[In the following essay, Cousins examines the complexities of the characterization of Venus and Adonis.]

(I) THE MINOR EPIC. LODGE'S SCILLAES METAMORPHOSIS

Venus and Adonis was the first of Shakespeare's poems to be published. It was registered at Stationers' Hall on 18 April 1593 and may have been begun in the summer of the previous year.¹ For much of the time, approximately between that summer and May 1594, the London theatres were closed because of the plague.² His career as a playwright interrupted, Shakespeare took the opportunity to present himself publicly as someone who could write not only plays.³ He dedicated his poem to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who was then nineteen years old, prominent at court and a sought-after patron.⁴ As has often been pointed out, the wording of the dedication gives one no reason to believe that Shakespeare knew the Earl well, or even at all.⁵ Moreover, what he hoped to gain from dedicating the poem to Southampton is not clear. Shakespeare no doubt desired the prestige of patronage by the Earl; he also probably wanted more than prestige. It may be that he wanted hospitality in a comfortable residence outside London and hence away from the plague. Perhaps he wanted, indirectly or directly, financial support now that his livelihood as a dramatist was under threat.⁶ Whatever his likely hopes, his gains—if any—are unknown.

The poem through which Shakespeare courted the Earl's attention is in kind a minor epic, or epyllion.⁷ Some reasons for poems such as Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and others by their contemporaries or successors being called ‘minor epics’ have been usefully suggested by Clark Hulse:

Minor epic is linked most closely to epic in its materials; its characteristic diction, verse forms, and mythological imagery all seek out the marvelous and often the extravagant. Its amorous action is quite literally the minor action of epic, set in counterpoint to the major themes of public and military virtue. … And, like so many epics, it is a mixed genre, presenting its objects with motifs from drama and lyric, especially the sonnet and pastoral.⁸

Thomas Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589) appears to have been the first of the English minor epics. Like most of the minor epics subsequent to it, the poem is partly an imitation of and partly an elaboration on a story as re-told by Ovid. Not solely the Metamorphoses was used, of course, in Lodge's making of his poem—something that also links it to others of its kind. Furthermore Lodge does not merely re-tell Ovid's version of the Glaucus and Scilla myth; nor does he suggest that it has a moral content, as English verse translations or imitations of Ovidian narratives, prior to his poem, tended to do.⁹ He playfully revises the Ovidian narrative on which he draws—just as Ovid, in his epic, playfully revised the familiar form of the myth.¹⁰ Glaucus, for instance, becomes in Lodge's poem a deft, amusing parody of the unhappy male lover to be seen in so much other Elizabethan verse: the sea-god ponderously complains, at comically tedious length, of his unrequited love (as in stanzas 18-32); he is comic, too, in his long-winded self-pity (as in stanzas 43-69). Then, too, in the Metamorphoses Scilla is transformed by a jealous rival, a witch, who poisons her, whereas in Lodge's poem Cupid punishes her for disdaining Glaucus, her loyal suitor, but her consequent transformation results from her mental sufferings (see stanzas 115-24). Lodge's revision of Ovidian fable is wittily parodic. Creating a (mostly) comic Glaucus, he parodies Ovidian narrative in order to parody an aspect of current literary fashion. And instead of tacking on or inserting a moral to legitimize his doubly parodic fiction, for the quite different benefit of an apparently young, male audience he offers male wish-fulfillment (a disdainful object of desire is punished) and male sexual fantasy (a bevy of attractive, sympathetic, sexually aware females surrounds Glaucus, and he is freed from unrequited love).¹¹ The poem ends with the narrator's repetition, notionally to the female reader but, more likely, for the male reader's delectation, of a message from Glaucus: ‘Nymphs must yield, when faithful lovers stray not’ (L'Envoy, l.3).

The narrator, who in repeating that message confirms the poem's abandonment of the convention that the Metamorphoses should be read as moral allegory, is himself one of the poem's significantly new elements. He is the frame to the poem's action; he is also closely involved in its action; in fact, he is a main figure in the poem from its beginning. Represented as mingling ironic ingenuousness with a more overt sophistication, a sensitivity to pathos with a sense of the ludic and the ludicrous, he is as well a quite distinctly characterized figure: like others in the tale in as much as he is a disappointed lover and (or) preoccupied with the psychology of sexual experience, but unlike those others in having the traits of ironic ingenuousness and so on.¹² Because he is indeed a main figure in the poem and quite distinctly individualized, Lodge's narrator would seem to be new to Tudor verse narrative derived, by imitation or by translation, from the Metamorphoses—new, that is to say, with the appearance of the minor epic itself.¹³ Moreover, those features that seem to make him novel—and one would want to emphasize here his obtrusiveness in conjunction with the specific traits that distinguish him from the other figures in the poem—seem at the same time to make him resemble the narrator fashioned by Ovid in his epic.¹⁴ Lodge appropriately gave a poem close in spirit to the Metamorphoses a narrator recalling the ironic, sophisticated, game-playing narrator who guides the reader through Ovid's tales of transformation.¹⁵

No one, I think, would want to argue that Venus and Adonis is both directly and heavily indebted to Scillaes Metamorphosis, although there have been suggestions that at some moments Shakespeare's poem clearly echoes Lodge's.¹⁶ Yet it would seem reasonable to argue that Lodge's poem provided Shakespeare with an opportunity. Scillaes Metamorphosis was written primarily for a specific, sophisticated audience, the young men at the Inns of Court. When Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis he was, apparently, no longer writing for the very diverse audience of the playhouse but for an audience similar to that of Lodge's poem; for a similar audience he wrote a poem of the same kind as Lodge's.¹⁷ Of course one member of that new audience was hopefully identified by his poem's being dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. Shakespeare, then, in his new role as non-dramatic poet, wrote for a new audience—particularly including the Earl as (possibly) also a patron—a new poem of a new kind.¹⁸ It now seems appropriate to look at the concerns and strategies of Shakespeare's poem, and at how his poem relates not only to Scillaes Metamorphosis but, as well, to other poems by his contemporaries or successors.

(II) THE POEM'S NARRATOR. VENUS AND THE MULTIPLICITY, THE OTHERNESS OF LOVE

Before discussion of Venus and Adonis as they are fashioned in Shakespeare's poem, something must be said of the poem's narrator, for in presenting Venus and Adonis to the reader he himself is carefully presented. Unlike Lodge's narrator he is not a character in the story he relates, yet like Lodge's narrator he is distinctly individuated as a storyteller. He has some characteristics in common with the narrator of Scillaes Metamorphosis but those seem to derive from the characterization of Ovid's narrator in the Metamorphoses. It may be that Shakespeare modelled his narrator on Lodge's, elaborating on Lodge's achievement; it is also possible, and I think more probable, that Lodge's poem suggested to Shakespeare how effectively Ovid's narrator could be recreated in English verse.¹⁹ Like the speaker of Ovid's epic, Shakespeare's urbanely plays with myth, implicitly being far too sophisticated to accept it merely at face value. He brings out its comic incongruities (like Ovid's speaker, however, he does not always bring out merely the comic aspects or possibilities of ancient myth); he brings out its paradoxes (enlarging on or inventing them). He seems at a distance from what he describes (though, like Ovid's speaker, he can also at times seem very responsive to scenes of pathos or of suffering); he confronts the reader with the unexpected; he favours epigrams and the epigrammatic—and also luxuriant description. One result of the many specific similarities between Shakespeare's narrator and Ovid's is a further and more comprehensive similarity: the former, like the latter, appears to be in almost total control of the mythic world that he pictures.²⁰ Thus Shakespeare's narrator indicates his creator's insight into and ability to recreate the narrator of Ovid's Metamorphoses; nonetheless, when one sees the narrator presenting and, hence, represented with Venus and Adonis, one sees that Shakespeare's poem as a whole signals its maker's mastery of the genre that Lodge had recently introduced into Tudor literature.

