These are a handful of the entailments of ‘Love is a Collaborative Work of Art’, a representative example of what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson call ‘new metaphor’. Unlike everyday metaphors, new metaphors exist ‘outside our conventional conceptual system, metaphors that are imaginative and creative. Such metaphors are capable of giving us a new understanding of our experience.’ The world-making capacities of new metaphor are especially resonant in ‘Love is a Collaborative Work of Art’, which conceptualises love as artfully creating a reality. From the list of metaphorical entailments above, we can see that this new metaphor builds upon more conventional metaphors that I have explored, particularly in Part I, where the domains of stillness and motion shape eros as a dynamic action, a process of becoming. In Part III, I analyse aesthetic features of this creative process, in which making love also remakes Lyly's and Shakespeare’s lovers.

Eros's creative and metamorphic power on Lyly's and Shakespeare's stages has been central to the arguments of the preceding chapters of this book. In Galatea and Endymion, we have seen Lyly's lovestruck characters undergo radical changes, from gender transformation to age reversal. It is no surprise, then, that Lyly entitles one of his plays Love's Metamorphoses. Shakespeare, too, dramatises the power of eros to ‘translate’ the likes of Helena (I, i, 191) and Bottom (III, I, 114). On Shakespeare's stage, erotic identities both dissolve (Angelo's self-fracturing, Antony’s self-loss) and regenerate (Cleopatra's crocodile, Antony’s ‘dolphinlike’ delights). Each new metaphor produces a slightly different Angelo or Antony or Galatea or Cynthia, such that characters themselves become labours of love, projections of desires (sometimes their own, sometimes those of a beloved). Lyly's and Shakespeare's lovers are, in short, collaborative works of art. But what exactly is the relationship between making love and making lovers? Can we separate the lovers from the erotic relations that they make together? How do we distinguish lovers who are bound up in their ‘collaborative work of art’?