Similaic Eroticism and Polymorphic Sexuality

ABSTRACT

This article performs a psycho-rhetorical reading of the generalized theorization and specific application of simile in classical and early modern rhetorical treatises and in Shakespeare’s similaically entitled play, As You Like It (1600), respectively. Shakespeare’s play articulates multiple forms of gender and sexuality that are situated beyond the phallic norm inscribed into the privileged category of metaphor and trope; that is, cisgender heterosexuality. These forms include nonprocreative pleasure, lesbianism, homosexuality, incest, adultery, polyamory, pansexuality, drag and masquerade, and nonbinary gender, all of which are associated with the figure of simile. The similaically erotic, polymorphic language of Shakespeare’s illustrative comedy transgresses the Law of the phallus, and fabricates alternative gradations of gender, sexuality, love, li(n)king, and desire. Consequently, repressive and reductive operations of ancient and early modern rhetorical guides constitutively fail in Shakespeare’s play, and reaffirm the nonnormative forms of gender and sexuality that they aspire to censure and censor.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• psychoanalysis
• rhetoric
• sexuality
• simile

Power’s hold on sex is maintained through language, or rather through the act of discourse that creates, from the very fact that it is articulated, a rule of law.

—Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (83)

In the second essay from the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, “Infantile Sexuality,” Sigmund Freud writes that in the early stages of human life, various forms of sexuality can be detected, phrased “polymorphously perverse”:

Children can become polymorphously perverse. … An aptitude [for polymorphous perversity] is innately present in their disposition. There is consequently little resistance towards carrying them out, since the mental dams against sexual excesses—shame, disgust and morality—have either not yet been constructed at all or are only in course of construction. … This same disposition to perversions of every kind is a general and fundamental human characteristic. (191)

The phrase “polymorphic perversity” that Freud coins refers to an entire continuum of sexual structures that are beyond heteronormative cisgenderism.¹ Freud further specifies that “the first [organization of sexual life] is the oral or … pregenital sexual organization. A relic of this constructed phase of organization … may be seen in thumb-sucking, in which the sexual activity, detached from the nutritive activity, has substituted for the extraneous object one situated in the subject’s own body” (198). The substitution of a biological nutritive activity for pleasure and for pleasure alone is, in short, perversion. Psychoanalytically, perversion is to be understood not in its contemporary (mis)understanding; that is, as an aberration from a social norm or moral conduct. Rather, Freud emphasizes that sexuality in human life is inherently and constitutively perverse and nonnormative because it involves annexing an organ, or a portion of an organ, from its anatomical, biological, and physiological functions (such as the mouth for consuming food and beverages) for the purposes of satisfaction, enjoyment, and pleasure (such as kissing, among other amatory activities).² Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan also states that an organ becomes erogenized when it is used not for the purposes of survival and/or self-propagation but for pleasure (Seminar XI 167). He delineates perverse desire, in this context, as that which “makes up one aspect of the drama of homosexuality” (Seminar I 221). At the same time, polymorphic sexuality can also denote other forms of desire, including those that have not been articulated as of now by either Freud or Lacan.

Following a joint rhetorical and psychoanalytical theoretical framework that incorporates elements from queer theory and gender studies, this article examines Shakespeare’s similaically entitled play, As You Like It. The purpose of this examination is not to locate and illustrate phenomena and concepts that have already been theorized by psychoanalysis (such as polymorphic sexuality), nor is the play a mere traditional demonstration of the genre of pastoral poetry that thematizes and narrativizes the lives of shepherds in an idealized rural setting (what is otherwise known as the genre’s governing principle; that is, locus amoenus³). Rather, Shakespeare’s play will serve as a tool for an intellectually stimulating investigation on the relationship between human sexuality, gender, desire, love, and their particular and potentially subversive manifestations in and by the field of rhetoric. As such, this psycho-rhetorical article pays close attention, not to the hermeneutical dimensions of content, theme, story, and plot, but to stylistic components. More specifically, Shakespeare’s play, I claim, articulates multiple forms of gender and sexuality, forms that are situated beyond the phallic norm inscribed into the privileged category of metaphor and trope; that is, cisgender heterosexuality. These forms include nonprocreative pleasure, lesbianism, homosexuality, incest, adultery, polyamory, pansexuality, drag and masquerade, and nonbinary gender, all of which are directly and intimately associated with the rhetorical and orgasmic figure of simile. The similaically erotic, polymorphic language of Shakespeare’s illustrative comedy transgresses metaphoricity and the accompanying Law of the phallus, and fabricates multiple, alternative gradations of gender, sexuality, love, li(n)king, and desire. Consequently, repressive and reductive operations of ancient and early modern rhetorical guides constitutively fail in Shakespeare’s play, and reaffirm the very excessive, nonnormative forms of gender and sexuality that they aspire to censure and censor. The very title of As You Like It sets for us a preliminary, macrostructural model for reading the entire play and its broader rhetorical, psychoanalytical, and gendered implications by foregrounding two gender-inclusive pronouns vis-à-vis the similaic copula, namely “like,” creating a potentially infinite libidinal spectrum.⁴ In terms of a microstructural examination of the play, this article engages with several illuminating scenes that employ the erotic language of the similaic, and more significantly, engages with the structurally similaic relations between characters who like (and love) each other, a liking that is consistently dramatized and rhetoricized in meta-similaic terms, especially in the play’s epilogue.

I claim thus that it is possible to accentuate psychosexual forms that are in excess of metaphor as an oppressive, barring function by linking nonphallic sexuality with the category of figure and especially with the figurality of simile. As will be substantiated throughout, similes transcend a restrictive binary model of gender (woman/man), sex (female/male), sexual orientation (homosexual/heterosexual), and gender expression (transgender/cisgender). The transgressive logic inherent in simile, a logic that is vividly synecdochized in and nuanced by Shakespeare’s play, can function thus as a productive semiotic launch pad to the question of polymorphic sexuality and its various expressions in the elocutionary domain by and large, doing so while sharing conceptual continuities with our contemporary, post-Enlightenment taxonomical understanding of gender and sexual categories. As You Like It serves thus as an exemplary theoretical substrate through which alternative forms of desire and sexuality can be explored and emphasized, namely by the intersection of elocutionary, gendered, and sexual categories, and psychoanalytical theory, and more specifically by what links and separates a subject from a predicate in grammar (i.e., the copula), and even more specifically by the eroticism of the similaic copula, in contradistinction to the more arid, phallic logic of the metaphoric. The starting point in the Western tradition of rhetoric and its theorization of similes and metaphors, in this regard, is typically Aristotle’s Rhetoric.

