<i>Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare: Metaphor, Cognition and Eros</i>. Gillian Knoll. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Pp. xii+273. <i>The Shapes of Fancy: Reading for Queer Desire in Early Modern Literature</i>. Christine Varnado. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Pp. 329.

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewConceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare: Metaphor, Cognition and Eros. Gillian Knoll. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. Pp. xii+273. The Shapes of Fancy: Reading for Queer Desire in Early Modern Literature. Christine Varnado. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Pp. 329.Joseph GambleJoseph GambleUniversity of Toledo Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreDesire has been a perennial concern in early modern sexuality studies, but these two remarkable books make it seem like a completely fresh topic. Rather than using expressions of desire as evidence to support reinterpretations of social structures (e.g., friendship) or critical practices (e.g., bibliography), these books demonstrate the analytic capacity and conceptual force of desire per se by offering an account of its production in language. By turning to models of psychic processes—cognitive linguistics, in Knoll’s case; psychoanalysis in Varnado’s—both critics arrive at complementary concerns about the production of desire, and about desire’s productivity, by way of very different orientations toward texts and desiring subjects.Gillian Knoll’s Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare turns to cognitive linguistics—and specifically to the “conceptual metaphor theory” (11) of scholars like George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner—in order to analyze the myriad metaphorical constructions of desire in the dramatic corpora of its two subjects, John Lyly and Shakespeare. “Metaphor,” Knoll writes, “gives Lyly, Shakespeare, their characters, and us through them, a way in, a way of accessing experiences as formless and fleeting as ecstasy” (2). This is both a methodological claim—metaphor is “a way in” to these texts—and a conceptual one, since Knoll argues that Shakespeare’s and Lyly’s “words do more than merely narrate or express eros: they constitute characters’ erotic experiences” (2). She approaches these metaphors by way of cognitive linguistics precisely because its tools allow scholars to understand “the interdependence of linguistic structures, the embodied mind and lived experience” (13). Indeed, the strength of Knoll’s cognitive readings of the metaphorical conception of desire in the plays she surveys—Galatea (1588), Measure for Measure (1604), Othello (1604), Endymion (1588), Antony & Cleopatra (1606), Campaspe (1584), and The Taming of the Shrew (1592), with some shorter excurses into plays like Twelfth Night (1601)—makes it seem particularly surprising that desire and sexuality have not been more central topics in early modern cognitive studies, and that cognition has not been a more central concern in early modern sexuality studies. Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare makes clear that these two fields have much to gain from each other.Knoll’s book is divided into three sections, each taking up different types of metaphors about desire: desire as motion, desire as space, and desire as creativity. These three metaphorical types or “schemas” (10), Knoll argues, “constitute significant building blocks for erotic experiences such as sensation and arousal (motion), intimacy and connection (spatiality), and lovemaking (creativity)” (19). Both Lyly and Shakespeare, she shows, pull from each of these conceptual domains at different times as they craft their metaphors. For example, in her reading of Lyly’s Campaspe, Knoll demonstrates that both Campaspe and Apelles conduct their flirtation through elaborations on the metaphorical schema “Desiring is Creating” (184). The creation of art, in Knoll’s reading, is not only the literal action that brings Campaspe and Apelles together; it is also “their erotic medium” (184). Campaspe, for instance, flirts with Apelles in the language of artistic creation: “Sir,” she says, “I had thought you had been commanded to paint with your hand, not to gloze with your tongue” (Campaspe 3.1.3–4, quoted in Knoll, 186). Knoll argues that this metaphor—“to gloze with your tongue”—“recasts desire as something made rather than something felt, something that depends upon each lover’s skill” (187). This analysis of desire as creation reanimates the “making” in the phrases “lovemaking” and “to make love” as an idiom for flirtation—which enters English in the second half of the sixteenth century, according to the OED—rather than as intercourse (a modern usage).Much like a metaphor, Conceiving Desire places constraints on particular domains (e.g., Lyly and Shakespeare, rather than all early modern drama or culture; cognitive linguistics, rather than “epistemology” broadly) in order to produce surprising connections and extended analyses. Indeed, one of the joys of this book is that its readings are seemingly indefatigable: a short monologue can sometimes garner up to ten pages of analysis, as does, for example, a speech in Measure for Measure wherein Angelo theorizes desire as motion—desire for Isabella drives him from the stillness of carrion “lying by the violet in the sun” to the frenzied action of “raz[ing] the sanctuary” and “pitch[ing] our evils there” (Measure for Measure 2.2.165, 2.2.170–71, quoted in Knoll, 30–31). This depth of analysis allows Knoll to make canonical plays seem like vibrant, new texts she has plucked from a hidden corner of a little-known archive. Thus, when she writes that her “main subject is erotic language rather