Volume 54, Number 17 · November 8, 2007
Stroking
By Stephen Greenblatt
In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal
by Niklaus Largier, translated from the German by Graham Harman
Zone, 526 pp., $37.00
'The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne/Burned on the water.' So begins Shakespeare's greatest evocation of erotic arousal, Enobarbus' celebrated account in Antony and Cleopatra of the way the Egyptian queen's appearance on the river Cydnus first 'pursed up' the heart of the Roman general. For Niklaus Largier it would come as no surprise that Shakespeare has Cleopatra's seductive tableau include a playful, fleeting image of flagellation:
Review, 4894 words
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