Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric

Abstract

In early modern lyric poetry, the male poet or lover often appears not as powerful and masterly but rather as broken, abject, and feminine. Catherine Bates examines the cultural and literary strategies behind this representation and uncovers radically alternative models of masculinity in the lyric tradition of the Renaissance. Focusing on Sidney, Ralegh, Shakespeare, and Donne, she offers astute new readings of a wide range of texts-a sonnet sequence, a blazon, an elegy, a complaint, and an epistle. She shows how existing critical approaches have too much invested in the figure of the authoritative male writer to be able to do justice to the truly radical nature of these alternative masculinities. Taking direction from recent psychoanalytic theories of gender formation, Bates develops critical strategies that make it possible to understand and appreciate what is genuinely revolutionary about these texts and about the English Renaissance lyric tradition at large.

Transformation and Interpretation of Gender Concepts in Metaphysical Dimension: From Contemplative Worldview to Transpersonal Experience

“…Donne and the Metaphysicals contributed to the creation of a kind of masculinity embodying an ironic subject position that is constantly shifting between men's desires for women and men's simultaneous rejection of women's bodies. Bates (2007) takes a slightly different view in her book Masculinity, Gender, and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric. It deals with the male poet or lover who often appears not as powerful and masterly but rather as broken, abject, and feminine in early modern lyric poetry.…”

“…Gender is a complex component of the early modern social imaginary (Wade, 2014;Hammons, 2010;Bates, 2007;Saunders, 2006). Gender matters are embodied in the works of the time, actualising the Baroque poetics which emphasizes a keen understanding of the world by the authors.…”

Centrifugal Fires. Consuming Desires and the Performative Female Subject in Karin Michaelis’s The Dangerous Age

“…In Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric , Catherine Bates analyses the male poetic speaker’s self‐consciously abject positioning towards his beloved. Bates reads this abjection as a textual strategy, as well as a psychological demonstration: ‘subordination’ is read as ‘insubordination’ (Bates 2010, 5). Appropriating this idea in relation to The Dangerous Age , we see that the different tones of voice, and the varying narrative modes, undermine the solidity of gendered categories, while prioritising the relationship between gender and subjectivity.…”

“…However, by refiguring ‘sacrifice’ through the flame‐haired Jeanne, Michaelis simultaneously uses the idea of sacrifice to reassert the potency of female desire. To appropriate Bates once more, ‘subordination’ is rendered as ‘insubordination’ (Bates 2010, 5). As Jeanne’s confession to Elsie reveals, female communication is provoked by homoerotic desire.…”

‘My Tongue Will tell the anger of my heart’: Revisiting Female Speech and Silence in Shakespeare

“…34 Catherine Bates concurs in this reading: "The shameful but erotic sub-text of this poem [...] whispers a desire for homosexual rape." 35 These ingenious and compelling readings are significant indicators of the degree of latitude Shakespeare's poem allows in relation to interpretive freedom, and this is not an avenue that I would wish to foreclose in arguing, as I do, for the poem as one of forceful female protestation and resistance to Tarquin's crime. Contra cancel culture, literary interpretation is, after all, about opening the text up, not closing it down.…”