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:

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.