1. Stephen J. Greenblatt, ed., Representing the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).

2. For example, Shoshana Felman, ed., "Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise," Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977).

3. If the phallus constitutes the ur-form, it is possible that, as Stephen Greenblatt has implied, it does not definitively belong to the man, since the same form reversed and internalized constitutes the Renaissance anatomy of the woman. So if part of the self-consciousness of Renaissance representation consists in its dialectical interplay between a repertoire of forms and the imaginary phallic uni-form, which is also putatively that of ultimate power, a possibly more repressed aspect of its consciousness admits this doubleness, indeterminacy, or female (feminine) instantiation of the ur-form. All the latter possibilities, including appropriation of the feminine in these terms, will be evident in the texts I discuss. See Stephen Greenblatt, "Fiction and Friction," in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 66-93.

4. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). In more recent work, White has developed and modified his earlier positions, but that is irrelevant to the point I am making here. His tendency to make form prescriptive of, or identical to, content is one repetition of neoplatonic poetics that I wish to avoid.

5. Producing this "romance" stereotype of critical representations of the Renaissance entails the double risk of misrepresenting the broad work of scholarship and criticism in this field and of doing justice to no- soft

body's work in particular. No offense is intended; what is at issue here is only the broad shape of Renaissance representation at present, not the state of knowledge or research. Nostalgia for the Renaissance as the empowering origin of the modern world has recently given way to a still-nostalgic critical reading of it as an already belated and self-mourning epoch, self-consciously suspended in the afterglow of the classical world: see Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), and Jonathan Goldberg, Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (New York: Methuen, 1986). A nostalgically renewed "cult of Elizabeth" is also evident in a good many recent critical essays and book-jacket illustrations. Yet nostalgia is far from being ubiquitous: recourse to the Renaissance not just as a storehouse of exempla but as a putative reservoir of energy for effecting change in the present (usually as regards the construction of the subject or self, and as regards political and/or gender constructions) is quite widely apparent: see, for example, Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Stephen J. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), and Shakespearean Negotiations ; Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); John Drakakis, ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London: Methuen, 1985); Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers, eds., Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1986); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Leonard Tennen-house, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986). The charge of misrepresenting the Renaissance in the interests of renewed authoritarian control has explicitly been leveled from various quarters at Stephen Greenblatt as a seminal figure, and by implication at those who have been influenced by his work. The text most often incriminated is the frequently reprinted "Invisible Bullets," now chapter 2 of Shakespearean Negotiations . break

6. Many of the texts I cite to instantiate one aspect of romance could as well be cited to instantiate any one, or all, of the others I list. I have tried to avoid excessive repetition. The title of one book cited above, Rewriting the Renaissance , implies something more than revisionary reinterpretation of the Renaissance; it implies rewriting in order to change history. This implication of "rewriting" applies to most of the works cited in the previous note, but also, for example, to some of the essays in Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds., Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); and in Arthur Kinney and Dan S. Collins, eds., Renaissance Historicism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987).

7. Reappropriating the unfixed energies of the Renaissance is, once again, a strategy of many of the books cited above, especially those most influenced by deconstruction. Repeated attacks on any notion of fixed Renaissance hierarchy or of a stabilized Elizabethan World Picture have been intended to mobilize the Renaissance both as an object of representation and for continuing political action. Misrepresenting or misusing these unfixed energies has been part of the charge leveled against Greenblatt and those he has influenced. Magisterial restabilization with a difference has been pursued—almost uniquely so—by Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjur'd Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), and "The Turn of the Shrew," in Parker and Hartman, eds., Shakespeare and the Question of Theory , 138-59. In these discussions, the Jacobean Robert Fludd's concentric, hermetic, universal diagrams constitute a bigger and more imperturbable world picture than Tillyard's Elizabethan ones. Fineman is, however, reading these reconstructed world pictures back into Elizabethan texts.

8. Greenblatt must be credited as the prime inaugurator of this anthropologism—and of a taste for exotica—in which the work of Clifford Geertz has been an important influence. Anthropological discourse, including that of Victor Turner and Jack Goody, has been invoked by Louis Adrian Montrose, most notably in "Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture," in Representing the English Renaissance , 31-64. See also Steven Mullaney, "Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs: The Rehearsal of Cultures in the Late Renaissance," in the same volume, 65-92. "The culture" tends to emerge in these anthropologized representations as the plane of successful action, or even continue

as the successful actor, throughout history. It also tends to emerge as the realm of authentic causation.

9. Most of the terms cited here have appeared repeatedly in discussions of Renaissance culture, often as terms putatively defining that culture. The syncretism of these representations, many of which include historical, anthropological, epistemological, psychoanalytic, and linguistic components, has often gone under the name of cultural studies and/or of interpreting the cultural text.

10. White, Metahistory , 251.

11. Systematically so, for example, by Karl Schorsky in discussion at The Johns Hopkins University, 1985. There is of course a side to Burckhardt and to the Renaissance that is not going to be represented here. This is what might be called the Black or Evil Renaissance so memorably captured in some of Burckhardt's accounts of princely rulers, and which has been rather significantly forgotten in recent discussions of Burckhardt.

12. White, Metahistory , 250-51.

13. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 247. The sweeping undoing and/or reversal of pain constitutes the at once admirable and highly problematic romance project of this book.

14. To which, among others, Fredric Jameson testifies in Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).

15. I recall, though I cannot find in print, an anthropological anecdote retold by Stephen Greenblatt in which a particular tribe showers its idol with excrement and verbally abuses it. This anecdote can serve as an allegory of negative relationship to objects of cultural veneration.

