ABSTRACT
For an astonishingly long time in the contentious modern history of literary criticism – for a full quarter century, an entire lit-critter generation – we have been telling ourselves essentially the same story about psychoanalysis, gender, religion and Renaissance lyric poetry. What Sigmund Freud discovers in the fetish is the emptiness of the object. Freud, in this at least, is the true heir of Protestantism. William Shakespeare’s story of the fetish is not the story of trauma because, as it turns out, we are already fitted with one. Or, to put the same point another way: Shakespeare is telling a version of Freud’s story, but he does so neither from the credulous standpoint of belief nor from the skeptical standpoint of disillusion. Shakespeare tells his story instead from the apex of the triangle: from the position where spirit finally matters. This is where the fetishist stands.
