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SIDNEY-SPENSER  October 2000

SIDNEY-SPENSER October 2000

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Subject:

Re: affectionate shepherds

From:

shirley sharon-zisser <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

[log in to unmask]

Date:

Tue, 17 Oct 2000 02:03:04 +0200

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As a rhetorician, I might mention that "imaginary sex" is an oxymoron. As a
passionate woman, I might say I have little interest in bodies which are
beyond excavation, and no prurient or other interest in the lives of people
whose bodies are not touchable and (passionately) alive. As a scholar of
Renaissance pastoral poetry AND a rhetorician I would say, yet again, as I
and Stephen Whitworth have been arguing in print too for quite a while now,
that much of the sexual and the erotic (two distinct categories) is evident
in the *forms* of Renaissance pastoral poetry and its classical heritage,
which included, besides Virgil, the rhetorics of Aristotle, Cicero and
Quintilian, which, when re-articulated by Sherry, Peacham, Puttenham,
Fraunce, and others, are distinctly eroticized. Closely scrutinizing the
ways in which these rhetoricians (and sometimes, as in the case of Fraunce,
at the same time translators of Virgil's second eclogue and passsionate
enough admirers of Sidney and Spenser to the point of entitling treatises
*The Arcadian Rhetorike* and *The Shepheardes Logike*, or, in the case of
Puttenham, passionate enough lovers of pastoral and its classical heritage
to describe the genre as the poetic site of "first amorous musicks")
theorized rhetorical forms (such as oxymoron, or the subjunctive tense of
desire in which I am striving to write this message) can teach us
remarkably much about the very nuanced forms in which they thought about
desire and sexuality within their culture. I would insist, and, the future
tense being another  form nuancing the erotic in early modern rhetorical
theory and poetry, will continue to insist, precisely on the classical
education/heritage as what we might read, and in depth, to understand early
modern sexuality. We might consider, for example, as Stephen Whitworth does
in his article on Barnfield, how Barnfield uses the subjunctive and future
tenses, the category of the mean, and the figure of zeugma, to poeticize
oral sex between men. Who these men may or may not have been biographically
is not at all relevant to our understanding of the specifics of this oral
sex, which unfold rhetorically. We might also want to consider the psychic
and physical specifics of such oral sex as they unfold in the noun-verb
ambiguity in Shekspeare's sonnets 134 and 135. But, as I said, such
unfolding requires mastering a tradition which was an integral part of a
classical education in the Renaissance but which includes many words like
"anapodoton" and "tasis" and "tapinosis" which are still evident after all
those years but not part of "our" cultural repertoire and which Renaissance
scholars tend to neglect when they gesture toward the humanists' "classical
education." As for the parts of this education more palatable to most
current critics, such as Virgil's second eclogue (or Theocritus's less
often mentioned but no less relevant eighth idyll), we might want to
consider the aesthetic/rhetorical/semiotic stakes involved in its
reworkings by Spenser, Barnfield, and Fraunce, or the many appearances of
the "name" Corydon in Renaissance pastorals. If we do not care to learn to
read with our minds re-tuned to the categories of classical education
undergone by the humanists, upon all their nuanced rhetorical,
mythological, and literary conceptually and psychologically laden
vocabularies, and with teh same apssionate investment in our work they had
in theirs, what a very poor chance have we of ever intellectually
excavating anything but dead relics, ever accessing the subtle and
variegated ways they thought about their sexuality, from which we could
learn much with which to understand our own.  

affectionately,

Shirley Sharon-Zisser                           








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