16. One example of this bondage is supplied by Jonson's Epigrammes . Beginning by establishing the medical alibi of the satirist in the prose preface, and then going on to produce regular, brief epigrams at the start of the sequence, Jonson finally writes the 196-line "The Famous Voyage" as a prolonged, excremental inversion of romantic epic (one that may also testify to the effects of all the satirical purging that has preceded it). This poem suggests the tendency of satirical representation eventually to shift attention from anterior to "posterior" forms, at the same time eliciting the biological potentialities of those terms—as when "fame's posterior trumpet" blows in The Dunciad , or when Swift's yahoos perform their continue

distinctive act of critical depreciation. While "anterior" forms may be gender-indicative, "posterior" forms evidently are not. These satirical developments remain, however, on the horizon in my account as conventionally post-Renaissance ones in English literary history.

17. Jacqueline Miller, Poetic License: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

18. Margaret Ferguson's work in this area has not yet been published. See, however, Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, eds., The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Margaret Hannay, ed., Silent But For the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985).

19. Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 121.

20. Richard S. Sylvester, ed., English Sixteenth-Century Verse: An Anthology (New York: Norton, 1984); Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding, eds., Two Early Tudor Lives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962); H.E. Rollins, ed., Tottel's Miscellany (1557), 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1928-29).

21. Some recent discussions of "Lucrece" that represent the state of the art are not taken into account in this discussion, either because they appeared after it had substantially been completed or because they do not affect my reading of the poem in what I have to emphasize is the framework of this book. See, however, Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986); Joel Fineman, "Shakespeare's Will : The Temporality of Rape," Representations 20 (1987): 25-76. I should also like to acknowledge in a general way Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

22. Jonathan Goldberg, James 1 and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).

23. In addition to repeatedly restaging the oedipal scenario in his works and also rereading the Oedipus story, in The Wisdom of the Ancients , as the great mythic authorization of knowledge and power, Bacon contributes importantly to the process of making woman, as Luce Irigaray has put it, into "science's unknown." For an account of Woman's being reduced to the object-type of scientific discovery, and of Bacon's continue

part in this, see among others Carolyn Merchant, Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1983).

24. Arthur Marotti, John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), paradigmatically establishes an approach that will be applicable to, and is already strongly informed by, texts and manuscripts of the sixteenth century.

1. In the most recent as well as the best and most theoretically informed book on English prosody of which I am aware, Derek Attridge writes that "Wyatt's metrical intentions remain one of the most enduring of prosodic mysteries, and I have no solution to offer." An account is nevertheless given of what makes some Wyatt lines seem irregular ( The Rhythms of English Poetry [London: Longman, 1982], 374-77). The discussion of these meters, likewise of Wyatt's intentions (or mysterious lack of intentions), is complicated by the almost universal claim that "rhythm," "the natural rhythms of the English language," or even ''the ring of truth" take precedence over metrical regularity in all good English poetry, including Wyatt's. Whether Wyatt is metrically deficient or is obeying higher, intuitive laws thus remains in contention; implicitly, however, we are often led to believe that Wyatt's poems are metrically regular constructions in which strains of natural language are periodically and thrillingly audible. I am aware of no discussion in which it is recognized that the many oppositions that structure the debate about Wyatt's meters (wild/tame, art/nature, savage/civil, voluntary/involuntary, regular/irregular) are problematized, as are the borderlands between them, in the very poems under consideration.

2. The metrical issue intersects with exceedingly vexed and difficult editorial problems, including those presented by Wyatt's handwriting and practices of revision. See, however, R. A. Rebholz, Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 33-58, which includes extensive notes on Wyatt's meters; Joost Daalder, ed., Sir Thomas Wyatt: Collected Poems (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), xi-xiii; H. A. Mason, Editing Wyatt: An Examination of Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

3. Sylvester, ed., English Sixteenth-Century Verse , 130, 139. break

4. A significant opening up of the sociocultural and ideological determinants of sixteenth-century anthologies has been made in published and unpublished work by, for example, Arthur Marotti. See "'Love is not love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order," ELH 49 (1982):396-428.

5. Tottel's Miscellany 1:2.

6. In this context, the use of a modernized edition of Wyatt is unthinkable, since spelling modernizations frequently suppress crucial implication, homonymic/homophonous kinship, and atavistic elements in the poems. The state-of-the-art texts from Yale and Oxford, cited above, are thus excluded. No edition of Wyatt will be ideal—nothing about Wyatt ever seems to be—and no claim is being  made here about the superior authority or fidelity to Wyatt's "intentions" of unmodernized editions. I have in fact decided to cite here the lightly edited though over-punctuated Kenneth Muir, ed., Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), supplemented by Sylvester and by Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thompson, eds., Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1969). "What vaileth trouth" is cited from Muir, Collected Poems , 3.

7. Stephen Greenblatt, "Power, Sexuality and Inwardness in Wyatt's Poetry," Renaissance Self-Fashioning , 115-56. See also Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading In Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).

8. Guild-identity, constructed in a setting of apprentices, master-craftsmen, closed guilds, and protected "mysteries," may seem to have been oppressively and exclusively masculinist as a historical fact, yet the symbolic possibilities (which may also be impossibilities) of the tool-bearing craftswoman are a common trope in traditional literature.

9. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, in Sylvester, ed., English Sixteenth-Century Verse , 214.

10. There are several accounts of Wyatt's career, including his possible involvement with Anne Boleyn (a number of whose alleged lovers were executed along with her) and his well-documented defense on the charge of treason in 1541. A good chronological summary appears in Rebholz, ed., Complete Poems , 19-32.

