The stroke of death, the lover's pinch: masochism and ambivalence in renaissance texts

In the 1599 collection of epigrams by John Davies and elegies by Christopher Marlowe, a reader can find one of the frankest descriptions of masochistic sexual practices in Renaissance England: Davies's Epigram 33. “In Francum” depicts a scene of pleasure through pain and then concludes with the speaker's wish to be a part of it:

1. When Francus comes to sollace with his whoore

2. He sends for rods and strips himselfe stark naked:

3. For his lust sleepes, and will not rise before,

4. By whipping of the wench it be awaked.

5. I envie’him not, but wish I had the powre,

6. To make my selfe his wench but one halfe houre.

The concluding moment of identification is less straightforward than it might appear, for, as Ian Frederick Moulton argues, the phrase “whipping of the wench” could refer either to Francus's whipping the wench or the wench's whipping of Francus in order to arouse him. Since the epigram's speaker wants to be the wench, it is unclear whether he wants to be beaten by or to beat Francus himself. The ambiguous relationship of Renaissance satire to dominant culture further complicates the meaning of these lines. That the Davies-Marlowe collection and other verse satire would be thought subversive enough for the Bishops to ban them in 1599 may seem curious because epigrams and satire usually reserve their scorn for departures from a social norm. In the act of imagining such departures only to critique them, the Bishops worried, epigrams would provide scripts for readers to discover and act on their own potentially transgressive sexual tastes.

Like the other “failures of intimacy” I discuss in this book, Renaissance texts’ representations of masochism are suffused with this tension between making pleasures available and calling into question whether such pleasures ought to be desired. For example, in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra (1606–1607), Cleopatra eroticizes death when she tells Charmian, “The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch / Which hurts and is desired.” For the audience, her imminent suicide shrouds the masochistic pleasure of the lover's pinch that she imagines. What is briefly referenced in Antony and Cleopatra becomes in other Renaissance plays a fuller exploration of the politics of alternate forms of sexual practice, and in this chapter, I hope both to map the ideological terrain surrounding these dramatic representations and to complicate our understanding of early modern intimacy by turning to non-Shakespearean drama. Through a transgressive re-enactment of hierarchical relations, between and within classes and genders, masochistic pleasures offered Renaissance readers and audiences an opportunity to reimagine social relations. Bringing same-sex and opposite-sex relations together in this chapter, I seek to expand the scope of queer inquiry to shed light on what Jonathan Goldberg has called “the open secret of the imbrication of alternative possibilities within normative sexualities.” In the Renaissance, certain types of same-sex and cross-sex relations were cast as potentially disruptive to sexual normalcy, and such disruption is especially illuminated by focusing not on nascent forms of identity but instead by attending to the history of sexual practices, especially those where the gender of object choice does not play the same role as it does in modern parsings of sexuality, though it may still be influential in shaping a practice's form and meaning.