Robert Herrick's Gift Trouble: Male Subjects "Trans-shifting" into Objects

In the introduction to their influential collection Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass ask, "[I]n the period that has from its inception been identified with the emergence of the subject, where is the object? . . . What new configurations will emerge when subject and object are kept in relation?"¹ Analyzing a select cluster of Robert Herrick's many poems that are explicitly focused thematically upon the exchange of love tokens yields intriguing answers to these questions. Many of Herrick's portraits of heteroerotic, secular gift-giving represent the poetic speaker transforming into the thing he gives: the male subject becomes absorbed into the gifted object. A careful analysis of Herrick's gift lyrics thus reveals, at times, an unstable blurring of distinctions between person and thing. This observation reinforces de Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass's critique of the assumption by literary critics, historians, and art historians of a strict binary opposition between Renaissance subjects and objects.² As I hope to show, however, attention to Herrick's gift poems does more than simply provide new evidence for the intermingling of Renaissance subjects and objects. As Ann Rosalind Jones and Stallybrass note in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, the Renaissance marked a crucial transition in relations between subjects and objects: "paradoxically, as Europe imported goods from Asia, Africa, and the Americas in ever greater quantities, it increasingly asserted the detachment of the European subject from those goods. From this new perspective, to attach too much significance to the power of clothes was to fetishize them—to endow 'mere' objects with a power that would increasingly be appropriated as the sole prerogative of subjects."³ Herrick's gift poems serve as particularly rich sites for understanding the changing historical relations between subjects and objects not only because they provide evidence of a merging of persons and things quite alien to today's full-blown capitalist culture, but also because they simultaneously anticipate the increasing fixity of a binary opposition between these two terms.

First, unlike the binary-defying animated clothing that Jones and Stallybrass observe to constitute subjectivity in their monumental study, Herrick's gift objects are typically static, passive, and available for manipulation by the lovers who exchange them.⁴ When he depicts his poetic speakers as transforming into love tokens, those speakers in turn become static, passive, and available for manipulation, by the female beloved in particular. The combined blurring of subjects and objects, and representing objects specifically as passive in Herrick's Hesperides (1648), articulates a distinct configuration between subject and object different from that which Jones and Stallybrass highlight and from the rigid binary that scholars have previously taken for granted. It is especially significant to find that Herrick's depictions of relations between subjects and objects in his gift lyrics do not correspond perfectly with Jones and Stallybrass's theories about Renaissance clothing, given the considerable overlap between typical love tokens—jewelry, lace, ribbons, gloves, and so forth—and clothing, generally speaking, which Jones and Stallybrass define broadly in their study as "all that is worn."⁵ In fact, one could consider livery—a category of material goods central to the arguments of Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory—not only as part of an economic system of payment, but also as partaking in what Natalie Zemon Davis delineates as a "gift mode" or "gift register."⁶ As Jones and Stallybrass suggest, clothing as livery can constitute the subject, creating apprentice, servant, or wife where before there was none. Similarly, according to Marcel Mauss, a gift transforms the recipient into one who must reciprocate, one who owes.⁷ In either case (whether one considers livery a form of gift or not), a material object makes or transforms a subject. But as we will see, Herrick's heteroerotic gift poetry frequently unsettles both scenarios: in the fictions of his verse, gifted objects can turn the male subject into an object.

Second, Herrick's gift lyrics that represent the male speaker/lover's transformation from subject to object are marked by a...