[In the following essay, Stanivukovic probes the rhetoric of desire in Venus and Adonis.]

Venus and Adonis is the most rhetorical and erotic of Shakespeare's early works. Eros is the main subject of the poem's narrative and also the central topic of the rhetorical arguments in it. Hence, critics have focused on these two aspects of the poem, discussing the purpose and the tone of its rhetoric, and interpreting the representation of eros in the poem's narrative. A list of references documenting this point would be too long, and perhaps even unnecessary, because many interpretations arrive, more or less, at the same conclusion. Summarising this, Lucy Gent notices that "Rhetoric in [ . . . ] Venus and Adonis is usually thought of as remarkably plentiful, and very well done—but rather tedious, and not relevant to our understanding of the meaning of the poem."'¹ Gent's view of the rhetoricrelated criticism of Venus and Adonis still holds value. For her own part, Gent attempts to relate eloquence to meaning and to the "central issue" of the poem, which she sees in the relation between hyperbole and reality.² In Gent's project, hyperbole denies reality, life and sexual drive triumph over death, and she defines the theme of the poem as the antithesis between eloquence and truth. As opposed to Gent's view, the relationship between rhetoric and reality is only one aspect of the "real" issue in the poem; the other aspect concerns the reality of rhetoric, the relevance of rhetoric which prefigures the conceptualisation of eros in the poem. In Venus and Adonis, rhetoric reduces life to eros and, therefore, one way of understanding the theme of eros, or desire, is to analyse and interpret the structure of the rhetorical patterns which represent desire. Yet the dichotomy between the rhetoric of lust and the rhetoric of love, between the Ovidian desire for body and the Neoplatonic yearning for beauty, is not all that simple, as Richard A. Lanham argues in his rhetorical reading of Venus and Adonis.³ In fact, Lanham believes that the complexity of the text lies in the rhetorical ambiguities which underlie both the representation of love and the construction of characters in this poem. He concludes his analysis of rhetoric in Venus and Adonis by noticing "the peculiar/serious rhetorical ambivalence toward character and language".⁴ I would like to take this "rhetorical ambivalence" one step further, into semiotics of the text. Moreover, I would argue that the linguistic ambiguities and the rhetorical opacity are, in fact, functional in Shakespeare's construction of desire. I would further argue that the persuasive techniques which underlie Venus' and Adonis' rhetorical language create new expectations for our reading of desire in the poem.

Criticism of a text whose meaning depends on the rhetorical strategies which textualise that meaning should start with an interpretation of the rhetorical patterns in order to argue anything about thematic representation. A critical practice in which the move is from specific patten to representation—from argumentation to aesthetics—enables us to see a literary text in a perspective different from the one which treats rhetoric as a stylistic ornament only. An examination of sexuality as a theme of Venus and Adonis is further related to our interpretation of the rhetorical strategies which represent arguments about desire in the poem. I approach rhetoric as a cognitive mode which suggests the early modern conceptualisation of desire in Venus and Adonis. Thus in reading the poem, I employ a critical method which is not served by, but is in the service of rhetoric. We should remember that in the narrowest sense, in which both classical and the early modern culture understood it, rhetoric was considered an art of argumentation whose end is in persuasion. Therefore, instead of treating rhetoric as a stylistic ornament which supports reading—thematic criticism formulates this sort of approach as "the rhetoric of . . ."—I argue that rhetoric itself, the structure of argumentation, renders meaning. Thus I suggest that the real subject of Venus and Adonis is desire in rhetoric, not the rhetoric of desire. This desire is transcribed as rhetorical pattern which in itself captures the nature and the structure of desire. In this essay, I further argue that the thematic context of Venus' sexual soliciting of Adonis, expressed as ineffective rhetoric—Venus' tedious song (841)—results in Venus' failure both as an orator and as a lover. In turn, an interpretative strategy which focuses on an analysis of rhetorical arguments alters our reading of desire in the poem.