The Venus presented by Shakespeare's narrator has been studied in recent times from mainly two angles. Sometimes she has been looked at as if a character in a play, which seems appropriate enough given that her creator was a playwright and that he gave her speech after speech. As a result, the consistencies, fluctuations and contradictions in her characterization have been often discussed, with a good deal of agreement but by no means with unanimity.²¹ Sometimes she has been studied in connection with particular aspects of Renaissance symbolism or thinking about ancient myths. Critical commentary adopting that angle of approach has occasionally interpreted Venus as a simple, symbolic figure but, more usually, as an evocatively allegorical one—especially, of course, in the context of some Renaissance interpretations of the Venus and Adonis story.²² Here, employing both well-established ways of approach, I want to offer a new account of Venus' presentation in the poem. First it will be argued that the characterization of Venus, although often acknowledged to be various, is in fact far more diverse than has been recognized. Most of the manifold aspects of her, it will be suggested at the same time, accord with (maybe derive from, partly or wholly) ancient representations of her that were still known and studied in Shakespeare's time, as can be seen from a range of contemporary books about the meanings of ancient myths.²³ The main points of that first argument will be: that even if most of the different aspects of Venus' characterization seem conventional, frequently their conventionality is subverted; that, in presenting the goddess of love as having a great variety of aspects, Shakespeare's narrator implies not merely love's many-sidedness but its often incongruous multiplicity. The second argument put forward will be that one of the more important aspects of Venus' characterization is her discovering the familiar, human experience of loving another in vain.²⁴ It will be suggested that her experiencing the misery of unrequited human love has significance for a couple of reasons. She comes to know something of not only the unhappiness to be found in human love but, as well, of how love can usurp control over a human consciousness.²⁵ Therefore the goddess of love comes experientially to know—to a degree—a phenomenon that she has necessarily seen yet never felt. For her, the experience of loving Adonis both in vain and obsessively is a new, alien experience: ultimately, the experience of love as otherness. The third and last major argument proposed in what follows will be that Venus, herself partly transformed by her unrequited love for Adonis, offers him her love as a means for his achieving self-transformation. To be more specific, it will be argued that, in offering Adonis her love, Venus simultaneously offers him metamorphosis, a redefined subjectivity, in which self-perfection and safety will be supposedly gained but a loss of self will be inevitable.

Venus had been seen since ancient times as having a wide range of aspects; there were, as various writers had demonstrated, many Venuses. Early in her initial wooing of Adonis, Venus uses a tactically considered, schematic language of sexual seduction, and it characterizes her as a goddess of physical desire, wise in the techniques of enticement. That characterization is developed when she goes on to say:

‘Vouchsafe, thou wonder, to alight thy steed,
And rein his proud head to the saddle-bow;
If thou wilt deign this favour, for thy meed
A thousand honey secrets shalt thou know.
          Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses,
          And being set, I'll smother thee with kisses.
‘And yet not cloy thy lips with loath'd satiety,
But rather famish them amid their plenty,
Making them red, and pale, with fresh variety:
Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty.
          A summer's day will seem an hour but short,
          Being wasted in such time-beguiling sport.’

(ll. 13-24)

The rest of Venus' opening speech suggests both the mingling of imagination with sensuality in her attempt to seduce Adonis and how intensely, almost boundlessly physical her desire for him is. The speech as a whole, then, shows the goddess of love to be skilled in the deceptive language and rhetoric of seduction; it shows, too, that she is obsessive in her desire, in effect seeking infinite physical enjoyment of Adonis who, in his physicality, is finite. Yet while Venus' opening speech vigorously characterizes her, it does so in accord with two ancient versions of the goddess which were still current in the sixteenth century. Insofar as she is the calculating rhetorician of love, Shakespeare's Venus recalls the Venus Mechanitis of the ancient world, the Venus practised in love's verbal and other artifices.²⁶ Insofar as she is the goddess of virtually limitless physical desire, she recalls Venus Vulgaris, an ancient representation of Venus as the goddess of wholly sensual love.²⁷ Venus' opening speech at once forcefully presents her and offers what can be seen as a conventional representation of her. It seems clear, however, that whether Shakespeare's Venus merely harmonizes with or actually derives from convention, the conventional elements in her characterization are treated ironically. For a start, Venus fails as a rhetorician of love. Her language and tactics of seduction are problematic because some of their main images for praising Adonis' exceptional beauty also highlight its transience and (or) vulnerability (‘flower’, ‘doves’, ‘roses’). But a far more important problem is that in trying to seduce Adonis she uses the wrong language—the wrong language and rhetoric for her particular audience.²⁸ Maybe Venus does not fully recognize that Adonis is not only very young and inexperienced but very reluctant as well; it seems likelier, though, that in her urgency she just pays too little attention to those things. Whatever the case, her speech implies that she is both a connoisseur of the erotic (‘A thousand honey secrets shalt thou know’) and smothering (‘I'll smother thee with kisses’), greedy in her passion (see ll. 19-24, passim). Adonis has, clearly enough, no wish to be smothered by Venus' greedy passion, something the introductory stanza of the poem has indicated and that the rest of it makes explicit. Therefore her words of love repel him; and, failing to express her desire persuasively in words, she gets no chance to express it physically to her satisfaction. In effect, she fails as Venus Mechanitis and so is frustrated as Venus Vulgaris. It could be suggested that her opening speech even has the result of turning her into a parodic Venus Verticordia, the Venus who promotes chastity in women—given that Adonis is described as having some female attributes.

Perhaps two other features of Venus' presentation here might be briefly considered before further aspects of her in the poem are discussed. When Venus tries to seduce Adonis she acts, according to the poem's initial stanza, like an assertive, male lover. Some of the words she chooses and her tactics of persuasion distinctly suggest that. For example, her insistence that the beauty of her beloved is unique, although justified by its actually being so, is of course conventional in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English love verse written in imitation of Petrarch's, and by men to or about women. No less conventional in that love verse are celebrations of female beauty in terms of emphatic images of whiteness and redness, such as appear in Venus' praise of Adonis' beauty.²⁹ Likewise, the male speakers in that love verse sometimes offer their ladies gifts in order to win their affections. To cite a pair of obvious instances, Marlowe's speaker in ‘Come live with me and be my love’ offers gifts to his beloved; Damon, in Marvell's ‘Damon the Mower’, tells of the gifts with which he has wooed his beloved Juliana.³⁰ Venus, too, offers Adonis a gift, an elaborate enticement in order to bring him physically close to her (‘A thousand honey secrets …’). As those examples reveal, Venus uses a predominantly male, assertive (Petrarchan) language and rhetoric of love. The outcome is, though, that when Venus acts ‘like a bold-fac'd suitor’ in using such a language/rhetoric she uses it inappropriately, after the fashion described above, and appears comic. Shakespeare's Venus seems, as it were, to be a Venus Mechanitis who simultaneously fails and acts out a comedy of gender-reversal. And that doubly ironic presentation of her is immediately developed. Having misemployed language in her initial attempt to make Adonis love her, she then successfully persuades herself of his sexual inclinations by misreading the body language of his ‘sweating palm’ (l. 25). She cannot or will not read his ‘sweating palm’ as signifying physical discomfort and (or) emotional distress. Moreover the comedy of gender-reversal becomes almost grotesque when Venus subsequently ‘pluck[s]’ Adonis from his horse (l. 30), tucks him under her arm (l. 32) and finally ‘thrust[s]’ him to the ground (l. 41). The comedy of gender-reversal is, nonetheless, more shrewd than such an instance of it might indicate, and that more interesting dimension to it will be considered later in this discussion.