Theoretical Framework

A large portion of Book III of Aristotle’s seminal Rhetoric is concerned with the apt and inapt uses of language as means of inducing persuasion, doing so by discussing figurative language and copulative verbs. Strange words, compound words, and strained comparisons, Aristotle warns, should be avoided in prose due to their “depart[ure] from what is suitable” and movement “in the direction of excess” (168). “The foundation of good style,” according to Aristotle, is located in “the proper use of connecting words”; that is, copulas, and in the proficient manipulation of figures (174). More importantly, Aristotle equates the ideal and most effective copulative figure with the “proportional metaphor,” which “give[s] names to nameless things” (170). The proportional metaphor then produces a nomenclative system of signification that is far from being mimetic or descriptive. The proportional metaphor (any variation of the auxiliary verb to be) glues semantically disparate elements by the supposed disappearance of grammar as a means of mediation. This metaphor is wholly symmetrical because it “must always apply reciprocally to either of its co-ordinate terms” (174). Conversely, the similaic copula (like/as/as if/seems) is a type of metaphor but one that is inferior to its proportionality because it makes unfortunate use of “explicit explanation” (174). It is, as a result, “longer [hoti makroter]” and “less attractive [hḗttōn hēdús]” (174) than the proportionate metaphor.⁵The similaic copula “does not say outright that “‘this’ is ‘that’” (187; emphasis in original); that is, it is not engaged with tautological statements, and makes the orator and listener “less interested in the idea” (187).⁶ The similaic copula is designated thus as supernumerary and complementary to the metaphoric. Instead of an absolute sameness of identity, it reproduces an identity of disparate, dehiscent, and intersecting signifiers that do not produce a fusion or a union of bodies. According to Aristotle, this associates simile more with “the nature of poetry” (173) in contradistinction to prose. The superadded element of simile, namely the copular like or as, is also testimonial to the necessity of sexual, phenomenal, grammatical, and conceptual difference.⁷

The copula serves as a testament to the language of sexual difference, namely between femaleness and maleness, with the similaic copula being isomorphic with female genitals.⁸ Aristotle’s depiction of femaleness as supposedly defective maleness due to a female-assigned subject’s genitalia is also evident in his Generation of Animals, a biological study that explicates animal reproduction. The supposed lack or failure that Aristotle images and imagines is as much ontological as it is sexual, resulting from a simile’s lack of the ontological-metaphorical copula; that is, is. The elocutionary difference between simile and metaphor would become, a millennia later, the Freudian (and then Lacanian) logic of sexual difference between femaleness and maleness, respectively.⁹ This logic has been misread and misrepresented by critics, but implies nonetheless that between the sexes, either female-female, male-male, female-male, or any other potential variation, “there is no sexual relationship [il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel],” (Lacan, Seminar XX: Encore, 1972–73 126) intimating that in the human realm of sexual and amatory relations, harmony is always lacking or is prone to fissures and disturbances, regardless of the partner’s identification with or assignment of sex, gender, and/or sexual orientation. This dis-harmonious relation is a direct result of the subject’s encounter with radical alterity and sexual difference in the form of the Other sex.¹⁰

Aristotle’s definition of simile is subverted in George Puttenham’s influential early modern rhetorical handbook, The Arte of English Poesie. Simile, in the words of Puttenham, is synonymous with the “first Rhetoricke of the world” because it is more “currant” in one’s mouth and more “slipper upon the tong,” appealing to the interest in euphony and oral/aural pleasure in the Renaissance. Puttenham follows Cicero’s treatment of simile. In Book II of De Inventione, the Roman orator says that the best response to an argument that has relied on metaphor is to allow that argument to “dilate.” Puttenham associates the similaic with gynecological images of dilation and pregnancy, defining simile as a “slippery distention” of metaphor. Metaphor, Cicero adds, leads to a contraction that does not appeal to the orator’s faculty of reason. Aristotle, conversely, argues that metaphor renders an idea as appealing to one’s fancy instead of appealing to intellectual faculties. As such, Cicero’s logic exposes the phallogocentric structure of language underlying Western culture, a structure that is predicated on the privileging of the metaphoric over the similaic and of the masculine over the feminine, respectively.¹¹ His rhetorical counterpart, Quintilian, discusses the distinction between metaphor and simile by stating in Book VIII of his Institutio Oratoria that metaphor is situated in “a place already vacant” (305) and is a “shorter form of simile” (311). More significantly, Quintilian writes that “excess in the use of metaphor” leads to “a fault,” implicitly condemning the use of simile qua rhetorical excess. Similes have been theorized and applied not only by employing gendered terminology but also in relation to transgressive forms of femininity vis-à-vis similaic repetition, forms that are foregrounded in Shakespeare’s play.

Transgressive Femininity and the Risks of Repetition: On Lesbianism, Incest, and Adultery

Seminal rhetorical treatises from the early modern period divide simile into catachretic and illustrative configurations. This division is evident, for example, in the writings of Richard Sherry (A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes),¹² Thomas Wilson (The Art of Rhetoric), Henry Peacham (The Garden of Eloquence), Abraham Fraunce (“The Shepherds’ Logic”; The Arcadian Rhetorike), George Puttenham (The Arte of English Poesie), and Thomas Hobbes (The Art of Rhetoric). A catachretic simile is synonymous with transgressive forms of femininity such as lesbianism, adultery, maternal incest, and phallic femininity. An illustrative simile, on the other hand, maps a hierarchical, gendered semiotic structure, a patriarchal dyad in which the maternalized, illustrative signifier is semiotically subordinate to a phallic signifier.¹³ This division creates another polarity, namely the image of a woman as a whore/chaste virgin. This image is perhaps best articulated in Hobbes’s The Art of Rhetoric: “[The] change of signification must be shamefac’d and, as it were, maidenly, that it may seem rather to be led by the hand to another signification. … Yet sometimes this fine manner of Speech swerveth from this perfection, and then it is … the abuse of fine speech, called Katachresis … when the change of speech is hard, strange, and unwonted” (p. 138, emphasis in original). Hobbes’s phrasing is far from being a neutral account of rhetorical forms. He emphasizes the larger cultural anxieties of the early modern period regarding feminine sexuality, which has to be contained and limited within a symbolic patriarchal economy such as that of the early modern treatise. The treatise also recreates the polar imaging of a woman as either a chaste virgin, a “maiden” who employs minimal to no rhetorical forms, or a promiscuous seductress who “swerveth” and turns away from her supposedly natural role as a woman so as to “ab-use … fine speech” with excessive rhetorical ornamentations such as similes. Comparatively, in Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetorike, rhetoric by and large is theorized by a negative simile, as “vnlike that of Poets, and alwaies vnlike it selfe” (emphases added). According to Fraunce, rhetoric aspires to be un-like the polymorphic structure of the unconscious as formalized in Shakespeare’s play.