Reading Venus and Adonis rhetorically challenges thematic approaches to the poem. Thematic criticism of the poem, as Douglas Bush notices, centres on two main issues: First, that "The central antithesis of subject, [is] between the warm goddess and the cold youth"; and second, that "Shakespeare's representation of a chaste youth solicited by an amorous woman had precedents not only in Ovid but in the pastoral tradition derived partly from Ovid".⁵ One might argue that Bush's argument is characteristic of the tendency to approach the poem in terms of binary opposites. Thus, thematic critics either examine the opposition between Venus' destructive sexuality and Adonis' amorous reluctance; or, they discuss the psychological motivations of the two characters in terms of their contrasting attitudes towards love. Moreover, discussion of the moral implication of the contrast between physical and spiritual love has been a common topic in the existing criticism of the poem.⁶ Ovidian foundations of Shakespeare's poem cannot be avoided in any reading of the sexuality in Venus and Adonis, as Jonathan Bate so admirably demonstrates in his latest book on Ovid and Shakespeare.⁷ Realised as a destructive force, the Ovidian passion in Venus and Adonis reflects the larger theme of Ovid's influence on the early modern erotic literature. However, Shakespeare's rhetoric in the poem is Ovidian in a very broad sense, in so far as its purpose and tone rely on the Ovidian carpe diem formula, an invitation to enjoy sensual love. However, Shakespeare's argumentative techniques are more diverse and functional than Ovid's eloquence. If Shakespeare borrows anything from Ovidian eloquence, it is the ornamental copiousness of its pastoral passages. In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare rhetorically expands on Ovid's topic of Venus' body and mind overwhelmed by passion for Adonis, rendered as "The beawty of the lad/Inflam'd hir".⁸ As an early modern adaptation of Ovid, Shakespeare's poem represents a rhetorical study of that desirous flame.

Recently, John Roe has cautioned against reading the poem ethically, arguing instead that the rhetoric-related approach to the poem—his subject is wordplay—offers a more fruitful insight into the study of passions in Venus and Adonis. So Roe says:

Attempting to take a consistent ethical reading of, for example, Venus's sensuality is bound to fail. The play of language in the poem sees to that. The subversions of wordplay are no trite affair, nor are they mere surface merriment. For wordplay is not [ . . . ] only divisive [...] . It provides the only solution there is—an aesthetic one, which is beyond the scope of continuous, unfinished, formless action. The language of the poem encapsulates human reality, fragmented, inconclusive, and frustrating, and submits it to the order of art.⁹

In Roe's view, the rhetoric of Venus and Adonis tells us much about how reality is to be critically perceived in the poem. Following up on Roe, I suggest that the pleasure of reading desire in Venus and Adonis textually, enhances the thematic interpretation of desire, because the uncontrollable and the irregular nature of desire is evoked in the logical and stylistic modalities which render it. As a linguistic, formal way of representing affects, rhetoric brings out what is contained in(side)—self, mind, body—and, therefore, anything external—themes, socio-cultural contexts: anything outside the realm of rhetoric—depends on the rhetorical construction.

A critical scrutiny of the commonly used rhetorical figures and tropes in Venus and Adonis relates my critical approach to the poem to the early modern attitudes toward the purpose of rhetoric. For the early modern humanists, ornamentation meant argumentation, and, as Bernard Weinberg and Richard Waswo remind us, the humanist poet-orators considered the poetic text to be a rhetorical construct in which literary language was an instrument for achieving moral utility.¹⁰ While it is true that, as Thomas M. Conley notices, in the early modern period character (ethos) "would seem to be a more significant formal cause of work than any orderly distribution of the principles of rhetoric",¹¹ it can also be said that, in early modern texts, character motivation is achieved rhetorically, through strategies of argumentation. In the early modern literary culture, the character originates in the rhetorical rendering of it; it is first a rhetorical, then an ethical construct. Early modern texts demonstrate that in the quest for the self, rhetorical procedure is inseparable from an ethical endeavour.

