ABSTRACT
Beginning in the 1570s and continuing for almost thirty years, the literate classes in England developed what seems to have been an insatiable appetite for writing concerned with the vicissitudes of erotic desire. There was the Petrarchan poetry for which the epoch is known. Collections of love poems, as well as the sonnet sequences, circulated in manuscript and at times even found their way into print. There were also poetic games played out through conceits oflove, answer poems, courtier disquisitions on love, and a wide variety of love poetry and prose translated from classical and continental sources. Narratives of tragic desire appeared in print, as did Ovidian elegies, anacreontics, epyllia, along with the many pastorals devoted to the trials of courtship.l The drama, too, made love its obsessive concern. Court entertainments - masques and plays - along with comedies and tragedies, staged at the Inns of Court or in the great halls of prominent Elizabethans, seemed bent on figuring out the permissible and forbidden forms of sexual relations. But from a literary historical viewpoint, perhaps the most important manifestation of the new ars erotica, was the rise of a public theater which worked variations within the same problematic of desire. This is all to suggest that England had never before experienced such intense interest in the permutations of love and the pursuit of desire. Although this chapter will attend primarily to Shakespeare's romantic comedies, it is important to remind ourselves at the outset that his comedies appeared in the wake of nearly twenty years ofintense literary activity of this kind, much ofit produced and consumed by members of the same audience who attended his plays. Available to him was an elaborate language of desire out of which sophisticated comedies could be made and presented to an audience already familiar with these materials.
