SOURCE: Asals, Heather. “Venus and Adonis: The Education of a Goddess.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 13, no. 1 (winter 1973): 31-51.

[In the following essay, Asals challenges critics who view Venus as a humorous figure who embodies female lust in its lowest and most aggressive form. Asals argues that when Venus's responses to Adonis are studied in terms of Neoplatonism, Venus's growth as a character and her progression from “Lust” to “Love” become recognizable.]

Critical reaction to the figure of Venus in Shakespeare's curious contribution to the body of Elizabethan Ovidian poetry has been almost unanimously unfavorable. As Hallet Smith points out, Venus “represents no ideal picture of physical love. She is dominated by the imagery, which most often and most significantly revolves around the hard and violent appetite of the hawk.”¹ Eugene Cantelupe argues that “there is very little divinity and even less of mythology about Venus”—“there is not so much as a shred of Platonic ennoblement and spirituality in her feelings for him. Certainly there is only revulsion in his feelings for her. And this is the theme of the poem.”² Most find her simply an advocate of lust. Robert Miller explains, “It is clear that what the goddess of love desires is abandonment to the enjoyment of sensual pleasure for its own sake, not for the purpose of propagation.”³ In fact, Rufus Putney finds even her grief unattractive: “Venus' grief spurs her to such heights of absurdity that we are at first incredulous, then amused.”⁴

A further investigation into the development of the character of Venus is at the heart of an investigation into the tone of the poem, a problem which has perplexed most modern readers. For years critics have been aesthetically troubled by the peculiar combination of comedy and tragedy—one has trouble avoiding either the comic elements in the first half or the eloquent suffering in the last half of the poem. Venus, by moving from comic to tragic dimensions, gains and grows in stature by the end of the poem, but most readers deny her that stature. Most commentators approach Venus as a static character, as a ravenous and lustful creature from the beginning to the end of the poem. And thus, most force a completely comic reading of the poem. “The tradition that Shakespeare followed and affected, then, is demonstrably comic. Once we make the assumption that Venus and Adonis was meant to be amusing, all that before seemed ridiculous and inept is transmuted into mirth, and Shakespeare's wonderful vivacity becomes apparent.”⁵ I think that it is more fruitful to approach the poem by holding fast to one's initial conviction that the perspective of the poem is both comic and tragic, that the tone of the poem develops—is not fixed—rather than to make assumptions which transmute the poem into mirth.

Those who condemn Venus for her sexual aggressiveness side with Adonis for his virtue, yet this position is not held by the narrator of the poem. Certainly the narrator's language reveals the direction of his own sympathies. Adonis is “testy” (l. 319),⁶ “silly” (l. 467), a “poor fool” (l. 578), who breaks away from the “fair arms” (l. 812), the “sweet embrace” (l. 811) of Venus. I think that this is evidence that the characterization of Venus and Adonis, as well as the tone of the poem, is in need of reevaluation. I propose first to investigate the means by which Venus perceives, understands, and, finally, suffers her love for Adonis and to define exactly what this would have meant to readers in the sixteenth century. The Renaissance reader would have been familiar with and would, therefore, have responded to the particular significance of the Neoplatonic details present in the poem.

Distinguishing love from lust, the Neoplatonists define a hierarchy of the senses, making the highest the sense which is responsible for visual beauty. Castiglione summarizes the commonplace Neoplatonic position: “as a man heareth not with his mouth, nor smelleth with his eares: no more can he also in any manner wise enjoy beautie, nor satisfie the desire that she stirreth up in our mindes, with feeling, but with the sense, unto whom beautie is the very butt to level at: namely, the virtue of seeing.”⁷ As most Neoplatonists, he continues by placing sound next to sight, condemning the other senses as “blinde.” Pico, too, supports the standard Neoplatonic definition of love: “The desire of this Beauty is Love; arising onely from one knowing faculty, the Sight.”⁸ And Ficino comments most frequently and extensively on the subject: the beauty of the soul, he says, “is perceived by the mind; that of the body, by the eyes; and that of sound, by the ear alone. Since, therefore, the mind, the sight, and the hearing are the only means by which we are able to enjoy beauty, and since Love is the desire for enjoying beauty, Love is always limited to [the pleasures of] the mind, the eyes, and the ears.”⁹ Ficino is later explicit in his condemnation of the indulgence of the other senses: “Since love is nothing more than the desire of enjoying beauty, and beauty is perceived by the eyes alone, the lover of the body is content with sight alone. Indeed the lust to touch the body is not a part of love, nor is it the desire of the lover but rather a kind of wantoness and derangement of a servile man.”¹⁰

One can legitimately judge the various degrees of love or lust which Venus experiences in the poem according to the mediums of her experience. Whatever is true of the first part of the poem, clearly by the end of the poem Venus has committed her experience to the two highest senses. Lamenting the death of Adonis, she remembers him by what she knew of him through her eyes and ears:

Alas, poor world, what treasure thou hast lost!
What face remains alive that's worth viewing?
What tongue is music now?