In her discussion of humanist rhetoric, Hanna H. Gray reminds us that "humanists' own stress on form [has] not always been treated sufficiently as an integral dimension of their thought".¹² For humanists, the purpose of rhetoric is to inspire an aesthetic response by leading the mind to meaning through the rhetorical form, a process most often neglected by modern critics. By arguing for a criticism absorbed in the poetic form of the text, not the text dominated by its context, Gray and de Man argue for rhetoric as a site of meaning, not rhetoric equated with literary criticism. Those two critical paradigms provide us with tools to read Shakespeare's rhetoric not just in a new way, but also in a way closer to the early modern understanding of its purpose. Yet in the early modern treatises on style, there are numerous examples of writers' insistence on treating rhetorical patterns as vehicles for thought and tools of persuasion, and not mere stylistic ornaments. Thus, for example, in his style manual, entitled The Garden of Eloquence (1577), Henry Peacham discusses the relationship between ornamentation and representation, and says:

wise men [poet-orators] remembring that many thinges were very like one to an other [ . . . ] declared their meaning by wordes that made a likely simillitude, of those thinges which they signifyed, and then seeing, that by this meanes, thinges were well set out, matters well expressed, and causes well commended, and that by translation they might utter their mindes largely, and set forth any matters with great perspecuity and pleasauntnesse, perceyuing also that it brought often times great delectation to the hearers, by reason of the simillitude.¹³

In suggesting that the pleasure of reading derives from both associating meaning with ornament (since this is what rhetors do in the first place) and in substituting ornaments for meaning, Peacham argues for an ornament which is the form of knowing the text, and subsequently, a vehicle of understanding both subjects and themes embodied in a text.

The early modern theory of knowing subjects (reality) in rhetorical patterns corresponds to some illuminating modern theories about the relationship between rhetorical figures and literary meaning. Thus, in an essay on the semiology of rhetorical figures, Paul de Man argues for the importance of "formalist and intrinsic criticism".¹⁴ De Man calls for the "rhetorically conscious reading" of the literary text, arguing that rhetoric in general, and tropes in particular, constitute an epistemological system of codes whose structure shapes meaning. The act of reading then is a process of interpreting rhetoric, a process which helps us delve into the meaning of other, extrinsic (contextual) elements which shape a literary text. Paul de Man illustrates his theory with an example from Marcel Proust's novel Swann's Way. In the novel, the paradigmatic substitution which underlies the use of metaphor and metonymy is both crucial to our reading (knowing) of Proust's narrative itself, and central to our appreciation of the character of young Marcel who simultaneously takes delight in reading a text and enjoys a warm summer day, substituting one pleasure with the other in the process. Thus, for Paul de Man, interpretation represents a process of reading which is a simultaneous deconstruction and construction. Reading is an action in which analysis of the rhetorical form (an intrinsic aspect of the text) informs our knowing of the subject, and hence the contextual (extrinsic) aspect of the text, too. Thus deconstruction, as Paul de Man says, "is not something we have added to the text but it constituted the text in the first place".¹⁵

Paul de Man's epistemology of tropes, and Hanna H. Gray's idea about the relevance of the language form in the quest for meaning in our reading of humanist texts, provide a constructive theoretical framework in reopening the question of the rhetorical rendering of desire in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. Following up on Gray's and de Man's theory of interpreting meaning through rhetorical forms, and not losing from sight the humanists' attitudes toward rhetoric and meaning, I propose an approach to reading desire in Venus and Adonis which centres on the forms of Venus' rhetoric whose subject is desire, and I suggest that such an approach changes our perception of Venus as the powerful embodiment of desire. Arguments which Venus uses to move Adonis to love her demonstrate Venus' failure, not her mastery and dominance, as a lover-orator.

Shakespeare's insistence on rhetorically vivid articulation of sexual pleasure without satisfactory fulfilment—Venus' "hollow womb" (268)—pushes the limits of the carpe diem ethics and aesthetics towards conceptualisation of desire as frustration, unfulfilment, and instability. The void and anxiety created by the lack of the object of desire are rhetorically textualised in patterns of argumentation through which Venus creates an illusion of desirous possession.

Since rhetoric is always emotion-driven, the arguments through which desire is articulated in Venus and Adonis suggest a complex psychological situation which underlies Venus' invitation to love. Figures and tropes of anticipation, probabilities, rearrangement, displacement, suppression, and reduction, are all germane to Venus' sexual solicitations. Consider, for example, the passage in which Venus offers herself to Adonis:

Were I hard-favoured, foul, or wrinkled-old,
Ill-nurtured, crooked, churlish, harsh in voice,
o'Erworn, despised, rheumatic and cold,
Thick-sighted, barren, lean, and lacking juice,
Then mightst thou pause, for then I were not for thee;
But having no defects, why dost thou abhor me?

