Reading Shakespeare's Cupid

Reading Shakespeare's Cupid

The figure of Cupid flits through Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream (hereafter abbreviated as Dream), a mythological agent of desire whose varied portraiture contributes to the staging of the subversion of the subject through his desire. Supplementing his Christian theological counterparts, Cupid figures in an authorial meditation on the nature of the lover's desire and its relations to cultural ideals of Love and masculinity. The exploration that follows tracks how Shakespeare uses a Renaissance mythography of Cupid and Christian theology, together with a rich literary tradition of representing the subject and the doctrine of sacral sovereignty, to advance proto-psychoanalytic allegories of the advent of desire and the subject's displacements of lack. In both dramas, Cupid is described at an originary scene of desire, as the cause of desire and sometimes as the phantom object of desire, an allegory of desire that anticipates the Lacanian subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire.¹

Practitioners of the new historicism have eschewed the use of psychoanalytic theory to study early modern texts as employing a putatively ahistorical notion of the subject. This article takes up Stephen Greenblatt's challenge that "psychoanalysis can redeem its belatedness only when it historicizes its own procedures,"² showing how early modern theology, political theory, Petrarchan poetics, and gender ideology all inform Shakespeare's representations of the subject, powerful representations that in turn inform the modern discipline of psychoanalysis. While the tailpiece of this article reads an overlooked letter in the history of Freudian theory for a passing debt to Dream, psychoanalytic inquiry into eros in the Renaissance can begin to historicize its procedures by investigating how early modern texts position God as Other, as the traditional guarantor of identity and the self's coherence. This article approaches Shakespeare's mapping of the subject's relations to the politico-theological Other in God and sacral sovereignty onto his relations to alterity in an allegory of desire and Love. That is, the article assumes that the politico-theological is a crucial interpretative field for Shakespeare's representations of the literary subject in the travails of his passion. Attending to Shakespeare's staging of desire and gender, one can track his grafting of the repeated arc of a (failed) imaginary union with God or the sovereign (i.e., as another theological Other), onto the performance of a vexed masculinity in phantasy's staging of desire. While the loving covenant with God appears as the model for the subject's symbolic castration by a phantastic double to the subject and God, Cupid,³ the textual exegesis that follows unpacks how the specular castration of separation (and its memory) is also troped as sodomic in an allegory of desire.

Shakespeare's negotiation for social recognition as a dramatist certainly depended on a complex balance of self-effacing engagement with contemporary political and religious issues, but more crucially, his success as a playwright would depend on the staging of desire and phantasmatic gender.⁴ In tandem with its critical contribution to a literary history of subjectivity, this article extends recent work on the performative nature of gender on the early modern stage, demonstrating how masculinity is implicated in a proto-psychoanalytic account of the subject's often obscene (as phantasied on the stage of the unconscious) or offstage relations to the Other and the advent of an eros whose attachment to castration threatens to undo proper masculinity. The article's tailpiece shows how Freudian theory is beset by—and capitalizes on for its authority—the same "problem" of the male subject's submission to the Other, the fundamental castration of the subject.

The topic of Shakespeare's staging of homoerotic desire and its relation to an unstable masculinity has been the occasion of much recent critical attention. Many studies investigate the cross-dressing of boy actors and theatrical transvestism against the backdrop of the antitheatricalist discourse. Although transvestism on the stage is not my approach to the playwright's representation...