[In the following essay, Lake identifies the transition between comedy and tragedy in Venus and Adonis and traces Venus's evolution into a sincere, if not admirable, character.]

When one considers the numerous contributions made yearly in Shakespeare criticism, it seems remarkable that the poet's first published work¹ should receive such scant recognition. With a few notable exceptions,² critics have tended either to deprecate Venus and Adonis as a cold, dull failure³ or to explain it away as a kind of mirthful poetic exercise geared to the tastes of the Earl of Southampton,⁴ while they have tended to ignore the observation made long ago by Coleridge, that in this poem “the great instinct, which impelled the poet to the drama, was secretly working within him.”⁵ Moreover, Shakespeare's unique treatment of a myth familiar to every Elizabethan school boy who read Ovid attests to his dramatic purposefulness.

Traditionally, whether Adonis is preserved from the hunt to operate harmoniously with Venus Genetrix in the sustenance of all creation, as in Spenser's version (F.Q. [The Faerie Queen], III. vi.), or is finally destroyed by the boar, as in Jean de Meun's,⁶ he is always his lady's paramour. In Shakespeare's poem, however, Adonis is aloof to love (l. 4) and Venus, who at the beginning of the poem wrests Adonis from his courser to stow him under her arm (l. 32), is almost ludicrous. The comic potential of traditional lovers newly mismatched is exploited to the fullest, but once Venus hears that Adonis intends to hunt the boar, her character takes on a new, serious dimension. And just as the dark mirth of Mercutio is halted to allow for the tragic plot to unfold in Romeo and Juliet, so does the comic element in Venus and Adonis give way to allow for the tragic.

At the beginning of the poem, Adonis is revealed as a masculine, if youthful, hunter; but he is immediately compelled to exchange roles with Venus, who assumes the unnatural position of “bold-fac'd suitor” (l. 6). Elizabethan love convention made no allowance for a lady who overtly pursued her man; she might travel incognito half way around the world in hot pursuit; she might switch places in a bed which he assumed would be occupied by another; but for her to take openly the aggressive role, as Venus does, was simply contrary to the character expected of her. There is little wonder that Adonis finally says, “I hate not love, but your device in love / That lends embracements unto every stranger” (ll. 789-90). He listens to the account of her affair with Mars (ll. 103-8) and he observes her exemplum of the horses (ll. 259-319), which demonstrates at the animal level that, “Seeds spring forth seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty / Thou wast begot, to get it is thy duty” (ll. 167-68). But he detects that her motive in such advice is dishonest (l. 792). The advice itself was perfectly acceptable, since copulation was not a sin so long as its purpose was procreation and not pleasure. But Venus falls short in the motive which impels her counsel. Hence, the disdain which she elicits from Adonis does not stem from priggishness, but from basic Renaissance morality.⁷

Regardless of her ill-advised strategy, Venus is so bewitching that Adonis, despite his protests, is not so much unwilling as unable: “Measure my strangeness with my unripe years” (l. 524). He supposedly seeks nothing more than escape from the overpowering huntress, yet when she seems to faint (l. 463), allowing him an opportunity to flee, he remains to do whatever he can to revive her (ll. 468-80); when his kisses elicit an immediate reaction, he is not totally unresponsive: “Now quick desire hath caught the yielding prey. … her lips are conquerors, his lips obey” (ll. 547, 549). But when he does respond, Venus redoubles her efforts and frightens him. Her “careless lust stirs up a desperate courage” (l. 556), and she nearly mauls him. Thus, until Venus learns of the proposed boar hunt, she appears to be, as Adonis supposes, a self-seeking, love-sick woman guided solely by her passion.

After Venus learns of the hunt, the poem's emphasis shifts from the comic and erotic to the serious; and Venus, previously described in predatory terms (ll. 57-58), assumes the gentleness of a “milch doe” (l. 875). Her preoccupation with the sensual becomes steadily mingled with a more selfless concern for Adonis, which at the end of the poem transcends the corporeal. Her development into a sincere and tender if not wholly admirable figure is initiated by a kiss (ll. 545-46), reinforced by the news of the boar hunt (l. 587 ff.), heightened by Adonis' final rejection of her (l. 811 ff.), and at last fully realized in the next to the final stanza, when Venus lifts the purple flower from the dead boy's grave.

