, p. 76), at the same time, in deviating from Ovid by homosexualizing her, he pointedly refuses to supply that lack in the form of an absent but theoretically restorable male lover who mirrors her genius and is thus able to kick-start and set in motion again the satisfactory and self-congratulatory idealizations of the traditional praise-relation. In removing this possibility by banishing the male figure from the scene, Donne not only refuses the phallus any compensatory or

240 Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric restorative capability but also disturbs the penis/phallus equation and so throws the whole ‘status of “having”’ (p. 76) into doubt. For if, as Butler suggests, ‘“having” is a symbolic position which . . . institutes the masculine position within a heterosexual matrix, and which presumes an idealized relation of property which is then only partially and vainly approximated by those marked masculine beings who vainly and partially occupy that position within language’, then to que(e)ry that position by lesbianizing it – to insist, by means of that contradictory signifier, ‘the lesbian phallus’, on the fundamental transferability and displaceability of the phallus which, as a result, is no longer anyone’s property – is to offer the most ‘promising spectre of its destabilization’ (p. 63). If one were going to put the phallus/penis equation to the test, with a view to radicalizing the ‘status of “having”’ and so to inspecting the destabilizing effect that this would be bound to have on the masterly writing subject, then (other than doing what Shakespeare does in the Sonnets) presenting a lesbian poet who has lost her poetic touch – a figure, that is, who clearly does not have a penis and whose possession of the phallic signifier has also been put under some doubt – would, one could argue, be a most efficient if not economical way of going about it. If this is indeed what Donne is doing in Sapho to Philaenis, then it might be borne out by the fact that the topic to which the poem turns next, as if by logical inference, is nothing other than the way in which this would impact upon the traditional poetry of praise. That is to say, if the habitual practice of the sovereign writing subject was to mirror the image of itself as masterly, commanding, ‘full’, ‘whole’, and so forth, in that of an idealized other (the practice that Shakespeare parodies in the Young Man sonnets), then it is precisely this that Donne’s poem (although with its own uniquely lesbian twist) now proceeds to scrutinize, the radical assault on poesis that constitutes the first fourteen lines of the poem being the context against which such traditional epideictic practice is now to be set: That tells mee how faire thou art: Thou art soe faire As Gods, when gods to thee I doe compaire, Are grast therby; and to make blynde men see What thinges Gods are, I say they are like to thee, For if wee iustly call each syllie man A littell world, what shall wee call thee than? Thou art not softe, and cleere, and strait, and faire As Downe as Starrs Cedars and lillies are But thy right hand, and cheeke, and eye onlye Are like thy other hand, and cheeke and Eie (lines 15–24)

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Since the word that opens this section refers back to what precedes it, the ‘That’ which promises to ‘tell mee how faire thou art’ – which appears, that is, to direct the speaker on how to proceed in her poem of praise – is, in fact, only the profound scepticism toward the viability of such an enterprise which the previous section had unfolded at some length; and the fact that Sapho echoes these words – almost repeats them exactly, indeed – in the phrase with which she then embarks on her praise of Philaenis, ‘Thou are soe faire . . .’, inevitably knocks the apparent confidence of such a pronouncement into ironic if not parodic shade. In the same way, the statements of poetic agency and competence that follow – ‘I doe compaire’, ‘I say’, ‘wee iustly call’ – are not to be taken at face value, I suggest, but are to be read in the context of those statements of poetic incapacity (‘cannot draw’, and so forth) which are so prominent a feature of the opening section. It is no accident, I think, that the devices which Sapho now invokes in her stab at and rejection of traditional epideixis here should be ones that are immediately recognizable as distinctive of Donne’s style – hyperbole, especially by means of reversing the tenor and vehicle of a standard metaphor (‘Thou art soe faire / As Gods, when gods to thee I doe compaire, / Are grast therby’), and the macro/microcosm analogy (‘wee iustly call each syllie man / A littell world’) – both of which might well be considered to be among Donne’s ‘signature’ tropes. Nor is it an accident that it is among these same lines, where Donne seems to quote and refer ironically to himself, that he should put himself under greater erasure still, for it is at this point in the poem that, as several critics have pointed out, he first echoes the words of Sappho herself and, in particular, the celebrated fragment sometimes known by its opening words in the Greek, Phainetai moi: ‘To me it seems / that man has the fortune of gods, / whoever sits beside you’.46 Moreover, Donne not only seems to echo Sappho here but he goes one better than her. For while the latter’s poem refers to a male rival who, to her chagrin, is enjoying the company of her beloved – ‘To me it seems / that man has the fortune of gods, / whoever sits beside you, and close, / who listens to you sweetly speaking / and laughing temptingly’ – Donne’s Sapho, by contrast, transfers the compliment directly to her female beloved: ‘Thou are soe faire / As Gods’. Where Catullus – in Carmen 51, his own well-known version of Phainetai moi – had changed Sappho’s lyric by switching the gender of the speaking voice and so making the scene, now one between two male rivals and female beloved, normatively heterosexual, Donne’s alteration, by contrast (no less striking, in this respect than his revision of Ovid) effectively feminizes the scene, eliminating the male subject altogether (giving another example, incidentally, of the strategy

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that seems to persist all the way through this poem, of marginalizing or demoting the male subject whenever the opportunity presents itself ). As Janel Mueller puts it neatly, Donne is ‘outsapphizing, at this juncture, Sappho herself’ (p. 186). Thus, the phallus is not only demeaned in the slighting reference to the ‘syllie man’ who can be no match for Philaenis, but also, more searchingly, in the rejection of the standard tropes of the epideictic poet on the grounds that they are woefully inadequate to the task. Posing the classic question of the praising poet – ‘what shall wee call thee than?’, which is to say, ‘to what shall I compare thee?’ – Sapho casts about for a suitable object of comparison; but if the wholly conventional (not to say Donnean) comparisons with the gods or with the world prove insufficient, then no less do the (equally conventional) comparisons that follow, for the traditional strategies of epideixis – simile, hyperbole, and so forth – have left the speaker with no choice but to refer the beloved object back to itself: Thou art not softe, and cleere, and strait, and faire As Downe as Starrs Cedars and lillies are But thy right hand, and cheeke, and eye onlye Are like thy other hand, and cheeke and Eie (lines 21–24)

Sapho’s strategy here has earned her the reproach of a number of critics who accuse her of peddling tautology and of falling back into a signifying system that, because it is self-referring and self-contained, fails to signify at all. Since, as suggested earlier on, such a critique – especially when couched as an indictment or rebuke – registers the degree to which the critic, as a writing subject who is ‘normally’ able to signify, feels under threat, then such critical responses, insofar as they imply that it is the phallic signifier (that is, the ‘normal’ or ‘proper’ control of significations) which is jeopardized, are to a large extent spot on. That the writing subject’s wonted ability to signify is indeed being put into doubt here, moreover, could further be corroborated by something that has not, I think, been picked up on before: that, in reeling off her list of down, stars, cedars, and so forth, Sapho is not simply rejecting a series of stale comparisons but, in the way she does so, the whole cult of artifice that arguably characterized late-Elizabethan aureate poetry, as well. For lines 21–22 provide a particularly neat example of what was recognized in the late sixteenth century to be one of the most contrived and artful of poetic forms: correlative verse. Here the respective elements of four different similes accumulate on either side of the line-break so as to mirror one another across the divide: as ‘softe . . . / As Downe’, as

