Renaissance Discourses of Desire.

While love may be the preeminent subject of Renaissance literature, as the editors of this impressive collection remind us, criticism has not always explored the extent to which sexuality is implicated in love. The elasticity of the term "desire" readmits the corporeal into critical investigation, and the fourteen essays collected here range over a spectrum of issues associated with desire, including topics traditional to Renaissance studies (Petrarchism, Neoplatonism, the figure of the hermaphrodite, virginity) and more recently admitted areas (lesbianism, homosexual desire, voyeurism). The essays were originally presented at the 1990 Renaissance conference at the University of Michigan, Dearborn; they have since been expanded and revised, and they are supplemented by four insightful meditations from the concluding panel discussion. What is striking about the volume is both the relative breadth of its contents (the essays examine works by Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Milton, Burton, Carew, Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Behn, Philips) and how relatively unified the essays are, since most are historicist, and because almost all take into account feminist criticism. Even more notable is the mark left by the recent incursion of queer theory into Renaissance studies; five essays deal explicitly with homosexual or lesbian material: Stella Revard on Donne's "Sapho to Philaenis," Arlene Stiebel on the lesbian erotics of Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips, Raymond Waddington on Shakespeare's Sonnet 20, Winfried Schleiner on Burton's use of tropology in his discussion of same-sex love, and Joseph Cady on "feminine love."

With the exception of Arlene Steibel's astute essay on Philips and Behn, Achsah Guibbory's consideration of Behn in relation to Lovelace and Carew, and Eugene Cunnar's fleeting mention of Behn, all of the essays concentrate on male authors. Yet in spite of the volume's orientation towards male, canonized works, the essays are commendably concerned with the nature of gender and its construction, and this responsiveness to gender often casts familiar works in a new, de-familarized light. The collection is also valuable in its exploration of Cavalier poetry, and a number of essays, especially Anthony Low's on Carew, open up new possibilities for understanding these poets' relation to their cultural context and to the earlier amatory traditions they rejected or reshaped. The volume as a whole works to portray a complex cultural vision of desire, one that explores the ambivalences that lie at the heart of such erotic codes as Petrarchism and libertinism, and that inflects the relationship between poet and lover, and poet and court.

Deborah Shuger comments in the panel discussion on the dual imperatives in Renaissance studies to historicize and theorize, asserting that the chief value of theory is to reaffirm the "intractability" (270) of Renaissance texts, their historical difference and their fundamental resistance to late twentieth-century paradigms. While this is a contestable assertion, and her definition of history is unproblematized, she makes some memorable distinctions, among them, about the bodily positioning of desire (the head and heart for the early modern period as opposed to genital orientation of modern desire). Her privileging of history over theory ("Theory is . . . invaluable . . . because it is usually wrong"[270]) could serve as an epigraph for the collection as a whole, for new historicism - as Paul Stanwood rather grumpily indicates - is the unifying critical method. The historicizing impulse is occasionally coupled with psychoanalytic theory - as in William Shullenberger's useful explication of the voyeuristic dimension of Donne's love poetry, or Roger Rollin's analysis of Herrick's erotics and its critics - but on the whole, psychoanalysis is present only as a subtextual, almost buried discourse in a couple of the essays. While the volume might have benefitted from some discussion of this exclusion, or some comparison of early modern and post-Freudian conceptions of desire - as Shuger briefly offers - the collection is nevertheless strong. Its strengths emerge from the implicit consensus of the essays, which provide a cultural portrait of desire as defined by its physiological, political, and historical specificity. As a result, the collection augments the corpus of Renaissance erotic discourses and significantly revises traditional views of early modern love and sexuality.

ELIZABETH D. HARVEY University of Western Ontario