Desire, a Crooked Yearning, and the Plants of Endymion

Abstract

two print forms that located desire in the disabled body began to appear onstage with far different consequences in Renaissance England. The first of these was the contreblason, satiric verse in praise of a deformed beloved. Developed by Francesco Berni (1497–1535), Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), and Clément Marot (1496–1544) as a form of anti-Petrarchanism, the contreblason was popularized through a schoolroom exercise known as paradoxical praise, rhetoric that elevated seemingly undesirable states such as the plague, poverty, or ugliness. In the theater, Sir Tophas praises his mistress Dipsas for her coral eyes, silver lips, blue teeth, and carbuncle nose in John Lyly’s Endymion (1588); Horatio seeks physical deformities (“lips of honest hide . . . teeth of a Moor’s complexion . . . a witch’s beard”) in Fiametta, his ideal woman, in James Shirley’s The Duke’s Mistress (1638); and Dromio of Syracuse performs a global anatomy of Nell, his “swart” kitchen wench in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (1589–93). For literary critics, lyric mock encomia are seen as hostile, mocking, and misogynistic—pathologizing the women the male poets claim to admire—and twice as problematic as the blazon, which figuratively dismembers the beloved. In the lyric tradition, women are objectified by the male speaker and wholly contained within language. But in the playhouse, actors could undermine these rules in many different ways, especially given that an audience sees the beloved (a real person), whose reaction to his or her verbal portrait may generate sympathy, attention, or intimacy. Rather than list parts