Conceiving Desire

This is a book about tongues that conceive – tongues that think, tongues that imagine, tongues that ‘expound’ (IV, i, 205) and conceptualise, and thereby bring into being erotic dreams and desires on the early modern stage. That Bottom intends for ‘Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream’ (212–13) testifies to the capacities of language – and artistic language in particular – to ‘conceive’ his erotic, fantastic, metamorphic midsummer night with Titania. So, too, does the innate wisdom of Bottom's synaesthesia affirm that hearts can indeed ‘report’ experiences that ‘hath no bottom’ (214). Because conceiving such bottomless experiences is both a cognitive and a linguistic activity, this book analyses the interplay of the heart, tongue and mind in creating erotic experience. To ‘conceive’ desire is also to beget it, to give it form and shape, as in Theseus's famous description in which ‘imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown’

and ‘the poet's pen / Turns them to shapes’ (V, i, 12–13, 17). Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare explores this generative potential of the erotic imagination, and the language it inspires, in plays by John Lyly and William Shakespeare.

Although Lyly and Shakespeare wrote for different types of theatres and only partially overlapping audiences, both dramatists created characters who speak erotic language at considerable length and in extraordinary depth. Their words do more than merely narrate or express eros; they constitute characters’ erotic experiences. Conceiving Desire in Lyly and Shakespeare locates this constitutive power in metaphor. Metaphor, I argue, gives Lyly, Shakespeare, their characters, and us through them, a way in, a way of accessing experiences as formless and fleeting as ecstasy. Taking my cue from cognitive linguists such as George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Mark Turner, I begin from the premise that the erotic imagination – indeed, that thought itself – is metaphorical.