[In the following essay, Cousins examines Shakespeare's use of rhetoric in characterizing Adonis, seeing him as an anti-Narcissus figure who is the object of a voyeuristic male sexual desire.]

Shakespeare's Adonis, like his Venus, has been primarily studied either in terms of Renaissance thinking about myth and symbol or as if a character in a play. Study in the first mode has connected Adonis with, for example, the idea of beauty's transience, a connection that has been interestingly explored.¹ Study in the second mode has closely traced his responses to Venus' sexual aggression, examining his evasions, his defiances, and so on.² In what follows (and so in parallel to my discussion of Venus), both familiar critical approaches are used but new arguments about Adonis' characterization are put forward. It is initially argued that, in response to Venus' assertive (male) rhetoric of seduction, Adonis has at once an eloquent, silent, female rhetoric of rejection and a Platonic, male rhetoric of love (he also has, of course, an adolescent rhetoric of indignation and impatience at harassment). He has, that is to say, a rhetoric of chastity through which to counter the goddess's de facto role as Venus Mechanitis. Next it is argued that when Adonis refuses the goddess's seductive offer(s)—from her point of view—of metamorphosis, he does not thereby merely resemble Narcissus, with whom Venus scornfully identifies him because of his unresponsiveness to her. On the contrary, in some important respects he virtually becomes an antithesis to Narcissus, almost an anti-Narcissus figure, and in this context self-knowledge seems to be a central issue. Finally it is argued that not Venus but Adonis appears to be foregrounded as the object of sexual desire in Shakespeare's narrative. To be more specific, it is argued that the narrator, particularly through his presentation of Venus, sets up Adonis as the object of the male gaze.³

When confronting the unwelcome, predominantly Petrarchan language/rhetoric of seduction directed at him by Venus, and her bodily aggression, which often accompanies it, Adonis sometimes reacts with speech whose terse, sullen anger seems appropriate to his years and his situation. "Fie, no more of love! / The sun doth burn my face, I must remove" he cries when Venus tells him of his duty to breed—or else become like Narcissus (lines 185-186; see lines 157-174). At another moment, when Venus forgets what she was talking about and asks, "Where did I leave?", Adonis replies: "No matter where . . . , / Leave me, and then the story aptly ends . . ." (lines 715-716). That adolescent rhetoric of indignation and impatience has occasionally, moreover, a feminine tone to it, so that it seems appropriate not only to Adonis' years and circumstances but also to the poem's recurrent description of his beauty in female terms—for example, in terms of perfect whiteness and redness, which metonymically and immediately evoke the Petrarchan ideal of female beauty (as in line 10). When Venus strokes Adonis' cheek, then imprisons his hand, to cite one instance (lines 352-364: his cheek being "tend'Rer" than her hand, his hand rivalling hers in whiteness, according to the narrator in lines 352-354 and 362-364 respectively), he cries out: "For shame," . . . "let go, and let me go . . ." (line 379; cf. line 53). The feminine tone that can be heard in such outbursts links them with a distinctly female rhetoric that Adonis at times uses, apparently not knowing that it is female, much less a cultural rhetoric.

Two episodes in the poem illustrate that clearly. In an early episode, Venus pushes Adonis to the ground (lines 40-41) and he begins "to chide" her (line 46). She silences him, stopping his lips and warning that she will not let him speak in opposition to her (lines 46-48). The narrator thereupon says: "He [Adonis] burns with bashful shame, she [Venus] with her tears / Doth quench the maiden burning of his cheeks . . ." (lines 49-50). One Renaissance commonplace about women was that they should be silent; often in early modern fictions they are simply voiceless, denied speech. It is odd, then, but not hard to understand, that in emblem books the ideal woman is figured by a tortoise, among other things. Like it she stays at home and is silent.⁴ Forced into silence, like a woman but also by a female (deity) who pervasively uses a male (human) language/ rhetoric of love/seduction, Adonis responds with what is recognizable at once as part of a conventionally female—and physical, silent—cultural rhetoric eloquent of sexual embarrassment and repudiation (the narrator, having said that Adonis "burns with bashful shame," goes on to specify the process as "the maiden burning of his cheeks," emphasizing that Adonis' body language is a female, necessarily silent, expressive and conventional articulation of shamefastness). Later in the narrative, Venus warily approaches Adonis and, the narrator says," [W]hat a war of looks was then between them! / Her eyes petitioners to his eyes suing, / His eyes saw her eyes, as they had not seen them, / Her eyes woo'd still, his eyes disdain'd the wooing . . ." (lines 355-358). There are some clear differences between the earlier and later episodes. In the later one Adonis' silence is voluntary; further, he seems more vigorous in rejecting Venus. Nonetheless his rhetoric appears to be broadly the same in each. The later episode presents Venus, in her role as assertive (conventionally male, Petrarchized libertine) lover aggressing Adonis in his (conventionally female, Petrarchan) role as unwilling object of desire. Like a disdainful, Petrarchan lady he repudiates his suitor's insistent gaze, expressing himself physically, tacitly, eloquently.⁵