(ll. 1075-1077)

She mythologizes the power of his beauty as it appeared, while he was alive, to the eye and ear: “To see his face the lion walk'd along / Behind some hedge, because he would not prey, / And never fright the silly lamb that day” (ll.1093-1098). The fish in the brook, she claims, were fed “with his sight” (l.1104).

But Venus's commitment to the experience of sight and sound, to love (the desire for beauty) rather than lust, is not consistent throughout the poem. In fact, a study of the means by which Venus perceives Adonis reveals a development in her appreciation of sight and sound more than touch. Even at the beginning of the poem Venus, by calling attention to the importance of eyes, gives us evidence that there is in her desire for Adonis an element of Neoplatonic love; but she draws, according to Neoplatonic standards, the wrong conclusion: “Look in mine eye-balls, there thy beauty lies: / Then why not lips on lips, since eyes in eyes?” (ll. 119-120). Descending all the way from the experience of sight to the desire for touch, Venus, a few lines later, imagines indulging in still another of the lower senses: “The tender spring upon thy tempting lip / Shows thee unripe; yet mayst thou well be tasted.” Her failure to comply with Neoplatonic values in the first part of the poem is further underscored by her rejection of what Adonis stands for: “Statue contenting but the eye alone” (l.213). Gradually Venus's behavior becomes more like that of a Neoplatonic lover:

Oh what a war of looks was then between them!
Her eyes petitioner 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.355-358)

But she continues at this point to be uncommitted to that standard: “‘Give me my hand,’ said he, ‘why doest thou feel it?’” (l.373). Venus makes the fullest and most explicit statement of her initial lack of commitment to either the higher or lower senses after she has heard and remarked on the voice of Adonis for the first time—“Ears' deep-sweet music, and heart's deep sore wounding!” (l.432). Explicitly traversing the entire hierarchy of senses, she conjectures,

Had I no eyes but ears, my ears would love
That inward beauty and invisible;
Or were I deaf, thy outward parts would move
Each part in me that were but sensible:
          Though neither eyes nor ears, to hear nor see,
          Yet should I be in love by touching thee.

(ll.433-438)

She continues by imagining that if she could neither see, hear, nor touch, she would smell; if she could not smell either, she would taste (ll.439-450). In this way Venus makes clear to the reader the ambiguity of her status, at this point, as a figure of both Love and Lust.

It is when Venus, for the first time in the poem, is deprived of the sight of Adonis that she comes to terms with and makes her commitment to the highest of the senses: “So did the merciless and pitchy night / Fold in the object that did feed her sight” (ll.821-822). As she does this, she ennobles her passion and, with her passion, herself. Indeed, she comes to define the grounds of her quarrel with Death in terms of her ability to see; thus, she calls still more attention to and focuses on her visual experience of Adonis: “O no, it cannot be, / Seeing his beauty, thou shouldst strike at it—/ O yes, it may, thou hast no eyes to see (ll.937-939). She also condemns the agent of Death, the Boar, for his blindness, suggesting that sight is the only means of perceiving the beauty of Adonis:

But this foul, grim, and urchin-snouted boar,
Whose downward eye still looketh for a grave,
Ne'er saw the beauteous livery that he wore. …
          If he did see his face, why then I know
          He thought to kiss him, and hath kill'd him so.

(ll.1105-1110)

By the end of the poem the narrator himself emphasizes, above all else, the eyes of Venus and what they have learned from the eyes of Adonis. Venus finishes her harangue against Death by questioning, “Why hast thou cast into eternal sleeping / Those eyes that taught all other eyes to see?”; and the narrator continues, “She vail'd her eyelids”—“O how her eyes and tears did lend and borrow! / Her eyes seen in the tears, tears in her eye; / Both crystals where they view'd each other's sorrow” (ll.961-963). One cannot escape the final power and intensity of Venus's sight, a power which far surpasses that of her other senses: “Upon his hurt she looks so steadfastly / That her sight dazzling makes the wound seem three; / And she reprehends her mangling eye” (ll.1063-1065)—“behold two Adons dead! / … Mine eyes are turn'd to fire my heart to lead. / Heavy heart's lead melt at mine eyes' red fire.”

In addition to suggesting Venus's Neoplatonic growth by calling attention to her increasing reliance on her eyes the narrator implies further the Neoplatonic elements in her love by describing the explicit power and function of her eyes. “For those lively spirits that issue out at the eyes,” explains Castiglione, “because they are engendred nigh the hart, entring in like case into the eyes that they are levelled at, like a shaft to the pricke, naturally pearce to the hart.”¹¹ Following the pattern established for the Neoplatonic lover, Venus is wounded by the arrows which travel from the eyes to the heart: “O thou didst kill me, kill me once again! / Thy eyes' shrewd tutor, that hard heart of thine, / Hath taught them scornful tricks, and such disdain, / That they have murder'd this poor heart of mine” (ll.499-500). And the narrator comments towards the end of the poem that at the death of Adonis the eyes of Venus fled “Into the deep dark cabins of her head”—“Where they resign their office and their light / To the disposing of her troubled brain, / Who bids them still consort with ugly night / And never wound the heart with looks again” (ll.1039-1042).

