Shakespeare's Sweet Leaves: Mourning, Pleasure, and the Triumph of Thought in the Renaissance Love Lyric

Particularly as the Reformation permeated England, the efficacy of the individual mind was widely assumed. When Hamlet remarks, "For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," a forerunner of Satan's affirmation, "The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n," he voices neither a daring nor an original idea.4 But to represent the power or joy of thinking in a love poem is a different matter. The lion's share of love lyrics from the English Renaissance, like their continental prototypes and counterparts, represent thought of the beloved as tormenting or dangerous,-)despite any