11. I use the term "emissary" advisedly, taking cognizance both of Wyatt's public role as diplomatic go-between and of the term bouc émissaire , recently given critical currency by René Girard, Bouc émissaire , trans- soft

lated as The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). The failure of mediations is implicitly or explicitly considered by, among others, Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning , Alexandra Halasz in "Wyatt's David," Texas Studies in Literature and Language , 30 (1988): 320-44, and Peter Sacks, in "Interpreting the Genre: The Elegy of Mourning," in The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 1-37.

12. The two accounts I have principally in mind are Stephen Greenblatt's seminal one, cited above, and Marguerite Waller's belated review, "Academic Tootsie: The Denial of Difference and the Difference It Makes," Diacritics 17 (1987): 2-20. Both these arguments call for detailed attention in their own terms, and I claim neither to do justice to them nor to adjudicate their differences. I should merely like to emphasize the key strategic role in Greenblatt's argument, and in the empowering of a referential new historicism, of "Whoso list to hunt."

13. A fifteenth-century Italian imitation, cited by Rebholz, ed., Complete Poems , 343, may intervene. One achievement of this edition is to suggest the huge extent and complexity of Wyatt's intertexts.

14. Waller, "Academic Tootsie," extensively surveys the sources and implications of this allusion in Petrarch and Wyatt, also privileging its implied invocation of the Christ figure in his interactions with women. (In Waller's argument, Christ becomes a figure, and perhaps the only one, who deconstructs the constitutive but denied differences of masculinist ideology.) For my purposes, it is enough to cite Rebholz, ed., Complete Poems , 343 n. 13: "Whatever Wyatt's immediate source, [ noli me tangere ] derives ultimately from a Latin motto, Noli me tangere quia Caesaris sum , supposedly inscribed on the collars of Caesar's hinds. That motto in turn was probably derived from a conflation of John, xx, 17 and Matthew, xxii, 21. In the first, the risen Jesus tells Mary Magdalen not to touch his body. In the second, Jesus tells the Pharisees to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's." A detail omitted in this account, but cited by other commentators, is the highly pertinent "romantic" one that Caesar's deer were still being found with their collars on long after Caesar's death.

15. Wyatt's banishment is noted by Sylvester, ed., English Sixteenth-Century Verse , 173.

16. Puttenham's chapter on the "courtier" figure of allegory or extended metaphor, with its allusion to Tiberius as the figure of the hidden, absent, and dissimulating ruler, has attracted a great deal of recent notice, continue

starting with Daniel Javitch's seminal Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978). It has been discussed, inter alia , by Louis Montrose, "'Of gentlemen and shepheardes': The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form," ELH 50 (1983): 415-60. Invisible, dissimulating, "emissary" Tiberian rule, reflexively instantiated in Jonson's "stoic" Sejanus , has been discussed by Jonathan Goldberg in James 1 and the Politics of Literature .

The stoic aesthetic is well discussed by Gordon Braden in Anger's Privilege: Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Braden draws attention to both the capacity for negation (not "negative capability"!) and the incipiently boundless, inordinate antiromance of Latin stoicism.

1. As in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions , ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987).

2. My approach to Surrey and my sense of the Surrey personal history and persona are influenced, perhaps inordinately so, by the essay of S.P. Zitner, "Truth and Mourning in a Sonnet by Surrey," ELH 50 (1983): 59-80. This essay constitutes an integral reading of the sonnet, in which formal, generic, historicist, and literary-historical data are skillfully processed. I have also, however, consulted Edwin Casady, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (New York: MLA, 1938). My Gestalt for this period, as well as the reintegrating criticism of Surrey I am attempting in the wake of Zitner, depends, in ways I can only incompletely acknowledge, on the work of historians, editors, and literary critics dealing with the Tudor period.

3. Tottel's Miscellany 1:32, 39.

4. Two crucial and fairly general treatments of the politics of Tudor sonneteering on which I depend here as elsewhere are Louis Adrian Montrose's "'Of gentlemen and shepheardes'" and Arthur Marotti's "'Love is not love.'" But the dark story is now quite widely told.

5. We need to keep in mind that Surrey's autobiographies are always those of a subject whose doubleness is inescapably engraved in the difference between his Howard name and Surrey "style." Understandably, if absurdly and misleadingly, the MLA Bibliography lists the author under continue

his style. Listing Sidney under Astrophil would not be so very different from listing Howard under Surrey. Stephen Foley, in "The Honorable Style of the Earl of Surrey," Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1980, anticipates my argument in some respects. He recognizes suicide as one among a range of options in the gentleman's repertoire (or rhetoric), though obviously I differ from him in establishing a suicidal telos in Surrey's work.

6. Zitner, "Truth and Mourning," amusingly elaborates a Monty Python version of Surrey, but it must be recalled that this version, which includes Surrey's hellraising in London with his servant ( pour épater le bourgeois , a point on which Nashe picks up), is part of Surrey's self-presentation in his "satirical" poems. And when Surrey puts himself on the battlefield as Monty Python, something less than fully comic ensues.

7. Sylvester, English Sixteenth-Century Verse , 185.

8. Sylvester avowedly depends on Emrys Jones, ed., Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), which I have periodically consulted, and from which Sylvester takes some notes verbatim. He is also aware of several earlier editions of Surrey's poems. In response to my claim that many poems by Surrey are misidentified as Petrarchan imitations, a friend has written that "the attribution [of "Thassyryans king"] is not from the Jones edition. . . . I have also found that both the Oxford and the Norton (third and fourth editions) Anthologies of English Literature consistently . . . misattribute Wyatt and Surrey poems to Petrarch, following a numbering that I have not been able to find anywhere in Petrarch editions. Something funny is going on . . ." Whatever is going on, with the preposterous results we see, it reveals the blind determination of literary-historical commentators to assimilate Wyatt and Surrey fully to "Petrarchanism."