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‘cleere . . . / . . . as Starrs’, as ‘strait . . . / . . . [as] Cedars’, as ‘faire . . . / . . . [as] lillies’. These similitudes are then rejected (‘Thou are not softe . . .’ and so forth) for another, superior set – this time a series that is drawn between the two halves of a single body; and although this second set is also written out as correlative verse – with ‘thy right hand’ mirroring ‘thy other hand’ across the couplet, along with thy ‘cheeke . . . / . . . and cheeke’, thy ‘eye . . . / . . . and Eie’ – the suggestion is that these latter pairings are superior (and prove acceptable to Sapho) because they exist in nature: because, that is, the second couplet, with its hands, cheeks and eyes balanced perfectly on either side, effectively embodies within its pair of lines the bilateral symmetry that makes for natural perfection in the human (indeed, within the specifically female) body. In other words, these two couplets, one of which is rejected in favour of the other, are, I would suggest, enacting the same reversal that occurs earlier in the poem: where Verse was subordinated to Nature, so now, once again, the artful constructions of poesis give way to the natural perfections of bodily form. The poem is not merely rejecting a set of particularly tired comparisons, therefore, but, in its reformulation of correlative verse, is in one very economical move also rejecting the whole pretension to artfulness that characterized Renaissance poetics. If undermining the powers of the masterly writing subject is bound to disturb the traditional praise-relation – the aim of which had habitually been to protect and enhance that subject – then an indication that it is indeed such disturbance that Sapho to Philaenis calls forth could also be seen in the effect the poem has on the epideictic object: the beloved in whom the former had admiringly projected an image of itself. Where traditional epideixis had been structured round the mirror-relation that was established between two partners who, definitively equal and ideal, had mutually reflected one another, then here that relation – and, indeed, what it is to be ideal – undergo a radical revision not to say re-structuration. For now, when a subject who does not ‘have’ the phallus (or who at any rate disturbs the habitual ‘status of “having”’) looks into the mirror, what this poem insists that she sees is an object who is, in this respect, exactly the same. That Philaenis does not ‘have’ the phallus any more than Sapho does is something that Donne’s poem goes to some lengths to emphasize, for while the blazoning of separate body-parts was, of course, a classic feature of traditional praise, the stress here on the bilateral symmetries of the praised body (something that is repeated later on in the poem when further paired body-parts – lips, breasts, and thighs – are added to the list) uncannily anticipates, as a number of critics have pointed out, what modern feminist theory has characterized as the inherent ‘doubledness’ of the female

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morphology, or at least as its prevailing definition within the tradition of phallogocentrism as (in Irigaray’s formulation) the sex which ‘is not one’: ‘So woman does not have a sex organ?’, Irigaray famously asks: ‘She has at least two of them, but they are not identifiable as ones. Indeed, she has many more. Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural ’. ‘The one of form, of the individual, of the (male) sexual organ, of the proper name, of the proper meaning’, she writes, ‘. . . supplants, while separating and dividing, that contact of at least two (lips) which keeps woman in touch with herself, but without any possibility of distinguishing what is touching from what is touched’; indeed, woman ‘“touches herself” all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two – but not divisible into one(s) – that caress each other’.47 The determination of Donne’s poem to keep the two bodies that reflect one another as symbolically ‘castrated’, ‘in pieces’, fragments, or parts, no less than its determination to deconstruct the masterly writing subject without recourse to rescue or redemption of any kind, could further be hinted at in the allusion it makes to Sappho’s lyric, Phainetai moi (itself fragmentary enough). For, after referring to the male rival who is enjoying her beloved’s company, Sappho then goes on, as she details the suffering that this induces in herself, to give what one critic has aptly described as a ‘self-blazon’ (and sees, in fact, as one of Sappho’s ‘hallmark tropes’):48 my heart flutters in my breast, whenever I look quickly, for a moment – I say nothing, my tongue broken, a delicate fire runs under my skin, my eyes see nothing, my ears roar, cold sweat rushes down me, trembling seizes me, I am greener than grass, to myself I seem needing but little to die.

As suggested earlier on, by echoing Sappho’s opening lines (‘To me it seems / that man has the fortune of gods’) at precisely the point where his own Sapho embarks on her alternative act of praise (‘Thou art soe faire / As Gods’), Donne is effectively erasing his own voice, or, rather, is subordinating the voice of the typical late-Elizabethan poet, with its predilection for certain tropes (for hyperbole, similes, correlative verse, and the like) to a voice that prioritizes mimesis over metaphor, Nature over Verse. If, in addition, the verbal echo of Sappho’s opening line could also

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be seen to allude to the ‘self-blazon’ that follows it, then Donne might possibly be undermining that typically male poetic voice further still, not only by subordinating it to a female voice but by identifying it with a female voice that was well known specifically for taking itself apart. Were this to be the case (and it is, admittedly, speculative), it might be taken as further evidence of the lengths to which Donne’s poem goes (somewhat further, in this regard, than Sidney’s) to enact the symbolic ‘castration’ of the traditionally ‘whole’ or ‘full’ poetic voice. That Donne is indeed alluding to Phainetai moi here, or at least that Sappho’s lines are hovering hauntingly over his own, is suggested by the next passage which, as a number of critics agree, seems distantly to echo the speaker’s original complaint that her grief renders her ‘greener than grass’: Heere Louers sweare in theire Idolatrie That I am such, but greife discolours mee (lines 27–28)

These lines, moreover, continue the radical revision of the traditional poetry of praise that the poem has been developing, and, in so doing, they provide a link with the section that follows. For here Sapho dismisses in one sweeping gesture all the love poetry that has ever been directed toward her: the object of praise (‘such’) which these ‘Louers’ (here unflatteringly reduced to an amorphous and undifferentiated mass) ‘sweare’ her to be (using as they do, presumably, the same rhetorical devices of comparison, hyperbole, and so forth which she had used herself but then rejected as inadequate in her praise of Philaenis) now finding itself no less summarily rejected. What is more, in being rejected specifically as ‘Idolatrie’, this kind of praise could, perhaps, be seen to refer (albeit anachronistically) to its prototype in Petrarchan epideixis. For, as John Freccero has suggested, the mirrorrelation that there obtains between subject and object (formalized, above all, in Petrarch’s celebrated laura/lauro pun by means of which ‘the poetic lady created by the poet . . . in turn creates him as poet laureate’) produces a self-referring circularity and attendant poetic autonomy that ‘corresponds, in the theological order, to the sin of idolatry’. ‘The idolatrous love for Laura’, he goes on, ‘however self-abasing it may seem, has the effect of creating a thoroughly autonomous portrait of the poet who creates it; its circular referentiality . . . cannot be transcended at a higher order’.49 It is just this circularity – an essentially self-promoting system that is designed, ultimately, to award the masterly writing subject his laurels and to reassure him in his continued possession of the phallic signifier – that, I have been suggesting, Sapho to Philaenis is dedicated to exposing. If read as such, these

246 Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric lines could thus be seen to continue the poem’s wholesale assault on poetic ‘mastery’ and so to introduce the next section in which the denigration of the phallus – now conflated explicitly with the penis – is relentlessly pursued: Plaies some softe Boy with thee, oh there wants yett A mvtuall feelinge, which should sweeten itt, His chin a thorny-hairye vneavenesse Doth threaten; and some daly change possesse. Thy body is a naturall Paradise, In whose selfe vnmanurd, all pleasure lies, Nor needs perfection, why shouldst thou than Admitt the tillage of a harsh rough Man? Menn leaue behinde them that which their sin showes And are as theefes tract, which rob when it snowes But of our dalliance, no more signes there are, Then fishes leaue in streames, or birds in aire: And betweene vs all sweetness may bee had All, all that nature yealds, or art cann adde (lines 31–44)

In a way that can only be described as flying in the face of the prevailing views on marriage and of the heterosexual orthodoxy of the time, Sapho here rejects the penis out of hand, the ‘extra’ that man brings with him to the sexual relation being presented, rather, as lack, as a ‘want’ of the ‘mvtuall feelinge’ that exists between the lesbian lovers. The beloved’s ‘body’ – referring back, perhaps, to the hands, cheeks and eyes that were itemized in lines 23–24 – is said here to be a ‘naturall Paradise’ in much the same way that, in those earlier lines, the natural doubling of those paired parts was shown to be superior to the artful pairings of simile and correlative verse. This assemblage of doubled parts, this sex ‘which is not one’ is, nevertheless, presented as not lacking: Philaenis is not in need of being ‘manurd’ (a resonant pun which, as many have noted, carries with it traditional images of heterosexual coupling as husbandry, as well as of the woman being the man’s property or tenure; not to mention her being, as another Donne poem famously proposes, ‘safelyest when with one man man’d’); nor is Philaenis in need of the ‘perfection’ that, in the traditional sexual orthodoxy (as, indeed, in other poems by Donne such as that which invites a bride to ‘put on perfection and a womans name’) the complementary male partner was otherwise seen to provide. Anything that a man might be thought to add (or to ‘Admitt’) to a woman is roundly negativized as unpleasant, unwanted, unwelcome, and unnecessary. Moreover, in a way

