I thought I provided such desired details in my previous postings, specific
details from Renaissance rhetorical treaties and poems, and details
developed in more detail in publications, all of them in the future with
respect to the volume mentioned as potential source of satisfaction. But
that was and those are in the past, about which, most contemporary cholars
seem to agree, we cannot really know anything because of its radical
alterity and so can do and for the most part have been doing nothing for
the past two details but describing, not analyzing, dead bones and relics.
So in those terms, I can't be sure.    

I certainly do not find Marlowe extinct, but many of his contemporaries
dismayingly remain so. I love his poetry passionately, along with the
poetry of Barnfield, Spenser, Dickenson, Dyer, and so many others.
Hesitation, a rhetorical/psychological version of what early modern
rhetoricians would call similiture and/or noema, partakes of the
necessarily non-definite form of the erotic, where we all are. The
assumption desire can be satisfied belongs, along with most
pseudo-historicist Renaissance criticism, in the imaginary, where we aren't
but delude ourselves to be. An interesting rhetorical/psychological
observation into this state of desiring and/as the non-definite is the last
stanza of Shakespeare's dazzlingly complex and predictably neglected "A
Lover's Complaint," where, apsotrophe, the subjunctive, and anaphora
combine to form a rhetorical/erotic/sexual climax at the very moment of
realizing "satisfaction" if a delusion. If you desire more detail, but not
satisfaction, see my article "'Similes Hollow'd With Sighs': The
Transferential Erotics of the Similaic Copula in Shakespeare's 'A Lover's
Complaint'." For more, you will, I'm afraid, be constrained to confront the
proleptic yet again and await the publication of the first volume of essays
on the poem I'm editing.      

Finally, I would not satisfy anyone by affiliating myself with a village
involving a title such as "Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and
Literature." For one thing, the title is uninspiring, unpoetic and unworthy
of the aesthetic musicality of Renaissance texts. For another, I do not
share the belief underlying this volume that psychoanalysis is a
methodology which can be applied to Renaissance texts. First because
literature and rhetoric are not an object of psychoanalysis but a source
from which linguistic psychoanalysis learns about the enigmas which are its
concern. Second, because the concern with these enigmas was shared by
Renaissance rhetoricians and poets, and, since they were much more refined
and precise in their thinking about them than even those psychoanalysts who
knew this but left the task of mapping those precisions to us, linguistic
psychoanalysis has much to learn from those rhetoricians, poets, and
pastoral writers who anticipated it by four centuries. A task Stephen
Whitworth and I have begun in the past and will continue into the future,
in all forums. 

Shirley Sharon-Zisser         



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