The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts

2. “To Speak of Love” in the Language of Petrarchanism

t q chapter two “o peak of ove” in the anguage of etrarchanism For Love is a perpetuall flux, angor animi, a warfare, militat omnis amans, . . . a grievous wound is love still, and a Lovers heart is Cupids quiver, a consuming fire . . . an inextinguible fire. . . . This continuall paine and torture makes them forget themselves. —Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (3.2.3.1) ovesick. Few things tell us so much about the attitudes toward pleasure and the erotic economies of people in early modern England as their capacity for and even established habit of considering love a sickness. In his Table of the Human Passions (1621), Nicholas Coeffeteau wrote approvingly of what he called the “first effect” of love, its “uniting vertue.” But though love could bring together, it could also rend apart: Coeffeteau notes a “second effect” that was literally unsettling, for in this case love “causeth the soule of him that loves, to bee more where it loves, than where it lives.” Echoing the moralist and historian Plutarch, who wrote that “the soul of a lover lived in another body, and not in his own,” Coeffeteau indicates the passion’s capacity to disrupt personal autonomy. No wonder he notes a further degree of “very violent” love that causes “languishings, extasies, and amazements.” Nor is it a long step from here to Robert Burton’s casual claim that “it is so well knowne in every village, how many have either died for love or voluntary made away themselves, that I need not much labor to prove it . . . Death is the common Catastrophe to such persons.”1 Oddly, given the claims of such writers on the passions as Coeffeteau and Burton that people actually did suffer dangerous and even fatal effects of lovesickness, the poetic genre corresponding to this malady—Petrarchan poetry —has typically been construed as emotionally bankrupt. Critics consider the flush of sonnet sequences composed in England in the 1590s to be a stylish form of experimentation and self-promotion. In the view of most modern readers, the Petrarchan code that shapes the sequences—suffering lover, scornful beloved, oxymoronic passions, obsessive complaint—registers their distance from actual emotional experience. Poetic fame rather than erotic fulfillment is taken to be the scarcely hidden goal.2 This perception of Petrarchanism as an artificial genre, false either in the poets’ declarations of love or in their analysis of the experience (or both), is built on the assumption that love has an essential, transhistorical truth, and presumably a happy one, to which the sonneteers’ suffering extremes correlate poorly. But the vogue of Petrarchanism together with early modern concerns about lovesickness document the currency in the Renaissance of a conception of love involving loss of self, an emotional economy acknowledging, however painfully , an undercurrent of desire for suffering in the erotic experience. Probing the connection between the psychology of lovesickness and the rhetoric of Petrarchanism provides historical contextualization to an understanding of love as it figures in Renaissance poetry. Nevertheless, my argument assumes that love—as emotion, experience, and trope—remains for several reasons structurally resistant to analysis. Partly this is the result of the displacement noted above, the way love decenters the subject by involving emotional investment in another person and perhaps identification with that other.3 Moreover, love presents an extreme instance of the capacity of language both to constitute and to alienate the subject, as seen when lovers, frustrated by the inadequacy of shopworn words, attempt to create original expression that will somehow be more true to their particular passion—thereby investing and dealing in an alienating currency. The complex resonance of masochism in Petrarchan ideology, although frequently judged extreme or perverse, nevertheless contributes significantly to prevailing humanist conceptions of love and romantic experience. Exposing that resonance allows us t 57 q “To Speak of Love” in the Language of Petrarchanism to recognize how Petrarchanism effects a link between early modern selfshattering and the proliferating narratives of masochism in the modern era. Deeming themselves martyrs to love, the English Petrarchanists charged their language with a secular form of the jouissance at play in martyrologies such as the Acts and Monuments. As Thomas Lodge presents the trope of martyrdom , fire and ice occasion an endless near-death, or actually “two united deathes” whose paradoxical union forestalls mortality. As where two raging venomes are...