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that seems to literalize the phallus/penis equation but to demean it at the same time, the penis is presented here as an organ that leaves a trace – a mark or ‘signe’ – yet only in the banalized form of pregnancy (hardly the same as aureate verse). As heterosexual coupling and its physical consequences – what men ‘leaue’ – is rejected in favour of a lesbian dalliance that, by contrast, has no such consequences – no more signs than what birds or fishes ‘leaue’ – so Art, or at least anything with pretensions to a signature, is subordinated to Nature once again. It is appropriate, therefore, that – to the mutual ‘sweetness’ that Sapho and Philaenis can enjoy – there is explicitly nothing extra that ‘art cann adde’. Given the poem’s consistent devaluing of poesis in general and of traditional epideixis in particular, the ‘addition’ that Sapho here dismisses as of no account could, furthermore, be seen to be the rhetorical ornamentation that characterized the traditional poetry of praise. For, as Joel Fineman notes, in both theory and practice the object of panegyric was traditionally heightened or amplified ‘by means of rhetorical devices that add something to merely mimetic description’ (p. 5). As Aristotle described, it is just this enlargement or aggrandizement of the praised object which, in its very excess and rhetorical grandiloquence, reflected back glowingly on the praising subject. ‘Praise is an “epi-deictic”, not simply a deictic speech’, Fineman goes on, because ‘what the prepositionally diffuse and intensifying “epi-” adds to “deixis” . . . is precisely the rhetorical surplus that praise as a rhetorical practice adds to ordinary verbal indication’ (p. 5). It is by means of ‘something discursively “extra”’ and ‘as an effect of something registered as supplementary’ (p. 5) that praise becomes an extraordinary language, a ‘showy showing speech’ (p. 6) that thereby draws attention to its own performance and literary prowess. It is this ‘extra’ that I have been styling here as the ‘phallic signifier’ – as that which, with its naturalized association with the male organ, has traditionally been an attribute of the ‘masterly’ writing subject who exercises full command over his significations and who draws admiring eyes toward his literary display. And it is this that – in her unflattering demotion of the phallic signifier and its traces or ‘signes’ to the banality of pregnancy (figured here as trails in the snow that incriminate not only the guilty but the stupid) – Sapho rejects so decisively, thereby effecting a radical revision of the traditional praise-relation and no less radical a deconstruction of its otherwise splendid and self-congratulatory laureate poet. As if to confirm this and, indeed, to substantiate everything that the poem has been building up to so far, the next section (‘the climax, or’, as one critic aptly qualifies it, ‘the anti-climax of “Sapho to Philaenis”’) moves to the poem’s most incisive parody of the praise-relation yet: for it

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is not until this point, in fact, that we are made aware that Sapho has been gazing into a mirror all the while and that her addresses to ‘Thee’ have been directed not so much toward her beloved Philaenis as toward her own reflection in the glass.50 Only now, in other words, is the mirror-relation between subject and object that is so characteristic a feature of traditional epideixis fully realized: My two lips, Eyes, thighes differ from thy two But soe as thine from one another doe And oh noe more: The likenes beeinge such Why should they not alike in all parts touch? Hand to strange hand, lip, to lip none dennies Why should they brest to brest or thighs to thighs? Likeness begetts such strange selfe flatterie, That touchinge my selfe all seemes done to thee. My selfe I embrace, and myne owne hands I kisse And Amarously thank my selfe for this. Mee in my glasse I call thee (lines 45–55)

There could be no more accurate a portrayal of the situation in which, as Fineman characterizes the classic praise-relation, ‘the poet’s praise of “thee” will regularly turn out to be a praise of “me”’ (p. 9). Moreover, the reification of the mirror-trope here literalizes the fundamental sameness – or, as the poem reiterates it, ‘likenes’ – that traditionally obtains between subject and object; and, in so doing, it throws the parody of that relation which the poem has been developing into even sharper relief. For, in the first place, the two figures who lovingly reflect one another here, although the ‘same’ and therefore logically homosexual, are not phallically equipped as they are in Shakespeare’s similar parody, with its laureate poet and golden youth – quite the reverse. As Sapho’s description, or rather blazon, of herself makes evident, the comparison between ‘My’ paired body-parts (lips, eyes, thighs, and so forth) and ‘thine’, in referring back to the similar list cited earlier on, serves only to emphasize that the praising subject no less than the praised object is a body ‘in pieces’, whose doubled organs, in designating a specifically female as opposed to male morphology, mark her out as the sex which is ‘not one’: the sex which does not ‘have’ and which is not ‘whole’. In the second place, however, this fragmented, dismembered, ‘castrated’ body that pointedly lacks a male organ is not, as might have been expected, an object of horror, loathing, or disavowal (except, perhaps, in certain critical responses) but is rather, within the terms of the poem at any rate, an object of admiration and praise. For the paired parts with

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which Sapho compares herself were also, in being comparable only with one another – ‘thy right hand, and cheeke, and eye onlye / Are like thy other hand, and cheeke and Eie’ – presented there as a wholly alternative kind of epideixis: one that gave short shrift to the literary and rhetorical pretensions of the traditional praising poet. There, Philaenis’ paired parts had made her a perfect ‘couplet’, as it were, a kind of ‘body-poem’ superior in its symmetry and balance to anything that art might produce, just as Nature’s ‘work’ outdid that of Verse or the most laboured productions of poesis. In the present section, then – where the physical doubling or self-mirroring that had made Philaenis an embodiment of natural perfection in herself (a perfection that is not available to the body possessed of an unwieldy, ‘single’ organ), is reduplicated in the doubling or mirroring between Philaenis and Sapho – that perfection can only be amplified or advanced, giving, in effect, a pair of pairs, a couple of couplets. After all, the lesbian coupling that Sapho describes is presented, in its self-evident symmetries and repetitions, as being equivalent to Philaenis’ body in its naturalness and perfection: ‘Hand to strange hand, lip, to lip none dennies / Why should they brest to brest or thighs to thighs?’ Moreover, if traditional epideixis had exercised a kind of logic of ‘addition’ whereby rhetorical ornament (and the more ingenious and high-flown the better) was supplied to the bare material so as to embellish the praised object and, by extension, the brilliantly praising poet, then it could be this, perhaps, that is being parodied in what might be called here the poem’s witty multiplication game. For just as the exponential multiplication of body-parts produces a plethora of lips, breasts, thighs, and so forth, with not a penis in sight (especially if one includes the figures of Verse and Nature who, in turn, mirror Sapho and Philaenis to give what one critic has called a ‘fourfold totality of femaleness’), so this might be seen to replicate the poem’s summary rejection of the phallic signifier as that ‘extra’ or ‘surplus’ with which the praising poet had habitually brought off his literary display.51 For, as this section of the poem seems to suggest, the absence of a penis or of the phallic signifier is no bar to the production (or, indeed, to the reproduction, for the word ‘begetts’ is significant here) of this alternative, anti-metaphorical, and ‘non-artful’ mode of praise: what Sapho styles as her ‘strange selfe flatterie’. In other words, as a praising poet who is progressively stripped of her ‘fire’ and ‘force’ – of all that made her a ‘maker’, a vates, an Orphic bard, a laureate poet, a legendary writer whose skill with verse had made her, as ‘mascula Sappho’, the equal of men – as this figure sees in the mirror a figure who is as dephallicized as herself, and as she makes of that figure – indeed, of their mirror-relation – the model for a new ‘strange’ kind of ‘flatterie’, one that rejects the additions of art and