It was mentioned above that the other important and complementary element in what seems to be Adonis' rhetoric of chastity is a Platonic, male rhetoric of love. That rhetoric, whilst idealistic and combative, appears also to be problematic.⁶ Just after Venus has again informed Adonis of his duty to breed (lines 751-768) he makes the most substantial of his speeches (lines 769-810). There—as unknowingly as when using a female rhetoric—he presents himself in the guise of an armed Petrarchan object of desire, firmly and cautiously resistant to Venus' seductive discourse (lines 778-784). He unflatteringly identifies Venus as Venus Vulgaris trying to legitimize her desire by an appeal to her cognate function as Venus Genetrix (lines 790-791).⁷ Then he remarks, in asserting that Venus' love is actually lust: "Call it not love, for love to heaven is fled, / Since sweating lust on earth usurp'd his name; / Under whose simple semblance he hath fed / Upon fresh beauty, blotting it with blame . . ." (lines 793-796).

Adonis distinguishes between a supplanted, original, absent Cupid of spiritual love (line 793) and a usurping, parodic Cupid of sexual desire, now present on earth (line 794). In doing so he deftly, if of course again unwittingly, evokes Pausanias' distinction in Plato's Symposium between two forms of love, each symbolized by a different Cupid and a different Venus: a Cupid and Venus of spiritual love (the latter being the heavenly Venus, or Venus Urania); a Cupid and Venus of sexual desire (the latter being the earthly Venus known as Venus Pandemos/Venus Vulgaris).⁸ Pausanias' distinction primarily concerns how adult males should, and should not, love adolescent males—hence it is aptly evoked, given that Venus woos the adolescent Adonis as might "a bold-fac'd suitor".

Adonis' Platonic allusion functions in a range of ways; however, a couple seem particularly relevant here. First, it indicates that, in opposition to Venus' (male) Petrarchized libertine discourse of seduction, Adonis has a male, powerful, totalizing counter-discourse. On the other hand, Adonis uses that discourse only once at any length, and then some while after Venus has begun pursuing him. Next, it indicates that Adonis' view of spiritual love as having fled the earth is extreme (if not hard to understand, given his recent experience). Pausanias, in celebrating spiritual love, does not suggest that it cannot be achieved; he does not suggest that it cannot be found on earth. Adonis' Platonic rhetoric of love in this his major speech both forcefully counters Venus' discourse of seduction and reveals his intransigent belief that the world is loveless, that no human amatory experience is or will be spiritual. The male component of Adonis' rhetoric of chastity has, then, a problematic strength. Helping Adonis to demystify the sophistry of Venus, it nonetheless immerses him in an unrecognised sophistry of his own.

One of the best-known ploys in Venus' attempted seduction of Adonis is her telling him that his failure to love someone else—namely herself—may make him into another Narcissus (see lines 157-162; cf. lines 115-120). Her use of Narcissus as an example of a dangerous indifference to others' desires, of the dangers attendant on self-love, seems narcissistic in its self-interestedness and indifference to Adonis' desires. Nonetheless, her comparison has some credibility insofar as Adonis, like Narcissus, resolutely rejects love ("I know not love," quoth he, "nor will not know it . . ."—line 409; "My love to love is love but to disgrace it . . ."—line 412) and meets sexual advances with a hard unresponsiveness (Venus calls Adonis a "flint-hearted boy" and asks him if he is "obdurate, flinty, hard as steel . . ."—a parody of the domina petrosa motif, in lines 95 and 199 respectively; in the Metamorphoses, Ovid's narrator says that "[m]any lads and many girls fell in love with him [Narcissus], but his soft young body housed a pride so unyielding that none dared to touch him").⁹ But whilst Adonis may be seen to resemble Narcissus, he appears also to be significantly unlike him, in fact virtually to be his opposite.