Thou canst not see one wrinkle in my brow;
Mine eyes are grey and bright and quick in turning;
My beauty as the spring doth yearly grow,
My flesh is soft and plump, my marrow burning;
My smooth moist hand, were it with thy hand felt,
Would in thy palm dissolve, or seem to melt.

(133-44)¹⁶

Here, the textualisation of desire, first as denial of beauty, then as its affirmation, is inscribed in terms of the conventional use of enthymemes. Richard A. Lanham defines enthymeme as "Maintaining the truth of a Proposition from the assumed truth of its contrary. [ . . . ] an abridged syllogism, one of the terms being omitted as understood."¹⁷ Venus creates an erotic self-portrait grounded in hypotheses (133-8), then, she continues to argue with a persuasion by proofs (140-2) which substitute her previous hypothetical denials, and she ends her argument with an enthymeme (143-4) expressed in the conditional mode. What Venus omits from enthymemes in the lines 133-8, she complements in the lines 139-44, thus satisfying herself as an orator, though not a good one. For Adonis' harsh snub, "Fie, no more of love!" (186), in response to Venus' oration, and his subsequent reaction to the long allegorical digression representing mating horses (193-216), whose purpose is to move him by example, but at which he only "smiles as in [ . . . ] disdain" (241), suggest that Venus fails as an orator. And Adonis' rejection of Venus' rhetoric as "bootless [fruitless] chat [ . . . ] an idle theme" (422) further suggests that her oratory is shallow. But here the question is whether we should take this—and other, similar examples in which Venus' rhetoric fails to move Adonis—as the victory of Adonis' Neoplatonism over Venus' Ovidianism. This may be relevant to a thematic reading of the poem, but there is nothing in Venus' arguments, let alone in Adonis' cryptic rejections of them, to indicate dichotomy chotomy between the two kinds of love. Yet, what the rhetorical situation indicates here—besides the subject of sexual appeal—is that Venus' argument reveals to us a character whose desire is not constructed as a stable force, but as a probability realised in the conditional mode which attempts to reshape reality.¹⁸

In rhetorically more precise terms, it can be said that what underlies Venus' argumentation is the Aristotelian formula of persuasion by arguments based on probabilities.¹⁹ Venus assumes that probability is effective enough a proof to move him. But Adonis' rejection denies the possibility of persuasion by probabilities. By implying that Venus' rhetoric is shallow, Adonis denies the validity of her proofs, and consequently of her way of knowing desire as well. The third—narrator's—voice captures, in the form or rhetorical questions, the moment of Venus' disorientation after her failed persuasion: "Now which way shall she turn? which way shall she say?/Her words are done, her woes the more increasing;/The time is spent, her object will away" (253-5).

Similarly, Shakespeare's use of catachresis—an implied, extravagant, or far-fetched metaphor²⁰—indicates a self-conscious end of persuasion; it pleases the speaker, but it does not move the object of desire. Thus seen in conjunction with Venus' "So shall I die with drops of hot desire" (1074), and together with the exemplum (a cited example) about her emasculation of Mars, "Making my arms his [Mars'] field, his tent my bed" (108), catachresis further transcribes Venus' desire as fantasy. As a form of vivid enthymeme, exemplum, as Aristotle says in Rhetoric, is "concerned with things which may, generally speaking, be other than they are".²¹ Like enthymeme, exemplum only supposes reality, it does not confirm it. Since Adonis cannot love like Mars, Venus satisfies her desire by conceptualising pleasure as a vivid rhetorical possibility; here, she performs desire not as truth, but as a fantasy of sexual fulfilment, as an alternative reality. Thus, Venus' desire is localised in her mind and in her rhetoric, not realised in her body and in the narrative. In Shakespeare, Venus becomes the embodiment of desire which is, as Catherine Belsey notices, "anarchic, and its cause is not, in the end, the persuasive powers of another person, not even a goddess, but the missing objet a".²²