In fact, the narrator's suggestion that at the death of Adonis the eyes of Venus resign their “light” is also filled with Neoplatonic overtones. Erwin Panofsky describes the contrast between Neoplatonic and lower forms of love as it is depicted in Renaissance iconography: “Occasionally the victorious adversary of Blind Cupid is explicitly identified with Platonic Love, as in an engraving where Amor Platonicus drives away his blindfold foe by brandishing two torches.”¹² By Ficino and his disciple, Pico, the light imparted by the Neoplatonic lover comes from the eye and is identified with the sun. Outlining the structure of analogies in the Neoplatonic universe Ficino states, “The Angelic Mind has turned toward God in the same way in which the eye is directed toward the light of the sun. For first it looks away, then it sees only the light of the sun, then third, in the light of the sun it perceives the colors and shapes of things.”¹³ Similarly, Pico summarizes, “Sensible light is the act and efficacy of corporeal, spiritual light of Intelligible Beauty. … As he who by Moonlight seeth some fair object, desires to view and enjoy it more fully in the day; so the Minde, weekly beholding in her self the Ideal Beauty dim … by reason of the Night of her imperfection, turns (like the Moon) to the eternal Sun, to perfect her Beauty by him; to whom addressing her self, she becomes Intelligible light; clearing the beauty of Celestial Venus, and rendring it visible to the eye of the first Minde.”¹⁴ It is, I believe, that very “Celestial Venus” who turns in Shakespeare's poem to the “eternal sun” represented by the “Beauty” of Adonis—“I'll sigh celestial breath, whose gentle wind / Shall cool the heat of this descending sun”:

The sun that shines from heaven shines but warm,
And lo I lie between that sun and thee:
The heat I have from thence doth little harm,
Thine eye darts forth the fire that burneth me;
          And were I not immortal, life were done,
          Between this heavenly and earthly sun.

The eyes of Venus quite explicitly reflect the glow of the sun which lives within the eyes of Adonis: “The night of sorrow now is turn'd to day: / Her two blue windows faintly she up-heaveth, / Like the fair sun when in his fresh array / He cheers the morn, and all the earth relieveth” (ll.481-484). In fact, mirroring the light of Adonis, the eyes of Venus reflect the sun itself: “And as the bright sun glorifies the sky, / So is her face illumin'd with her eye.” It is from the eyes of Adonis that the eyes of Venus “borrow'd all their shine” and, thus, in the proper Neoplatonic fashion they “Shone like the moon in water seen by night.” On the figure of the dead Adonis the eyes of Venus later throw “unwilling light” (l.1051). Venus equates Adonis with the Intelligible light which surpasses Sensible light: she addresses the sun, “There lives a son that suck'd an earthly mother, / May lend thee light, as thou dost lend to other” (ll.863-864).

The emphasis the poem makes on the eyes of Venus, on her experiencing Adonis through her eyes and reflecting the light of Adonis in her eyes, works as evidence that the basis for Venus's attraction to Adonis is that he represents to her the Ideal Neoplatonic Beauty. Lamenting the death of Adonis, she complains, “with him is beauty slain” (l.1019), and “true sweet beauty liv'd and died with him” (l.1080). Even before the death of Adonis, Venus calls attention to her apprehension of Beauty” by contrasting her appreciation with the blindness of the boar: “he naught esteems that face of thine, / To which love's eyes pays tributary gazes” (ll.631-632)—“Beauty hath naught to do with such foul fiends.” Venus even deviously flatters her rival, Death, so that Adonis's “beauty may the better thrive” (l.1011). To the Renaissance reader, Venus's frequently articulated admiration of Adonis's beauty would have had quite specific implications. “The beauty of some person,” writes Ficino, “pleases the soul not insofar as it exists in exterior matter, but insofar as its image is comprehended or grasped by the soul through sight. That image in the sight and in the soul, since these two are incorporeal, cannot itself be material.”¹⁵ Castiglione also comments, “Beautie is the true monument and spoile of the victory of the soule, when she with heavenly influence beareth rule over martiall and grosse nature, and with her light overcometh the darknesse of the bodie.”¹⁶ Surely, then, by underscoring her appreciation of Adonis's Beauty, Venus says something about the exact nature of her affection as well as the condition of her own soul—her attraction may begin with but does not end in Adonis's body.

