The Physics and Metaphysics of Metaphor

This section argues that Lyly’s and Shakespeare’s characters process and experience eros through the primary metaphor of motion. These introductory pages explore the philosophical and conceptual underpinnings of this metaphor through the example of Shakespeare’s Angelo in Measure for Measure. Drawing from the work of cognitive linguistics George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Zoltan Kövecses, this section explores the broad metaphorical structures that shape Angelo’s erotic experience as both a passion and an action. Things happen within Angelo well before he ‘acts out’ his sexual pursuit of the novitiate Isabella. The remainder of this section investigates the relationship between erotic potentiality and actuality, or entelechy, in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics. In Aristotle’s writings, as in Shakespeare’s play, the boundary between potency and actuality is fluid rather than fixed. As a result, Angelo’s metaphors dramatize the capacity of erotic potentiality to create drama. For him, as for so many of Lyly’s and Shakespeare’s characters, desire is itself a frenzied action.

Binding the Void: The Erotics of Place in Antony and Cleopatra

Chapter 4 analyses the erotics of bounded place and of limitless space in Antony and Cleopatra. The chapter begins by exploring Edward Casey’s philosophical history of place and space in order to consider the erotic implications of these two scenes for characters as well as for audiences. Images of bounded place in Antony and Cleopatra get their erotic charge from the language of sexual bondage, more specifically, the formal and temporal features of masochism. Chapter 4 then explores accounts of infinite space from early modern cosmologists such as Francesco Patrizi and Giordano Bruno, who theorized about the void. This chapter argues that Antony and Cleopatra eroticize the infinite void by imposing the sturdy boundaries of place onto vacant space. Binding the void allows the lovers to present this vacancy to one another, enabling pleasurable experiences of self-loss and self-forgetting.

Introduction

Part III studies characters who conceive of desire as a dynamic process of mutual creation. These introductory pages explore the world-making capacities of the metaphor ‘Love is a Collaborative Work of Art,’ which conceptualises love as artfully creating a reality. This creative process often invites a third entity—a filter, a buffer, or an instrument—that mediates between the subject and object of desire. When Kenneth Burke writes about the role of instruments in daily life, he emphasises the instrument’s ontological connection, its potential fusion, with the subject who deploys it. This section explores this dynamic connection in the collaborative work of art that is Shakespeare’s Cesario. In Twelfth Night, Cesario is an ongoing process rather than a finished product. An erotic subject, object, and instrument, Cesario keeps becoming Cesario through his/their continued exchanges with Orsino and Olivia.

Metaphorical Constraints: Making ‘Frenzy … Fine’

Having emphasised the creative potential of erotic metaphor, Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare concludes by reflecting on some of its limits, specifically the incapacities of any single metaphor to dramatize eros in all of its complexity. While Troilus considers his erotic limitations ‘monstruous,’ this section of the book probes the potential of such limits. Metaphorical constraints and entailments tether elusive erotic experiences to language and to the desiring body. This conclusion suggests that the process of constraining and limning eros through metaphor makes both love and lovers singular. For Troilus, as for so many of Shakespeare’s characters, contemplative speech brings coherence to physically incompatible sexual scenarios, making erotic experience startlingly new.

‘Love’s Use’ in Campaspe

Lyly’s Campaspe explores the roles of creative instruments—easel and canvas, pigments and words—in the erotic relationship between the painter Apelles and his model Campaspe. Like any object placed between two bodies in some kind of dynamic relation, these erotic instruments invariably generate friction and heat between Lyly’s lovers. Chapter 5 traces the medium and metaphor of painting, which shapes Apelles and Campaspe’s interactions according to particular artistic features. This chapter considers the erotic qualities of Campaspe’s portrait via classical and early modern psychological accounts of the “phantasm,” a pneumatic image of a beloved that can take on a life of its own. Lyly’s euphuistic language is an erotic instrument in its own right. Providing the lovers with more than a vocabulary, it affords them a structure, a conceptual system, which gives their experience of erotic desire its shape, its medium, and its meaning.

‘You lie, in Faith’: Making Marriage in The Taming of the Shrew

The “Desiring is Creating” metaphor in The Taming of the Shrew depends upon the generative power of words as erotic instruments. Petruchio’s blatant lies loosen the connection between words and the world they putatively reflect, and thus create the possibility of a different world—one that, for all that it is a lie, nonetheless can conjure a privately and mutually constituted truth. Or, it can do this if Kate confirms his untruths. Petruchio may believe that he must “tame” Kate if he is to secure her confirmation, but Shakespeare reveals that only their mutual erotic and affective experiences enable them to inhabit the shared reality that becomes their marriage. This shared reality is put to the test in Kate’s problematic final monologue in which she goes it alone, without Petruchio’s poetic flourishes to animate or invigorate her speech. Only when Kate and Petruchio’s words are placed in relation do the lovers generate friction and heat.

‘A Petty World of Myself’: Intimacy and Erotic Distance in Endymion

Chapter 3 analyses Lyly’s Endymion, whose eponymous hero forges an erotic connection with the moon across the vast expanse of the night sky. Endymion’s investment in Cynthia’s strangest and most distant incarnation grants him access to a form of intimacy that emerges from erotic distance. To theorize the attachment one can form with a majestic, vast, present-but-distant love object such as Cynthia, this chapter turns to Gaston Bachelard’s work on “intimate immensity,” a special mode of daydreaming in which the dreamer forms a powerful bond with an immense, mysterious, often cosmic, object of contemplation. Although such a relation requires a vast distance between the dreamer and the immense phenomenon he contemplates, Endymion’s metaphors of permeability activate a shared, mutual, and profoundly intimate erotic relation with Cynthia.

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.

Introduction

The introduction presents the main argument of Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare: that metaphors dramatize inward erotic experience on the early modern stage. The opening pages chart the book’s methodology, situate it among other studies of desire, and introduce conceptual metaphor theory via George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner’s foundational work in cognitive linguistics. To illustrate the importance of cognition to erotic experience, the introduction analyses Troilus’s soliloquy in which he anticipates his tryst with Cressida. Troilus’s imagination makes him “giddy” but it also betrays his cognitive performance anxiety—a fear of being unable to conceive of the “subtle” pleasures that await him, dooming them to be lost to him forever. Troilus confirms that our ability to process erotic experience mentally is what grants us access to it; both action and contemplation are vital ingredients in erotic experience. These pages conclude by discussing the value of pairing John Lyly’s and William Shakespeare’s plays to study erotic language. Both playwrights, but especially Lyly, reveal the power of contemplative speech to constitute vibrant, frenzied action on a stage.

In Love

Part II focuses on spatial metaphors of permeability and containment that dramatize erotic desire as a rupture between self and world. Such metaphors raise the stakes of erotic desire when intimacy requires characters to make themselves vulnerable. They compromise their personal and bodily boundaries but they also gain access to new forms of intimacy. This section of the book begins by exploring different philosophies of place, from thinkers such as Kenneth Burke to Luce Irigaray and Edward Casey, which illuminate the dynamics of desire in Lyly and Shakespeare. The introductory pages focus on the container schema, a basic cognitive structure that allows us to conceptualize bounded regions in space by imagining an inside, outside, and boundary. To illustrate the role of the container schema in erotic experience, these pages analyze Valentine’s speeches about Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Although the famous questions in the play are “Who is Silvia? What is she?,” Valentine himself turns out to be preoccupied with the question, where is Silvia?