(III) VENUS AND METAMORPHOSIS

The final feature of Venus' presentation here that I wish to glance at is this: in her attempt to seduce Adonis she offers him a heightening of his beauty to be achieved through transformation. Playfully assuring Adonis that when ‘smother[ing him] with kisses’ (l. 18) she will ‘not cloy [his] lips with loath'd satiety’ (l. 19), Venus goes on to assert that in fact she will enhance their beauty, ‘[m]aking them red, and pale, with fresh variety’ (l. 21). She will add, that is, to the ‘white and red’ of Adonis' natural beauty (l. 10)—and specifically to the natural beauty of his (red) lips—through her art of sexuality, making his lips startlingly change in colour and thus into instances of the Renaissance aesthetic principle of varietà (variety: connected with the principle, or ideal, of grazia—that is, an elegance delightful to the observer/reader).³¹ To receive that heightening of his beauty, Adonis must allow himself to be transformed from an asexual to a sexual being. For his beauty to be transformed, in other words, he must allow himself to be metamorphosed. The ‘time-beguiling sport’ (l. 24) of sexual play will involve at once his superficial aesthetic transformation and a metamorphosis of his subjectivity. Venus' offer of metamorphosis will be repeatedly made to Adonis throughout the poem. One of those offers, in particular, is both challenging and complex. The motif's introduction occurs, however, in her first speech; its initial, ludic appearance suggests the aesthetic element in Venus' connoisseurship of the erotic and Adonis' presentation in the rest of the poem as an aesthetic/sexual object.

It seems reasonable to argue that the aspects of Venus so far discussed (Venus Mechanitis and Venus Vulgaris, to put it briefly) recur more often throughout Shakespeare's poem than do virtually any of the others contributing to her many-sided characterization, and hence their elaborate, initial encoding has been examined in some detail. There is no need, I think, for the subsequent treatment of those aspects to be completely traced since in that initial encoding their defining features are indicated. Some of the modifications to them, nonetheless, do have to be looked at and now will be, in the context of an account of Venus' other guises in the poem. One of those, another major aspect of the goddess in the poem, is that of Venus Genetrix: the Venus, from ancient times to those of Shakespeare, associated with the generative power in nature, fertility and the desire to reproduce beauty through offspring (to take the most obvious illustration, the beauty of one's beloved). There has often been mention of Shakespeare's Venus in that role but the question remains as to how the role functions.³² Insofar as Shakespeare's Venus resembles Venus Genetrix, she does so problematically. When Adonis' stallion breaks away from where it has been tied and runs after ‘[a] breeding jennet’ (l. 260), it forcefully displays the generative impulse. Venus, turning the horse into an example for its master, suggests that he too should do, with her, what comes naturally:

‘Let me excuse thy courser, gentle boy,
And learn of him, I heartily beseech thee,
To take advantage on presented joy;
Though I were dumb, yet his proceedings teach thee.
          O learn to love. …

(ll. 403-7)

But in fact Venus argues there that Adonis, in acting ‘naturally’, should imitate solely animal desire: that his natural love for her should be only of and for the body. Her love for him is certainly of that kind, what Pico called ‘Bestial … Love’ as distinct from human or divine love.³³ It is natural and obsessively physical, as the image of the ‘glutton eye’ in her immediately preceding words makes startlingly clear:

‘Who see 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?

(ll. 397-400)

That ‘glutton eye’ image, furthermore, connects with other images in the poem that insistently imply Venus' devouring sexuality.³⁴ And all those link with the images suggesting that her desire is predatory as well as natural, the best known of which are probably the simile of the ‘empty eagle … devouring all in haste, / Till either gorge be stuff'd or prey be gone’ (ll. 55-8, a comparison made by the narrator), and the metaphor likening her to the boar (ll. 1117-18, a comparison made by Venus herself). If she resembles Venus Genetrix she is a parodic, a narrowly and brutally ‘natural’ version of that divinity: in effect, another manifestation of Venus Vulgaris. That being granted, the problematics of Venus as Venus Genetrix do not, even so, end there.

The similarity between Shakespeare's Venus and Venus Genetrix also seems ironic in at least a couple of other ways. First, when Venus speaks in effect as Venus Genetrix—celebrating the generative impulse in nature, urging Adonis to reproduce his unique beauty through offspring—she speaks primarily, at the very least, to seduce him.³⁵ What could be called the Venus Genetrix aspect of her characterization is therefore subordinate to the (de facto) Venus Mechanitis and Venus Vulgaris aspects.³⁶ Second, when Venus searches desperately for Adonis after he has gone to hunt the boar, there occurs this description of nature impeding the preoccupied goddess:

And as she runs, the bushes in the way
Some catch her by the neck, some kiss her face,
Some twine about her thigh to make her stay:
She wildly breaketh from their strict embrace,
          Like a milch doe, whose swelling dugs do ache,
          Hasting to feed her fawn hid in some brake.

(ll. 871-6)

The elision of the sexual and the maternal in that description of Venus incongruously mingles her Vulgaris and Genetrix aspects.³⁷ However it is ironic, too, that the goddess whose love almost smothered Adonis now finds herself almost imprisoned by a sexually assertive natural world with which, as Venus Genetrix, she is associated. She comes to experience something of what Adonis appears to have been undergoing throughout much of the poem, and ‘wildly breaketh’ indicates her response. The final function of Venus as Venus Genetrix may, then, be twofold. In that particular role she seems to imply the natural brutality and reductiveness, rather than the natural, creative beneficence, of sexual desire. Perhaps more important, in that role she seems also to help make problematic the nature of ‘nature’ in Shakespeare's poem. When trying to seduce Adonis she appeals recurrently to ‘nature’; Adonis appeals to ‘nature’ in rejecting her. But if she is, at least in part, a nature/fertility divinity who is incomplete as well as self-divided in being so—while, moreover, Adonis' perception of ‘nature’ differs in important respects from hers—her role as Venus Genetrix seems to emphasize the ambiguity of ‘nature’ in her fictional world and also in ours, its openness to appropriation for the justifying of quite opposite ends.

There are a great many further aspects to Shakespeare's Venus. For a start, she is also a deceiver. Just after telling Adonis that even Mars the god of war has wooed her (ll. 97-102), she reassures him that, if he makes love to her, no one will find out and therefore secrecy will preserve his honour (ll. 121-6). She omits to tell Adonis that Vulcan, her husband, not only caught Mars and her in bed but added to their embarrassment by calling in the other gods to share his discovery, an omission all too obvious to the reader. In trying to trick Adonis—and she tries more than once in the course of the tale—she bears a clear likeness to the conventional Venus Apaturia (Venus the Deceiver).³⁸ The poem reveals, though, that Venus has most success in unwittingly deceiving herself (as when, for example, she persuades herself that Adonis' ‘sweating palm’ indicates his amorous disposition). Venus the deceived Deceiver is, additionally, a prophet. She uncertainly foresees Adonis' death at the hunt (ll. 661-6). Soon after his death she deliberately and formally foretells what the experience of love will thenceforward be, always and everywhere (ll. 1135-64). Again, an old convention seems to underlie this aspect of her characterization: that of Venus as Magistra Divinandi (Mistress of/Instructor in Prophesying).³⁹ However, Shakespeare's Venus again parodically refigures convention. Jealousy prompts her first, accurate, hesitant foretelling (l. 657). Her second is anachronistic, for, as the myths show, love had already and widely been what she announces it will become. Her wholly negative vision of love's future seems, moreover, open to query since the reader could object that its truth is incomplete. The mock-explanatory prophecy, that is to say, actually tells more about Venus' bitterness, and selfishness, than it does about the nature of love supposedly since Adonis' death.

