ABSTRACT
Many of Robert Herrick’s heteroerotic, secular portraits of the exchange of love tokens represent the poetic speaker oddly transforming into the thing he gives. The male subject becomes absorbed into the gift, and thus objectified, he also becomes specifically passive and static. This observation reinforces Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass’s critique of the assumption by literary critics, historians, and art historians of a strict binary opposition between Renaissance subjects and objects (3-4). As I hope to show, however, attention to Herrick’s poems about love tokens does more than simply to provide new evidence for the intermingling of subjects and objects. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass argue in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory that the period marked a crucial historical transition in relations between subjects and objects:
Herrick’s gift poems serve as particularly rich sites for furthering our understanding of relations between English Renaissance subjects and objects, in part, because they call attention to the unevenness and inconsistency of the historical change Jones and Stallybrass attempt to delineate.
