English Visiting Speaker Seminar: Dr Jennifer Park, University of Glasgow The elixir, the editor and the platonic lover: pathologising and calibrating asexuality in William Davenant's The Platonick Lovers

What do early modern recipes for love and sex and modern editorial assumptions reveal about early modern asexualities and their pathologisations?

In William Davenant's play The Platonick Lovers (1636), two presumed asexual characters, including Theander, the play's titular platonic lover, are forcibly “made” allosexual using a “rare Elixir” that purports to “Provoke and warme” them to love and lust (1.1.391). The plot hinges on the intervention of this elixir to “fix” Theander, promising to transform Theander from a platonic lover into a romantic and sexual one.

By examining the culture of early modern recipes for love and sex as inspiration for fictionalised and dramatised love potions and drawing upon the new and urgent field of early modern asexuality studies, Dr Jennifer Park, University of Glasgow, proposes a critical asexual reading of the play through the history of recipes to trace early modern constructions of what Kristina Gupta terms “compulsory sexuality”.

Jennifer will demonstrate how interrogating the artifice of “making sex” in the play offers an invitation to revise and challenge contemporary allonormative assumptions in modern editorial practices surrounding the play.