Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses.

By Heather Dubrow. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 295. $45.

This perceptive book by one of our best readers of Renaissance lyric sheds new light on Petrarchism, "one of the most significant discourses in Tudor and even Stuart England" (p. 9). Treating mainly lyric poetry, Dubrow discusses four anti-Petrarchan moves: replacing Petrarchism's amorality with spirituality, replacing Petrarchism's frustrated desire with frank eroticism, cultivating more direct styles of writing and loving than Petrarchism's "banalities and excesses," and writing "ugly beauty" poems that praise qualities seldom praised (pp. 61, 163). Seeds of counterdiscourses are present in Petrarchism: "Petrarch himself was anti-Petrarchan in that his sequence pivots on a renunciation of the love of Laura for the love of God" (p. 62), and counterdiscourses echo Petrarchism's compulsive repetition: "Their repeated attempts to give up Petrarchism replicate the Petrarchan attempt to eschew love" (p. 74).

On the persistent rivalry between poets, Dubrow notes that Petrarch's followers reject other Petrarchan poets, Petrarch defines himself in contrast to Dante, and reactions against Petrarch himself are central to French Petrarchism (p. 49). She explores the question "what are the connections between the drive to distinguish oneself from other men and the drive to pursue a woman?" (p. 51), and one of the book's important contributions is its refusal--pace Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others--to let the woman disappear into the status of prize in a competition between men. Dubrow suggests instead that competition between male poets is a by-product of the male-female relation, the result of hostility redirected from its usual target, the female beloved: poets try to control rival poets' voices just as sonneteers try to control the mistress's voice, and they accuse rival poets of "writing without true emotion--of being . . . as hard-hearted, as rocklike, as a Petrarchan mistress" …