The kiss held special importance in Elizabethan Neoplatonic love theory.⁸ Cardinal Bembo advises in The Courtier (Bk. IV), “since a kisse is a knitting together both of bodie and soule, it is to bee feared, lest the sensuall lover will be more inclined to the part of the bodie, than of the soule.”⁹ But although Venus would certainly like him to be, Adonis is not so inclined; nothing more than the kiss ensues. And thus, the kiss which occurs in the poem, “may be saide to be rather a coupling together of the soule, than of the bodie, because it hath such a force in her, that it draweth her unto it, and … separateth her from the bodie.”¹⁰ This kiss is a breathless encounter: “He with her plenty press'd, she faint with dearth / Their lips together glued, fall to the earth” (ll. 545-46). Though it but briefly excites Adonis and is quickly stifled by Venus' “Hard embracing” (l. 559), it nevertheless has profound effect upon Venus, who only shortly afterward becomes “resolved no longer to restrain” Adonis (l. 579). She is still Venus “Who cannot choose but love” (l. 79), and therefore she attempts a last seduction. But when she is shocked into a prophetic fear that she may indeed never see Adonis again (ll. 670-71), Venus begins a rise toward the dignity implicit in tragedy.

When she first hears of the hunt, Venus panics. She falls back in shock (ll. 589-91), and pulls Adonis down on top of her. In this natural position her passion is renewed, and there is something pitiable in the poet's choric commentary that “She's love, she loves, and yet she is not lov'd” (l. 610). The psychomachia which follows, and from which Venus emerges thoroughly chastened, involves three issues: her sound advice to Adonis not to hunt the boar; her desperate and final seduction effort, now also a ploy to distract him from boar hunting; and Adonis' unqualified rejection of both. Her new honesty is manifest by her involuntary physical reaction to the intended hunt—her eyes show fear, she grows white, trembles, and faints (ll. 641-45)—and by the sincerity of her counsel:

“Thou hadst been gone,” quoth she, “sweet boy, ere this,
But that thou told'st me, thou wouldst hunt the boar,
Oh be advis'd, thou knowest not what it is. …”

(ll. 613-15)

.....

Lie quietly, and hear a little more;
Nay do not struggle, for thou shalt not rise.
To make thee hate the hunting of the boar,
Unlike myself thou hear'st me moralize. …

(ll. 709-12)

Adonis, however, will have no more of Venus' good counsel than he would of her bad. She had been dishonest in her arguments for love; therefore her well-intended advice against the hunt goes also unheeded (ll. 715-16, 804). Venus, having “loved not wisely but too well,” is left alone in the night to contemplate her failure, “as one that unaware / Hath dropp'd a precious jewel in the flood” (ll. 823-24).

On the following morning, hearing the sound of horns, she seeks Adonis, still hoping to thwart his hunt. On the preceding evening she had suggested alternative prey (l. 673 ff.), and had described such defenseless game:

Then shalt thou see the dew-bedabbled wretch,
Turn, and return, indenting with the way;
Each envious brier his weary legs do scratch,
Each shadow makes him stop, each murmur stay,
For misery is trodden on by many,
And being low, never reliev'd by any.

(ll. 703-8)

Now the poet's narrative reveals her in language similar to that which she herself had used:

And as she runs, the bushes in the way,
Some catch her by the neck, some kiss her face,
Some twin'd 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.
By this she hears the hounds are at a bay,
Whereat she starts like one that spies an adder
Wreath'd up in fatal folds just in his way,
The fear whereof doth make him shake, and shudder;
          Even so the timorous yelping of the hounds
          Appals her senses, and her spirit confounds.