Although other aspects of Shakespeare's Venus in relation to conventional representations of the goddess still remain to be examined, for example, the link between her and Venus Meretrix (Venus the Prostitute; see ll. 511-22), there is space for study of only one more of her guises: her pervasive guise as Venus Victrix (Venus the Conqueror). The ancient title Venus the Conqueror referred, as is fairly well known, to Venus' overcoming Mars, the god of war, through the power of her beauty and of his desire for her. In the sixteenth century that title was often interpreted as signifying Love's capacity to overcome Strife, or even Love's capacity to bind the conflicting elements of the universe into an harmonious discord.⁴⁰ The connection between Shakespeare's Venus and Venus Victrix is made explicit in the poem. Venus boasts to Adonis:

‘I have been woo'd as I entreat thee now,
Even by the stern and direful god of war,
Whose sinewy neck in battle ne'er did bow,
Who conquers where he comes in every jar;
          Yet hath he been my captive and my slave,
          And begg'd for that which thou unask'd shalt have.
‘Over my altars hath he hung his lance,
His batter'd shield, his uncontrolled crest;
And for my sake hath learn'd to sport and dance,
To toy, to wanton, dally, smile and jest,
          Scorning his churlish drum and ensign red,
          Making my arms his field, his tent my bed.
‘Thus he that overrul'd I oversway'd,
Leading him prisoner in a red rose chain:
Strong-temper'd steel his stronger strength obey'd,
Yet was he servile to my coy disdain.

(ll. 97-112)

But of what kind is that connection? Shakespeare's Venus seems to be a failed Venus Victrix; more important, the Venus Victrix motif itself—as an emblem of Love's salutary power—seems to be dismantled throughout the poem.

When Venus has finished recounting her victory over Mars, she immediately says to Adonis: “‘O! be not proud, nor brag not of thy might, / For mastering her that foil'd the god of fight’” (ll. 113-14). Her point is, of course, that Adonis has made her love him (simply by being irresistible) and in doing so has conquered Venus the Conqueror, who overcame even the god of war. She consciously inverts the Venus Victrix motif and identifies herself as a now-failed, now-parodic Venus the Conqueror. As is obvious enough, her admission is partly true because she has indeed been overcome by Adonis' beauty. Yet it is also disingenuous, mere flattery to seduce Adonis: she reveals herself as a failed/parodic Venus Victrix so that she can subsequently conquer him and re-enact her role as victor. At this moment of the poem, that is to say, she puts her role as Venus Victrix in the service of her roles as Venus Mechanitis and Venus Vulgaris so that, ultimately, the first and third of those roles can be fused. Her failure to seduce Adonis means, however, that she remains just the failed and parodic Venus Victrix she disingenuously claims to be.

Nonetheless Venus does have her moments of victory. She ‘pluck[s]’ (l. 30) Adonis from his horse, for example, walks off with him under her arm and then pushes him to the ground (ll. 32-42). To take another example, she forces her kisses on him with the greed and dominance of an ‘empty eagle’ devouring its prey (l. 55; cf. ll. 57-8 and 61). Again, Adonis when imprisoned ‘in her arms’ (l. 68) is as helpless as a ‘bird … tangled in a net’ (l. 67). Likewise, her hand imprisons his as ‘a gaol of snow’ might ‘a lily’ or as ‘an alabaster band’ might a piece of ‘ivory’ (ll. 362-3). Her lips ‘conquer’ (l. 549) his and she preys on him like a ‘vulture’ (l. 551) or a plunderer (ll. 553-8). Those are indeed moments of victory but they are all flawed.⁴¹ The reader sees Venus as a ludicrous, bestial, predatory or, at the least, visually perfect yet wholly undesired Conqueror. The narrator's ironic imaging of her as a Victor seems relentless: as the examples above indicate, he subverts the Venus Victrix motif not only once in the poem but throughout it. The implication would appear to be that, in the world of the poem, the Venus Victrix motif cannot function as an emblem of Love's overcoming Strife, or of Love's making the universe into an harmonious discord. The motif, as a signifier of love's benignly invincible power, is pervasively, comically, vehemently dismantled.

Those aspects of Venus' characterization which seem to accord with, and often to refigure, conventional representations of her suggest love to be not one thing, nor merely a number of things, but a great range of things. They emphasize love's multiplicity—both within and outside the fictive world of Venus and Adonis—and imply how unstable and protean, how incongruous and dangerous love can be in its manifold variety. In doing so they seem as well to imply that no single definition can encompass love. Notably absent among them, and therefore foregrounded by its absence, is a connection between Shakespeare's Venus and the conventional Venus Urania, the Venus of Divine Love. Certainly it is true that Venus asserts: ‘Love is a spirit all compact of fire, / Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire’ (ll. 149-50). Even so, her description of love as a fiery ‘spirit’ receives little, if any, confirmation in the rest of the poem, the ‘gross’ physicality of her love for Adonis instead being stressed. And Adonis, just after he has associated her with Venus Vulgaris (l. 790), complains—accurately enough given his encounter with the goddess: ‘[L]ove to heaven is fled, / Since sweating lust on earth usurp'd his name’ (ll. 793-4).⁴² As far as the conventional, yet often refigured aspects of Shakespeare's Venus reveal, love in its manifold variety may be unstable, protean, incongruous and dangerous—insistent, self-demeaning and frequently comic, one could add—but it is not divine, though Venus is of course a goddess.

Although the different aspects of Shakespeare's Venus that are related, directly or otherwise, to the conventions of ancient religious practice or to those of mythography seem to form the major part of her characterization, there appears to be at least one further, important element in her portrayal: her personal discovery, as it were, of the way humans experience unrequited love—a greatly disorientating discovery for her, even though one necessarily limited by the fact that she is a goddess. That element of Venus' characterization often makes her look comic, adding to the ludic treatment of her throughout the tale. However the main point to be emphasized here is that, in partly discovering human experience of unrequited love, Venus also discovers, to a degree, the experience of love as otherness, as partly and disturbingly ‘outside the system of normality or convention to which [she] belongs’.⁴³

It was argued earlier in this discussion that Venus uses a predominantly male, in fact chiefly Petrarchan, language/rhetoric of love in order to seduce Adonis. She is given that form of erotic speech to involve her in simple (human) gender-reversal—to make her sexual assertiveness look clearly and oddly like male sexual assertiveness. Yet there is arguably another reason as well, namely, to suggest that in trying to seduce Adonis she comes personally to know how humans experience loving in vain. Venus' speech between ll. 187-216 provides brief, sample evidence of this. There Venus speaks to Adonis in what are obviously and mostly Petrarchan terms. “‘Thine eye darts forth the fire that burneth me …,’” she says early on (l. 196), adding almost at once: “‘Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel? / Nay more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth; / Art thou a woman's son and canst not feel / What 'tis to love, how want of love tormenteth?’” (ll. 199-202). Those words suggest that the predominantly male form of erotic speech Venus uses can function not just to show her incongruously resembling ‘a bold-fac'd [male] suitor’ (l. 6) in her sexual aggressiveness but also, and simultaneously, to stress how human is her whole experience of loving Adonis in vain. To be more exact, those words suggest this: the Petrarchan language and rhetoric used so recurrently by Venus are able to involve her in (human) gender-reversal which is not merely a matter of narrowly limited analogy, for they at times function to confer on her many features of a primarily male, human, love psychology. Predictably, those features include angry, bewildered frustration and loss of self-control—the case in the passage quoted above—vulnerability, anguish, self-division, and so on, in keeping with the usual descriptions of male lovers in Petrarch-derived verse. And Venus' climactic words at this moment of the text, like her early ones, reveal that distinctly. A series of Petrarchan paradoxes recalls/anachronistically anticipates a multitude of fictional, male lovers' complaints to their disdainful beloveds: ‘Fie, lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone, / Well-painted idol, image dull and dead, / Statue contenting but the eye alone …’ (ll. 211-13). In short, the reader can see a more than superficial gender-reversal at work in some of Venus' speeches—but one working to make her appear recognizably (if not completely) human, rather than specifically male, in her experience of unrequited love.