One of the first things that Ovid's narrator relates about Narcissus is this. Just after he has been born and given a name, his mother asks the prophet Tiresias "whether [the] boy [will] live to a ripe old age." Tiresias' reported reply is: "Yes, if he does not come to know himself.'" Then the narrator says: "For a long time this pronouncement seemed to be nothing but empty words: however it was justified by the outcome of events: the strange madness which afflicted the boy and the nature of his death proved its truth."¹⁰ Later in the tale, as Narcissus talks to his own, unrecognized image in the pool he suddenly makes the inevitable discovery and exclaims: "Alas! I am myself the boy I see. I know it: my own reflection does not deceive me. I am on fire with love for my own self. It is I who kindle the flames which I must endure."¹¹ Tiresias prophesied that if Narcissus were to gain self-knowledge his doing so would destroy him. Love brings the boy self-knowledge and with it comes a grief that hastens his death. The most significant dissimilarity between Ovid's Narcissus and Shakespeare's Adonis centres, I think, precisely on the issue of self-knowledge and its relation to love.

By way of explaining to Venus his refusal to love her, Adonis at one point declares: "Fair queen, . . . if any love you owe me, / Measure my strangeness with my unripe years. / Before I know myself, seek not to know me . . ." (lines 523-525). He adds: "The mellow plum doth fall, the green sticks fast, / Or being early pluck'd, is sour to taste" (lines 527-528). Venus must well understand Adonis' argument, for much earlier in the tale she has remarked: "The tender spring upon thy tempting lip / Shows thee unripe; yet mayst thou well be tasted" (lines 127-128). Subsequently, in the major speech where he asserts that true, spiritual love has fled the world, Adonis indirectly raises the "unripeness" argument again: "More I could tell, but more I dare not say: / The text is old, the orator too green" (lines 805-806). It seems reasonable to propose that Adonis' insistences on his immaturity and on true love's having fled the world shape his main arguments for rejecting Venus' advances; as has just been indicated, both occur in his speech on the difference between true love and its counterfeit, lust. Be that as it may, however, the directly relevant point here is this. Whereas Narcissus self-destructively gains self-knowledge as a result of love (self-love though of course it is), Adonis wants to have self-knowledge prior to, and quite separately from, the experience of love. He apparently wishes to know himself—and so in effectto realize the ancient imperative "nosce te ipsum" ("know yourself)—without gaining sexual knowledge. The play on "know" as cognition and sexual experience in his command/request, "Before I know myself, seek not to know me" (line 525), makes that much clear. Yet Adonis' wordplay there brings together self-knowledge and sexual experience, implying (despite his wish) that they are actually connected, perhaps inseparable.

When Venus offers Adonis metamorphosis via his sexual initiation (as I have argued in discussing her characterization), she in fact offers him loss of self—or identity—as someone committed to the active life and the gaining of a new, incongruously diminished identity as aesthetic/sexual object and concupiscent prize of the hunt of love. In rejecting Venus' offers of lost and gained identities, Adonis retains his self-definition as follower of the active life (hunter, servant of Diana), a self-definition that he obviously thinks incomplete or that is incompletely understood by him (again, see lines 525-528), and refuses knowledge of his sexuality. Thereby he repudiates not only Venus' proffered new identities but also an extension of his self-knowledge: he deliberately limits his acquisition of self-knowledge by his stated decision to seek it prior to, separately from, sexual experience. Moreover, retaining his incomplete and asexual identity as follower of the active life, he therefore has his parodic sexual encounter with the boar, in which his very life is lost.¹² If self-knowledge in relation to love is a key issue in the characterizations of Shakespeare's Adonis and of Ovid's Narcissus, and the textual evidence seems to support the idea, then with respect to it the two figures are virtually antithetic. Venus' forceful, slightly accurate analogy between Adonis and Narcissus elucidates through its inaccuracy Adonis' presentation in the poem.