Shakespeare’s tautologically entitled Measure for Measure is similarly engaged with sexual transgressions and similaic subversions. The play dramatizes “a kind of incest” (3.1.138) and female homoeroticism, both of which are inscribed in the character of Isabella and her employment of the similaic copula, which bespeaks of the “desire [of the] like” (4.1.52). Isabella and Marianna, in this context, both belong to the same social group. The abdication of the duke at the beginning of the play removes the restrictive function of the phallus and unlocks polymorphic sexual possibilities. In the play’s symbolic economy and in the economy of early modern rhetoric more generally, “likes” coit, and the differential taxonomies of phallocentric elocution dissolve into mere repetition. The line “like doth quit like” (5.1.149), for instance, articulates a nexus between repetition, likeness, and female genitalia as inscribed in the similaic copula. Isabella’s simile is a catachretic or a far-fetched simile. This simile is aligned, as mentioned, with the image of a promiscuous woman, a social transgressor who renounces hetero-patriarchal economies. Her sexual libertinism heralds not only libidinal polymorphism but also the danger of biological extinction and a collapse of signification, as conceptualized in early modern moralistic tracts about language. This association is particularly foregrounded in George Gascoigne’s Instructions Concerning the Making of Verse, in which Gascoigne cautions from repetition, the form that “hunte[s] a letter to death.” Richard Sherry, by comparison, theorizes homiologia, one of the forms of repetition, as a “great … faulte” because it renders “the matter all alyke” so that there is “no varietie” (A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, p. 33). We are presented here, not with the threat of annihilation, but with a semiotic genocide: a state of absolute linguistic sameness that is also connected to the sameness of identity. This structure of kinship implies an impossible distinguishing between permissible and forbidden partners for intercourse so that every act becomes potentially incestuous. In Mark Beumley’s Rhetoricae (7) and in Joanne de Kerhuel’s Idea Eloquentiae Rhetoricae (22), catachresis is theorized as nothing less than executing parricide. In the latter, catachresis is further elaborated as “ex natura” (22), exceeding the natural or the normative and exceeding, thus, the phallic norm so as to situate itself both at the economic excess of usury and the sexual excesses of female homosexuality and incest. De Kerhuel is worried about a particular form of sexual excess associated with catachresis; that is, “sororis intersector” (22). This form refers to a conjunction of semantically contiguous signifiers, implying a slippage from catachresis to repetition. Conceptually, psychically, rhetorically, and sexually, he refers to the overlapping encounter between family members who experience both lesbian attraction and incestuous sexuality, such as cousins Rosalind and Celia in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

Rosalind and Celia’s relationship formalizes incest and female homoeroticism. Celia calls Rosalind her “sweet … coz,” (1.2.1) addressing her as her interchangeable “sweet Rose” (1.2.22). Rosalind also nicknames Celia “coz,” (1.2.4; 4.1.193) with each character becoming the Other’s homophonous cause; that is, cause of lesbian desire. Once they enter the magical Forest of Arden, which exceeds social regulation, they become “sister[s]” (3.2.120). This familial exchange is not merely a generic result of a change of setting occurring within the pastoral landscape’s imagined locus amoenus. Rather, it is a rhetorical, or more precisely a similaic, shift. This shift activates, in its sexual turn, the possibility of incest between the two. They “have slept together,” and “went, like Juno’s swans/ … coupled and inseparable” (1.3.70–73; emphases added); that is, coupled and fastened by the similaic copula’s sexually transgressive effect. Celia also tells Rosalind that she “cannot live out of [Rosalind’s] company” (1.3.83), existing only in relation to her. And while Celia confesses to Rosalind that they “art one” (1.3.94; emphasis added), they do not adhere to the fiction of metaphoric fusion as embodied in the metaphoric copula; that is, “art,” because their love becomes unequal and unsymmetrical when Celia expresses the following: “Herein I see thou louv’st me not with the full weight that I love thee” (1.2.8). Celia’s lesbianism and her role (or function) as agent of desire between the two is further accentuated in the marriage rehearsal between Rosalind and Orlando. When Rosalind pleads with her to marry them while seemingly maintaining her rhetorical mastery, Celia responds by saying that she “cannot say the words” (4.1.118). She does repeat Rosalind’s vow, but quickly afterward the latter assumes the role of priest in addition to that of bride, and Celia’s absence of similes—and desire—is made overly present. As soon as Orlando exits the nuptial stage, Celia regains authority qua rhetorical/sexual consciousness, as she accuses Rosalind of “misusing” their sex (4.1.189). She further complicates their gendered and romantic dynamics by alluding to the presence of the boy actors role-playing their parts. And while Rosalind’s love for Celia “cannot be sounded” (4.1.195)—that is, cannot be expressed in monosyllabic rhetorical devices such as apostrophe—it can be articulated in similaic terms, as Rosalind likens her “affection” to “the Bay of Portugal” (4.1.195–96). Female homosexual desire is dramatized thus via the erotics of similaic copulation. Rosalind’s love for Orlando, on the other hand, is positioned in relation to, and because of, Rosalind’s former and more subversive infatuation; that is, with her sister. Anticipating Foucault’s claim in The History of Sexuality, heterosexuality only comes into being in Shakespeare’s play as a result of homosexuality. In other words, it is Celia’s absent presence as a nonspeaking witness that sanctions the verbal contract between Rosalind and Orlando as wife and husband, respectively.

Homosexual desire for a woman as inscribed in the category of the far-fetched simile is also economically perilous. The far-fetched simile is, in Puttenham’s words, “deare bought” (The Arte of English Poesie, p. 193), stimulating the subject to excessive expenditures outside of the limits of marriage. In The Worth of a Penny, by comparison, Peacham cautions against depleting the economic resources and undermining the monogamous structure of the household, which the female adulterer might “give or sell” (4) in order to be able to provide her extramarital, erotic pursuits.¹⁴ Rosalind and Celia similarly (albeit ironically) remark about each other’s worth, employing an economical vocabulary of value, exchange, and consumption. Celia, for instance, says that she and Rosalind will be “the more marketable” (1.2.95) once their mouths will be “news-crammed” (94) with courtier Monsieur le Beau’s words of caution. Touchstone the clown informs a Ganymede-disguised Rosalind that his rhymes function as “the right butter-women’s rank to market” (3.2.95). Finally, Rosalind tells the enamored shepherdess Phoebe that the latter ought to “sell” herself “when [she] can,” for she is “not for all markets” (3.5.61). Doing so would procure her “a good man’s love,” but she must first euphemistically be “down on [her] knees” (3.5.58–59), exchanging fellatio for heterosexual love in this imagined business transaction between a woman and a man. Between the two, however, there is also another man.