Enthymemes, which transcribe Venus' desire as passion fantasised not realised, correspond in intention to numerous oxymora, figures of condensed paradox,²³ which Venus uses in her attempts to move Adonis. As a figure which combines opposites while affirming the impossible, oxymoron functions as a subgroup of enthymeme in Venus and Adonis. Oxymoron helps Shakespeare construct the erotic longing for the missing lover in terms of a logical paradox of the impossible. Thus Venus' complaint about Adonis' ability to destabilise eros and to leave it in agony, oxymoronically realises Venus' nostalgic fashioning of Adonis as a desirable, yet unattainable, source of erotic pleasure:

Thy mermaid's voice hath done me double wrong;
I had my load before, now pressed with bearing:
Melodious discord, heavenly tune harsh sounding,
Ears' deep-sweat music, and heart's deep-sore wounding.

(429-32)

The image of Adonis as a hurting mermaid, capable of harsh, hence painful tunes, on the one hand represents Adonis as a reluctant love. But on the other hand, words such as "load", "pressed", and "bearing" connote sexual charge. Venus' rhetoric suggests denial, but the narrative in which she continuously attempts to possess Adonis implies that her sexual energy cannot be reconciled with his inability to consume it. This situation, of appealing to emotions in the language of rhetorical paradox, corresponds to Quintilian's definition of enthymeme as "[an] incomplete syllogism [ . . . ] drawn from incompatibilities".²⁴ Quintilian's point further prefigures Venus' oxymoronic and enthymemic persuasion as the rhetorically constructed desire of the probable union with Adonis, which is the only way in which Venus conceptualises eros. Namely, Shakespeare treats enthymeme, a rhetorical figure, as if it were a representation of reality. He makes Venus believe and say it, that an unattainable object of desire is a real one.

Persuasive techniques which Shakespeare founds in the rhetoric of impossibility and logical paradox, suggest a speaker—Venus—who, though employing copious eloquence, argues, in fact, in a way which does not affect the listener. Venus' rhetoric exhausts the power of desire before this power even has a chance to possess the desired object. Hence, in the frequent use of chiasmus, a figure which in its most basic function signifies reversal, Shakespeare represents desire as a self-reflective force, thus embodying a sense of instability that suggests paradox. So, in Shakespeare's "Her eyes seen in the tears, tears in her eye" (962), the gaze, which in the early modern poetics of amorous longing has a transformative power (it represents the imagined as the real) here dissolves in its own reflection. Here, Venus' self-centred rhetoric originates in the techniques of "mirror inversion", which Richard A. Lanham identifies with chiasmus, a figure in which same elements of the verbal expression only swap places.²⁵ Thus chiasmus best reflects the situation in which nothing changes for Venus in her persistent quest for Adonis' body. Her rhetoric is not absorbed by the object of desire, but reflected back from it; and her pain remains the same.

In a similar fashion, antimetabole, which Lanham sees as a subgroup of chiasmus, and defines as an "inverted [ . . . ] order of repeated words [ . . . ] [which] sharpen their sense or [ . . . ] contrast the ideas they convey, or both",²⁶ contextualises Venus' desire as a commutative mode. So, in examples such as, "Pluck down the rich, enrich the poor with treasure" (1150) and "Make the young old, the old become a child" (1152), the opposites reshape reality into impossibility. The subjects of social distortion and of natural displacement, which constitute the two examples of antimetabole, transcribe Venus' desire in a rhetorical pattern of wrongly combined opposites. Yet, both antimetabole and chiasmus indicate a minimal persuasive effort because they do not discover new possibilities of argumentation, but only mirror the ones already established by rearranging of the existing syntactic order. Venus' rhetorical copiousness, therefore, functions not as a sign of power—it sounds more like a flurry of language—but only simulates authority and dominance in the rhetoric of paradox and impossibility. The rhetoric, whose very form limits the power of desire in the poem, also affects the body in the sense that the language of desire has the capacity, in Judith Butler's words, "to unsettle the mastery and subvert the intentionality of the subject who desires".²⁷

Lack of the desired object is further transcribed as metonymy, in Venus' "I am such park" (239) and in Shakespeare's frequent comments that "She [Venus] is love" (610). As a figure of substitution,²⁸ metonymy can be replaced with any number of concepts which correspond to the poetic reality it contextualises. In the examples quoted, metonymy, whose subject is an "eroticized landscape",²⁹ enables the construction of unlimited manifestations of eros in Venus' mind and also in our imagination. As a sign of "self-willed and autonomous inventiveness"³⁰ metonymy satisfies Venus' fantasy of desire, constructing Venus' body as a mirage of sexual possibility. However, the tone of Venus' language changes at the sight of Adonis' dead body.

