Italianating the Boy

In the 1580s John Lyly and other writers for children’s companies created novel plays featuring a keen-witted, hot-blooded, virtuosic innamorata, relying on the beauty and skills of the cross-dressed boy player. Plays aimed at a worldly elite audience exoticize and eroticize the “boy actress,” painting him as extravagantly Italianate in ways that shadow the foreign diva, evidence of her transnational impact on plays and playing. Lyly’s Gallathea, Sapho and Phao, and The Woman in the Moone; Peele’s Arraignment of Paris; and Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage show how the English contained the threat of the actress by appropriating and adapting her trademark playing and star scenes, such as solo song and madness. As a result, the skilled labor of both divas and boys left its mark on these innovative works.

Structural Doubleness and Repetition

Chapter 2, treating comic doubleness as a structural matter, explores the way scenes, actions, and plot lines reflect each other, as if to create an uncanny closed circuit or dream-world. Those reflections call up a long-standing critical recognition of ‘magical parallelisms,’ such as between the story lines of Viola and Sebastian, that express the Renaissance fascination with analogy and with occult theories of sympathetic influence. Within the play, structural doublings create affects ranging from enervation and frustrated desires, to a premonition of fatedness and converging destinies, to the agitation of manically accelerated action, to the liberating recognition of differences with in repetitions. Focusing on Twelfth Night, this chapter considers how the play creates the sense of a numinous but opaque providentialism, features that it also finds in other Shakespearean, Italian, and Tudor plays, including those of John Lyly.

The Erotic Potential of Idleness in Lyly’s Drama

By consistently refusing to subordinate eros to other actions that characters might undertake in its name, John Lyly confirms that desire itself can be the main event of a play. Chapter 1 explores the role of potentiality, what Aristotle calls dunamis, as both the source of erotic change and its medium in John Lyly’s plays. The chapter begins by surveying metaphors of motion and stillness that dramatize subtle erotic changes in Lyly’s plays, and then focuses on idleness, an experience his characters conceive less as physical stasis than as movement without purpose or telos. Idleness has a peculiar, counterintuitive, feel to it in Galatea, a play that explores alternatives to the fast-paced, teleological movement typically associated with sexual pursuit. Galatea, Phillida, and the nymphs who fall in love with them discover the queer erotic potential of circuitous language that prolongs desire and defers closure.

Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare

Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare explores the role of the mind in creating erotic experience on the early modern stage. To “conceive” desire is to acknowledge the generative potential of the erotic imagination, its capacity to impart form and make meaning out of the most elusive experiences. Drawing from cognitive and philosophical approaches, this book advances a new methodology for analysing how early modern plays dramatize inward erotic experience. Grounded in cognitive theories about the metaphorical nature of thought, Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare traces the contours of three conceptual metaphors—motion, space, and creativity—that shape erotic desire in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare. Although Lyly and Shakespeare wrote for different types of theatres and only partially-overlapping audiences, both dramatists created characters who speak erotic language at considerable length and in extraordinary depth. Their metaphors do more than merely narrate or express eros; they constitute characters’ erotic experiences. Each of the book’s three sections explores a fundamental conceptual metaphor, first its philosophical underpinnings and then its capacity for dramatizing erotic experience in Lyly’s and Shakespeare’s plays. Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare provides a literary and linguistic analysis of metaphor that credits the role of cognition in the experience of erotic desire, even of pleasure itself.