A Triad of Similaic Desire: Male Homosexuality and Gender Asymmetry

In “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles” (21–27) in her landmark Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick builds on René Girard’s theorization of erotic triangles in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Sedgwick claims that the male-male-female triangle so prevalent in literary texts is not symmetrical because of the introduction of a woman into the supposedly symmetrical, identical male-male bond. She subscribes to the somewhat limited and limiting Irigarayan model of masculinity as the sex which is one, uniform.¹⁵ Susan Bordo’s counterargument in The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private posits that “ideas about masculinity … are hardly one” (43). Men are, in the latter’s view, “creatures of variety, not unity” (43). Likewise, Lacan’s declaration in his twentieth seminar that “there is no sexual relationship” (126) implies a lack of harmony, symmetry, or Aristophanic “wholeness” within the sexual and amatory realms of human relations, precisely because of the discussed encounter with the sexual Other. A man, in other words, can be like a different man, similar to him, but never the same—not only because of potential, intersecting variations in class, race, and so on, but because of one’s singularity as a speaking subject. Unlike women, men, for Sedgwick, Irigaray, and other feminist thinkers, constitute a group.¹⁶ For Lacan, however, men are those who belong to a group for all of whose members the function of symbolic castration (i.e., loss of primordial satisfaction) is at work, irrespective of one’s identification with or assignment of a specific gender, sex, and/or sexual orientation, and irrespective of a binary woman/man heteronormative order (Seminar XX 78). Perhaps it would be more productive in both theory and praxis to speak of an indefinite, lowercase a man instead of The Man in the imaginary (or idealized), universalizing, and homogenizing senses, like there is no “Woman” in Lacanian psychoanalysis (“femme n’existe pas,” Seminar XX [emphasis in original] 72–73).

At the same time, Shakespeare’s proto-Sedgwickian triangles are seemingly more nuanced and culturally subversive in the sense that the function (or role) of a woman in the triangle can be (and was) performed by a male actor. Yet the appropriation of femininity by a play’s dramatis personae implies an exclusively homosocial relationship between the three participants in the triangle, crafting an all-male social fabric in which femaleness is at least implicitly deemed unnecessary and hence completely removed from the social sphere. Even more so, in Shakespeare’s England, female-assigned subjects were barred from performing female roles.¹⁷ In short, even when a woman does enter and interrupt the play’s underlying homoerotic and accompanying similaic structure, this woman is male. This rhetorical-erotic structure also intimates that procreation is equally discarded, privileging nonprocreative pleasure between men instead. This privileging is specifically evident in As You Like It’s intersecting, all-male triangles of Rosalind (portrayed by a male actor)-Orlando-Phoebe (portrayed by a male actor), Phoebe-Silvius the shepherd-Rosalind, and Rosalind-Celia-Phoebe, to name a few. In the multilayered character of Rosalind in particular a Sedgwickian triangle is manifest in the very three-tiered counterfeit that s/he embodies: a male actor playing the part of a woman who disguises herself as Ganymede.¹⁸

The play’s all-male bonds are similaic. Once Oliver has “barred” Orlando the love and “place of a brother” (1.1.18), or a (br)Other, at the play’s beginning, the latter flees to the enchanting Forest of Arden, the similaic realm where “country copulatives” (5.4.54-5; emphasis added) and male companions (not to say an all-male acting company) live among “a thousand similes” (2.1.45), wherein hierarchical cisgender heterosexuality virtually dissolves by the characters’ astute meta-rhetorical awareness. Orlando flees to where the banished Duke Senior and his “co-mates and brothers-in-exile” (2.1.1; emphasis added) live together “like the old Robin Hood of England … and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden World” (1.1.110–13; emphases added). This forest is the site in which similaic eroticism is guaranteed, activated, and reaches a psycho-rhetorical climax. This forest is the “golden World,” or Age of the Renaissance, in which characters “speak goldenly” (1.1.5), with glowing rhetorical brilliance, and in which rhetorical figures and tropes abound.¹⁹ This “golden World” is also the site in which Ganymede, the master signifier of same-sex erotic bonds since Greek and Roman antiquity, links one man to another (and another) psycho-semiotic chain of love signifiers on the basis of similaic likeness, resemblance, and correspondence, avoiding supposed metaphoric fusion. Homoerotic similitude also manifests anagrammatically and anaphorically (or epiphorically); that is, in the inscription of filial, incestuous love found in the names of brothers Orlando and Oliver. The triangular geometries that Shakespeare stages simultaneously exist between Oliver, Orlando (absent-present), and Rosalind (substituting the former), and between Oliver, Orlando, and Ganymede (epitomizing the relationship between Oliver and Orlando).

Other male bonds also materialize similaically throughout the play so as to reveal homosexuality as the deep structure of heterosexuality’s surface. One illustrative instance appears in the similaically fraught conversation between melancholic Jaques, Touchstone, and Duke Senior, forming a homoerotic, polyamorous triangle of similaic desire:

TOUCHSTONE:

I have had four quarrels and like to have fought one.

JAQUES:

And how was that ta’en up?

TOUCHSTONE:

Faith, we met and found the quarrel was upon the seventh cause.

JAQUES:

How, seventh cause?—Good, my lord, like this fellow.

DUKE SENIOR:

I like him very well.

TOUCHSTONE:

God’ild you, sir, I desire you of the like. (5.4.46–54; emphases added)

In this psychically revealing, meta-similaic exchange, Duke Senior “like[s]” Touchstone, who “desires” the former “of the like,” who answers Jaque’s “lik[ing]” for Touchstone. Jaques and the duke, in other words, are both enamored with Touchstone, competing similaically over him in what is typically considered a virtually meaningless encounter in heteronormative readings of the play.²⁰ As Lacan has argued in his twentieth seminar, the invention of heterosexual, Petrarchan courtly love is a mere substitute for the “oneness” involved in a man’s primary, repressed homosexuality (79). Preceding Lacan by nearly four centuries, Shakespeare teaches that there is always within cisgender, heterosexual courtly love something of this latent “oneness”; that is, of the oneness of homosexual jouissance (enjoyment). Yet this oneness is definitionally lacking at the site of its heterosexual rearticulation because of the encounter with the Other, who provides the most radical sense of alterity. A man approaches a woman not to join with her alterity. He approaches her so as to rediscover that which she can never give him. Heterosexuality can thus only ever be a constitutively failing approximation, a necessarily insufficient copular link. The heterosexual copula, to be discussed in the following section in greater detail, is its own vanishing point—it is homosexual insofar as it is homoiosis, a process of likening that is definitionally asymmetrical. The homosexual copula, and Shakespeare’s representative dramatization of it in meta-similaic terms, establish that which heterosexuality has repressed and replaced as the veiled substance or meaning underlying manifest heterosexual economies, namely homosexuality.²¹ Within the homoerotic rhetoric of Shakespeare’s play, homosexuality is likened to the archaic glue, the likening that produces a subjectivity that is always in excess of itself, in the form of an archaic supplement. And while female and male homosexuality are located, as discussed, within the register of similaic desire, enjoyment, satisfaction, pleasure, and lost ecstasy, its blissful language is at odds with the dry, phallic tropology of metaphor.

