ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates historicist critics such as Patrick Cheney, Paul Stegner, and Ilona Bell can provide great insight into the conflicting 'nationalisms' at work in the complaint. They can explain the complaint's 'staging' of the trauma caused by the Reformation's desacramentalizing of confession; and they can help the authors see the poem as an intervention into Renaissance debates about courtship and female chastity. For in Shakespeare's poem, the phantasy so inextricably linked to recollection not only gives figure to the trauma of the past, but calls it forth, shapes it in and as the real that is coming into being. In melancholia, Freud reminds authors, the shadow of a loved and lost object has fallen 'upon the ego' and split it. This cleavage within the ego mirrors the split between ego and unconscious. As Freud's exploration of the (non)event of the primal scene demonstrates, phantasy is frequently a process, a sustained dialectical interplay of analepsis and prolepsis.