As one must take into account the frequent references to Adonis as Beauty, one must also take into account the frequent references to Venus as “Love.” “She's love, she loves, and yet she is not lov'd,” comments the narrator in the first part of the poem (l.610). Later he remarks that Adonis “Leaves love upon her back deeply distress'd” (l.814). Like the references to Adonis as Beauty, the references to Venus as Love are filled with Neoplatonic overtones, and the two together suggest Neoplatonism's essential and central preoccupation with the relationship between Love and Beauty. In fact, one might interpret Venus's passion as a dramatization of Ficino's definition of the force represented by Venus: “When we say Love, we mean by that term the desire for beauty.”¹⁷ If Venus is Love and Adonis is Beauty, Venus's desire for Adonis is inevitable and built into her own identity. Within the poem itself one hears from the narrator suggestions of the necessary attraction of Love for Beauty: “Were beauty under twenty locks kept fast, / Yet love breaks through, and picks them all at last” (ll.575-576). Ficino makes the relationship between Love and Beauty still more involved by saying, in effect, Love inadvertently creates Beauty: “Likeness generates Love,” he claims—“a lover imprints a likeness of the loved one upon his soul, and so the soul of the lover becomes a mirror in which is reflected the image of the loved one. Thereupon, when the loved one recognizes himself in the lover, he is forced to love him.”¹⁸ It is clearly the notion of the creation of Beauty by Love, of Beauty as the mirror of Love, which leads the narrator to describe the eyes of the dead Adonis as “Two glasses where herself herself beheld / A thousand times, and no more reflect; / Their virtue lost, wherein they late excell'd, / And every beauty robb'd of his effect” (ll.1129-1132). The divergence of the pictures we get of Adonis through Venus, who blazons his beauty, and the narrator, who once describes his “louring brows o'erwhelming his fair sight” (l.183), can be explained by the fact that it is only the Love of Venus which creates and sees the Beauty of Adonis.

The origin of Love and its creation of Beauty are described by the Neoplatonists as the creation of the world: “It is that still formless substance which we mean by Chaos,” explains Ficino, “that first turning toward God we call the birth of Love; the infusion of the divine light, the nourishing of love; the ensuing conflagration, the increment of love; the approach to God, the impact of love; and the giving of forms, the completion of love. … The attractiveness of this Orderliness is Beauty. … Who, therefore, will not doubt that Love immediately followed Chaos, and preceded the world and all the gods who were assigned to the various parts of the world?”¹⁹ Spenser, too, in his “An Hymne in Honovr of Love” reflects the Neoplatonic commonplaces of the time by speaking of Love arising “Out of great Chaos” (l.158)—“Ayre hated earth, and water hated fyre, / Till Love relented their rebellious yre.” The Neoplatonic notion of the relationship between Love and Beauty, a relationship represented in Venus and Adonis, is behind Venus's apparent hyperbole at the demise of Adonis: “For he being dead, with him is beauty slain, / And beauty dead, black Chaos comes again” (ll. 1019-1020). Few Renaissance readers, I suspect, would have missed the particular overtones associated with Venus's claim that chaos comes again. Love is the power which arose from chaos to create order in the world, to give form to the formless and perfection to imperfect things. The end of Beauty is the end of that form and order which Love once created.

In his article, “The Myth of Mars's Hot Minion in Venus and Adonis,” Robert Miller explains what he considers to be the significance of Venus's digression about her affair with Mars. Having investigated the mythographers, he concludes, “The love affair between Venus and Mars was thus traditionally viewed as a mythological reenactment of man's fall.”²⁰ This interpretation of the episode supports Miller's belief that the Venus of Shakespeare's poem represents Lust rather than Love. However, I think that a close look at the things which Venus emphasizes about the episode reveals that what Shakespeare is using is the Neoplatonist's rather than the mythographer's interest in the union. Pico speaks of the origin of Beauty and, interestingly, its mortality: Beauty, he explains, rises from contrariety,

without which is no composition. … In these compositions the Union necessarily predominates over the contrariety; otherwise the Fabrick would be dissoved. Thus in the Fictions of Poets, Venus loves Mars: this Beauty cannot subsist without contrariety; she curbs and moderates him; this temperaments allays the strife betwixt these contraries. And in Astrology, Venus is plac'd next Mars, to check his destructive influence; as Jupiter next Saturn, to abate his malignancy. If Mars were alwayes subject to Venus (the contrariety of principles to their due temper), nothing would ever be dissolved.²¹

Essential to the definition of Adonis as Beauty, then, is the relationship between Venus and Mars. “The ancient ‘mystery’” upon which the Renaissance seized for their definition of Beauty, writes Edgar Wind in his Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, “was the unlawful union of Mars and Venus, from which issued a daughter named Harmony.”²² The nature of Harmony, he continues, is at the core of the theory of Beauty. At the heart of the Renaissance conception of Beauty, then, is the discordia concors of Venus and Mars. If Mars were always subject to Venus, nothing would ever die. Certainly what Venus concludes about and calls attention to in narrating the episode of the unlawful union is not the fall of man but the fact that she, during this episode, held control over the destructive influence of Mars:

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.109-112)

Before she concludes this, she gives dramatic evidence: “Yet hath he been my captive and my slave,” “Over my alters hath he hung his lance”—“Making my arms his field, his tent my bed.”

The Mars and Venus union is not only essential to the definition of Adonis (Beauty) but also essential to his demise. Venus does not always have power over Mars. More pertinently, she does not always have power over what Mars represents and which is embodied in Adonis: Venus warns, “Oh be not proud, nor brag not of thy might, / For mast'ring her that foil'd the god of fight!” Implicitly, Venus is warning Adonis of the dangers involved unless he allows Venus to rule him or, rather, the Mars within him—the martial spirit within him which is expressed in his all-absorbing interest in the hunt. But Venus never curbs the martial self-destructive drive within Adonis. Later she speaks directly, admonishing Adonis of the fatal mistake he will make if he does not curb the power of Mars with the spirit of Venus: “But if thou needs wilt hunt, be rul'd by me” (l.673).