Hymen’s Song(e): Phallic Tropology and Cisgender Heterosexuality

Elocution (or style), one of the cornerstones of rhetoric, consists of figures and tropes (not in the sense of a theme in a literary work). While figures such as simile are forms of speech that render speech more stylized but do not create an effect in sense, tropes, which are best illustrated by the master trope of metaphor, do have semantic consequences, altering sense by transporting a word from its proper signification to one that is theorized as improper. Etymologically too, the word trope originates from the Greek trepein, to turn. Shakespeare’s similaic bliss is indeed interrupted by metaphoricity, especially toward the play’s happy ending. The ending adheres both to the generic conventions of comedy by staging multiple wedding masques for all actors, and more significantly, to the metaphoric logic of cisgender heterosexuality. Hymen, the Greek God of weddings, freezes the possibility of gender nonconformity, as he explicitly “bar[s] confusion” (5.4.123). He warns Phoebe that her “love must accord [Silvius],” because otherwise she would “have a woman to [her] lord” (5.4.131–32; emphasis added). Ironically and subversively, in the male-only stage of Elizabethan England, Phoebe must be married as the boy actor playing a woman. Moreover, before the mock-ceremonies commence, Touchstone briefly remarks that “marriage binds” (5.4.56–57) woman to husband. When Rosalind is married (or marries herself, as she hypothetically declares) to both Duke Senior and Orlando, her threefold relation not only exemplifies the Sedgwickian triangle of erotica in its most glaring, satirical form, but she also ironically employs the ontic of metaphoric binding qua cis-hetero-normativity: “[to Duke Senior]: To you I give myself, for I am yours./[to Orlando] To you I give myself, for I am yours” (5.4.114–15; emphases added). Once she is “officially” married to Orlando, Hymen also envisions them as metaphorically entwined, forming a single romantic orb: “You and you are heart in heart” (5.4.130; emphasis added). There is an astute meta-rhetorical attempt here to literalize metaphor by the institution of marriage so that both Rosalind’s declarations and Hymen’s subsequent officiation will become real in the radical sense. This literalization, in its turn, is meant to make the fiction of metaphoric unity real, but it inevitably fails because of the characters’ meta-dramatic awareness, the meta-stylistic, ironic intonation in which they articulate it, and due to Shakespeare’s recontextualization of cis-hetero norms by wedding, as mentioned, boy actors.

English churchman Francis Meres, the first to present a critical account of Shakespeare’s work, champions the biblical principle of cisgender, heterosexual joining in the moralistic Gods Arithmeticke.²² Procreation is the same governing principle given in the Book of Genesis in the creationist narrative “[w]hen God had marryed Adam and Eua together [and] said to them both, increase, multiplie, and replenish the earth” (sig. A2). Meres’s emphasis on dyadic, reproduction-oriented matrimonial heterosexuality “between man & wife” (6) is contrasted with the abundant manifestation of the similaic copula in early modern texts, particularly in relation to excessive forms of sexuality such as homosexuality, adultery, and incest, as previously discussed. Consider, moreover, Renaissance playwright Ulpian Fulwell’s “nothing is more desirous than like unto the like” in his similaically entitled play, Like Will to Like. This similaic sensibility is similarly echoed in the declarative “like doth quit like” (5.1.409) in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. The latter in particular is paralleled with Isabella’s articulation of same-sex desire toward Marianna, the woman who “comes to do [her] good” (4.1.52), as the former says the following: “I do desire the like” (4.1.53). Meres’s words are also contrasted with the tradition of copia (abundance), which serves as the divine command’s “rhetorical counterpart” (Parker 15). His Gods Arithmeticke presents a phallic fantasy of female and male complementarity, even if the earth has already been “replenish[ed].” Female and male complementarity is a fantasy of the “two” who “turn into one” and subsequently enjoy “vnite … for ever” (19). The impossible sexual relationship of female and male as a perfect, harmonic sum is contrasted with other forms of desire that are directed not toward submissive procreation and Aristophanic wholeness, but toward an economic satisfaction of the drive.²³

Shakespeare’s play and early modern letters thus more generally become sites of struggle between two contradictory rhetorical axes, the similaic and the metaphoric. This psycho-semiotic struggle becomes, in the post-Enlightenment taxonomical reading of gender and sexual categories, an ideological struggle between queer resistance and heterosexual dominance, respectively. Yet Shakespeare’s play is diametrically, defiantly, and definitionally opposed to God’s divine command of exponential multiplication and the linked capitalist discourse of production and consumption, providing the alternatives of otium (leisure), same-sex coupling, and nonprocreative, masturbatory pleasure. In one illuminating passage whose Platonic homoerotic overtones have been ignored by Shakespearean critics, the melancholy Jaques engages in a meta-rhetorical discussion with Orlando, precising the mentioned alternative forms of sexuality. After Orlando employs an allusion to Narcissus, the mythological figure who “is drowned in the brook” (3.2.279) and who metonymically represents Jaques’s a-romantic solitude, the latter says that there he “shall see [his] own figure” (3.2.281). Orlando interprets this figure “to be either a fool or a cipher” (3.2.282). “Figure” and “cipher” are overdetermined signifiers, referring to figures of rhetorical type and most prototypically the figure of simile, the body as a rhetorical-erotic zone, and a mathematical figure. “Cipher” more specifically relates to a zero whose multiplication only results in more zeros. Zero also relates to an absence that is typographically isomorphic with the figure of apostrophe and the apostroph(a)ic copula; that is, O.²⁴ Jaques concludes their exchange by mocking the heteronormative conventions of Petrarchan love, bidding “farewell, good Signor Love” (3.2.283–84) to his interlocutor, who responds with an equally impressive, alliterative gesture: “Adieu, good Monsieur Melancholy” (3.2.285–86). Their conversation emphasizes more than an alienation of a French man from an otherwise English forest. Jaques’s subjectivity is first and foremost an atomistic one, formulating an autoerotic sense of subjectivity that fuels desire by a narcissistic attachment to his own body. Jaques is a single man, one who observes others’ Malthusian coupling, but never desires a romantic or sexual relation with someone other than himself. Later, the duke pleads with Jaques to keep him company. An uninterested Jaques articulates the following: “To have no pastime, I” (5.4.193; emphasis added). The first-person singular nominative “I,” perhaps the master marker of subjectivity in language, is anomalously positioned at the clause’s end, signaling a subject that is not procreative but autoerotic.

Jaques’s meta-elocutionary eulogizing of Touchstone is theorized in autoerotic and homoerotic terms, building on but also subverting the Aristotelian concern with the apt and inapt uses of language, especially in relation to metaphors and similes, respectively. “The motley fool,” who is described as “moral on the time,” invokes a similaic response with a clear homoerotic vehicle: Jaques’s “lungs began to crow like chanticleer” (2.7.29–30). This “motley fool” who “railed on Lady Fortune … /In good set terms” (2.7.13–15) is dramatized via formulaic, moralistic aphorisms employed in rhetorical discourse, except Jaques does not merely repeat or illustrate sententiae such as Rosalind’s “beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold” (1.3.107). Rather, he presents a meta-rhetorical, satiric subversion of those “civil sayings” (3.2.125), sayings that are specified in Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie as “all the figures that be Rhetoricall, and such as do most beautifie language with eloquence & sententiousness.”²⁵ The entirety of rhetoric becomes synonymous with eloquence and sententiousness, tropes and figures and their moralistic psychic and sexual subtext, respectively. Jaques’s “good set terms,” on the other hand, assume “mangled forms” (2.7.42) vis-à-vis his voyeuristic, homoerotic, and transgressive gaze unto Touchstone. The latter “drew a dial from his poke” and observed “how the world wags” (2.7.20–23). Jaques’s language is inundated with homosexual banter that, while explicitly referring to Touchstone, does not demand a rhetorical counterpart, considering the former’s soloistic preferences.²⁶

The exchange between Touchstone and a fictional William Shakespeare brings the discourses of rhetoric, gender and sexuality, and psychoanalysis into a mutually enriching discussion by using and abusing the linked language of metaphor and marriage:

TOUCHSTONE:

Give me your hand. Art thou learned?