9. "The Ascent of Mont Ventoux," in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man , ed. Ernst Cassirer et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 36-46.

10. Robert Durling, ed. and trans., Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The "Rime sparse" and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976): 258.

11. My discussion here, including some of its locutions, is indebted to the excellent first chapter of Gordon Braden's Anger's Privilege.

12. I am indebted to something like a common critical lore of the English sonnet form, some of which Zitner, "Truth and Mourning," re- soft

hearses, but for which considerable originality can be claimed by J.W. Lever, The English Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1965).

13. Zitner gives a fairly detailed account of Surrey's miseries in the Muttrell (Montreuil) engagement, in which Clere was mortally wounded. Henry's military exploits have been variously assessed, though it seems clear that the most decisive military conquest of his reign was the defeat of the Scots at Flodden, an engagement in which the Scottish nobility was practically wiped out for a generation. This defeat was inflicted while Henry was absent from the country in France, and while Catherine of Aragon and Wolsey presided. A highly parodic recall of Henry's French "conquests," resulting primarily in syphilis, is included in The Unfortunate Traveller .

14. I take this account mainly from J.J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968).

15. My characterization of Sidney here owes a lot to Richard McCoy, Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1979).

16. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning , 121. Alexandra Halasz suggests in "Wyatt's David" that, for Wyatt, Henry VIII might redeem himself by public confession and penitence, in which case as "David" he might be assimilated to a New Testament dispensation of poetic and public righteousness. (Dante among others supplies the model for this assimilation.) Failing Henry's acceptance of this generously offered role, which does more than justice to the royal poetic gift, Wyatt as royal poet is left to act it out himself.

17. It may be asked what else Surrey could have done than expose himself to danger. If, as seems to have been the case, Henry VII and Henry VIII followed standard Machiavellian procedure under which usurpers must cut down all possible rival claimants, Surrey's lying low would not necessarily have helped, and might have attracted suspicion in itself. Whatever the victim does may not work since, in Braden's acute formulation, imperial paranoia always verifies itself ( Anger's Privilege ).

18. Suggested by Joel Fineman in Shakespeare's Perjur'd Eye .

19. For the "homosocial" structure, I am indebted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). What I would want to emphasize is the antithetical interlocking of the homosocial and oedipal continue

scenarios, each of which gives a different though perhaps ultimately reconcilable account of the production and transmission ("between men") of sociocultural power. While the oedipal is seen from the side of the masculine observer/participant, the homosocial is seen from the side of the feminine observer/nonparticipant. Shakespeare in Hamlet may see it both ways.

20. I am influenced here by Peter Sacks, The English Elegy .

21. For a suggestive account of the represented relationship between Surrey and Wyatt, see R. B. Twombley, "Surrey's Fidelity to Wyatt," Studies in Philology 77 (1978): 376-87.

22. The crossover point between the oedipal and the homosocial may be the figure of the empowered male, indeterminately the father who owns the mother or the one whom Milton calls the Elder Brother. This is the one who by law of primogeniture is doomed, in every sense, to succeed unless displaced by a younger sibling, and who, again by unfair virtue of primogeniture, enjoys privileged possession of the mother for a certain time. In the homosocial scenario, fathers effectively don't exist except in and through empowered mothers, and the structure of male relationships is one of pure sibling affection and rivalry.

23. Freudian biography has increasingly emphasized though perhaps not yet sufficiently interpreted Freud's own lifelong stoicism and preoccupation with Rome. What my argument implies is that Freud, as erotic psychologist, willy-nilly replays a certain Petrarchanism. In this context, one can enter a protest against the ongoing foolishness of having Freud's basic subject-terminology Latinized in the English translation: ego, id, superego, etc. The overpraised Strachey translation, self-described as "standard" and representing a particular institutionalization of psychoanalysis, looks like it's becoming the "eternal" monument to a possible misreading.

1. Endless fascination with the "life" or enigmatic figure of More can be inferred from the repeated attempts of biographers to capture both. The most recent, highly ambitious attempt is that of Richard Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1984).

2. William Roper, The Life of Sir Thomas More , in Two Early Tudor continue

Lives , 197-254. While one can appreciate Marius's attempt, referred to above, modern biography reciprocally enables one to appreciate Roper's attempt. Its spareness implies extreme selectivity—whole areas of More's life are simply ignored—and a capacity to make the smallest detail count. Indeed, Roper's text, which is also Roper's "life," demonstrates an ability to distinguish between structure and circumstantial clutter. Judith Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), has written about Roper's text as one ideally instantiating a bio-hagiographic merger of art and life (40-51). This particular act of faith or ultimately of Christian witnessing is necessarily opposed in my reading. The "folly" reading of More is already launched by 1555, when the chronicler Edward Hall, cited by Marius (518), observes that More is either "a foolish wise man or a wise foolish man."