The final aspect of Adonis' characterization that I wish now to examine concerns the male gaze. As was suggested above, not Venus but Adonis appears to be foregrounded as the object of sexual desire in Shakespeare's poem; in fact, the narrator, chiefly through his presentation of Venus, appears to set up Adonis as the object of the male gaze.¹³ Perhaps the shortest way to start making that argument specific is by considering some of the poem's images of gluttony. Venus, in her role as Venus Vulgaris, seems appropriately (given the nature of that role) to think of Adonis as her "banquet of sense." For example, when concluding a celebration of how her senses do or would delight in Adonis, she says: "But oh what banquet wert thou to the taste, / Being nurse and feeder to the other four! / Would they not wish the feast might ever last [?]" (lines 445-447). Seemingly mindful of Venus' eagerness to gormandize on him, Adonis subsequently says in his major speech about the difference between love and lust: "Love surfeits not, lust like a glutton dies" (line 803). But whilst his allusion to gluttony denigrates, deliberately or otherwise, her picture of him as her "banquet of sense," it also echoes and condemns likewise a reference she has made to a sexual gluttony of the sight: "Who sees his true-love in her naked bed, / Teaching the sheets a whiter hue than white, / But when his glutton eye so full hath fed, / His other agents aim at like delight?" (lines 397-400).

Venus speaks those words when urging Adonis to follow the example of his horse, which has run off with "[a] breeding jennet" (line 260), and "learn to love" (line 407; cf. lines 385-408). Venus' words, that is to say, are designed to excite and to incite Adonis. They try to do so by putting before him an image of a desirable, available female subjected to a devouring, voyeuristic inspection—and of the male observer/lover's intent to follow that inspection by sexual action: she puts before him an image of the male gaze and of a consequent intent to enact its sexual power. Adonis is apparently meant to realize that he should more or less equate Venus with the desirable, available female figure in her description and that he should make himself approximate the male figure of sexual desire and power. The problem is, however, not only that Adonis does not want to become such a figure but that Venus in fact already resembles it. Adonis rather resembles the female figure in Venus' description, with the significant difference that he wishes to be neither an object of desire nor available.¹⁴ While Venus is talking to him, uttering the words now being examined, she has him firmly by the hand and will not let him go, although he asks to be set free (see lines 361-384, especially lines 361-362 with their trope of imprisonment). More important, when Venus earlier tells Adonis about her victory over Mars (lines 97-114) she also has the boy under physical restraint, but on that occasion—in her role as assertive (male) lover—she proceeds to subject him to a version of the male gaze and to voice excitedly what that gaze reveals (lines 115-128-for an ironic counterpart see lines 211-216). Yet Venus cannot, of course, ever enact the sexual power of her masculinized gaze; in that respect, as similarly in respect of gender-reversal, she diverges from the image of the male gaze and of its consequence which she puts before Adonis.

However if Adonis is subjected at some moments of the text to the masculinized gaze of Venus, he is pervasively and primarily subjected throughout it to the male gaze of the implied reader.¹⁵ A main factor in that would seem to be the narrator's recurrent, emphatic devaluing in the poem of Venus, the goddess of love, as an object of desire. From the first stanza he treats her ludically, introducing her as "[s]ick-thoughted Venus" who "like a bold-fac'd suitor 'gins to woo" Adonis (lines 5-6). From the start she seems a figure of comedy and of pathos. Thereafter, the narrator makes her appear not merely comic (as in lines 463-468) or pathetic (as in lines 1057-1062) but grotesque as well—veering between the poles of comedy and of pathos: in her physical power (for example, when exercizing force on Adonis; see lines 29-35); in her unreasoning and excessive passion (see lines 25-28, 61-66, 217-222, and so on). Those accord with the grotesqueness of much of her libertine rhetoric (cf. the excesses of pleading and of cajoling in lines 187-198, for instance). The narrator stresses, too, the grotesqueness/ferocity of her predatory desire (lines 54-60, 67-68, 541-576, and so on). He treats her with condescension (as notably in lines 607-610) and even celebrates her beauty only to heighten the reader's perception of Adonis' unique beauty (see, for example, lines 352-364).¹⁶ The repeated devaluing of Venus as an object of sexual desire, for all her beauty, helps in the placement of Adonis in that role; it facilitates, that is to say, the deflection of the implied reader's male gaze from the goddess of love to the adolescent boy.

