‘I Would Cure You’: Self-Help Advice on Love in Sidney and Shakespeare

Abstract

Setting aside the fancy (pleasing though it is) that Elizabethan and Jacobean society pullulated with hot lovers, critics have offered a range of weighty explanations for the popularity of the literature of obsession, from attracting the attention of the monarch, to artistic rivalry, to making subjectivity the subject of study. 1 This article suggests a more tongue-in-cheek approach to advice on love in Sidney and Shakespeare, based on recent reappraisals of the use to which self-help books are put. Readers approach these as refreshing fantasies of a radical potential change in lifestyle, but with little intention of putting most (if any) of their advice into practice. From this perspective, Astrophil and Stella (1591) depicts a lover who encourages counsel only to resist it, a move which gives a new view of the lovecure game played between Rosalind and Orlando in As You Like It (1599).Today's self-help books share similar techniques to cure the unhappily obsessed. In some cases, this is a serious business, of course: bibliotherapy can be an effective way to allow people to understand their mental condition, so they cease to be merely objects of advice and treatment. When readers re-describe their own situations to themselves in different genres, or recognize similarities in texts by others, including fictional ones, they may come to understand the perceptions and angles they have been obsessed by, and hence change any persistently unrealistic and inflexible thinking on their part. Moreover, such readers may be comforted by recognizing that they are part of a community of affect, as they find out how similar problems bedevil others as well as themselves. 2 A rapid survey of the self-help shelves in my local bookshop suggests that, after careers, love relationships are probably the best-selling topic of advice. Like myself, most prospective buyers were lurking and flicking -half-abashed, half-fascinated -through titles like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, The Complete Book of Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr Right, and He's Just Not that Into You: the No-excuses Truth toUnderstanding Guys, excusing ourselves in part by also skimming parody versions, such as 1 For surveys of some of these approaches, see M.