WILLIAM:

No, sir.

TOUCHSTONE:

Then learn this of me: to have is to have. For it is a figure in rhetoric that drink, being poured out of a cup into a glass, by filling the one doth empty the other. For all your writers do consent that ipse is “he.” Now you are not ipse, for I am he.

WILLIAM:

Which he, sir?

TOUCHSTONE:

He, sir, that must marry this woman [Audrey]. (5.1.38–46; emphases added)

In “L’appareillage,” psychoanalyst Michèle Montrelay discusses the penis and testicles as the idem and ipse of identity, respectively. The phallic “idem,” Montrelay writes, “is the eternal return, the (genetic) process of generation which establishes an immutable order outside of time,” a site wherein the subject “is singular within combination” (39). The testicular “ipse,” conversely, “characterizes the person who sees himself as a distinct individual, singular in his destiny and liberty” (39). The penis and testicles incarnate within the sexual act the contradictory impulses of the ontogenetic and the eternally archaic. They are what produces sex as a constitutively lacking relation, primarily because both the penis and the testicles exceed their respective and restrictive biological functions as the idem and ipse of identity, respectively. Touchstone the clown ridicules the testicular ipse and the ability to procreate, which become—or rather are, in the naturalizing logic of the Western cultural imagination—a synecdoche for the entire male body and its subjectivity, defining what a man supposedly is in the metaphoric-ontological sense. The penis, which links by disappearing in the moment of anal or vaginal sexual intercourse, must first “give itself to sight” as an individualized penis; and the testicles, although extimate to copulation, are ultimately the “reserve of semen” that “participates in the real of generations, in its memory and oblivion” (41). If “oblivion” and the threat of biological and linguistic extinctions are typically associated with transgressive femininity and similaic repetition, as discussed, then in Shakespeare’s play, they are also associated with the mask of masculinity and the all-male dramatis personae embodying female and male roles. This androgynous embodiment is where Rosalind’s epilogue plays out, and the psycho-rhetorical discourse of similaic eroticism climaxes.

Rosalind’s Epilogue: Staging Polymorphic Desire and the Orgasm of Rhetorical Discourse

Rosalind, the play’s center of gravity, delivers a meta-dramatic monologue that functions as the orgasm of discourse, articulated similaically:

ROSALIND: It is not the fashion to see the lady the Epilogue, but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the Prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in then, that am neither a good epilogue, nor cannot insinuate with you in behalf of a good play. I am furnished like a beggar, therefore to beg will not become me. My way is to conjure you, and I’ll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you. And I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women … that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell. (Epilogue 1–20)²⁷

The rhetorical, erotic, economic, and proto-psychoanalytical discourses of the Renaissance all intersect within Rosalind’s prescient monologue. “The fashion” or rhetorical ornamentation as a mode of supernumerary and noncomplementary desire are articulated by “the lady” who is also a man, one who is similaically “furnished like a beggar” (emphasis added). After several syllogistic statements phrased in negative and then positive terms, the play’s androgynous hero(ine), Rosalind, directly and apostrophically addresses the Elizabethan audience members, breaking the fourth wall of sex and gender. She mockingly accuses both women and men of being romantically in love with and sexually interested in one another. This double address and the erotic-stylistic pleasure it evokes is then replaced with the erotica of simile. Enamored of Rosalind’s rhetorical prowess and her equivocal “pretty youth” (3.2.323, 3.2.370, 3.5.65, 4.1.1), characters and audience alike become entangled in one large-scale, polyamorous, orgiastic relationship that is articulated in simialic terms. This relationship is also phrased as a double imperative, in which women must “like as much of this play as please you” (emphases added) and men must be “pleased” by that which is situated “between you and the women.” That is not only Rosalind’s conclusion and Shakespeare’s meta-dramatic play in general, but more importantly, the play’s similaic language of polymorphic desire. The language of polymorphic desire is a language that is posited precisely between a sexuated subject and their object of desire, the language of the copulative like or as as a testament to intersecting sexual, grammatical, and conceptual difference. The orgasm of discourse and of one’s sex is thus located not on the metaphoric axis of language as Montrelay claims in the biologically conservative conclusion to “Inquiry into Femininity.”²⁸ Nor is it metonymic, as Lacan claims in “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud.” The orgasm of discourse is, rather, an effect produced by Rosalind’s sly similaic smile.²⁹

Polymorphic sexuality as expressed via and nuanced by Rosalind’s figure is part of a larger rhetorical tradition, that of the theater whose origin is equated with Dionysus. Dionysus, the Greek god of ecstatic and orgasmic religious rituals and theatrical festivities, is associated with psychosexual forms that are in excess of the phallus as an oppressive function. Carl Jung and Karl Kerényi argue that choreographic rituals that are linked with Dionysus are a “reflection” of his “hermaphroditic nature,” (Essays on a Science of Mythology 68) equating him both with polymorphic, nonphallic sexuality, and with the category of figure or the Greek skhēma (not to be conflated with scheme as plot), rhetorically speaking. This category, embodied by Rosalind’s figurality and more precisely her similaic copulas, moves beyond a restrictive binary model of desire. Moreover, the play’s multiple forms of sexuality and the traversing of gender and sexual boundaries performed by the prepubescent Elizabethan boy actor are in a mutually illuminating dialog with the theater’s capacity for multiple perspectives (perspectivism).³⁰ Schema also concerns what has already been defined by Aristotle as stylized bodily movements of one’s organs. “Dancers,” Aristotle writes in Rhetoric about the art of choreography, “make use of rhythm alone: it is by rhythm expressed in bodily movement[s] that mime character, emotion, and action” (17). Emotion is indeed ecstatic and orgasmic in the sense that it is e-motion, ex-tasy, moving outside of one’s body and subjectivity so as to ex-press desire toward an eroticized Other. This ex-pression of desire is an active process that is en-acted theatrically and psychoanalytically in the sense of an acting out or a reenactment.³¹

