The name of the ancients: Humanist homoerotics and the signs of pastoral.

Abstract

The Name of the Ancients brings the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis and structural linguistics to bear on the problem of the sign within the rhetorical treatises and pastoral poetry of the early modern period. Its central, critical observation is that the constitutively homoerotic scene of classical pastoral comes to function as the melancholic, foreclosed prelude, or unconscious, of Renaissance philosophies of language. This unconscious repeatedly returns, it repeatedly confronts early modern poets writing in the pastoral mode with the homoerotic unthought thought at the primordially repressed foundation of their epistemology. Chapter 1 argues that Spenser's pastoral poetry attempts to solve the problem of homoerotic melancholy with the compromise formation of homosociality. Richard Barnfield, a reluctant admirer of Spenser, attempts to rewrite his illustrious predecessor's cycle of pastoral poems in his own eclogues, and this rewriting is the subject of Chapter 2. Barnfield's poetry uses productive ungrammaticality to reconstruct the lost psychic space of the middle-voiced verb, and it makes this psychic space the definitive syntax of a utopian homosexuality. Chapter 3 takes a look at John Dickenson's little known though fascinating pastoral romance, Arisbas. Dickenson's poetry is also in many respects a response to Spenser. It associates the lost paradise of pastoral with bisexuality rather than with homosexuality, however, and consequently has a tendency to privilege (against the authority of humanist rhetoric) schemes (figures of language) over tropes (figures of thought). The fourth and final chapter of The Name of the Ancients considers Marlowe's Edward II as an instance of pastoral drama manque. In many respects, Marlowe's pastoral project lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from that of Spenser. What in Spenser appears as a conflict between heteroeroticism and a returning, melancholic homoeroticism is staged in Marlowe as a conflict between competing pederastic and companionate models of male homoerotic desire.