The story of the adulterous relationship of Venus and Mars would have had, to Renaissance readers, still further significance for the characterization, themes, and action of Shakespeare's poem. The story was frequently used to explain the double life led by the average courtier (warrior and lover), the inextricability of the martial spirit with amiability, which was essential to the Renaissance code of chivalry. In his discussion of the Renaissance iconography of Venus, Edgar Wind offers an explanation for the Renaissance confusion of amare and armare, for the fact that Venus is often pictured with martial weapons of her own, by suggesting that it stands for the strength that comes from love. He elaborates, “that Venus is not only joined to Mars, but that his nature is an essential part of her own, and vice versa. True fierceness is thus conceived as potentially amiable, and true amiability as potentially fierce. In the perfect lover they coincide because he—or she—is the perfect warrior.”²³ Behind the characterization of Venus as an Amazon in the first part of the poem—a feature which has bothered and repelled most modern readers—rests the Renaissance notion of the perfect lover as the perfect warrior. Venus's invoking the union of Mars and Venus also suggests Adonis's incompleteness—he is a warrior but no lover. The strength of Venus equals her desire: she is a “bold-fac'd suitor,” an “empty eagle,” and she abducts Adonis, carrying him under one arm; “desire doth lend her force / Courageously to pluck him from his horse”—“Backward she push'd him, as she would be thrust, / And govern'd him in strength, though not in lust.” Ficino speaks further of the mythical episode when Venus had power over Mars: “‘Mars follows Venus, Venus does not follow Mars,’ since boldness is the foot-follower of love, not love of boldness.”²⁴ The narrator of Shakespeare's poem is quite explicitly aware of the relationship between love and boldness: “Affection faints not like a pale-fac'd coward, / But then woos best when most his choice is froward” (ll. 569-570). “Women indeed snare men easily,” Ficino observes, “but those do it more easily who assume a masculine nature; and men do it as much more easily than women as they are more like men, and they have blood and spirit that is clearer, warmer, and thinner; for of this Cupid's net consists. Among men, those attract men and women most strongly who are predominantly sanguine and somewhat choleric, and have large, blue, shining eyes, especially if they live chastely, and have not stained their bodies by exhausting their clear spirits in coitus.”²⁵ Ficino's understanding of the most attractive woman as the one who has assumed a masculine nature may very well be behind Shakespeare's depiction of Venus as what one critic has called “Venus Agonistes.” At one point Venus says to Adonis explicitly, “Would thou wert as I am, and I a man” (l.369). Perhaps, too, Ficino's idea of the most attractive man as the one who lives chastely is responsible for Shakespeare's original twist on the story of Venus and Adonis: the unwillingness of Adonis. At any rate, Ficino's identification between a woman's assumed masculine nature and Cupid's net seems to make its way directly into Shakespeare's poem: “Look how a bird lies tangled in a net, / So fasten'd in her arms Adonis lies” (ll.67-68).

As important as the Neoplatonic conception of the unity of the martial and amiable spirits is the Neoplatonic notion of the distinctions between the martial and amiable spirits. Ficino describes the loss and recovery of identity which results from love: “When you love me, you contemplate me, and as I love you, I find myself in your contemplation of me; I recover myself, lost in the first place by my own neglect of myself, in you, who preserve me. You do exactly the same in me.” Continuing, Ficino describes the essential difference between the forces represented by Venus and Adonis, or, Cupid and Mars: “It is in this that the power of Cupid differs from the force of Mars; indeed it is in this way that military power and love differ: the general possesses others through himself; the lover takes possession of himself through another.”²⁶ Certainly it is in terms of the loss of herself that Venus describes both the power of Cupid and her love for Adonis: she “Bids him farewell, and look well to her heart, / The which by Cupid's bow she doth protest / He carries thence encaged in his breast” (ll.580-82). Above and before all else, Adonis wishes to take possession of himself: he admonishes Venus, “Measure my strangeness with my unripe years. / Before I know myself, seek not to know me” (ll.524-525). What Adonis does not realize is that in pursuing the boar rather than love, he rejects the opportunity to know himself: he does not realize that he is offered the opportunity to take possession of himself through another and that this is the only way to know himself. Venus reminds him of this throughout the poem. At the very beginning she dares him, “Then woo thyself, be of thyself rejected; / Steal thine own freedom, and complain on theft. / Narcissus of himself himself forsook, / And died to kiss his shadow in the brook.” Later, Venus is much more direct: she states as a fact that Adonis, like Narcissus, has “himself himself forsook”: “So in thyself thyself art made away” (l.763). Part of the dignity of the Venus who, in the last part of the poem, must face the fact of the death of Adonis is her commitment to the will of Adonis (his desire to know himself). Venus knows, as Adonis never did, how this is to be accomplished—by initial loss of himself. She addresses the flower, the metamorphosed Adonis, “To grow unto himself was his desire, / And so 'tis thine; but know, it is as good / To wither in my breast as in his blood.”