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the pseudo-consolations of phallic recognition, so Sapho to Philaenis could be seen to effect its own unique parody of the otherwise ‘masterly’ writing subject and his self-advertisements via the traditional poetry of praise. However, should it be inferred from this that the poem is thereby seeking to promote one kind of speech over another, to substitute one type of literary production, however different or ‘strange’, for another – a kind of ´ecriture feminine for phallogocentrism, as it were (a direction in which my use of such words as ‘alternative’ and ‘superior’ may have seemed to be heading) – then the closing section firmly closes off any such possibility. For there is no question of one mode of praise replacing another here: of Nature replacing Art, or of Sapho’s ‘body-logic’ taking the place of ornamental rhetoric, or of a model for language that is morphologically ‘female’ substituting for one that is, more traditionally, ‘male’.52 Quite apart from romanticizing Nature in what would, of course, be a wholly anachronistic way, or from essentializing sexual difference (however justified such a manoeuvre might be ‘strategically’), such a move – especially if it holds out the prospect of any kind of utopian possibility – would serve only to replicate the compensatory and recuperative strategies that the poem, and indeed this book more generally, have been striving to put into question. The closing lines of the poem pre-empt any such possibility, therefore, by returning us to the state of dereliction and loss with which it began – there is no question but that Sapho remains bereft and alone – and by insisting that the incapacity and impotence of the speaking voice have by no means been overcome: Mee in my glasse I call thee; But alasse When I would kisse, Teares dim myne Eyes and glasse. O cure this louinge madnes and restore Mee to mee, thee my halfe, my all my more, Soe may thy cheekes red outweare scarlet dye And their white whitenes of the Galaxy, Soe may thy mightie amazinge beautie moue Envie in all weomen, and in all men loue And so bee change, and sickness farr from thee, As thou by comminge neere, keepst them from mee. (lines 55–64)

Since it refers back to the rhetorical question posed earlier on (‘what shall wee call thee than?’, line 20), the statement ‘Mee in my glasse I call thee’ must, for all its enunciative confidence and apparent resolution, nevertheless share, at least to some extent, the scepticism that had accompanied those earlier pronouncements of poetic capability (‘I doe compaire’, ‘I say’,

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‘wee iustly call’, lines 16, 18, 19) – share the same doubt, that is, toward anything that the praising poet might be able to ‘call’ the praised object, or toward the performative power that might be claimed by any act of comparison or naming. The inability of the speaking voice to execute any action – least of all to summon or conjure the absent beloved – is expressed in that elegiac ‘alasse’. The ‘Teares’ that, Narcissus-like, destroy the image that had temporarily consoled her, are presumably the same ‘teares’ (line 5) that had quenched Sapho’s former power with words, but not her ‘desire’. Nothing has changed to fill that gap, in other words, and Sapho’s desiring speech is destined ever to remain unsatisfied: for the new image of Philaenis that Sapho has spent the previous thirty-five lines elaborating proves no more permanent, in the end, than the old poetic ‘Image’ or ‘Picture’ that had melted away from her heart at the outset. However much lesbian ‘likenes’ may, in the course of the poem, have been presented as a parody of the traditional poetry of praise, and however effectively it may, in the process, have demoted the phallus and exposed the pretensions of the masterly writing subject, it is not presented in these closing lines as a positive alternative or as anything more satisfactory that might be offered in the latter’s place. On the contrary, if anything, these lines seem determined to emphasize the speaker’s continuing uselessness. Sapho’s imperious demands that Philaenis ‘cure’ and ‘restore’ her, for example, not only draw painful attention to her continued state of suffering and deprivation, but (since their execution depends upon the action of another) they are, like any imperative or command, as expressive of impotence as they are of power. Moreover, in being similarly expressive of a desired end, however devoutly to be wished, the optative clauses which follow – ‘Soe may . . . Soe may . . . so bee . . .’ – do nothing to reverse this trend. The first of these phrases, furthermore, serves also to demonstrate not only the exhaustion of the speaking voice (for the comparisons that Sapho proceeds to trot out are tired in the extreme and seem to have been chosen for no other reason than their conventionality) but also, insofar as they largely contradict everything which she has previously been arguing for, to demonstrate its inconsistency as well. For, were Sapho to maintain the position she had taken earlier on, what she should be saying at this point is not that Philaenis’ red and white cheeks are similar to or better than red dye or the Milky Way, but rather that they ‘onlye / Are like’ one another (lines 23–24), or, ‘The likenes beeinge such’ (line 47), that they only are like her own. Sapho’s self-contradictoriness here could be read, by those who are so inclined, as a sign of the ultimate failure of her lesbian poetics (or ‘homopoetics’, to use one critic’s word) and as evidence of Donne’s polemical indictment of the same; but even

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those who are more friendlily disposed toward her, sense in these closing lines a kind of reversion to type – as if, in their bid for hyperbole or in their unfolding of a typically specious argument, these lines become perceptibly more ‘Donnean’.53 Indeed, many critics have felt that this final section – and especially its striving to express love’s ultimate transcendence – evokes a host of intertextual echoes to other Donne poems, among them ‘The Good Morrow’, ‘The Canonization’, ‘A Valediction: forbidding mourning’, and ‘Love’s Infiniteness’. And, in Sapho’s suggestion, too, that Philaenis will come to inspire not only envy in her fellow women but also ‘in all men loue’, there seems to be a strange diluting if not downright forgetting of the poem’s whole lesbian scene and a kind of inevitable reversion to the heteronormative desire that is more usually associated with Donne’s poetry (indeed, with the re-introduction of ‘men’ into the picture here – the first time in the poem that the male subject has been anything other than denigrated or banished to the margins – it might seem as if the phallus is finally making a re-entry). However, even if this were to be allowed for, any apparent restoration of phallic values that may seem to be indicated here cannot be taken in isolation but must be set within the context of the poem as a whole: and since that is a context in which those values have been systematically questioned if not taken apart, then any ‘reversion’ to them, if that is what it is, cannot but be fatally compromised as a result. In any case, even if these lines do recall other Donne poems or typical Donne tropes they can hardly be taken as an advertisement for poetic genius: the sheer tedium of Sapho’s comparisons sees to that. There is no last-minute rescue or triumphant resurgence of the writing subject here, no redemption of poesis, as if a change of heart and mind had suddenly made Sapho revert to everything that she has comprehensively rejected to date. But, on the other side, neither is there any triumphant resurgence of an alternative, feminine or non-phallic mode of speech, for this closing section continues to render Sapho’s overall position self-contradictory and confused. What this neither/nor pre-empts, however, is simply replacing one with the other; it prevents us, that is, from being tempted to substitute Sapho’s alternative, ‘new’ mode of praise for the traditional, ‘old’ one, or from taking the former – no matter how effectively it may, in the preceding, have parodied traditional epideixis, exposed its writerly pretensions, shown its phallic self-confidence to be founded on a fraud, and thoroughly deconstructed phallogocentric values – as a viable alternative, where that is taken to be a substantive and selfconsistent position, a way of proceeding, a literary mode of production (different or ‘strange’ as it may be) in its own right. Instead, the poem

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remains, I would argue, true to its radical and deconstructive aims to the end. For if Sapho to Philaenis does effect a crisis in the ‘status of “having”’, then it is only to be expected that this speaker who has neither a beloved nor a penis nor (in the form of ‘fire’ or ‘force’ or poetic representations) the phallic signifier, should not have a positive alternative to offer either – for this is subject to no less scepticism and doubt than everything else. It is in going this far – in destabilizing not only the phallic self-confidence of the traditional poetry of praise but its ‘lesbian’ alternative to boot – that the poem effects its most far-reaching deconstruction of the writing subject: an assault that has registered in the pained critical reception with which the poem has been met in the past, in both feminist and more ‘traditional’ accounts, and that will continue, most likely, to stir and discomfort the writing subject for some time to come. NOTES 1. ‘masculine persuasive force’, Elegy 11, line 4. Unless otherwise specified all quotations from Donne are taken from The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, ed. Gary A. Stringer et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995– ). ‘Softnesses of Love’ cited in A. J. Smith, ed., John Donne: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), p. 151; ‘effeminat’ from Donne’s epigram ‘The Iughler’: ‘Thou call’st me effeminat, for I love womens ioyes / I call not thee manly, though thou follow boyes’; ‘the greatest Staine to mans estate’ from Elegy 3, ‘The Perfume’, lines 61–62. 2. See Patricia Parker, ‘Virile Style’, in Pre-modern Sexualities, ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 201–22. The quotation from Jonson is taken from Timber; or Discoveries, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925– 52), viii.585. 3. On Donne’s ‘masculine expression’ versus the ‘soft melting Phrases’ of inferior poets, see Thomas Carew, ‘An Elegie upon the death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. John Donne’ (lines 39, 53); on the ‘widdowed Poetry’ and ‘widow’d invention’ that Donne left behind on his death, see, respectively, ibid. (line 1), and Henry King, ‘To the Memorie of My Ever Desired Friend Dr. Donne’ (line 13), both in Appendix III of The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1985). For the ‘Fore-skinne’ image, see the dedicatory poem written by one Thomas Browne for the 1633 edition of Donne’s poems and reproduced in Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 42. 4. The first two quotations cited in Smith, ed., Critical Heritage, pp. 204, 271; ‘“manly” style’, from C. S. Lewis, ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century’, in Seventeenth-Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. 64–84, esp. p. 64.