The workings and results of that deflection can, I think, be briefly and representatively illustrated. When, to cite an early instance (lines 40-84), Adonis has been pushed to the ground by Venus and is, in effect, restrained by her (see lines 40-42), her virtual imprisonment of the boy seems clearly to promote him as the implied (and male) reader's object of sexual focus. Venus "stroke[s Adonis'] cheek" and begins to kiss him (lines 45-48). His response to her doing so is represented in terms that feminize him (lines 49-50, discussed above, and line 53)—whereas, of course, her assertive sexual actions imply her masculinization. Moreover, the narrator then introduces a short, simple account of Venus' proceeding, again and again, to kiss Adonis' face (lines 59-60), by vividly and at greater length comparing the impassioned goddess to an "empty eagle" tearing at and devouring its prey (lines 55-58). To that point in the episode, Venus has arguably been imaged as desiring rather than as desirable. Her beauty has been alluded to once (line 51); her desire for Adonis has been indicated to be confining, insistent, and fiercely predatory. On the other hand, and in contrast to the (ultimately grotesque) representation of Venus, the picture of Adonis has been that of a helpless, feminized victim of sexual violence. The reader sees a sexually devalued Venus and an Adonis who is sexually foregrounded to the goddess's cost.

In what immediately follows, the narrator uses that process of devaluing and foregrounding to set up Adonis as the object of the implied reader's male gaze. The immediately subsequent description of Adonis iterates his sexual distress: "Panting he lies and breatheth in [Venus'] face" (line 62). His distress may be made to look comic in its awkward physicality but, for all that, it is nonetheless distress. If the description again conveys something of Adonis' simplicity, it likewise implies his helplessness, his role as feminized victim of sexual violence. Whether or not Venus recognizes what Adonis' "breath[ing] in her face" reveals about him, she responds to it with sexual excitement. "She feedeth on the steam as on a prey" (line 63), the narrator says. Inevitably, the narrator's word "prey" in that line evokes his preceding representation of Venus as a sexual predator, and he alludes to it once more in lines 67-68. (The picture of Adonis as her victim is evoked, in both cases, at the same time.) That continued process of devaluing and foregrounding, however, now functions differently from the way it did earlier in the episode. The narrator now uses it to focus on and to celebrate Adonis' beauty—actually, to put that beauty on display for inspection by the implied reader. Venus' excited praise of the boy's beauty is recounted (lines 64-66); her virtually limitless pleasure in it is implied (lines 77-84). And Venus' harassment of Adonis brings (the narrator relates with apparent pleasure) reactions from him which in fact heighten his feminized beauty (lines 73-78).¹⁷ The narrator's own appreciation of Adonis' physical appeal is expressed both there and at another moment of the text (line 70). What seems to be happening here is a coercion of the female: a devaluation/suppression of Venus' attractiveness, an emphasis on her obsessive desire for and delight in Adonis' beauty, so that her beauty can be pushed into the background of the episode and thereby help to foreground his. Venus' desire for and delight in the boy's beauty, and the narrator's appreciation of it, merge in a cumulative and fairly long description—the results being that it is elaborately displayed and that Adonis is put forward as the (notional) object of sexual desire. Adonis' beauty appears to be held up by the responsive narrator and by the sexually devalued goddess of love for appreciative inspection, for visual possession, by the (notionally male and not indifferent) reader. "He" seems invited to view it with a "glutton eye" (line 399).