The lesson that Venus teaches the flower of Adonis (that it is as good to wither in her breast as in his blood) associates Venus explicitly with Death. Love and Death are identified throughout the poem, and the identification is dramatized at the end of the poem in the jealous reaction of Venus to the triumph of her rival, Death. The fierceness of the boar is joined with the amiability of Venus as the amiability of Venus is joined with the fierceness of the boar. Thinking that he can “persuade” Adonis with a kiss, the boar nuzzles in his flank—“the loving swine / Sheath'd unaware the tusk in his soft groin” (ll.1115-1116). As the boar is a lover, Venus is a potential killer: “Had I been toothed like him, I must confess, / With kissing him I should have kill'd him first.” Moreover, both Love and Death are represented as plucking the flower of Adonis: berating Death for performing the same act that she does at the end of the poem, Venus objects, “thou pluck'st a flower” (l.946). Traditionally, there is good reason for Love to be associated with Death. Ficino explains, “Plato calls love ‘something bitter,’ and correctly so, because whoever loves dies. Orpheus calls it ‘bitter-sweet’ because love is voluntary death. Insofar as it is death, it is bitter, and insofar as it is voluntary, it is sweet He who loves, dies; for his consciousness, oblivious of himself, is devoted exclusively to the loved one, and a man who is not conscious of himself is certainly not conscious in himself. … Therefore, everyone who loves is dead in himself. But at least he lives in the other person.”²⁷ The definition of love as a form of death was not peculiar to Ficino in the Renaissance: Lorenzo de' Medici comments on the fact that he begins his love sonnets with a sonnet on death: “the beginning of the vita amorosa proceeds from death, because whoever lives for love, first dies to everything else. And if love has in it a certain perfection, … it is impossible to arrive at that perfection without first dying with regard to the more imperfect things.”²⁸

What Adonis never realizes is that Love is the better Death—Death which allows a man to live again in another. Thus, Venus at the end of the poem is not only the agent of Death, who crops the stalk of the flower of Adonis, but also the means, the mother, of rebirth: “Lo in this hollow cradle take thy rest; / My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night.” Describing the dimples in the cheeks of Adonis, the narrator reveals at the beginning of the poem that he knows that death in love leads to rebirth in another: “Love made those hollows, if himself were slain, / He might be buried in a tomb so simple, / Foreknowing well, if there he came to lie, / Why there love liv'd, and there he could not die” (ll.243-246). By an extremely significant misphrasing, Adonis himself speaks of the real relationship between love, death, and rebirth, without realizing what he is saying: “My love to love is love but to disgrace it, / For I have heard it is a life in death” (ll.412-413). In many ways, the death of Adonis can be read as the inevitable result of his unwillingness to die in the love of Venus, to find the “life in death.” “Certainly there is a most just vengeance in reciprocal love,” comments Ficino, “for homicide must be punished by death, and who will deny that a man who is loved is a homicide since he robs the loving one of his soul? … Therefore, anyone who is loved ought in very justice to love in return, and he who does not love his lover must bear the charge of homicide.”²⁹ Ficino's notion of unreciprocal love as homicide is, quite clearly, a notion not unfamiliar to Venus:

O thou didst kill me, kill me once again!
Thy eyes' shrewd tutor, that hard heart of thine,
Hath taught them scornful tricks, and such disdain,
That they have murder'd this poor heart of mine.

(ll.499-502)

As important as the fact that Venus is identified with Death and the agent of Death, the boar, is the fact that she is distinguished from them. When she plucks the flower of Adonis, she, unlike the boar, mothers it, cradles it, into its rebirth. Moreover, the amatory feelings of the boar are quite thoroughly restricted to the level of lust. D. C. Allen has brought to our attention that in medieval annotations on the myth, the boar was lechery.³⁰ And it is clearly in these terms that he is depicted in Shakespeare's poem. By goring Adonis, the boar establishes with Adonis a kind of sexual contact such as Venus never had. But also to the reader familiar with the most basic elements of Neoplatonism, it would have been clear that the blindness of the boar identified him as unadulterated Lust: “thou hast no eyes to see, / But hatefully at random dost thou hit” (ll.939-940). Unlike Venus who, as Love, is the creator of Beauty, the boar is a “Hateful divorce of love” who stifles Beauty and steals his breath (ll.932-4). Of course, the boar and the ravaging lust that he embodies is undeniably a part of the nature of Venus—at least at the beginning of the poem. But by the end of the poem she has objectified, expelled, and set herself at war with that element within herself by setting herself in battle against the boar. By opposing herself to the boar, by contrasting her ability to see with the sightlessness of the boar, she purges from herself the nature of the boar. Importantly, Adonis never knows anything more of the nature of Venus than the part he is committed to overcoming—the part which resembles the boar: “‘I know not love,’ quoth he, ‘nor will not know it, / Unless it be a boar, and then I chase it.’” (ll. 409-410) Venus, too, in her own way finally unites herself with Adonis in a commitment to conquering the boar. But she knows better that the hunt must be ruled by her: the triumph over both Death and Lust is accomplished in Love.