The long lamenting passage (889-1074), which opens with an evocation of "bloodless fear" (891) and ends with a tragic affirmation of loss ("So shall I die by drops of hot desire" [1074]), suggests a process by which desire evolves into the fear of loss of the desired body. As Adam Phillips remarks: "Fear of loss of love instigates a project to secure something that by definition cannot be secured. Fear thus becomes the perception of truth that inspires tenacious denial."³¹ Venus' ineffective sophistry then posits a question of Shakespeare's motivation to construct her rhetoric in the way he does. Articulating desire in the forms of sophistic and probabilistic argumentation suggests that the speaker denies the possibility of affecting—moving to action—the object of desire. In turn, Venus' rhetoric transcribed as impossibility also suggests the lack of conviction in arguments whose goal is persuasion. Conviction and performance, two most important aspects of successful persuasion in the humanist rhetorical culture, do not complement one another in Venus' eloquence of desire. The real problem in the poem lies in the discrepancy between Venus' attempts to act and speak powerfully and Shakespeare's choice of rhetorical techniques which, in fact, undercut the effectiveness of her eloquence. What kind of impediment informs this discrepancy between Venus' loquaciousness and the fragile psychological foundations which underlie it?

So far, criticism of the poem has established that the dichotomy between destructive desire and chaste spirit is the central issue in Venus and Adonis. Yet, it seems to me that such reading of rhetoric, which helps thematic criticism but does not consider the rhetorical implication of Venus' arguments about desire, also neglects the affective foundations of rhetoric, which underly the linguistic construction of desire, and which have been implicated in the poem in the subtext of the narrative about Venus and Adonis.

The language of desire in Venus and Adonis is deeply entrenched in the tradition of the moralised Ovidian epyllia, in which the representation of sexual love is the main theme, and in which rhetoric both contains and subverts the display of eroticism. Yet in Shakespeare's source, Ovid's Metamorphoses (X. 519-651; 705-39), the emphasis is not on the rhetorical strategies through which desire is articulated, but rather on the general subject of passion, full of proverbial ruminations about love. Furthermore, in Shakespeare, the story of Venus' longing for the object of desire is also complicated by the implications of homoeroticism and incest, subjects which underlie Shakespeare's narrative, and which in Ovid provide only a larger subtext of the myth of Venus and Adonis. The complex myth of Venus and Adonis contextualises the narrative of Venus and Adonis and, as Jonathan Bate argues, determines the nature of love in the poem.³² In Metamorphoses, the story of Venus and Adonis is told by Orpheus, who was in the early modern culture associated with homosexuality. Also, the story of Venus and Adonis cuts through two stories which contextualise homosexuality, the one of Apollo's love for a handsome boy, Cyparissus, and the other of the androgynous youth Ganymede. In Ovid, the story of Venus and Adonis also intersects with the story of Myrrha (301-63), who gave birth to Adonis in the illicit union with her father Cinyras, king of Cyprus. This story of Myrrha, Bate reminds us, contextualises incest in both Ovid and, consequently, Shakespeare, too.³³ Shakespeare's disclaimer about Adonis' birth, that he is "thing like a man, but of no woman bred" (214), realises the theme of incest in the poem. Thus the stories which contextualise the multifaceted desire in Venus and Adonis, and in which Venus' desire is directed to, and clashes with, an object of desire of such an ambivalent sexual history, suggest to us that the rhetoric of probability and impossibility only transcribes instabilities which constitute the thematic framework of the poem.

