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"The onely way to be mad, is to bee constant":Defending Heterosexual Nonmonogamy in John Lyly's Love's Metamorphosis James M. Bromley Adultery—or in a less stigmatizing vein, nonmonogamy—challenges the normative placement of affection squarely within the confines of marriage and long-term coupledom that can be found in the discourse on interpersonal relations and in dramatic narratives from the Renaissance. We might consider nonmonogamy a queer erotic practice for an English Renaissance woman, whose sexuality was both solicited and delimited by the injunction to enter monogamous marriage. This essay examines John Lyly's comedy Love's Metamorphosis (1589), in which a defense of nonmonogamy responds to the violent attempts within the narrative to incorporate three obstreperous nymphs into a marital economy. The play allows us to begin to sketch out more clearly some of the queer sexual economies that were imaginable in the wake of the post-Reformation elevation of marriage as the desirable and exclusive site of the experience of eroticism and affection. The call to dismantle heterosexual normativity in queer theory has produced wide-ranging accounts of the discourses, structures, and institutions through which sexuality is regulated in a culture. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner describe heteronormativity as deriving from "a constellation of practices that everywhere disperses heterosexual privilege as a tacit but central organizing index of social membership."1 This dispersal through modern culture is so wide that "social and economic discourses, institutions, and practices that don't feel especially [End Page 420] sexual or familial collaborate to produce as a social norm and ideal an extremely narrow context for living."2 More specifically, membership in a heterosexual couple, usually though not exclusively in marriage, organizes experiences as diverse as having health insurance, holding hands in public, and inheriting an estate. It is imperative, however, to emphasize that heteronormativity is related to one specific form of relationality, the long-term monogamous (and usually reproductive) couple whose intimacy is perceived as culturally, religiously, politically, medically, psychologically, and juridically sacrosanct. It is not reducible to all cross-gender sexual practices, nor does it mean it is not appropriable by homosexuals, as evidenced by the recent dominance within gay political advocacy of the movement to legalize gay marriage.3 Understanding heteronormativity in this way prevents the reinscription of the hetero/homo binary through the equation of queerness with homosexual identity and normalcy with heterosexual identity. Certainly, gay men and lesbians have been at the forefront in resisting heteronormativity and the dominance of the couple form through "the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation."4 I would not want to denigrate those accomplishments, nor would I deny that gays and lesbians as a group have a significant vested interest in resisting heteronormativity in a way that others do not. Yet, as Jonathan Goldberg reminds us, "While telling the history of sexuality as a story about the making of identity may explain the lethal energies that have been directed at gay men and lesbians, doing so cannot account for the open secret of the imbrication of alternative possibilities within normative sexualities."5 Goldberg calls for a wider picture of resistances to regimes of the normal, which also affect heterosexual practitioners of S&M, for example.6 Indeed, certain types of same-sex and cross-sex relations may be potentially disruptive [End Page 421] to sexual normalcy, and queer theory is precisely calibrated to examine the extent of such disruptiveness. If queer theory did not allow for this wider scope in what constitutes resistances to normalcy, it would be vulnerable to and even validate some of its critics who claim that "queer" is reducible to "homosexual" or "homoerotic." While the marginalization, denigration, and violence perpetrated on homosexuals in Western culture certainly creates a strong alliance between homosexuality and queerness, queer theory emerges from a critique of the regimes that produced sexual identity categories such as homosexual and heterosexual because these categories are invoked to regulate behavior, limit pleasure, produce shame, and discipline bodies according to the definition of normalcy one group uses to render another group abject. This critique, in...
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