There is no denying that Venus's passion is characterized as lust at the start of the poem. She is described as foraging with the distinguishing feature of lust, “blindfold fury”—“careless lust stirs up a desperate courage” (l.556). And, as I have indicated before, in the early part of the poem Venus is all too willing to commit her affections to touch, the lowest sense: “My smooth moist hand, were it with thy hand felt, / Would in thy palm dissolve, or seem to melt” (ll. 143-144). Through her experience with Adonis she discovers her new identity.

The infinite variety of her nature and the development of her character can be explored on still another level. Ficino urges, “let there be two Venuses in the soul, the one heavenly, the other earthy. Let them both have a love, the Heavenly for the reflection upon divine beauty, the earthy for generating divine beauty in earthly matter. The beauty which the former sees, the latter wants with all its power to embody in a worldly creation.”³¹ Clearly, Venus is presented and presents herself at the beginning of the poem as simply the Earthly Venus, who wants to generate the beauty of Adonis:

By law of nature thou art bound to breed,
That thine may live when thou thyself art dead;
          And so in spite of death thou dost survive,
          In that thy likeness still is left alive.

(ll.171-174)

Aware that the body is a “swallowing grave,” she argues against “fruitless chastity”—“Love-lacking vestals and self-loving nuns / That on the earth would breed a scarcity” (ll. 752-3). But Adonis (followed by most modern readers) reacts to her noble arguments for the generation of beauty as a rationalization for her lust: “You do it for increase: O strange excuses, / When reason is the bawd to lust's abuse!” Venus proves, however, by the end of the poem that her desire to generate, to keep alive the beauty of Adonis is real. It is the suggestion of the narrator that her prophecy at the death of Adonis is in itself responsible for the rebirth of Adonis:

By this the boy that by her side lay kill'd
Was melted like a vapour from her sight,
And in his blood that on the ground lay spill'd,
A purple flower sprung up, checker'd with white,
          Resembling well his pale cheeks and the blood
          Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood.

The ambiguity of her final words—“There shall not be one minute in an hour / Wherein I will not kiss my sweet love's flower”—(the fusion of the object of her affections and her affections themselves in the word “love”) suggests that the metamorphosis and rebirth of Adonis is the product, metaphorically the flower, of not so much Adonis, her beloved, as her love for Adonis, which created and recreates his beauty.

But Ficino makes it quite clear that, as opposed to Lust and Love, the Earthly and the Heavenly Venuses are not to be distinguished—“let there be two Venuses in the soul.” He defines the two powers of the soul:

It certainly has the power of comprehension, and it has the power of generation. These two powers in us are the two Venuses which are accompanied by their twin Loves. When the beauty of a human body first meets our eyes, the mind, which is the first Venus in us, worships and adores the human beauty as an image of the divine beauty, and through the first, it is frequently aroused to the second. … both loves are honorable and praiseworthy, for each is concerned with the divine image.³²

Similarly, Panofsky defines the identity of the Earthly Venus, Venus Vulgaris: “The beauty symbolized by her is therefore a particularized image of the primary beauty, no longer divorced from, but realized in the corporeal world.”³³ Her function, he continues, is to give “life and shape to the things in nature,” making, thereby, “the intelligible beauty accessible to our perception and imagination.” Without doubt Shakespeare's Venus, as Venus Vulgaris, gives both shape and, finally, life to the beauty of Adonis. But I think that by the end of the poem Shakespeare's Venus finds also the better angel, the Heavenly Venus, within her soul.

Panofsky describes the ascent of the Earthly Venus into the Heavenly Venus: “Only he whose visual experience is but the first step, however unavoidable, towards the intelligible and universal beauty reaches the stage of that ‘divine love’ which makes him an equal with the Saints and Prophets.”³⁴ When Venus observes, “For she being dead, with him is beauty slain,” and when she comments, “true-sweet beauty liv'd and died with him,” she has clearly reached the stage where she is concerned not with particular but with universal beauty: she has uncovered the Heavenly Venus. Castiglione describes the educational process through which love takes one: “like as through the particular beautie of one bodie hee guideth her to the universall beautie of all bodies.”³⁵ So, too, Venus finds through her newly-discovered Heavenly nature the power of prophecy: she is indeed made an equal with the Prophets. Before Adonis fades into the night, she laments that fear teaches her divination: “I prophesy thy death, my living sorrow, / If thou encounter with the boar tomorrow” (ll. 671-672). And when she sees the indisputable fact of the dead Adonis, she curses, “Since thou art dead, lo here I prophesy, / Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend: / It shall be waited on with jealousy, / Find sweet beginning, but unsavory end” (ll. 1135-1138). The final ascent of Venus in her chariot of silver doves is dramatic proof of her newly discovered unearthly nature: “Thus weary of the world, away she hies.”

