Heroic action and erotic desire in Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare

"Heroic Action and Erotic Desire in Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare" examines the relationship between representations of heroic action and erotic desire in four texts of the English Renaissance: Sir Philip Sidney's Defence of Poesy and Astrophil and Stella, Edmund Spenser's 1590 Faerie Queene, and William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. The dissertation demonstrates that these texts present erotic desire as existing in tension with the cultural valorization of heroic ideals and action in early modern England. The central argument of the dissertation is that the powerful distractions and seductions accomplished by erotic desire in this poetry function as implicit criticisms of the heroic ideal itself, and do so not only from the vantage point of the body and its pleasures, but from what on further analysis appears to be a theologically inflected suspicion of the politics of the heroic ethos. In Sidney's Defence of Poesy and Astrophil and Stella, Spenser's 1590 Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, the opposition between the claims of erotic desire and the demands of heroic action is never just the opposition between lust and virtue, or between a deformed and sensuous will and the reign of heroic reason. Instead, the force and trajectory of erotic desire in these texts provokes a questioning of the truth of the heroic ideal by providing an experience from which the worth of this ideal is made relative, exposed as incomplete and perhaps even idolatrous.;Chapter 1 describes Sidney's attempt to synthesize the duties of heroic action with the claims of erotic desire in his Defence of Poesy. Chapter 2 reads the Defence of Poesy alongside Astrophil and Stella in order to show how Sidney's sequence of secular love poetry has affinities with religious verse, which resists the overtly heroic project of his larger poetics. Chapter 3 argues that Spenser's 1590 Faerie Queene uses the figure of the "unarmed Cupid" to convey an experience of erotic desire and pleasure that provides an alternate model to that of "self-fashioning" for thinking about Spenser's ethics. And Chapter 4 argues that Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra presents the temporality of Cleopatra's desire, in contradistinction to Antony's belated heroism and Caesar's obsession with the immediate present, as (1) informed by Christian eschatology and (2) anticipatory of the temporality of theater itself.