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5. See Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994). 6. ‘whining Po¨etry’ from ‘The Triple Foole’, line 3; ‘toyes prevaile not’ from Metempsychosis, line 476, in Patrides, Complete English Poems. 7. Helen Gardner, ed., John Donne: The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. xxxvii, xxiv, and xxv. 8. Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 45. 9. ‘A nocturnall upon S. Lucies day’, lines 15, 16, in Patrides, Complete English Poems; ‘something feminine’ from Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 14, Barthes’ italics. For the sake of clarification, in what follows I will use the form ‘Sapho’ to refer to the persona of Donne’s poem. The legendary Greek poet of Lesbos, and her appearance as a persona in other poems, including Ovid’s Heroides, will be referred to as ‘Sappho’. 10. D. C. Allen suggests that Donne must have been familiar with Sappho’s lyrics, ‘Donne’s “Sapho to Philaenis”’, ELN 1 (1964): 188–91. Stella Revard makes the strongest case for this supposition in ‘The Sapphic Voice in Donne’s “Sapho to Philaenis”’, in Renaissance Discourses of Desire, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), pp. 63– 76; and is followed by H. L. Meakin, John Donne’s Articulations of the Feminine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 11. ‘Cunningly contrived instruments’ from the pseudo-Lucianic dialogue, Affairs of the Heart (fourth century AD), in Lucian, Works, trans. A. M. Harmon et al., 8 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1913–67), viii.194–95. In two of his epigrams, Martial describes Philaenis as one who, like a husband, ‘penetrates eleven girls per diem’ (7.67.3), and as a ‘tribade of tribades’ who ‘fucks’ her female friends (7.70), in Martial, Epigrams, trans. D. R. ShackletonBailey, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), ii.132–35. On the ‘masculinization’ of the Renaissance tribade, see Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially chapters 2 and 5. 12. I am guided here by Traub’s extended and subtle discussion of the ‘femme’ as ‘a homoerotic figure who, until quite recently, has been effaced from the historical account. Defined primarily as lack, the blank space made intelligible only by the implied presence of the tribade or the butch, the femme has operated, both historically and in contemporary culture, as an erotic cipher . . . Figured either as the invisible, if antithetical, complement to a masculinized tribade or as a reflective mirror to her equally insubstantial feminine partner, the femme embodies a logical contradiction within past and present systems of gender and sexuality’, Renaissance of Lesbianism, p. 230. Meakin, Articulations, p. 97, contemplates how ‘extraordinary’ it is that Donne should be capable of conceiving lesbianism outside the male paradigm in which ‘the female homosexual acts either as a man in desiring a woman, or engages in a kind of immature dress rehearsal before graduating to the ultimately fulfilling and mature heterosexual Act’, ibid., p. 98.

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13. ‘anomalous’, ‘exceptional’, Janel Mueller, ‘Troping Utopia: Donne’s Brief for Lesbianism’, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 182– 207, esp. pp. 182, 183; ‘unprecedented’, Barbara Correll, ‘Symbolic Economies and Zero-Sum Erotics: Donne’s “Sapho to Philaenis”’, ELH 62 (1995): 487–507, esp. p. 495; ‘unusual’, Bruce Woodcock, ‘“Anxious to amuse”: Metaphysical Poetry and the Discourse of Renaissance Masculinity’, in Writing and the English Renaissance, ed. William Zunder and Suzanne Trill (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 51–68, esp. p. 62; ‘singular’, ‘extraordinary’, Elizabeth Susan Wahl, Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 71, 10. 14. ‘neither elegy’, Mueller, ‘Troping Utopia’, p. 182; ‘Heroicall epistle’, Herbert Grierson, ed., The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), ii.91; ‘verse letter’, Elizabeth D. Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 118; ‘antielegiac epistle’, Cecilia Infante, ‘Donne’s Incarnate Muse and His Claim to Poetic Control in “Sapho to Philaenis”’, in Representing Women in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), pp. 93–106, esp. p. 94; ‘verse elegy in semiepistolary style’, Revard, ‘The Sapphic Voice’, p. 69. 15. Gardner, John Donne, p. xlvi. 16. Lawrence Lipking, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 73. 17. See Donne’s verse letter ‘To Mr R. W.’ in which he proposes that his addressee should ‘joyne then thy Muse with myne’ (line 11, in Patrides, Complete English Poems); ‘mistique tribadree’ is from line 14 of ‘Thou sendst me prose and rimes’, a verse letter by ‘T. W.’ to Donne, printed in W. Milgate, ed., John Donne: The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 212. For a discussion of these verse letters and their representation of ‘lesbian’ Muses, see Meakin, Articulations, chapter 1, and Saunders, Desiring Donne, chapter 2. 18. Readings that come into this category include those by Harriette Andreadis, Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550–1714 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Diana Trevino Benet, ‘Sexual Transgression in Donne’s Elegies’, MP 92 (1994): 14–35; and Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Male Lesbian Voices: Ronsard, Tyard and Donne Play Sappho’, in Reading the Renaissance: Ideas and Idioms from Shakespeare to Milton, ed. Marc Berley (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003), pp. 109–29. 19. Marotti, John Donne, p. 44. 20. Harvey is the chief proponent of this view and is closely followed by Correll and Infante. 21. Revard, ‘The Sapphic Voice’, p. 76. 22. ‘thought experiment’, Mueller, ‘Troping Utopia’, pp. 184, 193; ‘“what if ” imagining’, ibid., pp. 184, 193, 195, 199, 202. Mueller is explicitly followed in this by William West, ‘Thinking with the Body: Sappho’s “Sappho to Philaenis”, Donne’s “Sappho to Philaenis”’, RP (1994): 67–83.

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23. The foundational article here is James Holstun, ‘“Will You Rent Our Ancient Love Asunder?”: Lesbian Elegy in Donne, Marvell, and Milton’, ELH 54 (1987): 835–67. Holstun’s terminology and line of argument are closely followed by Harvey, Correll, Infante, Wahl, and by Paula Blank, ‘Comparing Sappho to Philaenis: John Donne’s “Homopoetics”’, PMLA 110 (1995): 358–68, although the latter sees Sapho’s failure in more tragic than negative terms. 24. Holstun, ‘“Will You Rent”’, p. 842. 25. Meakin, Articulations, pp. 97, 136, 125, 100. 26. West, ‘Thinking with the Body’, p. 83. 27. Heather Dubrow hints that the institutional pressures and professional demands of the modern academy can sometimes unduly distort interpretations of a discourse such as Petrarchanism which is geared as much to failure as to success, noting the interest that critics from a range of different methodologies have in continuing ‘to emphasize the potency of the Petrarchan poet’, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 24. 28. West, ‘Thinking with the Body’, pp. 82, 74, 75; Meakin, Articulations, p. 136. 29. John Carey, on the jacket of John Donne: Life, Mind and Art, 2nd edn (London: Faber, 1990); for similar formulations within the book, see: Donne’s opinions on topics as various as religion and women were part of ‘an animated whole’, p. 14; ‘aware of the divisions within himself, [Donne] aspired towards a wholeness that would surmount and unite them’, p. 115; and Donne’s ‘impatience with a fragmented state of being’ made him ‘hungry for absolutes and totalities’, p. 169. William Kerrigan, by contrast, comments on the way in which Donne’s writings resist ‘our current passion for being comprehensive’ and notes that, totalizing studies like Carey’s aside, ‘Donne remains pretty much where he was in the twilight of the New Criticism – uncomprehended, a congeries of local excellencies: “Tis all in pieces”’, ‘What Was Donne Doing?’ SCR 4 (1987): 2–15, esp. pp. 2, 3, quoting the First Anniversarie (line 213). 30. Quotations from Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 77, 76. 31. Carey, John Donne, p. 122. 32. Citations, in order, are taken from: Carey, John Donne, p. 80; Marotti, John Donne, p. 158; and Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 212, 217; ‘impotency’ quoted from Donne’s letter to Mrs Martha Gerrard, in Edmund Gosse, ed., The Life and Letters of John Donne, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1899), ii.17. The word ‘transaction’ is also Goldberg’s, James I, pp. 212, 214. 33. Stanley Fish, ‘Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power’, in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 223–52, esp. p. 250. For a discussion of the way fantasies of desire on the part of the critic/reader are responsible for constructing certain versions of ‘Donne’, see also Saunders, Desiring Donne.

