Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Introduction
- PART I MOTION
- Introduction: The Physics and Metaphysics of Metaphor
- 1 The Erotic Potential of Idleness in Lyly’s Drama
- 2 The ‘Raging Motions’ of Eros on Shakespeare’s Stage
- PART II SPACE
- Introduction: In Love
- 3 ‘A petty world of myself ’: Intimacy and Erotic Distance in Endymion
- 4 Binding the Void: The Erotics of Place in Antony and Cleopatra
- PART III CREATIVITY
- Introduction: Erotic Subject, Object, Instrument
- 5 ‘Love’s Use’ in Campaspe
- 6 ‘You lie, in faith’: Making Marriage in The Taming of the Shrew
- Conclusion: Metaphorical Constraints: Making ‘frenzy . . . Fine’
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - The ‘Raging Motions’ of Eros on Shakespeare’s Stage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 October 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Introduction
- PART I MOTION
- Introduction: The Physics and Metaphysics of Metaphor
- 1 The Erotic Potential of Idleness in Lyly’s Drama
- 2 The ‘Raging Motions’ of Eros on Shakespeare’s Stage
- PART II SPACE
- Introduction: In Love
- 3 ‘A petty world of myself ’: Intimacy and Erotic Distance in Endymion
- 4 Binding the Void: The Erotics of Place in Antony and Cleopatra
- PART III CREATIVITY
- Introduction: Erotic Subject, Object, Instrument
- 5 ‘Love’s Use’ in Campaspe
- 6 ‘You lie, in faith’: Making Marriage in The Taming of the Shrew
- Conclusion: Metaphorical Constraints: Making ‘frenzy . . . Fine’
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If Lyly probes the directionality of erotic desire, Shakespeare gauges its intensity. We have seen that Lyly's is an art of potentiality – time and again, his characters are moved less by the actual than the possible – and although Shakespeare explores this form of eroticism, his characters are typically less content to linger there. Raising the stakes of motion and stasis, Shakespeare amps up his metaphors such that escape and imprisonment, chaos and death prevail. Armado wants to ‘take desire prisoner’ (Love's Labour's Lost I, ii, 57) with his sword; Demetrius and Chiron rape Lavinia with ‘their worse-than-killing lust’ (Titus Andronicus II, iii, 175); Proteus is ‘yoked’ (The Two Gentlemen of Verona I, i, 40) by the fool Love; Juliet ‘should kill [Romeo] with much cherishing’ (Romeo and Juliet II, i, 227). These metaphors charge motion with turbulent force and stasis with paralysing tension, prompting Shakespeare's characters to test the power of desire and offering them a means to test their own power over it. Whether casting themselves as captors or as victims, characters find agency on both sides of the verb. Take, for example, Shakespeare's Helena, as she navigates the formidable currents of desire in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Desire is never a static business in the forest, where lovers
shift their attentions as quickly as they shift their gazes. And yet Helena, feeling stuck, laments her helplessness. She begs Hermia to ‘teach me how you look, and with what art / You sway the motion of Demetrius’ heart’ (I, i, 192–3). For Helena, desire is something that can be controlled, directed through particular actions, or ‘art’, as she puts it.
Needless to say, the play itself is less confident. Even in Helena's metaphors of motion, she ascribes agency elsewhere. She wants to learn Hermia's seductive ‘art’, but in her speeches to Demetrius, Helena admits her powerlessness:
You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant,
But yet you draw not iron; for my heart
Is as true as steel. Leave you your power to draw,
And I shall have no power to follow you.
(II, i, 195–8)Shakespeare's magnetism metaphor complicates the play's account of erotic action and stasis. Is Demetrius's magnetism the same as action? Following Aristotle's example, Kenneth Burke distinguishes action from motion, defining the former as deliberate and purposive motion.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Conceiving Desire in Lyly and ShakespeareMetaphor, Cognition and Eros, pp. 67 - 96Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020