Whilst other instances in Shakespeare's poem could be examined (for example, in lines 241-252, after Venus has set herself on display for Adonis' male gaze and that of the implied reader, and in 349-354; 427-452; 541-572-cf. 595-606), perhaps more revealing may be to make some comparisons between how Adonis is set up as an object of the male gaze and how the male gazeis exercized/evoked in Marlowe's Hero and Leander and in Donne's "Elegy 19 To his Mistress Going to Bed."¹⁸ In the former poem, the early and stylized descriptions of the soon-to-be lovers indicate that they are significantly alike. Hero, described in lines 5-50, is supposedly an object of irresistible sexual fascination, wooed by Apollo for the beauty of her hair alone (line 6), worthy—in his opinion—to be yielded his throne so that all men can gaze on her (lines 7-8), mistaken by Cupid for his mother Venus (lines 39-44). Leander, described in lines 51-90, supposedly complements her in attractiveness, for had his "dangling tresses that were never shorn / . . . been cut, and unto Colchos borne" (lines 55-56) they would have inspired a second, but more compelling, quest for "the Golden Fleece" (lines 57-58); moreover, Cynthia—Apollo's sister—desires him (lines 59-60). Yet the formal descriptions of Hero and of Leander indicate also that they are significantly unlike in terms of their being supposedly sexually irresistible.

The most important dissimilarity comes from the fact that whereas Marlowe's narrator describes Hero's clothing as well as her body, he subsequently pictures Leander's body but not his clothing. Such description as the narrator gives of Hero's body implies her impossible beauty; however, the account of her clothing suggests that her beauty—and the sexual desire that her beauty can generate—is linked to violence and death. The depiction of the Venus and Adonis story on her sleeves (lines 11-14), the blood on her kirtle (lines 15-16), suggest that link and foreshadow Leander's fate. It is true that, when first describing Leander, the narrator foretells/reminds the reader of Leander's death (lines 51-54). It is true, too, that some of the allusions to myth in the account of Leander's body have negative associations, linking beauty, sexual desire, and death (especially relevant here is the refiguring allusion to Narcissus, to whom Adonis in Shakespeare's poem seems a virtual antithesis). Nonetheless, even if the picture of Leander begins with a reference to his death, even if it links his beauty with sexual desire and death as does the account of Hero's clothing, it is startlingly appreciative and specific. Marlowe's narrator, seeming to delight in intimate celebration of the detail of Leander's body, puts him forward as an epitome of beauty taken too early from the world. In fact, the narrator's intimate celebration of Leander's beauty puts him forward, as an object of sexual desire, with an emotiveness and enthusiasm lacking in the description of Hero. Leander is celebrated and displayed—by the narrator with delight and clearly for the pleasure of the implied reader's male gaze:

His body was as straight as Circe's wand;
Jove might have sipped out nectar from his hand.
Even as delicious meat is to the taste,
So was his neck in touching, and surpassed
The white of Pelop's shoulder. I could tell ye
How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly,
And whose immortal fingers did imprint
That heavenly path with many a curious dint
That runs along his back . . .

(lines 61-69)

Marlowe's narrator may describe Hero first and he may make Hero and Leander similar as creatures who are supposed to be sexually irresistible. For all that, Leander is foregrounded to Hero's cost, as Adonis is to that of Venus in Venus and Adonis. Just as Shakespeare's narrator sexually devalues Venus, again and again, throughout Venus and Adonis, so Marlowe's narrator sexually devalues Hero throughout Hero and Leander. Her being constructed as the blindly, paradoxically, vulnerably virginal priestess of Venus Vulgaris (see 1, 131-166)—"Venus' nun"—makes her both comic and pathetic from the start; and there is the narrator's recurrent, ironic play with his characterization of her as at once beautiful and innocent (see, for example, his comparison between her and Diana seeking to evade Actaeon, 2, 260-262, and his comparison of her to a harpy, 2, 270). The process of devaluing and foregrounding at work in Shakespeare's poem has a counterpart, though not an identical one, in Marlowe's. As has been argued above, the result of that process, in each poem, is the narrator's homoerotic celebration and display of the male protagonist for the male gaze.

In that context of devaluing/foregrounding and the male gaze, Donne's "Elegy 19 To his Mistress Going to Bed" seems both illuminatingly like and unlike the poems by Shakespeare and by Marlowe. The main similarity lies in how Donne constructs his persona and in how that persona apparently exercizes/seeks to evoke the male gaze. The chief dissimilarity lies, of course, in the aggressive heterosexuality of Donne's poem. But the comparison and the contrast are more intricate than might be thought. Donne's persona in "Elegy 19" recalls both the persona of Ovid's Elegies and, as it appears, Marlowe's recreation of that Ovidian persona in his translation of the Elegies.¹⁹ Seeming to be wise in the ways of the world, of the flesh, and of letters, too sophisticated to take social or moral convention at face value, ingenious, ironic, fond of displaying his wit, self-assertive and self-centred, Donne's persona distinctly manifests his Ovidian and, very arguably, Marlovian lineage. This persona features, with varying emphases, in many of Donne's secular love poems; of necessity, given his lineage, he has much in common with the narrator of Venus and Adonis and with that of Hero and Leander (for although the latter poem is certainly indebted to "divine Musaeus"—1, 52—the construction of its narrator is nonetheless indebted to Ovid's earlier erotic verse).

