The Erotics of Doubt

Abstract

“The Erotics of Doubt” contends that the carpe diem trope whose classical form was an expression of pragmatic Epicureanism became, during the religious upheaval of the Reformation, an unlikely but effective vehicle for articulating religious doubt. For a diverse group of early modern poets, an encounter with ancient theories of essence and substance enabled the articulation of a skeptical hypothesis almost impossible to imagine in any other cultural venue. The unassuming carpe diem trope, that is, parlays classical physics’ materialist paradigm into a robust discourse founded entirely upon the presumption of mortality. The chapter shows that the erotic invitation’s discursive environment—its pitting of assaultive rhetorician against naïve virgin—is inherently confrontational. It reveals, through readings of Herrick, Marlowe, Ralegh, and others, that the dynamic structure that propels a lusty speaker towards consummation is latent with rhetorical and dramatic potentiality. To explore these issues, the chapter turns to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, whose central crisis is generated by a series of unwelcome invitations made to the play’s singular virgin, pressed to surrender her chastity in order to spare her condemned brother from execution. The cloud of unredeemed death that hangs over the play forces a “measurement” of that chastity as weighed against the evocative materialist nightmare it fails to redeem.