Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare has explored the capacity of language to create, to transform and to dramatise the erotic experiences of Lyly's and Shakespeare's characters. I have argued that, on the early modern English stage, metaphorical language constitutes the inner experience that it reveals. Characters such as Lyly's Apelles and Campaspe, and Shakespeare's Kate and Petruchio employ their metaphors deliberately and self-consciously, collaboratively making their erotic relations. Other characters’ metaphors are less intentional and so more a product of a fundamental or prior erotic orientation. In Othello's ‘stops’ (II, i, 196) that propel him into frenzied motion, in Endymion's self-effacing exposure and in Antony and Cleopatra's erotics of bounded loss, we find metaphors that are more cognitive than calculated, more self-making than self-made. Their metaphors create but also constrain their erotic experiences. Othello's erotic process consists of the collision between the domains of stillness and experience; Valentine's language of banishment gives way to the more flexible domain of permeability; and Endymion's metaphors of exposure produce a form of erotic intimacy that paradoxically feeds on solitude and distance. Erotic language can be extraordinarily fruitful – active, dynamic, dramatic – even if it takes the failure of one metaphor to spark another.

Having emphasised the creative potential of erotic language, I conclude by reflecting on the consequences of its limits. Exemplary are the nymphs in Galatea, whose inability to express and understand their desire comprises their erotic experience, even defines their very selves. Still more common is the inability of any single metaphor to dramatise eros in all of its complexity. Lakoff and Johnson note that complex concepts often require a combination of two metaphors ‘because there is no one metaphor that will do the job … Thus we get instances of impermissible mixed metaphors resulting from the impossibility of a single clearly delineated metaphor that satisfies both purposes at once.’ This helps us to understand why the language of desire is marked by inconsistency and change, by a shifting and layering of different conceptual domains that make erotic experience both coherent and incoherent. Metaphors sometimes overlap, sometimes contradict one another; they open up new erotic possibilities as quickly as they cordon off others.