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.