The same process can sometimes be seen when Venus the would-be seducer is described in Petrarchan terms, whether or not she herself uses them. For example, just after Adonis has failed to recover his horse and has sat angrily down, Venus softly approaches him. The narrator remarks: ‘O what a sight it was, wistly to view / How she came stealing to the wayward boy! / To note the fighting conflict of her hue, / How white and red each other did destroy!’ (ll. 343-6). The Petrarchan images of ‘white and red’ imply Venus' alternating timidity and boldness or, as is also possible, bashfulness.⁴⁴ That emotional conflict is often ascribed in Petrarchan love poems (by means either of those images or of ones closely related to them) to a male lover cautiously approaching his disdainful beloved, as readers then and now would readily perceive. Venus' recurrent sexual assertiveness seems here to be modified by her knowledge that Adonis does not return her love. Consequently she draws near to him as might a wary human lover. Now it may be that her apparent wariness is merely a ploy to conceal her hitherto unsuccessful aggressiveness: that it is, in fact, a reinscription of her aggressiveness. Whatever the case, in the speech by her considered a moment ago she appears comically petulant in her human, sexual frustration; at this moment of the text, however, her human experience of unrequited love makes her appear comically hesitant but also pathetic, even if she may be falsely evoking pathos.

Much that is suggested by Venus' being repeatedly attributed with a Petrarchan love psychology seems to be summed up when the narrator compares her with Tantalus (see ll. 91-4 and 599-600). Those comparisons imply that her personal discovery of how humans experience unrequited love, even though limited, puts her in hell: for Venus, in effect, to feel how mortals experience loving in vain is to enter a hell of obsessive, frustrated desire. Her love for Adonis can therefore be seen as involving her in a second and simultaneous personal discovery, that of love as a new and alien experience.⁴⁵ The second discovery is limited because the first is also; nonetheless, it is significant because it means that, in loving Adonis, the goddess of love herself comes experientially to know something of love as otherness. She is led into human intensities of emotion: human yearning, frustration, misery and false hope.

A final point should be quickly added here. What might be called the Petrarchan humanizing of Venus contributes not only to the portrayal of her as would-be seducer but, as well, to the portrayal of her after Adonis has left (ll. 811ff.). In that latter part of the poem, nonetheless, it does not primarily indicate Venus' continued, personal discovery of how humans experience unrequited love; rather, it chiefly suggests her personal discovery of how humans experience separation from, and the death of, a beloved.⁴⁶ (Thus it also suggests development and intensification in her coming to know love as otherness.) For example, just after mentioning Adonis' departure from Venus, the narrator indicates her confusion, anxiety and misery by a series of motifs that recur throughout Petrarchan love verse (the lamenting lover's grief being echoed by nature, and so on; see ll. 823-46). Likewise, when he tells of her meeting with the boar (ll. 901-12) he describes her horrified response to the creature in Petrarchan terms (a sequence of paradoxes suggests her self-division and paralysis; see ll. 907-12). He accounts for her sudden change from belief to disbelief in Adonis' death by means of Petrarchan love psychology (there, too, the paradoxical is emphasized; see ll. 985-90). He partly describes her grieving for the dead Adonis, moreover, in Petrarchan terms (again, a paradoxical rhetoric indicates her self-division, as well as her confusion and loss of self-control; see, for example, ll. 1057-74). Unsurprisingly enough, for it was the case earlier in the poem, pathos is interwoven with comedy in those presentations of Venus humanized.⁴⁷

A Venus humanized, even if only to a degree, is necessarily a Venus transformed. It was suggested above that self-transformation seems to be an enticement offered to Adonis when the goddess tries to seduce him. To repeat what was specifically suggested: in offering Adonis her love, Venus simultaneously offers him metamorphosis, a redefined subjectivity, in which self-perfection and safety will be supposedly gained but a loss of self will be inevitable. One instance of her putting that proposition to him has already been examined. In that particular instance, Venus implicitly promises Adonis self-perfection as a result of his sexual initiation. I want now to consider the most direct and elaborate offer of self-transformation that she makes to him (ll. 229-40), an offer in which she appears to envisage her own transformation.

At once embracing and imprisoning Adonis in her arms, Venus tells him: ‘Within the circuit of this ivory pale [the fence, as it were, of her white arms] / I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer: / Feed where thou wilt …’ (ll. 230-2). The goddess's serio-comic offer of transformation seems variously problematic. To begin with, her projected metamorphosis of her body into a site for Adonis to inhabit and enjoy, in fact, into a type of the ‘ideal landscape’, implies that to him she will be at once sentient and insentient, passive yet active, in her sexuality (active because, as she apparently sees it, she will in effect own Adonis: ‘my deer/[dear]’ she hopefully calls him in ll. 231-9).⁴⁸ More important, her projected metamorphosis of Adonis into her ‘deer/[dear]’ offers him a comprehensively redefined subjectivity—a new and ambiguous personal selfhood. Venus' ‘deer’ image suggests that, when sexually involved with her, he will be her beloved (‘dear’); it also suggests, as she probably does not recognize, that in becoming her lover he will become less than human because merely concupiscent. His former role as someone committed to the active life will vanish. No longer a hunter, instead a captured creature of the hunt of love—the ‘deer’ image of course connecting with the motif of Venus as a predator—he will be both a new person and a lost one, safe from the consequences of his planned boar hunt (about which Venus does not yet know) but himself a hunter's prize. Venus' fantastic, sophisticated offer of metamorphosis to Adonis indicates that her desire for him necessitates his loss of self, his gaining a new, incongruously diminished selfhood. On the other hand, her imagined self-transformation does not so much imply change to her as it does change to his perception of her. Venus' disregard for Adonis' independent selfhood, which pervades her offer(s) of metamorphosis to him and indeed all her attempt to seduce him, is emblematized at the poem's end by her plucking the flower sprung from his blood and carrying it away.

The intricate portrayal of Shakespeare's Venus presents her as a diverse, unstable yet not incoherent characterization. If the goddess of love appears to be, for example, tender and callous, compassionate and predatory, sophisticated and naive, pathetic and comic, alluring but also at times repellent, her almost infinite variety is nonetheless held together by the force of her self-centred sexual desire. One Renaissance view of love, mentioned above, was that love's power draws into coherence the various and conflicting elements of the world, compelling them into an harmonious discord, or discordia concors. It seems reasonable to suggest that in Venus and Adonis the reader sees the goddess of love, and so erotic love itself, as discordia concors, centred upon desire's selfishness. The poem's representation of Venus implies love's often incongruous multiplicity. Her experience of love as otherness, co-existent with her humanized experience of love's frustration, implies human love's extremes of misery and of obsession (as well, momentarily, of elation)—a Petrarchan humanizing of the goddess being Shakespeare's recreation of Ovid's anthropomorphic refashioning of his divinities. Her offer of metamorphosis to Adonis indicates love's capacity to transform the lover and, chiefly, the unresponsive beloved should he (she) become in turn a lover. That transformation, it appears to be suggested, may involve uncertain gain but will involve unavoidable loss of self. Yet, as has just been proposed, the insistent egocentrism within the many aspects of Shakespeare's Venus seems to signal what remains constant amid her inconstancies, and thus those of human passion.

(IV) ADONIS THE RHETORICIAN. ADONIS, NARCISSUS AND METAMORPHOSIS

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 the idea of beauty's transience, for example, a connection that has been interestingly explored.⁴⁹ Study in the second mode has closely traced his responses to Venus' sexual aggression, examining his evasions, his defiances, and so on.⁵⁰ 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—from her point of view—offer(s) 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.⁵¹

When confronting the unwelcome, mainly Petrarchan language and 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 (ll. 185-6; see ll. 157-74). 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 …”’ (ll. 715-16). 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 immediately evoke the Petrarchan ideal of female beauty (as in l. 10). When Venus strokes Adonis' cheek then imprisons his hand, to cite one instance (ll. 352-64), he cries out: ‘“For shame,” … “let go, and let me go …”’ (l. 379; cf. l. 53).⁵² 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.

