It may seem odd or counterintuitive to study metaphors of motion in plays that have been characterised as ‘static and passive’. What can John Lyly, a playwright routinely criticised for his lack of stage action, possibly show about the ‘event’ of erotic desire? By consistently refusing to subordinate eros to other actions that characters might undertake in its name, Lyly confirms that desire itself can be the main event, making good on Anne Carson's assertion that ‘eros acts everywhere like a verb’. In Lyly's drama, desire moves, especially when characters do not. As Andy Kesson notes, ‘Lyly exploits the considerable dramaturgical power of a character who is still as they speak, making them what Janette Dillon calls “a centre of contained activity-in-stillness”.’

Struck and immobilised by Cupid's arrows, or by the beauty of a beloved, or by their own longings, even the slumbering bodies of Lyly's characters rouse and stir from the erotic dreams that captivate them. Stock-still and caught in love's idleness, Lyly's lovers move by means of metaphor, which Angus Fletcher describes as ‘a figure of instant animation [that] lifts the mind to a fervour of aesthetic activity. Metaphor as a structural principle generates restless shift and flexing of sense.’

Restless shifts make eros new for Lyly's characters, many of whom are themselves new to eros. Among Lyly's favourite dramatic subjects are moments of sexual awakening – the very instant of erotic change – ‘moments’ that he is prepared to stretch across five acts of drama. For Aristotle, as for Zeno, the instant was a paradox of stillness and motion: an instant, or a ‘now’, is a fixed point and yet a series of instants comprises a sequential, moving experience of time. Lyly knew that a moment of erotic awakening is like Zeno's arrow, which, at any particular instant, is apparently at rest but which also is moving, ‘shift[ing] and flexing’, over a sequence of instants. Whereas Shakespeare's Angelo effectively stops wrestling with his desires and moves on to blackmailing Isabella for sex by the end of Act II, Lyly's characters spend the better part of a play wrestling. Or they analyse, they fantasise, they dream, they confess. From Sappho to Endymion and Alexander the Great, they experience erotic change instant by instant.