When Donne's persona commands his fictive mistress to undress, he celebrates both her body and her clothing ("Off with that girdle, like heaven's zone glistering, / But a far fairer world encompassing," lines 5-6). His commands, as that example indicates, recreate the woman: in fact they, and almost everything else he says, reinvent and reinterpret her (to the point where she becomes, from the persona's angle of vision, his sexual/political colony, his private source of physical riches, his personal empire—see lines 27-30). Donne's persona, that is to suggest, reinvents and reinterprets the woman to her face. The silent "she" finds herself being reconstructed by her lover as she stands before him. Her appearance is celebrated and made subject to the refashioning power of his male gaze. Moreover, in refashioning her before her own eyes (as it were) the persona holds his version of her on display for the appreciative male gaze of the implied reader—a twofold exercize of power. That exercize of power is also Donne's self-display, a display of rhetorical virtuosity to his (mainly) young, male audience containing fellow poets such as his friend Christopher Brooke.²⁰ The fictional lady is, then, apparently foregrounded yet actually devalued because made voiceless and refashioned, in order that Donne's persona and hence Donne himself can be foregrounded for appreciation. The male is displayed—even if not homoerotically—to the cost of the female (on which it is therefore, ironically, also dependent, within the scope of libertine discourse). So perhaps the assertive heterosexuality of Donne's poem may not, finally, very greatly distinguish it from Venus and Adonis or from Hero and Leander. The process of devaluing/foregrounding, in connection with the exercize and evocation of the male gaze by Ovidian speakers, who are complicit with the implied readers in their coercing of the female, makes all three poems akin.

The calculated, flamboyant transgressiveness of Shakespeare's poem, of Marlowe's and of Donne's goes beyond issues such as the construction of narrators or of personae, and the representation of sexual politics, as one need hardly point out. Beyond them, though not separable from them, are issues such as how the relations among desire, ceremony, convention, and anarchy are represented—and what the representations of them may imply. In Marlowe's poem, ceremony and anarchy coexist: love is both ritual and disruption in a world seemingly centred on Venus Vulgaris. On the other hand, in Donne's poem the speaking self constructs a private world, centred on its all-subordinating desire, by means of literary/social conventions which at once shape the speaking self and allow it to reshape its surroundings.²¹ Shakespeare's poem suggests love's often incongruous multiplicity and intense selfcentredness, its inability to be captured in a single definition, its ambiguous transformative power, each of which is indicated by the characterization of Venus. As in Marlowe's poem, yet not identically so, love is both ritual and disruption: ceremony and anarchy co-exist (but in a world where Venus has many aspects—to identify one of the differences between the world of Venus and Adonis and that of Hero and Leander). And the characterization of Adonis significantly complements that of Venus. His suggests, in counterpoint to hers, a link between chastity and self-ignorance, between sexual experience and self-knowledge. In rejecting sexual initiation Adonis may evade the insistence and egocentrism of sexual desire, and loss of his present, incomplete identity for the gaining of a diminished, eroticized, one, but he also evades self-knowledge, wilfully seeking to dissociate self-knowledge from sexual experience. If sexual desire is, then, problematic in its diversity, self-centredness and disorderliness, so too can chastity be in its destructive frustration of self-knowledge. Moreover, whereas Venus in her role as Venus Mechanitis voices a failed rhetoric of desire, excessive desire's marring the conventions of language designed to express desire, Adonis' characterization implies that chastity, desire's negation, may also flaw communication by having an intransigently idealizing, delusive rhetoric no less sophistic than that of desire. Adonis' characterization indicates as well, through its connection with a process of foregrounding/devaluing and with the exercize/evocation of the male gaze, that love's multiplicity by no means excludes homoerotic desire. Shakespeare's first poem, inventively ludic, sceptical, emphatically various in its representations of sexuality, and meta-Ovidian in its sophisticated self-awareness rather than merely Ovidian, reveals how shrewdly he understood the rhetorical possibilities of the epyllion and, in doing so, its social possibilities as a means for displaying his virtuosity as a poet in the competition for patronage.