Two episodes in the poem illustrate that clearly. In an early episode, Venus pushes Adonis to the ground (ll. 40-1) and he begins ‘to chide’ her (l. 46). She silences him, stopping his lips and warning that she will not let him speak in opposition to her (ll. 46-8). The narrator thereupon says: ‘He [Adonis] burns with bashful shame, she [Venus] with her tears / Doth quench the maiden burning of his cheeks …’ (ll. 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 sometimes figured by a tortoise. Like it she stays at home and is silent.⁵³ Forced into silence, like a woman but also by a female deity who pervasively uses a male, human language/rhetoric of love and seduction, Adonis responds with what is recognizable at once as part of a conventionally female—physical and silent—cultural rhetoric eloquent of sexual embarrassment and repudiation.⁵⁴ 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 …’ (ll. 355-8). 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 lover, aggressing Adonis in his role as unwilling object of desire. Her role is conventionally male, his female; her role manifests a Petrarchized libertinism, his Petrarchism. Like a disdainful, Petrarchan lady he repudiates his suitor's insistent gaze, expressing himself physically, tacitly and eloquently.⁵⁵

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, while idealistic and combative, appears also to be problematic.⁵⁶ Just after Venus has again informed Adonis of his duty to breed (ll. 751-68) he makes the most substantial of his speeches (ll. 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 (ll. 778-84). He unflatteringly identifies Venus as Venus Vulgaris trying to legitimize her desire by an appeal to her cognate function as Venus Genetrix (ll. 790-1).⁵⁷ 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 …’ (ll. 793-6). Adonis distinguishes between a supplanted, original, absent Cupid of spiritual love (l. 793) and a usurping, parodic Cupid of sexual desire, now present on earth (l. 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). 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). Pausanius, 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 unrecognized 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.⁵⁸ 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 and meets sexual advances with a hard unresponsiveness. Instances of the former can be seen in these lines: ‘“I know not love,” quoth he, “nor will not know it …”’ (l. 409); ‘“My love to love is love but to disgrace it …”’ (l. 412). Instances of the latter can be seen when Venus calls Adonis a ‘flint-hearted boy’ and asks him if he is ‘obdurate, flinty, hard as steel …’ (parodies of the domina petrosa motif in ll. 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.’⁵⁹ Yet although 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.’⁶⁰ 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.’⁶¹ 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 …”’ (ll. 523-5). He adds: ‘“The mellow plum doth fall, the green sticks fast, / Or being early pluck'd, is sour to taste”’ (ll. 527-8). 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”’ (ll. 127-8). 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’ (ll. 805-6). 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 selfknowledge prior to, and quite separately from, the experience of love. He apparently wishes to know himself—and so in effect to 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’ (l. 525), makes that much clear. Yet Adonis' wordplay there elides self-knowledge and sexual experience, implying (despite his wish) that they are actually connected, perhaps inseparable.

When Venus offers Adonis metamorphosis via sexual initiation (as I have argued above), she in fact offers him loss of self, insofar as he is someone committed to the active life, and the gain of a new, incongruously diminished selfhood as an aesthetic/sexual object and concupiscent prize of the hunt of love. In rejecting Venus' offers of lost and gained subjectivities, Adonis retains his self-definition as follower of the active life (hunter, servant of Diana), a self-definition that he obviously thinks either incomplete or as yet incompletely understood by himself, and refuses knowledge of his sexuality.⁶² Thereby he repudiates not only Venus' proffered new subjectivities 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 selfhood as follower of the active life, he therefore has his parodic sexual encounter with the boar, in which his very life is lost.⁶³ 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.

(V) ADONIS, THE NARRATOR AND THE MALE GAZE. MARLOWE'S HERO AND LEANDER AND DONNE'S ‘ELEGY 19’

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 emphasized 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.⁶⁴ 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 [?]”’ (ll. 445-7). Seemingly mindful of Venus' eagerness to gourmandize on him, Adonis subsequently says in his major speech about the difference between love and lust: ‘“Love surfeits not, lust like a glutton dies”’ (l. 803). But while 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?’ (ll. 397-400).

Venus speaks those words when urging Adonis to follow the example of his horse, which has run off with ‘[a] breeding jennet’ (l. 260), and ‘learn to love’ (l. 407; cf. ll. 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.⁶⁵ 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 ll. 361-84, especially ll. 361-2 with their trope of imprisonment). More important, when Venus earlier tells Adonis about her victory over Mars (ll. 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.⁶⁶ Yet Venus cannot, of course, 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.⁶⁷ 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 (ll. 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 ll. 463-8) or pathetic (as in ll. 1057-62) but grotesque as well—veering between the poles of comedy and of pathos: in her physical power (for example, when exercising force on Adonis; see ll. 29-35); in her unreasoning and excessive passion (see ll. 25-8, 61-6, 217-22, and so on). Those portrayals of her accord with the grotesqueness of much of her libertine rhetoric (cf. the excesses of pleading and of cajoling in ll. 187-98, for instance). The narrator stresses, too, the grotesqueness and (or) ferocity of her predatory desire (ll. 54-60, 67-8, 541-76, and so on). He treats her with condescension (as notably in ll. 607-10) and even celebrates her beauty only to heighten the reader's perception of Adonis' unique beauty (see, for example, ll. 352-64).⁶⁸ 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, Adonis has been pushed to the ground by Venus and is, in effect, restrained by her (ll. 40-2), 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 (ll. 45-8). His response to her doing so is represented in terms that feminize him (ll. 49-50, discussed above, and l. 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 (ll. 59-60), by vividly and at greater length comparing the impassioned goddess to an ‘empty eagle’ tearing at and devouring its prey (ll. 55-8). To that point in the episode, Venus has arguably been imaged as desiring rather than as desirable. Her beauty has been alluded to once (l. 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 whose sexual attractiveness is emphasized at the goddess's cost.

In what immediately follows, the narrator uses that process of devaluing and emphasizing 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’ (l. 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,’ the narrator says (l. 63). 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 ll. 67-8.⁶⁹ That continued process of devaluing and emphasizing, 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 (ll. 64-6); her virtually limitless pleasure in it is implied (ll. 77-84). And Venus' harassment of Adonis brings (the narrator relates with apparent pleasure) reactions from him which in fact heighten his feminized beauty (ll. 73-8).⁷⁰ The narrator's own appreciation of Adonis' physical appeal is expressed both there and at another moment of the text (l. 70). What seems to be happening here is a coercion of the female: a devaluation and (or) 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 emphasize 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 Adonis' beauty is elaborately displayed and that he is put forward as the (notional) object of sexual desire. Adonis' beauty appears to be held 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’ (l. 399).

Although other instances in Shakespeare's poem could be examined, 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 gaze is exercised and (or) evoked in Marlowe's Hero and Leander and in Donne's ‘Elegy 19 To his Mistress Going to Bed’.⁷¹ In the former poem, the early and stylized descriptions of the soon-to-be lovers indicate that they are significantly alike. Hero, described in ll. 5-50, is supposedly an object of irresistible sexual fascination. She is wooed by Apollo for the beauty of her hair alone and worthy, in his opinion, to be yielded his throne so that all men can gaze on her (ll. 6-8). She is mistaken by Cupid for his mother Venus (ll. 39-44). Leander, described in ll. 51-90, supposedly complements her in attractiveness. Had his ‘dangling tresses that were never shorn / … been cut, and unto Colchos borne’ (ll. 55-6) they would have inspired a second, but more compelling, quest for ‘the Golden Fleece’ (ll. 57-8); moreover, Cynthia—Apollo's sister—desires him (ll. 59-60). Yet the formal descriptions of Hero and of Leander indicate also that they are significantly unalike insofar as their supposed sexual allure is concerned.