3. Stephen Greenblatt, "At the Table of the Great," Renaissance Self-Fashioning , 29-30.

4. The hagiographic representation of constancy is more than just a Christian undertaking in the sixteenth century, just as the "virtue" in question is more than just a Christian one; its stoic provenance is well known. The hagiographic impulse asserts itself strongly in sixteenth-century secular contexts; Sidney, for example, construes the epic hero as a figure of ideal constancy in all the vicissitudes of the narrative: "Only let Aeneas be worn in the tablet of your memory . . . how in storms, how in sports, how in war, how in peace, how a fugitive, how to strangers, how to his own; lastly how in his inward self . . . he will be found in excellency fruitful." The hero of epic action thus becomes the stoic par excellence (Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry , ed. Geoffrey Shepherd [London: Nelson, 1965], 119-20). Spenser, whose Book 1 of The Faerie Queene gives more than a casual nod in the direction of the hagiographic Golden Legend , published in English by Caxton in 1483, overtly attempts hagiography in his "legend" of Redcrosse/St. George, though what ensues is a portrayal of one whose great lack seems to be stoic constancy or "singleness.'' As legend succeeds legend in The Faerie Queene , constancy seems capable of being marked only as the virtue that is always absent, whatever the gender of the protagonist. In the "Mutabilitie" cantos its lack is formally marked, since we have only the fragmentary cantos of Mutability, not the purported Legend of Constancy to which they belong. break

5. More not only entertains Henry VIII but apparently instructs him in astronomical lore and calculations. What More rejects along with the role of the entertainer is that of the natural philosopher, skilled in material phenomena.

6. It has been suggested by J.J. Scarisbrick, for example, in Henry VIII , that all the major personages of More's "life" are politically significant while he is not: Wolsey as gifted and tireless administrator-diplomat seriously committed to the ideal of European peace; Thomas Cromwell (More's successor as chancellor) as a bureaucratic genius who developed stable administrative procedures for a centralized state; Henry VIII as one who, despite his vagaries, contributed significantly to the development of English national power and visibility. For Scarisbrick, each of these figures has an intelligible political agenda and some ability to carry it out; More has none, and he is a scarcely appreciable figure in the larger picture. The most systematic reading of More's political career as such is given by J.J. Guy, The Public Career of Thomas More (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), and even it must conclude with the remark that More failed at last: "his ship had sunk with all hands" (201). The point made by Guy is that More does not just fail, but is outmaneuvered politically by Thomas Cromwell.

7. Thomas More, Utopia , trans. Edward Surtz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 49-50. It is impossible to track here the endless criss-crossing between Roper's "life" and More's self-representations in Utopia . It should be noted, however, that in Cardinal Morton's "family," various filial roles are rehearsed, including those of clown, lawyer, and philosopher (9-57).

8. "Failing political conversion More's continued presence in Henrician England undermined forces of social constraint which buttressed the revolutionary morality of blameless conformity and obedience to parliamentary and royal authority," Guy, Public Career , 202. "Political conversion" is a significant locution in the context of my argument as well as Guy's, since it implies that conversion (like revelation) does not go only one way.

9. Two Early Tudor Lives presents powerfully antithetical figures in More and Wolsey, with Wolsey, of course, the overt figure of monstrous vanity, worldliness, and empty show. It is ironic, however, that Wolsey too wears a hairshirt, a fact discovered only when his corpse is stripped, not "accidentally" beforehand. break

10. The question of More's sexuality and even of the "special" relation to Margaret has always hovered in discussions of his life and career, including Greenblatt's, in ways to which the Marius biography gives partial access. Critics have noted not just More's hairshirt but his self-flagellations, and have connected his controversial violence and persecution of heretics with a certain sexual obsessiveness. (It is in the register of obsessiveness and sadomasochistic violence that More's sexuality has most often been construed.) For my argument, More's own remark is significant: at a time when Margaret was severely ill, More observed that if she had died he "would never have meddled with worldly matters after" (Marius, Thomas More , 226; my emphasis). During this illness, More performs what Roper records as his one miracle. When the doctors give Margaret up for lost, More goes into a kind of vatic trance, from which he emerges with the suggestion that she be given an enema ("clyster," 213) while sleeping. This having been done, she recovers miraculously. An imagined, then literal, penetration of her body becomes the miracle cure. What has to be recalled in all readings, including hagiographic ones, is the extent to which terms like "life" and "spirit'' are bawdily contaminated in the period in which this biography is written. When Guy, for example, lugubriously concludes that More "earned his place among those who have enlarged the horizon of the human spirit" ( Public Career , 203), one wants to respond with something more complicated than the pious "amen."

11. Making this strong—perhaps exorbitant—claim for Roper's very "slight" text may seem implausible. What I would suggest, however, is that the text bears witness to a still imperfectly comprehended cultural moment, from which exorbitant consequences may indeed flow. It is characteristic of various slight, "artless" Renaissance texts to produce just this excess: Lazarillo de Tormes, The Prince, The Praise of Folly, Utopia itself.

12. Processes of displacement and construction are occurring all over Roper's text. "Son Roper," constructed by More and displacing the biological son, also reconstructs himself in this text, even contesting More's possession of his "life." More's choice of the less attractive of two potential brides who are also sisters (198-99) saves his own sexual energy from being inwardly consumed in the family and at the exogamous, homogenerational level; it thus frees it from a politically and culturally predetermined end, enabling both it and its objects to be reconstructed. The continue

clever, educated Margaret, constructed by More in his own image, displaces the vulgar, ignorant, and rebellious wife (Dame Alice is More's second wife, which may explain his paranoia about family unfaithfulness should he die); she also displaces the other sister, whose laughter at the hairshirt may be more than a sign of her worldliness. The pattern of reconstruction is also visible outside the text: More begins reconstructing Roper by converting him from Lutheranism, while a not-so-naive Roper may "seduce" More as an object of conversion.