Paradoxically anticipating the ascent of Venus at the end of the poem, Adonis had previously chided, “Call it not love, for love to heaven is fled, / Since sweating lust on earth usurp'd his name” (ll.793-794). As the beginning of the poem looks forward to the end of the poem, the end of the poem looks back at the beginning of the poem: Venus's final plucking of the flower is a reenactment of her plucking Adonis off his horse. Even the prophecy which Venus makes at the end of the poem says as much about the past as the future. She predicts that Love will “Make the young old, and the old become a child” and that “They that love best, their loves shall not enjoy.” However, the laws of love which she suggests will begin with her prophecy are just those laws which have governed her relationship with Adonis. During her night in the woods she sang a song of much the same theme, “How love makes young men thrall, and old men dote.” But the prophecy which she makes for the future is even more precisely related to what has happened in the past. As she foresees that love will make “the young old,” she had previously accused Death, “Thy mark is feeble age, but thy false dart / Mistakes that aim, and cleaves an infant's heart,” and concluded about the fate of Adonis, “Love's golden arrow at him should have fled, / And not death's ebon dart to strike him dead.” The notion of the mistaken exchange of the arrows of Love and Death—the golden and the ebon arrows—is derived from a legend which became very popular in the Renaissance and which found its way into the emblem books of Alciati, Peacham, and one which Shakespeare undoubtedly knew—Geffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes (the emblem is entitled “De morte, et amore”—problems not irrelevant to Venus and Adonis). Mars and Cupid meet and stay together at an inn one night and take away, by chance, each other's quivers. Whitney concludes with words that seem echoed in the final comments of Venus: “Thus natures lawes, this chaunce infringed so: / That age did loue, and youthe to graue did goe.”³⁶ As Venus refers to the exchange of the ebon and the bonie darts, Whitney tells of the exchange of the “bonie” and the “goulden dartes,” the “frozen” and the “fierie dartes,” and he moralizes in much the same vein as Venus: “Then when wee see, vntimely deathe appeare: / Or wanton age: it was this chaunce you heare.” Venus's prophecy that Love will make the young old and the old young, that they that love best their love will not enjoy, is inextricably related (as an emblem to its moral) to the conditions which existed at the beginning of the poem, conditions which led the young Adonis to Death rather than Love.

The cyclical form of the poem embodies the theme of generation which is at the heart of the meaning of the poem. Even the narrator's use of tense, while telling his story, reflects the paradox, or what Venus calls the wonder of time: he moves, apparently without reason, between narrating the events in the past and the present tense. He begins by stating that Adonis “hied him to the chase” and in the same sentence tells how Venus “'gins to woo him.” He ends by telling in the past tense how “the boy that by her side lay kill'd / Was melted like a vapour from her sight” and shifts to describing in the present: “She bows her head, the new-sprung flower smell.” Ovid's Venus reacts to the death of Adonis by prophesying that every year his death will be staged anew. The narrator of Shakespeare's poem fulfills the prophecy of Ovid's Venus by making the past interchangeable with the present. During the night scene in the forest the narrator reveals to us explicitly how much he understands about the nature of the lover's complaint:

Their copious stories oftentimes begun,
End without audience, and are never done.

Notes

1. Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Ann Arbor, 1968), p. 86.

2. Eugene B. Cantelupe, “An Iconographical Interpretation of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare's Ovidian Comedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly, XIV (1963), 148.

3. Robert P. Miller, “Venus, Adonis, and the Horses,” ELH, XIX (1952), 263.

4. Rufus Putney, “Venus and Adonis: Armour with Humor,” Philological Quarterly, XX (1941), 548.

5. Putney, 546.

6. All citations from Venus and Adonis are taken from the Arden text of The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (London, 1960), pp. 3-62.

7. Throughout my text I have used Sir Thomas Hoby's 1561 translation of The Book of the Courtier in Three Renaissance Classics, ed. Burton A. Milligan (New York, 1953). This passage is on p. 604.

8. Again for reasons of convenience I have used a translation: Pico della Mirandola, A Platonick Discourse upon Love, ed. Edmund G. Gardner (Boston, 1914), p. 27. Although one could not possibly argue that Shakespeare had read Pico, I have used his discourse on love because it is an eclectic compendium of Neoplatonic commonplaces.

9. “Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium,” with a trans. by Sears Reynolds Jayne, The University of Missouri Studies, XIX (1944), 13-247. This passage appears on p. 130. Most recent work on Shakespeare's Neoplatonism has assumed that Shakespeare was familiar with Ficino's work.

10. Ficino, 146-7.

11. Castiglione, pp. 524-5.

12. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (New York, 1962), p. 128.

13. Ficino, 129.

14. Pico, p. 71.

15. Ficino, 168.

16. Castiglione, p. 601.

17. Ficino, 130.

18. Ficino, 146.

19. Ficino, 128.

20. Robert P. Miller, “The Myth of Mars's Hot Minion in Venus and Adonis,” ELH, XXVI (1959), 475.

21. Pico, p. 26.

22. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven, 1958), p. 81.

23. Wind, p. 87.

24. Ficino, 177.

25. Ficino, 227.

26. Ficino, 145.

27. Ficino, 143-4.

28. See Wind, p. 133.

29. Ficino, 145.

30. Don Cameron Allen, “On Venus and Adonis,” in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to F. P. Wilson (Oxford, 1959), p. 110.

31. Ficino, 191.

32. Ficino, 143.

33. Panofsky, p. 142.

34. Panofsky, p. 143.

35. Castiglione, p. 612.

36. G. Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes, ed. Henry Green, intro. Frank Fieler (New York, 1967), pp. 132-3.