Erotic Language As Dramatic Action in Plays by Lyly and Shakespeare
ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: EROTIC LANGUAGE AS DRAMATIC ACTION IN PLAYS BY LYLY AND SHAKESPEARE Gillian Knoll, Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Dissertation directed by: Professor Theodore B. Leinwand Department of English This study closely examines the language of desire in the dramatic works of John Lyly and William Shakespeare, and argues that contemplative and analytical speeches about desire function as modes of action in their plays. Erotic speeches do more than express desire in a purely descriptive or perlocutionary capacity distinct from the action of the play—they incite, circulate, and create eros for characters, exposing audiences to the inner workings of the desiring mind and body. For many of Lyly’s and Shakespeare’s characters, words come to constitute erotic experience. My approach to dramatic language draws from the work of cognitive linguists such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson who argue that our basic conceptual system, according to which we think, speak, and act, is metaphorical in nature. My focus on primary metaphors, which are based on sensorimotor experience, foregrounds the interdependence of erotic language and early modern notions of embodiment. Since language, thought, and action are all subject to this embodied metaphorical system, conceptual metaphors allow Lyly and Shakespeare to dramatize the often invisible, paradoxical, and potentially unknowable experience of erotic desire. My understanding of language as dramatic action derives from a theory about the attribution of human motives that Kenneth Burke, in The Grammar of Motives (1945), called dramatism. Burke uses five key terms to address human motivation—Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose—and I in turn use each of these terms to make sense of erotic desire on the early modern stage.
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