Adonis' own pronouncement about love, "My love to love is love but to disgrace it;/For I have heard it is a life in death" (412-13), seems not an affirmation of immature love, but a claim to scorn her desire and, therefore, to disdain her rhetoric.³⁴ Yet Adonis' rhetorically obfuscated expression of disdain and scorn may also suggest containment of an alternative desire, which is assumed to please him more than Venus' desire can, but which he is reluctant to define and articulate directly and clearly. Venus, however, understands well—at least her formulae are recognisable—that Adonis, "more lovely than a man" (9), is not just an idealised male figure, but an effeminate man, too. For the rhetorical formulae she uses to praise his beauty are common attributes in the conceits of praise of Petrarchan lady. So, Venus rhetorically constructs Adonis as an ideal woman with "soft bosom" (81), "soft hands, sweet lips and crystal eyne" (633), and she also rebuffs him in terms which suggest both cruelty and detachment (he is a "lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone [ . . . ] , image dull and dead" [211-12]) of a Petrarchan mistress. The stylistic construction of femininity in Venus' praise of Adonis, and both the homoerotic and incestuous subtext of the poem, imply that Shakespeare constructs Adonis as an object of desire which cannot satisfy Venus on the grounds of his sexuality whose craving may not be for the female body. After all, he seems quite happy pursuing the boar, a symbol of overbearing masculinity. Venus' sophistic rhetoric of impossibility, therefore, may be motivated by her awareness that she desires a body which suggests subversive desire. Thus her rhetoric of failed argumentation indirectly functions as a moral controller of desire in the poem.

Venus' psychosexual situation, in which she desires the body which she cannot possess, prefigures Lacan's conceptualisation of the problematic relationship between the homoerotic jealousy and the "horror of incest" realised in "the structure of language [which] gives a clue to the function of the ego".³⁵ The Lacanian idea—it derives from Freud—about knowing the ego in the language which expresses it, correlates with Paul de Man's theory of reading content in the rhetorical form. In a similar way, in both Lacan and Paul de Man, rhetoric and language are seen as modes of consciousness. Thus reading Venus' ineffective rhetoric in psycho-rhetorical terms suggests to us that in the realm of desire, power is not stability, but, on the contrary, instability and insecurity. Instability and insecurity, which are inscribed in the rhetoric of enthymemes, constitute themes created by articulating desire not as a possession of the object of desire but as its substitute in a rhetorical fantasy. Hence the purpose of rhetoric in Venus and Adonis lies not in its ability to evoke themes but in its capacity to inscribe desire in linguistic terms. The aim of the poem is not to thematise eros as a subject, but to render eros in the only way it can be represented vividly, in language. And Venus' rhetorical frustration suggests both difficulties and anxieties in textualising desire and attaching to it erotic meaning.³⁶

Formalist reading of the persuasive rhetoric in the poem does not only illuminate our insight into the function of rhetoric in an early modern text, but it also suggests to us one way—through rhetoric—of conceptualising desire in the literature of the sixteenth century. Venus and Adonis shows that the true nature of sexual pleasure is in the "pleasure of the text", in modes of its textual representation. However, such reading of desire also reopens the question of the poem's moral purpose which rhetoric had to convey according to the early modern expectations of it. Thus, if the rhetoric of probability only realises the fantasy of desire, and fashions the subject of that desire as an illusion, denying reality in the process, then the reality of desire—the subject of Venus' arguments—indicates a danger in Shakespeare's thematic project in Venus and Adonis. That reality is textualised as fear, pain, and the failure of the desirous performance. Thus the poem demonstrates that desiring the possession of the wrong body, the body of the one "more lovely than a man"—a handsome, effeminate youth in this case—is transcribed as an unimaginative, failed rhetoric. In turn, from both the moral and the rhetorical standpoint, an improper desire which renders bad eloquence is neither an ethical nor an eloquent ideal that Shakespeare's noble dedicatee, the allegedly licentious Earl of Southampton, should aspire to.³⁷

Notes

¹ Lucy Gent, "Venus and Adonis: The Triumph of Rhetoric", The Modern Language Review 69 (1974), 721-9 (p. 721).

² Gent, "'venus and Adonis'", p. 721.

³ Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven and London: 1976), pp. 83-94.

⁴ Lanham, The Motives, p. 94.

⁵ Douglas Bush, Mythology & the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (rev. ed. New York: 1963), p. 141.