than the mental processes that produce such language” (13), she seems to me to give short shrift to her own readings, which, while they may indeed be grounded in erotic language, are powerful in their ability to reach out toward the “mental processes that produce such language” both at the level of the author and at the level of the character.Indeed, the restricted methodological domain of Knoll’s work produces insights into sexual proclivities—kinks, we might say—that are simultaneously linguistic forms and mental processes. For example, Knoll argues that the motion-based metaphors of Galatea constitute a sort of linguistic and erotic “edging,” a contemporary kink term “for the sexual practice during which a person deliberately evades orgasm in order to explore the pleasures of indirection, foreplay, and delay” (54). This reading both illuminates something vibrant about the erotic imagination and practice evident in Lyly’s play and offers a cognitive-linguistic history to contemporary sexual metaphors, since “edging” is itself a metaphor of motion (and space) that describes erotic experience.Though not the primary focus or idiom of Conceiving Desire, kink practices and modes of conceptualizing desire emerge multiple times from Knoll’s extended linguistic analyses—as they do, for instance, in her claim that “a close examination of the language of containment in [Antony and Cleopatra] reveals that the ‘bourn’ of bounded place obtains its erotic charge from the metaphor of sexual bondage, drawing, as it does, from the formal and temporal features of masochism” (139). As she writes in the conclusion, while some, like Troilus, may find “limitations on eros … intolerable, even monstruous … for others—Antony and Cleopatra, along with a robust kink community—being ‘a slave to limit’ is sexually exciting” (243). Where a psychoanalytic approach to Lylyian edging and Shakespearean masochism might emphasize the negativity inherent in these practices—in the sense not of pathology, but of their performance of deferral and displacement, rejection and abjection—Knoll’s cognitive-linguistic approach allows us to see what edging and masochism might produce for the characters in these plays: forms of life-sustaining intimacy and sociality, modes of making do (and even thriving) amid life-threatening crises. These are, after all, metaphors these characters (sexually) “live by.”Christine Varnado’s The Shapes of Fancy: Reading for Queer Desire in Early Modern Literature takes up questions similar to Knoll’s—“What counts as desire, and how is desire constituted in text and performance? What are the features of a text that can have, speak, or be animated by desire?” (Varnado, 6)—not from a cognitive-linguistic perspective, but from a psychoanalytic one. In Varnado’s hands, psychoanalysis becomes a tool not for diagnosing desire’s gaps and lacks (as in my overly reductive description above), but for excavating and analyzing its queer excesses. Varnado deploys what she calls an “adverbial queer analytic” that, in its adverbial inflection of verbal action (as opposed to an adjectival inflection of nominal categorization), “can illuminate the moments in texts where desire makes strange motions, takes strange shapes, or goes awry” (3). Doing so, she uncovers four queer “affective modes” in an eclectic archive of early modern playscripts, pamphlets, and narratives of failed colonies: the “pleasure of being used,” a “bottomless, free-floating, promiscuous appetite that refuses to differentiate among objects at all,” the “paranoid suspicion that makes true what it suspects,” and “melancholic ideations that failed Protestant would-be colonizers express about the Native American people, places, and objects they encountered, then lost” (4). Across readings of texts as disparate as The Antipodes (1640) (introduction); Philaster (1610) and The Roaring Girl (1611) (chap. 1); Twelfth Night and Bartholomew Fair (1614) (chap. 2); The Witch of Edmonton (1622) and the Newes from Scotland (1591), an account of Scottish witch hunts (chap. 3); and narratives of failed colonies like Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578) and Thomas Harriot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) (chap. 4), Varnado offers her readers a wide array of entry points into reading forms of desire that suffuse early modern texts, but that have nevertheless gone largely unnoticed within a critical habitus that sutures desire primarily to acts and relationships recognizable as “sexual.” “Desire,” as Varnado defines it, is a “craving or affinity that is infused with both the pleasure of investment (however ideational) and the pain of irremediable lack” (13). This definition is capacious enough to hold both something like “sexual” desire and something like the insatiable appetite of Bartholomew Cokes in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair.Delightfully, The Shapes of Fancy reads like queer theory, which is to say that it reads like an attempt to create frames of recognition for modes of living—and thus of desiring—that have relied on improvisational forms. To say that a work of queer theory like The Shapes of Fancy “reads like queer theory” may seem redundant, but it captures something about the aesthetics of Varnado’s vivacious, rolling—even insatiable—prose, and her productively askew orientation toward early modernity and the reigning analytic protocols and interpretive habits of early modern sexuality studies. She claims that her approach “looks different from the desire explicated in more historicist studies” because “desire in this book is diffuse and distributed throughout scenes” rather than “confined to binary subject/object relations” (12). While I might object that in their frequent focus on macrolevel sexual discourses, many “historicist” studies have deployed a quite “diffuse” conception of desire, Varnado isn’t wrong to suggest that desire does look different in, and because of, her work.While the first two chapters—which read early modern drama for forms of “getting used, and liking it” (51) and voracious appetite—are strong, the book is at its strongest in the final two chapters, perhaps because (with the exception of The Witch of Edmonton) this is where Varnado leverages the insights she has built about the dramatic construction of queer desires to illuminate darker, queer desires in other genres. For example, she offers a bravura rereading of the passage in Thomas Harriot’s Briefe and True Report in which Harriot imagines that the Algonkians believe that the colonizers have killed some of them with “invisible bullets.” In Stephen Greenblatt’s incredibly influential reading of this passage, Harriot and the Algonkians collaborate on, as Varnado notes, an “‘eerily prescient’ prefiguration of modern germ theory” (231).Within Varnado’s framework, however, Harriot’s Report becomes much queerer. In the same passage, Harriot claims that the Algonkians were surprised by the fact that the colonists had come with no women, and that they did not desire the Algonkian women; they also, Harriot claims, believed that “there were more of our generation yet to come, to kill theirs and take their places” (quoted in Varnado, 230). “In one possible future hinted at in this prophecy,” Varnado writes, “the replacement of one generation with another will be enacted not by heterosexual sex but by homoerotic murder, a queer fantasy (in the style of Leo Bersani or Lee Edelman—or Patricia Highsmith) of an end to heteroreproductive futurism itself. If we read it literally, homoerotic annihilation and replacement will replace reproduction and descent as the new relation between generations. Such a queer mechanism of iteration would mirror the paradox of melancholia’s nonheterosexual directionality: its death-driven, self-destroying affects, its incorporation of the lost other, and the eerily self-perpetuating duration of its negativity” (236). But while this melancholic “end to heteroreproductive futurism” might seem like a form of antisocial queer negativity that has been lauded by some strains of queer theory over the past two decades, it is not, Varnado points out, a politics one can bear. The men that might homoerotically “take [the] place” of the Algonkians in this scenario may be, Varnado argues, “queer descendants, but on the side of genocide” (235). As she so astutely argues in her chapter on witchcraft, identifying how the historical actors in witchcraft accusations can be “produced as queer figures for their pursuit of antisocial sexual ends, does not mitigate the violence of these stories. Instead,” she continues, “it reminds us that the history of deviant and antisocial desires does not conform to a modern, liberal, purifying bifurcation of free and consensual perversions as distinct from violent and predatory ones” (194). This seems to me to be one of the key insights of The Shapes of Fancy, and it will surely prove to be an incredibly useful touchstone for queer studies (early modern and otherwise) as scholars continue to think through the knotty relation between sexual desire, knowledge, violence, and consent.But despite its salient focus on desire’s negativities, The Shapes of Fancy ends with a clarion call for the hard-won values and pleasures of (queer) reading, especially in a moment (and haven’t we almost always been in such a “moment”?) in which universities are increasingly calling for demonstrable, job-oriented outcomes that eschew something so supposedly “mere” as pleasure. Literature, Varnado writes, “is a space of affective experimentation, a chance to enter into the pleasures and problems of identification and other weighty affects” (265). This space, she argues, offers students who are “brutally, intimately acquainted with structural violence” a chance to craft “a livable world” (262–63)—one that, importantly, doesn’t sidestep that structural violence, or the long histories of structural violence (like the melancholic colonial dispossession evidenced in Harriot’s Report) that precede and produce it.In their joint focus on the productive capacities of desire, then, both of these books bespeak a form of critical optimism, an attachment to the idea of a future—a critical future, but also an erotic one—in which readers, critics, and desiring subjects will continue to find structures of pleasure and attachment in early modern texts. Whether by analyzing the metaphors of creativity that put the “making” in “lovemaking,” or the dark homoerotics of a genocidal colonial imagination, these books excavate desires that exceed current frames of critical recognition, even as they take on particular, generalizable forms—metaphorical schemas, say, or melancholic object relations. Significantly, both Knoll and Varnado also turn to analyses of desires that might be called “kink”: edging, masochism, being used by others. Readers will find a wealth of delights and lessons on the surface of these two excellent monographs, but I hope that they will also take up this (slightly) submerged kink imaginary as one path forward for early modern sexuality studies, since it opens out onto a whole host of questions about desire, practice, and forms of identification that are nevertheless not identitarian. Such questions might be one foundation for the critical future these books so beautifully push us toward. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 3February 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711764 Views: 207 HistoryPublished online November 02, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

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