For the most recent article on Barnfield, that says all worth saying about
the topics of this discussion, and in an exceptionally brilliant way,
please see Stephen Whitworth's "Passing for Mean: Barnfield and the
Aristotelian Poetics of Copulation" in *Rhetoric Society Quarterly* 29.3
(1999):71-86.
This discussion has reached the point at which I feel I have the
intellectual responsibility to say several things. Yes, it is extremely
important, and, after four centuries, quite timely, that we recognize and
scrutinize the topics the texts we Renaissance scholars work on engage with.
That homoerotic love is one of the major concerns of the "meeting of minds"
of pastoral poets of this period is indeed clear. What is important is not
how Foucault would call this love, but how Spenser, Sidney, Barnfield,
Marlowe and others *poeticized* it -- *not* in terms of "cultural
discourses" of "friendship" vs. "sodomy," but in terms of the extremely
complex, nuanced, intricate, and fascinating semiotic and rhetorical
techniques they developed to this end.
The question of what these poets did within those semiotics of pastoral
with their own, and their peers', "identities" (a categoty I believe they
engaged consciously) and "names" is of course most intellectually and
historically pertinent -- not only in terms of biography but especially as
it functions as a category/technique within their rhetoric and semiotics.
Unfolding these semiotics requires serious thinking. Renaissance rhetoric,
a highly nuanced system which these poets knew well and exploited to
poeticize the erotic, has many categories necessary for unfolding these
semiotics but hardly ever mentioned in current criticism. Learning it and
its meanings in depth, as the poets we study did, is hard work too. But
such work is what we are paid to do.
Finally, I believe the pastoral poets and rhetoricians of the sixteenth
century would have had little interest in categories such as the
"homosocial" and the way of thinking exemplified by Foucault, and that we
are not being very good historicists when we invoke either. Witness what
George Puttenham has to say about the anagram, one rhetorical category that
has come up (without bening "named") in this discussion and indeed features
prominetly in pastoral poetizations of the homoerotic. Puttenham speaks of
the "reprehendours" of the anagram, and characetrizes them as those who
"care for nothig but matters of pollicie & discourses of estate" and esteem
"nothing that savoureth not of Theologie" (p. 82). Yet he cautions the
anagram is not the "trifle" such reprehendours who focus on politics and
theology take it to be, but a linguistic form that yields "pleasure,"
insight or "grateful news," and can led to the "receration of mens' minds."
We had best heed Puttenham, and, consequently, follow Stephen Whitworth's
lead and call to *listen* to the *forms* in which humanist homoerotics
speak their name.
Shirley Sharon-Zisser
Tel Aviv University
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