⁶ The bibliography on this subject is very long. Some of the most illuminating criticism of the poem is found in Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton: 1981); William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Their Contemporaries (New Brunswick: 1977); Coppella Kahn, "Self and Eros in Venus and Adonis", The Centennial Review 20 (1976), 351-71; William Sheidley, "'unless it be a boar': Love and Wisdom in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis", Modern Language Quarterly 35 (1974), 3-15; A. C. Hamilton, "Venus and Adonis", Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900 1 (1961), 1-15.

⁷ Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: 1994), pp. 51-65.

⁸ Arthur Golding's 1567 translation of Metamorphoses. Quoted in Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London and New York: 1957), I, p. 167.

⁹ John Roe, ed., William Shakespeare, The Poems, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: 1992), p. 5.

¹⁰ Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: 1961), I, p. 150; Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: 1987), p. 228.

¹¹ Thomas M. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Chicago and London: 1990), p. 136.

¹² Hanna H. Gray, "Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence", Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1963), 497-514 (p. 497).

¹³ Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London: 1577), Sig. B1^v.

¹⁴ Paul de Man, "Semiology and Rhetoric", Diacritics 3 (1973), 27-33 (p. 27).

¹⁵ Paul de Man, "Semiology", p. 32.

¹⁶ I quote the text of Venus and Adonis from: William Shakespeare, The Narrative Poems, ed. Maurice Evans, the New Penguin Shakespeare (Harmondsworth: 1989).

¹⁷ Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: 1991), p. 65.

¹⁸ Here I profit from Heather Dubrow's discussion of Venus' use of conditionals. See Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca and London: 1987), p. 19.

¹⁹ P. Albert Duhamel, "The Function of Rhetoric as Effective Expression", Journal of the History of Ideas 10 (1949), 344-56 (pp. 345-9).

²⁰ Lanham, A Handlist, p. 31.

²¹ Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, tr. J. H. Freese, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: 1926), I.ii.13.

²² Catherine Belsey, "Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis", Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995), 257-76 (p. 275). Here, Belsey bases her argument on Lacan's concept of the objet a, "the lost object in the inextricable real, the cause of desire" (Belsey, "Love as Trompe-l'oeil", p. 258).

²³ Lanham, A Handlist, p. 106.

²⁴ Quintilian, The Institutio Oratoria, tr. H. E. Butler, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass. and London: 1921), V.xiv.2.

²⁵ Lanham, A Handlist, p. 33.

²⁶ Lanham, A Handlist, p. 14.

²⁷ Judith Butler, "Desire", Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago and London: 1995), 369-86 (p. 376).

²⁸ Kenneth Burke, "Four Master Tropes", A Grammar of Motives (New York: 1945), 503-17 (p. 503).

²⁹ Bate, Shakespeare, p. 65.

³⁰ Paul de Man, "Semiology", p. 32.

³¹ Adam Phillips, "Psychoanalysis and the Future of Fear", Raritan 15 (1995), 51-66 (p. 56).

³² Bate, Shakespeare, pp. 48-65.

³³ Bate, Shakespeare, pp. 51-2.

³⁴ Roe (The Poems, p. 101) glosses Adonis' "disgrace" as "to disdain", while E. T. Prince paraphrases the line 412, as "What I feel towards love is only a strong desire to scorn it". See Prince's New Arden edition of William Shakespeare, The Poems (Cambridge, Mass.: 1960), p. 25.

³⁵ Jacques Lacan, "Some Reflections on the Ego", The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 34 (1953), 11-17 (p. 12).

³⁶ Gregory W. Bredbeck makes a similar case for Shakespeare's "boy sonnets". See his "Tradition and The Individual Sodomite: Banfield, Shakespeare, and Subjective Desire", Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representation in Historical Context, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York and London: 1992), 41-68 (p. 54).

³⁷ Katherine Duncan-Jones, "Much Ado With Red and White: The Earliest Readers of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis", The Review of English Studies, NS, 44 (1993), 479-501 (pp. 485-6); Alan Bray, "Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England", History Workshop Journal 29 (1990), 1-19 (p. 8). G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, Mass.: 1968), pp. 36-7, 180-2.