psychoanalytic, self, Petrarchan, courtship, verse, Renaissance, conventional, sigh, lamentation

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260

he might use them to manipulate the context of their relationship.

In retaliation Rodney sonnets an “aye-me” purposely to disprove the accusation of being a fake, responding “[Ay] me, myself my self must kill” (l.3). Donald W. Foster writes of such constructions that ““ay me!” was a conventional sigh of lamentation (often spelled “I me,” as if to anticipate a psychoanalytic reading of the sigh as a charm against nullification of the self)”. ⁴¹⁸ Foster is right to notice the importance of this construction as an assertion of self. Without needing to go so far as imposing a psychoanalytic interpretation upon it, it is obvious that the doubled first person pronoun represents an attempt to monopolise the subject position and to exclude rival subjectivities; an endeavour reflected by Arthur Wilson’s account of Rodney writing his poems in his own blood, literally infusing himself into, and reifying himself as, the verses he sent to Seymour. ⁴¹⁹

As a Petrarchan motif this assertion of a coherent self might be traced to the threat posed to self-integrity by exposure to the contraries of the “fair and cruel” beloved, whose bewitchingly oxymoronic, and therefore fragmented identity, infects and threatens to disintegrate the onlooker’s own coherence of identity as he simultaneously burns and freezes with desire. In this sense, the struggle for subjectivity preexists in Petrarchan literary conventions and provides conditions highly favorable for such a struggle to emerge in a real socially dialogic exchange in which these conventions might be played out. Although the story of this exchange of verses perhaps serves as little more than a footnote to the history of Petrarchan courtship verse in the Renaissance and as an interesting anecdote from contemporary court gossip, Seymour’s assertion of her subjectivity against Petrarchan objectification, like Elizabeth’s answer to Schede, might be seen as part of a

⁴¹⁸ Foster (1994), pp.98-9 (n.50).
⁴¹⁹ Wilson (1653), p.258.

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