13. My connecting Roper's Life to the Jacobean Shakespeare depends somewhat on the story being told in this book, which is one of eventual symbolic restoration. This story implies that the phase from Edward VI through Elizabeth I is an interregnum in which one boy and two women rule, distorting if not suspending the patriarchal construction of power. As soon as James is king, history begins to repeat itself. In Lear , it may be said that Goneril and Regan immediately take up their options on power within the patriarchy, embarking on a highly competitive stripping, humiliation, and final emasculation of patriarchal figures. Cordelia reserves her option, apparently exercising it, however, when she returns at the head of an army to restore the kingdom and absolve Lear. Perhaps Edmund, the "natural" son and thus rival of the "natural" (that is, most political?) daughter, intuits something like this when he "gratuitously" orders her execution.

14. Stephen Greenblatt, "Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture," in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts , ed. Parker and Quint, 210-24. The scenario I have outlined of course combines the Freudian daughterly seduction and oedipal ones, and turns the repetition of the former into the undoing of the latter. In Freud's own intellectual chronology, daughterly seduction comes before oedipal theory and is annulled by it; in this scenario, daughterly seduction is postoedipal as regards the patriarch and pre- or antioedipal as regards the son. Its repetition and inversion allow it to reappear in these different guises and positions. Daughterly seduction also "successfully" repeats the oedipal son's thwarted impulse towards maternal incest and paternal displacement, allowing him to be reborn as a father indeed. Shakespeare translates Dante's "Vergine madre, figlia del tuo figlio" ( Paradiso 33) into the secular chiasmus "Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget" ( Pericles 5.2.197). break

1. C. S. Lewis, "New Learning: New Ignorance," in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama , vol. 3 of The Oxford History of English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 1-65.

2. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., eds., The Renaissance Philosophy of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

3. Notably Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). At present, the term "paradigm" continues to be used in interpretation, though seldom with Kuhnian technicality. I assume the continuing usefulness of the term, which predates Kuhn even in its somewhat "Kuhnian" sense, yet I also recognize that the term is no longer useful insofar as it implies a model of absolute discontinuity and a unidirectional temporality of change.

4. Judith H. Anderson, Biographical Truth , 27-39.

5. Wolsey died in 1530 and Cavendish evidently completed his Life in 1558. Comparably, More was executed in 1535 and Roper's Life was completed ca. 1557. The publication of both these "redeeming" Catholic lives at that time must be regarded as somewhat opportune.

6. Thomas Wyatt, "Myne owne John Poyntz," in Sylvester, English Sixteenth-Century Verse , 170-73.

7. Perhaps it would be fairer to say "incipiently theatricalized" in this context, in which a paradigm shift is being claimed. The theatricalization of conscience proceeds apace during the English Renaissance, however, and by the seventeenth century, according to Jonathan Goldberg, conscience has become a theatrical motif in itself ("The Theatre of Conscience," in James 1 and the Politics of Literature , 113-63). Questions of the kind raised by More's performance and Roper's representation of sanctity are articulated, for example, by Donne in Pseudo-martyr and Ignatius his Conclave . The failure of death to signify authentic martyrdom (true witnessing) is bound up with the theatricalization even of the saintly end.

8. Part of what distinguishes Wyatt from More (and from Catholic hagiographers) is a nascent and highly iconoclastic "Protestant poetics." Producing the image of the saint in life or letters becomes a highly problematical (indeed, suspect) undertaking in these new Protestant terms, as continue

witness, among others, the Spenser of The Faerie Queene and the Milton of Eikonoklastes . In "Wyatt's David," Halasz interestingly contrasts Wyatt's iconoclastic and nonrecuperative representation of David in the Penitential Psalms with Dante's recuperative one in Purgatorio and Paradiso .

9. Greenblatt has not extensively referred to Cavendish in print as far as I know, yet his references to Cavendish in teaching and discussion imply this utility of the Life of Wolsey.

10. Baldessare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier , trans. Charles Singleton (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 293-94.

11. Thomas More, Utopia , 81; 91-101.

12. The disembodied quality of this power is definitively identified by Jonathan Goldberg as the problem for the conspirators in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar . See James 1 and the Politics of Literature , 164-76. One might suggest that it is part of Coriolanus's madness to attempt ideal reembodiment of that power in himself, thus detaching it from all opportunistic appropriations, failing representations, and theatrical mediations. The attempt doesn't make him any less a "Roman actor," in Goldberg's phrase, than his Shakespearean predecessors, and his stupendous negations invest him with a negative theatrical charisma unequalled on the Shakespearean stage—at least until his collapse before Volumnia, an even more stupendous Roman actor. On a slightly different point, Cavendish suggests that one reconstructive possibility for the disenfranchised traditional nobility is that of becoming the political "prophets," contra Wolsey, of Henry's Reformation. Hence the startling moment in which the Duke of Suffolk, prompted by the king, confronts Wolsey with the words: "'It was never merry in England whilst we had Cardinals among us.' Which words were so set forth with such a vehement countenance that all men marvelled what he intended" (93).

1. Yvor Winters, "Aspects of the Short Poem in the English Renaissance," in Forms of Discovery (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1967); 1-20. This is not to say that Gascoigne has received no attention in recent criticism, only that he has not functioned as a particularly significant exemplum. See, however, Joseph Loewenstein, Responsive Readings: Versions of continue

Echo in Pastoral, Epic, and the Jonsonian Masque (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 57-73.

2. The Gascoigne anthologies are A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers [1573], revised, reissued, and self-censored, partly in response to complaints, as The Posies [1573].

