‘Properly a noun,’ writes the poet Anne Carson, ‘eros acts everywhere like a verb.’ Nowhere is this grammatical pliability more evident than in our metaphorical expression of eros. In modern phrases such as ‘falling in love,’ ‘having sex’ and ‘making love,’ the erotic noun couples with verbs that tell condensed stories about the relationship between erotic being and doing, passion and action. ‘Making’ love tells a story of bodily arousal and mental provocation. In other metaphors, eros immobilises us: it points to a place into which we ‘fall’, or it stops us in our tracks or weighs us down. Even the most captivating, spellbinding erotic experiences ‘move’ us, blurring the distinction between emotion and motion (note that the transit from the former to the latter requires no more than the addition of a single letter). Perhaps this linguistic intimacy explains why we feel physically moved by our emotions, and why we make a move or ‘put the moves’ on a beloved. From what Lucio, in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, calls ‘the wanton stings and motions of the sense’ (I, iv, 59) to what Angelo describes as a force that ‘subdues me quite’ (II, ii, 185), eros has the capacity to catalyse and paralyse, sometimes at the same time.

Whether it is a source of action or an act in its own right, eros is always an event. Hence, this section argues that Lyly's and Shakespeare's characters process and experience the event that is erotic desire through the primary metaphor of motion. In the pages that follow, I explore the philosophical and conceptual underpinnings of this metaphor by way of Angelo's example. Drawing from the work of cognitive linguists George Lakoff, Mark Johnson and Zoltán Kövecses, I introduce the broad metaphorical structures that shape Angelo's erotic experience as both a passion and an action. Things happen within Angelo well before he ‘acts out’ his sexual pursuit of the novitiate Isabella. Further on, I consider the relationship between erotic potentiality and actuality in Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics. In Aristotle's writings, as in Shakespeare's play, the boundary between potency and actuality is fluid rather than fixed. As a result, Angelo's metaphors dramatise the capacity of erotic potentiality to create drama. For him, as for so many of Lyly's and Shakespeare's characters, desire is itself a frenzied action.