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34. See, for example, John Carey, for whom the poems’ ‘changeable, contradictory voice was ultimately a function of his personal character. It does not belong to the poetic surface, or to the manipulation of rhetorical figures, but to the man’ ( John Donne, p. 197). Thomas Docherty makes a sustained case against such biographical readings which uncritically ascribe ‘identity, authority and meaning to an informational consciousness identified as the individual, “Donne”’, in John Donne, Undone (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 60. 35. G. R. Wilson, Jr., ‘The Interplay of Perception and Reflection: Mirror Imagery in Donne’s Poetry’, SEL 9 (1969): 107–21, esp. p. 119. 36. Holstun, ‘“Will You Rent”’, pp. 838, 844. 37. See also Saunders who suggests that the poem disturbs critical commonplaces on the grounds of its ‘alternative models and configurations of desire’, Desiring Donne, p. 140. 38. Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 73. 39. Antony Easthope, Poetry and Phantasy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 59. 40. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 1, 6, 9, Fineman’s italics. 41. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 11, line 2, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946), ii.120. That this was the standard Renaissance translation of Ovid’s verb, see Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation (‘draws’), in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ed. Madeleine Forey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002), p. 321. 42. Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), p. 100. 43. Plato, Epigrams, 16; Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, 1398b, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), p. 307; Longinus, On The Sublime; Catullus, Carmen 51; Horace, Epistulae 1.19, line 28, in Horace: Satires and Epistles, ed. Edward P. Morris (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), p. 127. 44. Heroides 15, lines 13–14, in Ovid, Heroides and Amores, ed. G. P. Goold, trans. Grant Showerman, 2nd edn, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). 45. Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 55. 46. Sappho, fragment no. 8, in Sappho’s Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece, trans. Diane Rayor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 57. 47. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 28, 26, 24, Irigaray’s italics and ellipses. The way in which Sapho to Philaenis appears strikingly to anticipate some of Irigaray’s formulations is discussed by Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices, pp. 136–39; and Meakin, Articulations, pp. 97–99, 133–36; West concurs that ‘there are strains of recent feminist thought that would celebrate

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48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

Masculinity, gender and identity in the English Renaissance lyric some aspects of this corporeal representation’, ‘Thinking with the Body’, p. 73. Infante, ‘Donne’s Incarnate Muse’, pp. 95, 100. John Freccero, ‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics’, in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 20–32, esp. p. 27. Infante comments that ‘Sappho’s poetics are idolatrous because they reject metaphor and embrace a symbolic system in which the thing is what it represents, the sign is the signified’, ‘Donne’s Incarnate Muse’, p. 100; and comments on Sapho’s ‘poetics of idolatry’, ibid., p. 103; while Holstun avers that Donne ‘continues his critique of Petrarchan poetic conventions by attributing an idolatrous pining for feminine beauty to a lesbian speaker’, ‘“Will You Rent”’, p. 845. Meakin, Articulations, p. 95. Ibid., p. 114. The phrase ‘body-logic’ is Infante’s, ‘Donne’s Incarnate Muse’, p. 101. ‘Homopoetics’ is Blank’s word, ‘Comparing Sappho’.

Index

abjection 141, 153–56, 157, 164, 183, 188, 206–7, 208 Abraham, Nicholas 169 Actaeon 90, 94, 96, 109, 114–15, 116, 117, 119, 120, 134 Adelman, Janet 20, 21, 26 Alberti, Leon Battista 93 Allen, D. C. 254 Amadis de Gaule 107 anacreontics 179 Andr´e, Jacques 68, 86, 195 Andreadis, Harriette 255 Aristophanes 87 Aristotle 28, 76, 180, 236, 247 Aubrey, John 80 Bacon, Sir Francis 1 Badinter, Elisabeth 22, 26 Bajetta, Carlo 168 Baker, Moira 48, 83 Bakhtin, Mikhail 92, 131 Balint, Michael 21, 26 Barkan, Leonard 132, 134 Barker, Francis 123, 135 Barnfield, Richard 181 Barthes, Roland 126, 129, 132, 217 Bate, Jonathan 199, 213 Bateson, Gregory 76, 87 Bell, Ilona 174, 175, 182, 198, 209, 210, 213 Benet, Diana Trevino 255 Benson, John 174 Benton, John F. 16, 26 Berger, Harry 76 Berry, Edward 73, 87, 101, 104, 107, 133 Berry, Philippa 157, 166, 172 Bersani, Leo 69–70, 71–72, 99 Blank, Paula 251, 256, 258 blasons anatomiques 92–93, 122–23, 124, 135 Bowie, Malcolm 87

Bradbrook, Muriel 167 Braden, Gordon 7, 25, 171, 193 Breitenberg, Mark 6, 20, 25, 26 Browne, Thomas 217, 253 Browne, Sir Thomas 79 Buchan, Alexander 67, 166 Burkhardt, Jakob 140, 171 Burrow, Colin 174, 179, 193, 194, 209, 210, 211 Burton, Robert 168 Butler, Judith 22, 23, 27, 43, 60, 83, 147, 150, 170, 206–7, 224, 228–29, 231, 239, 240, 256 Campbell, Marion 139, 142, 167, 168, 171, 172 Carew, Thomas 216, 253 Carey, John 99, 224, 225, 256, 257 Cassirer, Ernst 171 castration 1, 2, 18, 19, 23, 24, 47, 55, 61, 63, 65, 67, 96, 97, 114, 116, 117, 118, 120, 129, 134, 144, 146, 161, 163, 178, 179, 188, 192, 200, 204, 207, 230, 238, 239, 244, 245, 248 Catullus 236, 241 Cecil, Robert 139 C´eline, Louis-Ferdinand 171 Chapman, George 175 Chase, Cynthia 214 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 67 Cheney, Patrick 211, 212, 213 Chodorow, Nancy 67 Churchyard, Thomas 177 Clanton, Stacy 166 Cl´ement, Catherine 214 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 217 Colie, Rosalie 87 correlative verse 242–43, 244, 246 Correll, Barbara 219, 255, 256 Cosgrove, Peter 66, 86 courtly love 15–19, 33, 43, 80, 88, 183 Cousins, A. D. 137, 165, 166 Craik, Katherine 174, 175, 208, 209, 213 Crewe, Jonathan 13–14, 26, 225

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260

Index

Daniel, Samuel 25, 58, 177, 178 The Complaint of Rosamond 178 A Defence of Ryme 7 Delia 178 Dante 84 Davie, Donald 142, 157, 165, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172 Davies, John, of Hereford 175, 209 Davison, Francis 80 Day, Angel 35, 81 Deleuze, Gilles 62–67, 68, 71, 72–73 Derrida, Jacques 85 Dipple, Elizabeth 108, 134 Docherty, Thomas 257 Dollimore, Jonathan 3–5, 24 Donaldson, E. T. 16, 26 Donne, John 2, 3, 24, 152, 156, 216–29, 230–53 ‘The Anagram’ 230 ‘The Canonization’ 225, 252 ‘The Comparison’ 230 Elegy 11 216, 253 Epithalamion made at Lincoln’s Inn 246 The First Anniversarie 256 ‘The Good Morrow’ 252 ‘The Iughler’ 216, 253 ‘Love’s Infiniteness’ 252 Metempsychosis 217, 254 ‘A nocturnall upon St Lucies Day’ 217, 254 ‘The Perfume’ 216, 253 ‘To Mr. R. W.’ 255 Sapho to Philaenis 2, 24, 98, 199, 216, 217–23, 226–53 Sermons 225 ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ 229, 246 ‘The Triple Foole’ 217, 254 ‘Twicknam Garden’ 225 ‘A Valediction: forbidding mourning’ 252 Dorsten, Jan van 81 Drayton, Michael 177 Dryden, John 216 Dubrow, Heather 193, 256 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 81, 137, 146, 166, 167, 168, 172, 210 E. K. 169 Easthope, Antony 229 Ecclesiastes 169 Edwards, Philip 137, 142, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 172, 173–74 Eliot, T. S. The Wasteland 140, 168 Elizabeth I 136, 138, 139, 147, 152, 155, 157, 159, 166 Elliott, Ward 209 Empson, William 38