3. Edmund Spenser, Poetical Works , ed. J.C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 456.

4. This is not a step to be taken lightly, fraught as it is with possibilities of misconstruction, as well as of offense to and appropriation of black women. Yet without taking this heuristic step, it is hard to imagine a way of eliciting the significance of these sonnets, which may be even more deeply disconcerting, liberalism notwithstanding, than the homoerotic Young Man sonnets. A double crossing in idealized masculine representation is being effected when the Black Woman becomes its subject: it is a simultaneous crossing of "color" and gender that dislocates the epideictic conventions of the fair Young Man sonnets as well as of Petrarchanism generally. The dislocation may additionally be one of social class (the woman in place of the lady) and bodily representation (the diseased, deficient body in place of the whole one). The very act of writing becomes conceptually inverted in this sonnet sequence; instead of being an instrument that marks the chaste white paper, the pen becomes figuratively a stylus penetrating the cosmetic whiteness of the page to expose a dark "primary text" and/or primary object of desire below. Without purporting to summarize all the effects of these amazing sonnets, including their equivocal praise of miscegenation, I will suggest that they constitute a singularly radical attempt to conceive of the "other," which is also the repressed primary text, of any representation in which the White Man is explicitly or implicitly the idealized subject. My term "double crossing" implies the complex chiasmus involved as well as the possibility of further betrayal of rather than by the Black Woman in this representation. She is the one who will repeatedly be excluded from any order of "likeness.''

5. Cited from Gascoigne's "The Griefe of Joye," in Ronald C. Johnson, George Gascoigne (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972).

6. See the frequently and deservedly reprinted minor classic Certayn Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse , in Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays , 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), 1:45-47.

7. On the strength of his siege reporting, Gascoigne has sometimes continue

been taken as a precursor of the modern journalist or even war correspondent. It is noteworthy that Gascoigne projects various authorial functions including those of the Secretary and the Reporter, thus implying both a skepticism about "authorship" and ongoing difficulty in assimilating these dispersed functions to any construction of integral authorship to which he might lay claim.

8. In this connection, see especially the important essay by Jane Hedley, "Allegoria, Gascoigne's Master Trope," ELR 11 (1981): 148-64.

9. The constitutive scene of the poem's reading as real or imagined social message is a staple of Shakespearean comedy, notably in As You Like It . This constitutive scene is also well discussed by Hedley.

10. Hedley, "Allegoria, Gascoigne's Master Trope," 156.

11. If this seems unduly sweeping or arrogant, particularly in the wake of feminism, it testifies to the virtual impasse at which we arrive when our thinking of the subject as a cultural phenomenon is either Freudian or nothing at all. I do not underrate the power or interest of the Kristevan conception of a proto-subject prior even to narcissistic determination, and partaking only of a nondifferential dyadic relation to the mother that is at once constitutive and annihilating. (It is from this dyad that the subject as such requires to be abjected, perhaps repeatedly through the agency of so-called purification rituals.) It is not yet clear what systematic cultural rethinking along these lines would entail, or how feasible it would prove. See, however, Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection , trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

12. By broad cultural tradition here I mean international tradition, in which Spenser doesn't necessarily count as a Major Poet. It is easy to recall as well a New Critical dispensation under which Spenser wasn't even a Major English Poet. His metapoetic situation is implied in the tradition according to which he is "the poet's poet," not a primary "maker."

13. "Gascoigne's woodmanship," in Sylvester, English Sixteenth-Century Verse , 268-72.

14. Hedley, "Allegoria, Gascoigne's Master Trope."

15. Thanks to the work of Montrose and others, the represented pastoral scene has been converted from one of apparent retreat into one of intense, displaced, political negotiation. Pastoral otium is thus recharacterized as strenuous negotium . The "invasion" of masculine pastoral negotiating space, which is also a hunting space, by the woman is defini- soft

tively though of course incompletely staged by Shakespeare in As You Like It .

16. Charles Prouty, George Gascoigne: Elizabethan Courtier, Soldier, Poet (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942).

17. Roger Ascham, Toxophilus, in English Works of Roger Ascham , ed. W.A. Wright (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 112.

18. How it is read as that text varies considerably, even under the psychoanalytic dispensation since Ernest Jones. For a very strong feminist reading, see Jacqueline Rose, "Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare," in Alternative Shakespeares , 95-118. My "excluding drama" clause notwithstanding, it is hardly irrelevant that Gascoigne coauthored an English translation of Ludovico Dolce's Jocasta and was also the author of masques, including one presented for the queen's entertainment at Kenilworth in 1575.

19. An excellent discussion of these variants with special reference to Shakespeare's simultaneously anomalous and seminal position is contained in work forthcoming by Julia Lupton of the University of California at Irvine and Kenneth Reinhard of the University of California at Los Angeles.

1. The historical legend of Lucrece is discussed by Ian Donaldson in The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Textual predecessors of Shakespeare's poem include: Livy, Ad Urbe Condita (trans. Philemon Holland, 1600) 1:57-60, 3:44-49, in a version conceivably pertinent to the Folio "Rape of Lucrece"; Ovid, Fasti 2:721-852; Augustine, City of God 1:19; Chaucer, Legend of Good Women 1680-1885; Gower, Confessio Amantis 6.4593-5130; Painter, Pallace of Pleasure (1556). More remote impingement might be traced to versions by Dionysius of Halicarnassus; Servius; Plutarch; Diodorus Siculus; Valerius Maximus; Florus; Dio Cassius; Emporius; Seneca; Jerome; Tertullian; Salutati; Machiavelli; Tyndale; Edward More; John Case. See also Heather Dubrow, "The Rape of Clio: Gender and Genre in Shakespeare's Lucrece ," Shakespeare Newsletter 34 (1984): 3.