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 it can generate—is linked to violence and death. The depiction of the Venus and Adonis story on her sleeves (ll. 11-14), as well as the blood on her kirtle (ll. 15-16), suggests that and foreshadows Leander's fate. It is true that, when first describing Leander, the narrator foretells/reminds the reader of Leander's death (ll. 51-4). 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.⁷² 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. …

(ll. 61-9)

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. 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 fashioned as the blindly, paradoxically, vulnerably virginal priestess of Venus Vulgaris—‘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.⁷³ The process of devaluing and emphasizing 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, Donne's Elegy 19 seems illuminatingly both like and unlike the poems by Shakespeare and by Marlowe. The main similarity lies in how Donne creates his persona and in how that persona apparently seeks to evoke and exercises 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.⁷⁴ 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. He 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.⁷⁵

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’ (ll. 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 his angle of vision, his sexual/political colony, his private source of physical riches, his personal empire (see ll. 27-30). Donne's persona, that is to suggest, reinvents and reinterprets the woman to her face. The silent ‘she’ finds herself being refashioned 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 exercise of power. That exercise 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 friends the Brookes.⁷⁶ The fictional lady is, then, apparently put forward for appreciation yet actually devalued: made voiceless and refashioned. She is devalued in order that Donne's persona and hence Donne himself can be set on display for appreciation. One sees male display, even if not homoerotic display, at female expense; yet at the same time, that display also ironically indicates the dependence of male selfhood, in libertine discourse, on some conjectured notion of femaleness. So perhaps the assertive heterosexuality of Donne's poem may not very greatly distinguish it from Venus and Adonis or from Hero and Leander. The process of devaluation and emphasis, which is connected with the exercise and evocation of the male gaze by Ovidian speakers complicit, in their coercing of the female, with their implied readers, 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 fashioning 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 and social conventions which at once shape the speaking self and allow it to reshape its surroundings.⁷⁷ Shakespeare's poem suggests love's often incongruous multiplicity and intense self-centredness, 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.⁷⁸ 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 subjectivity for the gaining of a diminished, eroticised one, but he also evades self-knowledge, wilfully seeking to dissociate self-knowledge from sexual experience. Shakespeare's poem implies that if sexual desire is 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 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 emphasis/devaluation and with the exercise/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. All reference to the poem is from F. T. Prince (ed.), William Shakespeare: The Poems (1969; rpt. London: Methuen, 1976). My ‘date’ for the poem is in fact only a suggested boundary. See: Prince, The Poems, p. xxvi; S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (1977; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1986), pp. 159-70; R. Dutton, William Shakespeare: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 35-40; R. Ellrodt, ‘Shakespeare the Non-Dramatic Poet’, in S. Wells (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies (1986; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 35-48, at p. 45.

2. For an illuminating account of the ‘plague years’ and Shakespeare, see M. C. Bradbrook, Shakespeare: The Poet in His World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978), pp. 65-87.

3. That is, in any event, the conventional view.

4. See: G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968), pp. 191-200; S. Schoenbaun (n.1), pp. 170-74; Charles Martindale and Colin Burrow, ‘Clapham's Narcissus: A Pre-Text for Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis? (text, translation and commentary)’, English Literary Renaissance, 22 (1992), 147-76.

5. For example, see Schoenbaum, pp. 173-4, and R. Dutton (n.1), p. 37.

6. See Bradbrook (n.2), pp. 70-8 and, more generally, also: G. F. Lytle and S. Orgel (eds), Patronage in the Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981); A. F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Robert C. Evans, Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989).

7. The term ‘epyllion’ has been controversial but, as it is also widely used, I use it throughout …. The dating of Marlowe's poem is much debated, a point I discuss below. See S. Orgel (ed.), Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems and Translations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), pp. 9-10 and p. 219 (all further reference is to this edition); L. C. Martin (ed.), Marlowe's Poems (1931; rpt. New York: Gordian, 1966), pp. 1-8. However, I tend to agree with W. Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their Contemporaries (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1977), p. 85. See also: C. Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 3. On the issue of genre in the English Renaissance, see especially A. Fowler, Kinds of Literature (1982; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985) and B. K. Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History and Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).

8. Hulse, p. 23. Hulse provides other useful reasons but those are the most relevant here.

9. On the tradition of moralizing the Metamorphoses, see Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (1932; rpt. New York: Norton, 1960), pp. 3-83. He discusses Lodge on pp. 83-8, emphasizing continuity with the past rather than novelty in Scillaes Metamorphosis.

10. For example, through his ingenious elaborations on it, especially his exaggerations, as can readily be seen in the version given in his Metamorphoses. Keach, at pp. 37-8, mentions Lodge's use of Ronsard. Reference to Lodge's poem is from E. S. Donno (ed.), Elizabethan Minor Epics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963).

11. On the primary audience for Lodge's poem, see Keach, p. 40 and Schoenbaum, p. 173.

12. For the relevant moments in the poem where those traits are revealed, see respectively: stanzas 3, 8, and L'Envoy; stanzas 84-8; stanzas 33 and 72; stanzas 90-4—among many instances.

13. As E. S. Donno and N. Alexander have earlier noted, respectively in their editions, Elizabethan Minor Epics, pp. 6-7, and Elizabethan Narrative Verse (London: Arnold, 1967), pp. 9-10.

14. His humanity, for example, as a general trait doesn't count.

15. The poem is close in spirit, too, to Sackville's work and to Petrarch's love verse. Lodge's narrator is, therefore, also un-Ovidian in some obvious respects (one cannot tell, moreover, to what extent the design of the narrator is deliberate).

16. See, for example, Bush, p. 143.

17. Here, I follow Schoenbaum. See also Dutton, p. 38.

18. Perhaps because Shakespeare's role as a non-dramatic poet is new he calls Venus and Adonis, in the dedication, ‘the first heir of my invention’.

19. It may be, too, that both Lodge and Shakespeare modelled their narrators on Marlowe's Ovidian narrator in Hero and Leander. However, given the difficulty of dating Marlowe's poem, and likewise given the distinct possibility that it was written closely in time to Shakespeare's (not before Lodge's), I prefer the account of relations between Lodge's and Shakespeare's narrators sketched above, which reflects acceptance of the notion that Lodge wrote the first English minor epic.

20. He is not, of course, in total control of the problems raised by what he pictures going on inside his imaginary world, especially insofar as those problems connect with everyday human problems which defy solution; the same is true of Ovid's narrator.

21. There has been general agreement, for example, about Venus' predatoriness, dishonesty, maternalism and so on—though with varying emphases. Among the commentaries on Venus and Adonis, see especially: D. N. Beauregard, ‘Venus and Adonis: Shakespeare's Representation of the Passions’, Shakespeare Studies, 8 (1975), 83-98; W. A. Rebhorn, ‘Mother Venus: Temptation in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis’, Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 1-19; L. J. Daigle, ‘Venus and Adonis: Some Traditional Contexts’, Shakespeare Studies, 13 (1980), 31-46; J. Doebles, ‘The Many Faces of Love: Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis’, Shakespeare Studies, 16 (1983), 33-43; H. Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 21-79. See also: G. Sorelius, Shakespeare's Early Comedies: Myth, Metamorphosis, Mannerism (Uppsala: University of Uppsala Press, 1993), pp. 111-17; J. Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (1993; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 48-65; S. Wells, Shakespeare: A Dramatic Life (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), pp. 115-20; J. Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (London: Picador, 1997), pp. 23-4.

22. See, for example: T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. 1-93; D. C. Allen, Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry (1960; rpt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), pp. 42-57; W. Keach, pp. 52-84; C. Hulse, pp. 141-75.

23. The mythographers drawn on in this discussion are chiefly Natalis Comes and Vincenzo Cartari, respectively in their Mythologiae (Venice: 1567) and Le Imagini … Degli Dei (Venice: 1571)—both in the Garland reprints of 1976, introduced by S. Orgel.