energia 30, 31, 38, 152, 170 Enterline, Lynn 23, 27, 83, 95, 96, 147, 148, 158, 177, 178, 180, 194, 210, 211, 212 Erasmus 60, 74 Praise of Folly 74, 121 The Fair Ephelia 182 Farley-Hills, David 35, 81 Ferguson, Margaret 74–75 fetishism 17, 56–57, 91, 94, 125, 129, 231 Fineman, Joel 23–24, 27, 85, 97–98, 117–18, 125–26, 129, 140, 214, 229–30, 247, 248 Finucci, Valeria 22, 26 Fish, Stanley 225 Foucault, Michel 3, 5, 24, 37, 66, 67, 82, 88 Fowler, Alistair 79 Foyster, Elizabeth 22, 26 Francis I 123 Freccero, Carla 132 Freccero, John 84, 94, 96, 245 Freud, Sigmund 23, 44–47, 55, 61–62, 63, 68–70, 71, 141, 145, 147, 163, 172, 176, 195, 201, 204 ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’ 68, 86 ‘Anxiety in Instinctual Life’ 195, 212 Beyond the Pleasure Principle 195, 212 ‘A Child Is Being Beaten’ 85, 196, 210, 213 Civilization and its Discontents 172 ‘The Economic Problem of Masochism’ 47, 68, 69, 83, 85, 86, 179, 195, 210, 212 The Ego and the Id 45, 68, 83, 85, 86, 148–50, 153, 169 ‘Femininity’ 210 ‘Fetishism’ 176 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego 169 The Interpretation of Dreams 204, 214 ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ 145, 147–48, 169 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality 69, 85 Fuss, Diana 204–5 Gallop, Jane 96–97 Gardner, Helen 217, 219, 226–27, 232 Gascoigne, George 2, 169, 177 Gaunt, Simon 88 Gearhart, Suzanne 82 Gide, Andr´e 4 Gilmore, David 21, 26 Ginzburg, Carlo 59 Giroux, Robert 174, 209, 213 Goldberg, Jonathan 225, 256 Golding, Arthur 35, 81 Gorges, Sir Arthur 139, 169 Gosse, Edmund 167 Gray, Thomas Elegy 136

Index Grazia, Margreta de 35, 81, 171 Green, D. H. 88 Greenblatt, Stephen 10–12, 25, 36, 38, 39, 82, 140, 142, 154, 165, 167, 168 Greene, Roland 81 Greene, Thomas 9–10, 14, 25 Greville, Sir Fulke 85 Grierson, Herbert 219, 255 Guattari, F´elix 63 Hager, Alan 38, 39, 58, 73, 80, 82, 84, 85, 87, 167 Hamilton, A. C. 87 Hammond, Gerald 142, 165, 168, 172, 173 Harvey, Elizabeth 181, 182, 210, 219, 255, 256, 257 Harvey, Gabriel 57, 138, 167 Hazlitt, William 175 Hedley, Jane 142–43, 164 Hegel 5, 20, 72 Helgerson, Richard 80 Heninger, S. K. 170–71 Herbert, George 77, 87–88 Herbert, William 39 Holstun, James 221, 227, 256, 258 Homer 79 Odyssey 79 homosexuality 4, 24, 53, 97–98, 112, 113, 118, 128, 134, 176, 201, 202, 203, 204, 218, 220, 229–30, 234 see also lesbianism homosociality 2, 93, 105–6, 107, 108, 112, 123, 124, 187–88, 190, 191, 193, 194, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 214, 220 Horace 236 Horner, Joyce 137, 141, 163, 165, 166, 168, 171, 173 Hoskins, John 109 Howard, Douglas 169 Hutson, Lorna 6, 25, 217 Infante, Cecilia 219, 244, 250, 255, 256, 258 Irigaray, Luce 210, 222, 244 irony classical irony 10, 14, 35, 38–39, 71, 72, 74, 78, 81, 183 non-dialectical irony 14, 20, 23, 72–73, 75, 78, 122, 130 James I 166 Jardine, Alice 19–20, 22, 26 Johnson, Michael 137, 157, 163, 165, 166, 168, 172, 173 Johnston, Mark 135 Jones, Ann Rosalind 39, 83 Jones, Dorothy 101, 133 Jonson, Ben 216

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Kahn, Copp´elia 20, 21, 26 Kauffman, Linda 180, 210, 238–39 Kay, Dennis 167 Kennedy, Duncan 84 Kerrigan, John 174, 181–82, 184, 194, 196, 208–9, 210, 211, 212, 213 Kerrigan, William 7, 25, 171, 256 Kierkegaard, Søren 86 King, Henry 216, 253 Kinney, Clare 100, 111, 114, 133, 134 Klein, Lisa 36, 82 Klein, Melanie 173 Knight, Charles 174, 209 Koj`eve, Alexandre 24 Koller, Kathrine 166, 167, 171 Kristeva, Julia 85–86, 131, 141, 157, 169, 170, 171, 172 Kritzman, Lawrence 125, 135 Kuin, Roger 88, 175, 209 Lacan, Jacques 17, 18, 26, 87, 129, 135, 214, 224, 228–29 Lamb, Mary Ellen 101, 111, 133, 134 Lang, Candace 86, 87 Lanham, Richard 41, 81, 83 Laplanche, Jean 68, 69, 86, 207, 210, 212–13 Latham, Agnes 138, 165, 167, 168, 171 Leiris, Michel 5, 25 lesbianism 2, 24, 90, 96, 97, 98, 100, 102, 103, 111, 112, 113, 118, 134, 199–200, 203, 204–5, 206, 216, 218–22, 226–53 see also homosexuality Levao, Ronald 98–99, 114 L´evi-Strauss, Claude 59 Levin, Richard 110, 131 Levine, Laura 20–21, 22, 26 Levy, Charles 81 Lewis, C. S. 15–16, 26, 136, 217 Lieur, Jacques le 135 Lipking, Lawrence 177, 209, 210, 219, 255 Lodge, Thomas 177 Loewenstein, Joseph 36, 37, 82 Longinus 236 McCoy, Richard 37, 39, 82, 83 Mahler, Margaret 67 Malone, Edmund 174, 175 Man, Paul de 14, 26, 72, 86 Mann, Paul 70–73 Marlowe, Christopher 2 Edward II 134 Hero and Leander 100, 133 translation of Ovid’s Amores 135 Marot, Cl´ement 92, 122, 134