2. I have been positively and negatively influenced by William Beatty continue

Warner, "Reading Rape: Marxist-Feminist Figurations of the Literal," Diacritics (Winter 1983): 12-32. Warner criticizes the notion that rape is purely signified in Clarissa: he antithetically conceives of rape as a circulating figure in the text, which such critics as Terry Castle and Terry Eagleton aggressively literalize. My main differences with Warner arise from his constituting antithetical realms of textual circulation and free play on one hand and of inert sociolegal fact on the other. I wish to emphasize writing rape rather than reading it, and to insist that writing goes between these antithetical realms, if such they are.

3. As significantly "entitled" women, protagonists like Lucrece and Clarissa are hardly instances of broad social fact, nor do they self-identically and exclusively instantiate the feminine. It could be suggested that my account, unlike those of Terry Castle, Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's "Clarissa" (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), and Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class-Struggle in Richardson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), dehistoricizes the issues. For Eagleton especially, the figure of Clarissa is a function of a particular, determinate shift from aristocratic landowning to bourgeois property relations. Clarissa acts for the latter against the former, yet her "excessive" adherence to the codes of the latter disrupts the codes. A very similar argument could be made, however, about the Shakespearean Lucrece in her earlier historical setting; in fact, the argument practically makes itself.

4. Under reifying criticism, I include the work of Eagleton and Castle, and of Warner inasmuch as he antithetically reifies a free text and a fixed world of sociolegal fact. In relation to "Lucrece," the reifying tendency is represented, for example, by Coppélia Kahn, "The Rape in Shakespeare's Lucrece ," Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 45-76; Katherine Eisaman Maus, "Taking Tropes Seriously: Language and Violence in Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece ," Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 66-82.

5. William Shakespeare, "Lucrece" in The Poems , ed. F.T. Prince, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1960), 80. Prince represents one limit in regarding the poem as virtually pure, unmotivated, and tiresome figuration from start to finish.

6. I make no claim about what women dream, yet the claim that they dream inter alia of rape is made by Helen Hazan, Endless Rapture: Rape, Romance and the Female Imagination (New York, 1983), cited in Warner, "Reading Rape," 13. Nothing new or different is proved about rape even continue

if that is the case, and it is certainly no argument either for women's social complicity in rape or for any sociolegal tolerance of it.

7. Needless to say, the woman's property in her body or self is virtually a contradiction in terms in the poem and elsewhere in Shakespeare. Such property is property in the no-thing ( res nulla ) that woman must be in phallocentric representation. Yet even that negative ownership or property is not immune to invidious appropriation, as Shakespeare equally suggests. In the invidious eye of the beholder, that paradoxically unownable property may become the most desirable of all.

8. In unpublished work, Mark Rasmussen of Johns Hopkins University has interestingly discussed Catullus's lament of Ariadne abandoned by Theseus, in "The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis," as a model for such extended complaint in Latin and neoclassical poetry. The problematic of such prolonged complaint includes that of its solitariness—its lack of, and lack of any desire for, a social audience or participation.

9. On the blazon and its implications, see Louis Adrian Montrose, "'Eliza, queene of the shepheardes' and the Pastoral of Power," ELR 10 (1980): 153-82; Nancy Vickers, "'The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's 'Lucrece,'" in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare , ed. Caroline Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980): 95-115; and Catherine R. Stimson, "Shakespeare and the Soil of Rape," in the same volume, 56-64.

10. There is now a very extensive critique, largely feminist, of the master-gaze of the male beholder in Western painting, film, and visual representation generally. A summary of the issues and some of the criticism is included in Michael Fried, "Courbet's Femininity," forthcoming. I am not aware of any extensive comparable discussion of the reciprocal gaze that is troped in "Lucrece." It also needs to be recalled that reading is not "gazing."

11. I acknowledge the usefulness of Joel Fineman's discussion of colors and tints in "Venus and Adonis," Johns Hopkins University, 1986.

12. Reading the woman's blush as the undecidable sign of her innocence or guilty complicity is too widespread in literature and criticism to need particular citation. Suffice that the reading of the blush is an issue in "Lucrece," as in Much Ado and Clarissa , to name only those. Frequently in the criticism, but not in Shakespearean representation, "reading rape" seems to come down to a reading of the blush. break

13. Jonathan Goldberg has emphasized that the biological is always and already written, subject only to revision as the (auto) biographical. See "Milton's Prose Autobiographies," English Renaissance Prose 1 (1987): 3.

14. Susan Brownmiller, Against our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).

15. In work forthcoming, Jonathan Goldberg systematically and powerfully examines writing (writtenness) as the material matrix of all Renaissance constructions of universal anthropology, of privileged and repressed subjecthood, and of representation generally. He also gives a landmark account of "the violence of the letter" in Renaissance representation.

16. The question cui bono? could somewhat tediously be thrashed out with reference to the action of the poem, yet the point I would rather make is that the action of Lucrece—both figure and poem—is not just inconclusive but unconcluded inasmuch as it continues in our criticism.

17. I acknowledge the forthcoming work of Laura Levine of Wellesley College on the homoerotic "taintedness," in the eyes of Elizabethan antitheatricalists, of the theater and all who participate in it. The claimed emasculation of the actors and, by extension, their imitative audiences, makes them virtually equivalent to depraved women in this antitheatrical discourse. break