Bodily organs and their organ-ization on stage, akin to psychoanalyst and scholar Shirley Zisser’s conceptualization of “rhetorical erotogenicity” (“Erotogenic Aesthetics”) are synonymous with the subversive feminization of the male body. The belief that the theater feminizes both spectator and actor—vis-à-vis cross-dressing, extravagantly clad (or barely clad) bodies, makeup, and bodily gesticulations—is not novel, and harkens back to the myth of Dionysus in Euripides’s Bacchae. Before entering the enchanting Forest of Arden, Celia will “put [herself] in poor and mean attire,” urging Rosalind to perform “the like”; that is, similaically, so that they “shall … pass along” (1.3.108–10). Rosalind responds by “suiting” herself “all points like a man” (1.3.114), detailing her prospective wardrobe and the accompanying anxiety of the Renaissance from female sexuality, gender ambivalence, and rhetorical similitudes.³² S/he breaks her body unto “garments” (4.3.84), imagining “a gallant curtal-axe upon” her “thigh,” “a boar spear” in her “hand,” and in her “heart” will lie “what hidden women’s fear” (1.3.115–17). Finally, they will “have a smashing and a martial outside,/As many other mannish cowards have/That do outface it with their semblances” (1.3.118–20; emphases added). Similes and “semblances” (akin to the psychoanalytical semblant as a veil amalgamating the imaginary and the symbolic) become directly and intimately associated with drag, masquerade, play-acting and roleplaying, and nonbinary gender.³³ Sex and gender are theorized thus as an external illusion, a psycho-linguistic “description” (4.3.82) involving a similaic veil that can render a woman “a thousand times a properer man” (3.5.52, 3.5.116) and vice versa. Another synecdochical blazoning of the body assumes epic proportions, as Touchstone’s letter breaks and reconstructs an imagined Rosalind out of a repertoire of mythological female figures. The repertoire ranges from “Helen’s cheek” and “Cleopatra’s majesty” to “Atlanta’s better part” and “Sad Lucretia’s modesty,” forming a “Rosalind of many parts … /devised,/Of many faces, eyes and hearts” (3.2.123–29; emphasis added).³⁴ The actors—Platonic Shadows whose bodies are masked and unmasked in consistent similaic terminology—entertain theatergoers via pageantry and masque, the genre that ties masculinity with masquerade.

The theater of similes in the play’s conclusion implicates the organization of bodies, the eroticism and pleasures of the flesh, and the psychoanalytical conception of the drive. The theatrum mundi (world theater) metaphor, which originally served as a way of understanding human agency in Greek stoic philosophy, is productive here. Human beings are compared to puppets in the hands of an everlasting, omnipotent God (or fate) while having internal freedom in choosing how to re-act and e-mote, if at all. This metaphor intimates that the world becomes a stage (and vice versa); that is, a temporal house of eloquence in which women and men live as actresses and actors, governed by the Godlike playwright as master puppeteer. This deterministic paradox raises ambiguity. If reality is a mere performance, then the categorical distinction between theater and world eventually collapses, with the two terms becoming intertwined up to the point of no ontological distinction.³⁵ Shakespeare’s play—and the newly built Globe in which it was performed—were deeply conscious of this, both dramatically and semiotically: a posted sign situated outside of the theater read “totus mundus agit histrionem,” complementing Jaques’s well-known “all the world’s a stage” monologue (2.7.140–67) and its cultural intertexts.³⁶ More significantly, in Rosalind’s moment of theatrical unmasking, the corporeal presence of the audience members galvanizes a twofold function, as they embody an available erogenous zone around which the drive turns (a linguistic substrate, a point of departure whose orality is equated here with Rosalind’s lips), and an object of desire through which the drive achieves its aim of satisfaction, paralleling the moment in which rhetorical discourse climaxes in Rosalind’s epilogue. If the Elizabethan theater is a synecdoche of the early modern English world, then the entire theater becomes a homoerotic site of linguistic pleasure, an orgiastic landscape (otherwise known as the genre’s locus amoenus) in which female and male participants engage en masse in a socially transgressive act by the intersection of similaic copulas and bodily copulations. All “like” Rosalind, the play’s surrogate playwright who has orchestrated the wedding masques. Her meta-similaic, mellifluous voice, which “talks well” (3.5.111) and “pleases those that hear,” (3.5.113) is precisely that which invaginates the object, whereas the audience’s ear functions as a penetrative elocutionary erogenous zone.³⁷ In other words, the theater—Shakespeare’s Globe, “this wooden O” (King Henry V, Prologue, 13)—the theater becomes a joint rhetorical erotogenic site that fulfills a twofold, intersecting function for speaker and listener, subject and object, respectively: it manifests transgressive desire vis-à-vis the copulative logic of similes while organ-izing ecstatic bodily jouissance. The psycho-rhetorical vector of this jouissance is geared toward pleasure and pleasure alone.

Acknowledgments

I am heavily indebted to the always fascinating Shirley Zisser, who introduced me with immeasurable kindness, generosity, and brilliance to the enthralling world of Lacanian psychoanalysis and to the sweet letters of the English Renaissance. I also wish to express my gratitude toward Noam Reisner, Nir Evron, Milette Shamir, Roi Tartakovsky, and Galili Shahar. Finally, I thank Jacqueline Rhodes, the anonymous peer reviewers, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly’s editorial board. Your comments have significantly improved this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Shirley and Leslie Porter School of Cultural Studies, Tel Aviv University.

Notes

¹ Cisgenderism refers to a person whose gender expression matches their assigned sex at birth (Assigned Female at Birth or Assigned Male at Birth), in contradistinction to transgender or gender nonbinary persons (Serano, Whipping Girl 164–65). Regarding heteronormativity, in Fear of a Queer Planet, Michael Warner writes that “Western political thought has taken the heterosexual couple to represent the principle of social union itself” (xxi). Heteronormativity becomes a naturalizing worldview in which there exists two complementing genders (women and men) from which “natural” roles are assigned, espousing the supposed normativity of sex, gender, and sexual orientation in order to privilege heterosexuality over homosexuality and queerness.

² Psychoanalyst Michèle Montrelay similarly writes that “the organ is what organizes reality for pleasure” (L’Ombre et le Nom 86).

³ Cf. Paul Alpers’s “What is Pastoral?”

⁴ It is worth noting and precising, however, that the first seemingly similaic “as” in the title does not function as a similaic copula within the title’s grammatical context (and can also function as conjunctive in a different grammatical context), but rather as prepositional; that is, to the second person singular or plural “you,” directly addressing and implicating the nongender-specific spectator(s) as well.

⁵ Within this passage, Aristotle applies to the “longer” (174) figure that is simile the same aesthetic standards that classical Greek culture applied to the size of the male member. In Greek Homosexuality, and especially in “Predilections and Fantasies,” Sir Kenneth Dover shows how classical Greece did not believe in the maxim that “bigger is better,” associating oversize male genitalia with monstrosity.

⁶ Cf. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, especially 68–70. Darwin continues the Aristotelian, biologically inclined line of thought, a line that is both limited and limiting.

⁷ Cf. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics 334.

⁸ I thank psychoanalyst and scholar Shirley Zisser for pointing my attention to this revelatory point. My reading of literature in general from a psycho-rhetorical prism is heavily indebted to Zisser’s insights and research. In the context of Aristotelian rhetorical formulations of sexuality, see Zisser’s “‘Calliope’s Sc(D)ream.’”