Notes

¹ See, for example, C. Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 151-153. Sandys' note, "Men of excellent beauties haue likely beene subiect to miserable destinies," has a topical relevance to Buckingham (Ovid's Metamorphoses Englished, p. 366). Reference to Shakespeare's poem is, throughout, to The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (1960; rpt. London: Methuen, 1961).

² See, for example, J. D. Jahn, "The Lamb of Lust: The Role of Adonis in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis," Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1970), 11-25.

³ On the gaze, and on the male gaze, see: Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983; rpt. London: MacMillan, 1985); Edward Snow, "Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems, "Representations, 25 (1989), 30-41. I am grateful to Patrick Fuery for drawing my attention to the former.

⁴ The emblematist Valeriano, for example, makes that point. Greville's A Letter to an Honorable Lady interestingly reworks/revises it.

⁵ Venus is voluble but, again, male in her volubility (she predominately uses, after all, a Petrarchan language/rhetoric of seduction).

⁶ The Platonic aspect of Adonis' rhetoric has been noted by others—but its problematic nature has not, as far as I am aware, been considered.

⁷ Again, an unknowing cultural specificity.

⁸ Reference to Plato's Symposium is from the translation by W. H. D. Rouse (ed. E. H. Warmington and P. G. Rouse) in his Great Dialogues of Plato (New York: New American Library, 1956), pp. 78-82. It is beyond the chosen scope of this essay to examine the characterization of Adonis in relation to the early modern discourse of homoeroticism—a subject that I shall be considering in a subsequent discussion. Thus the representation of Adonis is not considered here in the context of theorizings of that early modern discourse by writers such as Guy Poirier, E. K. Sedgwick, Joseph Cady, Jonathan Dollimore, and so on.

⁹ Reference to Ovid is from Mary M. Innes, trans., The Metamorphoses (1955; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), here at p. 83.

¹⁰ Ovid, trans. Innes, p. 83.

¹¹ Ovid, trans. Innes, p. 86.

¹² Though in this he also broadly resembles Narcissus, because a refusal to love brings Narcissus to false love and death. The boar is clearly an antithesis to the horse: the former is unreasoning malevolence and destructiveness, the latter, innate nobility; the former, a parodic punishment for sexuality avoided, whereas the latter is "natural" sexuality exampled.

¹³ In what follows, my thinking on the male gaze has been especially influenced by both Bryson and Snow (see n. 3).

¹⁴Venus sees him as available, if not as her willing "true-love."

¹⁵ The assumed readership for the poem would seem to be primarily male (in kind, much the same readership as for Lodge's epyllion), and hence the male gaze seems to be evoked. I do not wish to consider here the issue of the female gaze.

¹⁶ Venus' beauty is not always praised or displayed, of course, only to set off that of Adonis. Venus' "deer park" picture of her own body is an instance of her beauty being displayed for the implied reader's male gaze and in hope, on her part as it were, of evoking Adonis' male gaze. I am grateful to David Bevington for making me consider this point.

¹⁷ The Petrarchan red and white being iterated, heightened even by his distress.,

¹⁸ There are not, as I read the poem, many instances at all of Venus' being displayed for the male gaze. Reference to Marlowe's verse is from S. Orgel's edition, The Complete Poems and Translations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971). Reference to Donne's verse is from A. J. Smith's edition, The Complete English Poems (1971; rpt., London: Allen Lane, 1974).

¹⁹ For similarities in rhetoric and language between Donne's persona (and the personae constructed throughout his Elegies as a whole) and Marlowe's Ovidian persona, see 3, 6 and 7 in Marlowe's translation. As S. Orgel remarks: "Donne's elegies are full of a sense of Marlowe's language . . ." (Poems and Translations, p. 233).

²⁰ See R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 35-79.

²¹ The conventions of libertinism both shape and free (in some respects) the self, helping it to create a private world of desire that subordinates all to it: the woman; politics; God, and so on.