Abstract
The word ‘like’, in its transition from an Old English to a modern English verb, experienced a profound syntactical transformation, having previously been glossed as ‘to please’. By the sixteenth century, ‘to like’ meant almost unconditionally what it means to modern English speakers. However, English Renaissance poets occasionally exploited its archaic usage to produce a rhetorical effect that calls into question notions of subject and object, and which, I argue, foregrounds the way in which language actually generates these subjects and objects rather than merely describing them. In this paper, I read ‘to like’ psychoanalytically as a verb whose history challenges early modern conceptions of selfhood, reflecting and reinforcing a burgeoning consumer capitalist ideology that posits desire as something contained within the self, and which the self can therefore autonomously control.