⁹ Cf. Freud’s “Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes.”

¹⁰ By the Other sex I am not necessarily denoting the cisgender, heterosexual woman-man encounter, but the encounter with sexual alterity per se. The very phrase “same-sex desire” is problematic precisely because it presupposes a sexual sameness between a subject and their object of desire, even if both identify with or are assigned as women or men. In either case, in the discourse of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Other with a capital O indexes the symbolic register (i.e., language as a system of significations), the social order and its association with the law, conventions, and so on, and the primordial (M)Other in-utero.

¹¹ Cf. Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium, in which a similar claim is made so as to suggest that metaphor is a kind of “abridgment” that might cloud one’s judgment (379). In it, Cicero discusses simile as a “linking of figures” (385).

¹² The first systematic treatise of figures and tropes written in the English vernacular.

¹³ Also see Zisser’s The Risks of Simile in Renaissance Rhetoric 304–05.

¹⁴ Compendia of similes from the early modern period attempt to relegate similes to a textual locus of a storehouse or treasury, a hetero-patriarchal, matrimonial economy in which the supposed treasure of feminine sexuality would be safeguarded from external, excessive temptations. Zisser’s The Risks of Simile in Renaissance Rhetoric provides an extensive examination on this issue, particularly in relation to English clergyman Robert Cawdrey’s A Treasvrie or Storehouse of Similes.

¹⁵ Cf. Luce Irigaray’s This Sex Which is Not One.

¹⁶ Cf. Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language, and Antoinette Fouque’s There Are Two Sexes.

¹⁷ In Between Men, Sedgwick coins “homosocial desire,” defining it as “social bonds between persons of the same sex. … It is applied to such activities as ‘male bonding,’ which may, as in our society, be characterized by intense homophobia, fear and hatred of homosexuality. To draw the ‘homosocial’ back into the orbit of ‘desire’ … then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual” (1).

¹⁸ Celia’s disguise is also three-tiered, albeit differently. She is the reverse image of Rosalind’s male-playing female-playing male and thus she also embodies the reverse structure of Sedgwick’s male-male-female triangular structure: Celia is portrayed by a male actor portraying a female Celia, who portrays female Aliena upon entering Arden.

¹⁹ In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book I 2), the Golden Age was a time of eternal spring in which Law did not exist—an Arcadian pastoral paradise whose Judeo-Christian equivalence is Paradise. In Shakespeare’s play and in the early modern world more generally, Elysian bliss exists not in the woman-man relationship but between men.

²⁰ Liking was equivalent with loving in Shakespeare’s time (see the Arden edition of As You Like It 263).

²¹ Cf. “Letter from Freud to Fliess, 17 October 1899,” in which Freud links “male homosexuality (in both sexes)” to “the primitive form of sexual longing,” “the first sexual aim, analogous to the infantile one.” This statement appears nearly a century before the emergence of queer theory. In it, Freud already anticipates Sedgwick’s claim that male homosociality implies latent homosexuality.

²² Cf. Robert Recorde’s The Whetstone of Witte.

²³ Cf. Aristophanes’s satiric speech about the nature of love and the origin of humanity in Plato’s Symposium. It is no coincidence that Aristophanes opts for humor and satire when discussing clichés of romantic love. Also see Lacan’s reading of Aristophanes’s speech in his eighth seminar on transference (1960–61), especially 71–72.

²⁴ Cf. the similarly meta-apostrophic “thou art an O without a figure” (King Lear, 1.4.183–84).

²⁵ Cf. Duke Senior’s meta-rhetorical description of Touchstone as being “very swift and/sententious” (5.4.62–63).

²⁶ Cf. the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the play (144), which, unlike the Arden edition, unpacks Jaques’s various sexual innuendos (Shakespeare puns, for instance, on sexual organs, brothels, and prostitutes).

²⁷ Rosalind’s epilogue, in which she exposes that she has been a boy all along play-acting a girl, is inspired by John Lyly’s Galatea, in which a magical sex transformation occurs, and by an earlier, inverted intertext, that of Iphis’s wedding in Book IX of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. There are also classical allusions to the myths of Tiresias, Hermaphroditus, and Salmacis. The epilogue also anticipates another gender subversive moment in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, in which the effeminate prepubescent boy actor portraying Cleopatra breaks character and turns a distorted, narcissistic cultural speculum on the audience’s own expectations of sex and gender: “I shall see/Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness/I’th’ posture of a whore” (5.2.217–19; emphasis added).

²⁸ Cf. Montrelay’s “Inquiry into Femininity,” 371. Also see metaphor and metonymy as the governing axes of language in Roman Jakobson’s “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances.”

²⁹ In Impersonations, Stephen Orgel writes that “the eroticized boys” in the play “appear to be a middle term between men and women, and … are represented as enabling figures, as a way of getting from men to women” (63). To precise Orgel, the boy as a middle term is dramatized in rhetorical, and specifically meta-similaic, terms.

³⁰ Cf. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 24. Perspectivism, the intended distortion of an object, who must be seen by the spectator from the correct oblique angle (typically the upper right angle), is also evident in some prominent Renaissance paintings, such as Hans Holbein’s highly emblematic The Ambassadors as a prototypical example of the artistic technique of anamorphosis.

³¹ Cf. Zisser’s “The Signifier in Motion.”

³² The antitheatricalists’ fear of a masculine woman and a feminine man is further illustrated in Laura Levine’s Men in Women’s Clothing.

³³ Cf. Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter 86–88. The Elizabethan theater and the early modern world as reflected in and shaped by the theater, in any case, was still an overtly patriarchal terrain akin to the Greek one. In it, female-assigned persons were not allowed to perform, and the spectator was still assumed to be heterosexual and male, catering to his heteroerotic pleasure (Howe, The First English Actress).

³⁴ A similarly profound meta-dramatic consciousness is expressed in 4.1.60–100. After Rosalind’s fictional-ontological status is questioned, she responds “in her person,” purporting to be Orlando’s “right Rosalind” (4.1.100). Celia, however, claims that Orlando already “hath a Rosalind of a better leer” (4.1.60–61).

³⁵ Cf. Björn Quiring’s “If Then the World a Theatre Present …”

³⁶ Alongside its classical and medieval sources, Jaques’s monologue draws on Thomas Lodge’s A Margarite of America and Lodge’s defense of theatrical performativity against Stephen Gosson’s The Schoole of Abuse.

³⁷ Cf. Ernest Jones’s “The Early Development of Female Sexuality,” Françoise Dolto’s L’image inconsciente du corps, Denise Vasse’s L’Ombilic et la voix, and Montrelay’s L’Ombre et le Nom (88). The psychoanalytical tradition sketched here equates femininity with orifical, absorbing organs that take in, fold and unfold, and whose prototypical instrument of articulation is the cavum, the hollow space from which one is born.