24. Whether or not other myths or tales depict or suggest that as having happened to the goddess prior to her loving Adonis, the discovery seems new to her in Shakespeare's narrative—as she indicates in her speech about Mars. See ll. 91-114. But were this not, in fact, her personal discovery, it would still be so forceful an experience of love as otherness that it almost completely disorientates the goddess of love herself.

25. Even if Venus has been previously obsessed with love for another divinity, love between immortals cannot be equated with love between mortals; hence the humanized experience of obsessive love she seems newly to undergo in this tale would have to be qualitatively different from any other experience she may have had of Love's power to preoccupy the consciousness.

26. See Cartari, Le Imagini …, p. 543.

27. The Venus Vulgaris that Shakespeare's Venus most closely resembles is that in the Symposium. See Pausanius' account of that Venus, and her celestial counterpart, in the Symposium, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (ed. E. H. Warmington and P. G. Rouse) in his Great Dialogues of Plato (New York: New American Library), pp. 78-82. See also: Comes, Mythologiae, 120(a); Pico, Commento sopra una canzona de amore … trans. Thomas Stanley, A Platonick Discourse upon Love, in The Poems and Translations, ed. G. M. Crump (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 2, 7-22. Filarete, Treatise on Architecture, trans. J. R. Spencer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965), Bk 18, fol. 148v. Insofar as Shakespeare's Venus resembles Pausanius' Venus Vulgaris, she aptly perceives Adonis as her ‘banquet of sense’. That Venus is, however, a debased aspect of the Venus Vulgaris described by Pico and some others. They see Venus Vulgaris as having two aspects: one human, the other bestial. The former is concerned with sight and with the desire to reproduce beauty whereas the latter is concerned only with sexual satisfaction.

28. Heather Dubrow, in Captive Victors, notes that ‘Venus and Adonis is concerned with faulty or failed communication …’ (p. 38), and I would wholly agree; however, her reading of Venus' opening speech and of its context differs significantly from my own (see pp. 31-7 of her study). My main point here is that Venus' speech subverts her role as Venus Mechanitis.

29. Again, images have immediately Petrarchan associations, though in fact they can be traced much further back. Cf. T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics …, pp. 9-10.

30. On parody of this in ‘Damon the Mower’, see my ‘Marvell's “Upon Appleton House to my Lord Fairfax” and the Regaining of Paradise’, in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, edited by C. Conden and myself (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), 53-84, at p. 73.

31. On varietà and its link to grazia, see David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 82, 166, 172.

32. On Venus Genetrix see: Comes, Mythologiae, 122(a); Cartari, Le Imagini …, p. 530; Ficino, Commentary on the Symposium, 1, 5. It should be mentioned that, for Pico and others, Venus Genetrix is linked to the higher aspect of Venus Vulgaris.

33. Pico, Commento, trans. Stanley, 2, 20, 323. Ficino, in his Commentary on the Symposium, of course also calls such love ‘bestial love’. See Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love, trans. Sears Jayne (1985; rpt. Woodstock: Spring, 1994), 7, 3, 158. As mentioned earlier, ‘bestial love’ is the form of love associated by Pico with the lower aspect of Venus Vulgaris.

34. See, for instances: ll. 18-22, in her first speech, and especially ll. 445-50, 543-52.

35. On Adonis' supposed duty to breed, see ll. 163-74. I write ‘primarily, at the very least’, because Venus may also genuinely—if quite secondarily—want Adonis to reproduce his beauty through offspring.

36. That is, to make the point again, Venus' celebration of the generative impulse and her urging Adonis to breed are ploys in an attempt at seduction.

37. For further discussion of Venus' maternalism, see Rebhorn, ‘Mother Venus …’, cited in note 21.

38. On Venus Apaturia, see Comes' allusion in Mythologiae, 121(a). The goddess's role of Venus Apaturia naturally links to her role as Venus Mechanitis.

39. On Venus as Magistra Divinandi, see Comes, Mythologiae, 121(a).

40. Here I follow Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, rev. edn (1958; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 91-6. Clark Hulse also discusses the motif, though differently. See his Metamorphic Verse, pp. 166-73.

41. There seems no need to give further examples, as they clearly tend the same way. It could be added, however, that if the Venus Victrix motif is dismantled, so too is that of Venus Basilea (Queen of Love).

42. In l. 791 he associates her with Venus Genetrix.

43. Jeremy Hawthorne, A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory (London: Arnold, 1992), p. 124.

44. Cf. Ficino, Commentary, 1, 6.

45. Again, seemingly new and alien within the confines of the tale.

46. Of course, secondarily it is continued experience for Venus of how humans may experience unrequited love.

47. As regards the comic: exaggeration generates it—but then Venus actually is larger than human life, and Adonis, likewise, is perfect; the Petrarchan comedy, as it were, contributes to other comic elements—such as Venus' questioning the dogs and scolding the boar. As regards the pathetic: Venus' disorientation and misery are, despite all their comic features, nonetheless recognizably and familiarly human, evoking sympathy.

48. On the ‘ideal landscape’ see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953; rpt. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 183-202. Her self-description seems a recreation of Claudian's famous set-piece in his Epithalamium de Nuptis Honorii Augusti, ll. 49-96.

49. See, for example, C. Hulse, pp. 151-3. 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).

50. 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.

51. 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.

52. His cheek is ‘tend'rer’ than her hand, his hand rivals hers in whiteness, according to the narrator in ll. 352-4 and 362-4 respectively.

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

54. 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.

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

56. 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.

57. Again, an unknowing cultural specificity.

58. See ll. 157-62; cf. ll. 115-20.

59. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. M. Innes (1955; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 3, p. 83.

60. Ovid, trans. Innes, p. 83.

61. Ovid, trans. Innes, p. 86.

62. Again, see ll. 525-8.

63. 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.

64. In what follows, my thinking on the male gaze has especially taken into account Bryson and Snow.

65. Venus sees him as available, if not as her willing ‘true-love’.

66. Lines 115-28; for an ironic counterpart see ll. 211-16.

67. 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. Iser's notion of the ‘implied reader’ is interestingly elaborated on in S. Chatman's Story and Discourse (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978).

68. 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.

69. The picture of Adonis as her victim is evoked, in both cases, at the same time.

70. The Petrarchan red and white being iterated in description of Adonis and their hues being apparently heightened by his distress.

71. For examples of those other instances, see: ll. 241-52, 349-54, 427-52, 541-72; cf. ll. 595-606. There are not, as I read the poem, many instances at all of Venus' being displayed for the male gaze. Reference to Marlowe's poem is from Orgel's edition and reference to Donne's verse is from A. J. Smith's edition, The Complete English Poems (1971; rpt. London: Allen Lane, 1974). Subsequent reference to Donne's verse is from Smith.

72. Especially relevant here is the refiguring allusion to Narcissus, to whom Adonis seems a virtual antithesis.

73. For depiction of Hero as ‘Venus' nun’ (the phrase itself occurs at 1, 45) see 1, 131-66; for examples of the narrator's ironic play with his characterization of her as at once beautiful and innocent, see his comparison between her and Diana seeking to evade Actaeon (2, 260-2) and his comparison of her to a harpy (2, 270).

74. 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).

75. That is to say, with reference primarily to the narrator of Venus and Adonis, that the speaker(s) of Ovid's Amores has (have) features in common with Ovid's speaker in Metamorphoses. Marlowe's Hero and Leander is certainly indebted to ‘divine Musaeus’ (1, 52) but the making of its narrator is nonetheless indebted to Ovid's fashioning of his speaker(s) in his earlier erotic verse.

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

77. 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.

78. Thus to identify one of the differences between the world of Venus and Adonis and that of Hero and Leander.