262

Index

Marotti, Arthur 39, 83, 217, 220, 225, 254, 255, 256 Martial 254 Martin, Christopher 37, 82 Martines, Lauro 6, 25 masochism 2, 3, 5, 12, 28–80, 99, 114, 118, 134, 145, 160, 164, 179–81, 183, 188, 192, 193, 195–96, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204, 207, 208, 214 mastery 2, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 20, 35, 37, 38, 39, 42, 67, 70, 71, 73, 74–75, 76, 79–80, 88, 90, 91, 94, 96, ; 98, 99, 101, 103, 105–6, 109, 115, 122, 132, 139, 140, 141, 150, 152, 153, 171, 176, 183, 188, 195, 198, 205, 208, 222, 223, 225, 226, 231, 232, 237, 238, 239, 240, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 250, 251 Maus, Katharine Eisaman 83 May, Steven 138, 142, 165, 166, 167, 168, 171, 173 Mazzola, Elizabeth 82 Mazzotta, Giuseppe 23, 27, 95–96 Meakin, H. L. 221, 222, 233, 237, 247, 249, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258 melancholia 45–46, 141, 145, 146, 147–50, 162–65 Melville, Herman 5, 25 Meres, Francis 174, 208 Miller, Paul Allen 37, 52, 82, 84 Minogue, Sally 82 Montaigne, Michel de 56, 60, 84 Montrose, Louis A. 8, 12–13, 25, 106, 138, 151, 160 mourning 141, 144–45, 162, 163 Mueller, Janel 219, 220, 242, 255 Muir, Kenneth 175, 190, 209 Nashe, Thomas 28, 29, 32, 79, 80 Newman, F. X. 16, 26 Oakeshott, Walter 165, 171, 173 object relations theory 21–22, 32, 39–41, 67 O’Connor, John 133 Oedipus complex 44–47, 55, 61, 63, 66, 68, 147–50, 179, 200–6 Orgel, Stephen 131 Ovid 52, 57, 94, 95, 96, 114, 116, 117, 120, 125, 165, 177, 178, 193, 212, 218, 220, 241 Amores 57, 84, 135 Ars amatoria 177 Heroides 177, 180, 217, 218, 220, 237–39, 254 Metamorphoses 177, 193, 257 Paris, Gaston 16 Parker, Patricia 7, 25, 131, 253 Parkes, Malcolm 168 Persels, Jeffrey 135

perversion 1, 3–6, 8, 9, 12, 14, 15, 19, 22, 23, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 41, 42, 43, 61, 64, 68, 70, 73, 81, 91, 97, 98, 103, 107, 113, 117, 118, 120, 121, 128, 134, 201, 202, 206, 207, 223, 225, 227 see also fetishism, masochism, sadism Petrarch 7, 9–10, 13, 14, 23, 32–33, 54, 55, 58, 93–96, 109, 114, 117, 178, 245 Canzoniere 9, 13, 14, 93–96 Petrarchanism 7, 32–33, 37, 39–41, 52, 55, 138, 139, 152, 156, 178, 179, 187, 194, 217, 225, 229, 230, 232, 245, 256, 258 Plato 74, 76, 236 poesis 55, 125, 126, 234–35, 236, 240, 243, 247, 249, 252 Pontalis, J.-B. 207, 210 Pope, Alexander Eloisa to Abelard 182, 210 Prendergast, Maria Teresa 81 Prescott, Anne Lake 255 pseudo-Lucian 218, 254 Puttenham, George 56, 57, 74, 84, 119, 120, 138, 152, 167, 170 Quilligan, Maureen 38, 39, 82, 83, 84, 171 Radden, Jennifer 168, 169 Ralegh, Sir Walter 2, 3, 23, 46, 136, 137–39, 144, 147, 152, 155, 158, 169, 172, 175 The History of the World 155 ‘If all the world and love were young’ 169 ‘Like truthless dreams’ 156, 171 ‘My body in the walls captived’ 144, 169 ‘Now we have present made’ 173 The Ocean to Cynthia 2, 46, 128, 136–47, 150–65, 174, 175, 235 ‘The praise of meaner wits’ 169 Rees, Joan 213 Reik, Theodor 66, 71, 73 Revard, Stella 219, 220, 254, 255 Ringler, W. A. 97, 133 Robertson, D. W. 16, 26 Roche, Thomas 35, 36, 41, 81, 82, 83, 88, 175, 191, 194, 199, 209, 211, 212, 213–14 Roe, John 174, 175, 184, 209, 211, 212, 213 Romance of the Rose 15 Roper, Lyndal 6, 25 Rorty, Richard 75–76 Rose, Jacqueline 17 Rougemont, Denis de 16, 18, 26 Rudenstine, Neil 170 Rudick, Michael 138, 143, 151, 155, 161, 165, 167, 168, 169, 171, 173 Sacks, Peter 144–45, 165 sadism 37, 41, 42, 47, 62, 64, 66, 72, 73

Index Sandison, Helen Estabrook 167 Sannazaro, Jacopo 104, 120 Sappho 218, 219, 226, 236–39, 241–42, 244–45, 254 Saunders, Alison 131 Saunders, Ben 253, 255, 256, 257 Sawday, Jonathan 90–91 Scanlon, James 35, 81 Sc`eve, Maurice 93, 135 Schiesari, Juliana 23, 27 Schiffer, James 212, 213 Schleiner, Winifred 108, 133 Schmidt, Albert-Marie 125, 135 Schmitz, G¨otz 180, 209–10 Schwarz, Kathryn 89, 90, 101–3, 110, 131 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 211 Seneca 58 Shakespeare, William 2, 3, 23, 186, 216, 230, 232 ‘A Funeral Elegy by W. S.’ 175 As You Like It 75, 87 A Lover’s Complaint 2, 23, 98, 157, 172, 174–208, 216 Pericles 211 The Rape of Lucrece 174, 180, 194, 201, 212, 214 Richard II 144, 168 Sonnets 90, 97–98, 118, 129, 140, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 189, 193, 196, 212, 229–31, 240 Troilus and Cressida 209, 211 Twelfth Night 91 Venus and Adonis 174, 200, 203 Sharon-Zisser, Shirley 211 Sidney, Sir Henry 54 Sidney, Sir Philip 2, 23, 34–37, 38–39, 40, 60, 73–76, 85, 103–7, 115, 137, 152, 216, 230 Apology for Poetry 2, 28, 29–31, 34, 35, 36, 39, 56, 73–76, 77, 79, 80, 119, 120, 123, 169, 170, 234 Astrophil and Stella 2, 3, 28–43, 47–62, 65, 67, 76–80, 90, 92, 123, 152, 169, 199 New Arcadia 2, 24, 88, 89–91, 97, 98–99, 100, 103, 107–31, 197, 216 Old Arcadia 48, 84, 90, 97, 98, 99–107, 108, 109, 113, 121, 123, 126, 130 ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’ 2, 3, 23, 24, 89–91, 97–131, 230, 239, 245 Siegel, Carol 82, 86 Silverman, Kaja 1, 5, 24, 25, 42, 43, 47, 65–66, 68, 83, 86, 201–3, 206, 210, 214 Silverstein, T. 17, 26 Sinfield, Alan 35, 81, 82 Smith, Bruce R. 27 Socrates 72, 87 Spenser, Edmund 8, 29, 120, 137, 147, 177 Amoretti 29, 80 Colin Clouts Come Home Againe 137

263

Daphna¨ıda 145 The Faerie Queene 8, 137, 138, 146, 166, 169, 170, 172 The Shepheardes Calender 8, 106, 147, 169 Spiller, Michael 39, 83 Stallybrass, Peter 39, 83, 111, 171, 176, 209 Stillman, Robert 137, 139, 155, 156, 157, 160, 166, 167, 169, 171, 172, 173 Stoller, Robert 67, 108, 133 Studlar, Gaylyn 31–32, 67, 81 Surrey, Earl of 2, 10, 13, 57, 177 Throckmorton, Elizabeth 136 Torok, Maria 169 Traister, Daniel 35, 81 Traub, Valerie 20, 26, 134, 254 Turbervile, George 177 Underwood, Richard Allan 211, 213 Ure, Peter 168 Valenza, Robert 209 Vickers, Brian 209, 211, 213 Vickers, Nancy 6, 25, 90, 92, 94, 96, 123, 131, 134, 135 Villeponteaux, Mary 7, 25 Virgil 9, 56, 57, 120, 180 Aeneid 155, 173 Wahl, Elizabeth 219, 255, 256 Wall, Wendy 93, 111, 134, 183, 210 Waller, Gary 36, 37, 38, 39–41, 82, 83 Waller, Marguerite 12–13, 14, 23, 25, 26, 95, 96, 225 Warburton, William 217 Warton, Thomas 167 Watson, Thomas 58 Wells, Robin Headlam 36, 82, 166 West, William 221–22, 255, 256, 257–58 Whitworth, Stephen 215 Wilde, Oscar 4 Wilson, G. R. 227 Wood, Chauncey 35, 81 Woodcock, Bruce 219, 255 Woodward, Rowland 219 Woodward, Thomas 220 Worden, Blair 166 Wroth, Lady Mary 39 Urania 91 Wyatt, Sir Thomas 2, 9–14, 38, 225 Penitential Psalms 10–11 Satires 9–10 ‘Whoso list to hunt’ 12, 14 ˇ zek, Slavoj 88 Ziˇ