(ll. 871-82)

The fertility image of her “swelling dugs” seems to suggest that her initial sensuality has been transformed into an acceptable, generative love; her more selfless concern for Adonis becomes evident also in her hazardous disdain for Death, wherein she speaks not as the goddess of Love challenging another deity, but as a grief-stricken mortal blaspheming him who deprived her of her love (ll. 931-54).

There is tragic irony in her false hope that Adonis is still alive (l. 992) and in her later arguments exonerating the boar (ll. 1111-17) and prophesying at Adonis' grave (ll. 1135-64). The first irony, ending with her confession that had she been toothed like the boar, she would have killed Adonis with her kissing (l. 1118), exists because in fact she unwittingly causes his death by failing, through her earlier dishonesty, to dissuade Adonis from the hunt; the second, because practically all her predictions have already been realized in her relationship with Adonis. Jealousy, sweet beginning and unsavory end, fickleness, falsehood, fraud, suspicion, deception, and perversion (ll. 1135-65), all have characterized Venus' abortive love affair. That her advances have driven Adonis away to the hunt constitutes a species of peripeteia;¹¹ and that Venus herself cannot yet see this irony suggests that she still lacks the perspective which she will achieve in the anagnorisis of the concluding stanzas.

After her prophecy, Adonis' corpse “Was melted like a vapour from her sight / And in his blood that on the ground lay spill'd / A purple flower sprung up …” (ll. 1166-68). Venus plucks the flower and addresses it as though it were human:

“Poor flower,” quoth she, “this was thy father's guise,—
Sweet issue of a more sweet-smelling sire,—
For every little grief to wet his eyes;
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.
“Here was thy father's bed, here in my breast;
Thou art the next of blood, and 'tis thy right.
Lo, in this hollow cradle take thy rest;
My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night:
          There shall not be one minute in an hour
          Wherein I will not kiss my sweet love's flower.”

(ll. 1177-88)

Her speech equating the flower with Adonis, or his next of kin, indicates anagnorisis: she now recognizes Adonis' need to “grow unto himself,” which he had insisted upon earlier, and which she did not understand or preferred to ignore. She now promises to nurture the flower with almost maternal care until it reaches the maturity denied Adonis. This acknowledgment perfects her development. Her ascension in the concluding stanza enforces her transcension of the corporeal and restores dignity to her character.

What is tragic in the poem is that Venus achieves understanding too late to save Adonis from the boar, which, like any “motiveless malignity,” continues to operate blindly in the universe. Had she achieved her development earlier, she might have succeeded in dissuading Adonis from the hunt, or, at least, might have remained guiltless of his death. In either case, however, Shakespeare's early sense of the tragic would not here be realized as he bequeathed it to us.

Notes

1. Venus and Adonis, called by Shakespeare in his dedication, “the first heir of my invention,” published in quarto by Richard Field, 1593. All line references are to The Arden Edition of William Shakespeare, The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (London, 1960), and appear parenthetically within my text.

2. For example: Hereward T. Price, “The Function of Imagery in ‘Venus and Adonis,’” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, XXXI (1941), 275-97; Robert P. Miller, “Venus, Adonis, and the Horses,” ELH, XIX (1952), 249-64; A. C. Hamilton, “Venus and Adonis,” SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900], 1 (1961), 1-15; J. W. Lever, “Venus and the Second Chance,” SS [Scandinavian Studies], XV (1962), 81-88; Kenneth Muir, “Venus and Adonis: Comedy or Tragedy?” Shakespearean Essays, Tennessee Studies in Literature (Knoxville, 1964), II, 1-13; Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York, 1967), pp. 150-64.

3. C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), p. 499.

4. Rufus Putney, “Venus Agonistes,” University of Colorado Studies, IV (1953), 52-56; Eugene B. Cantelupe, “An Iconographical Interpretation of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare's Ovidian Comedy,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], XIV (1963), 141-51; Muriel C. Bradbrook, “Beasts and Gods: Greene's Groats-Worth of Witte and the Social Purpose of Venus and Adonis,” SS, XV (1962), 62-72.

5. Samuel T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. John Shawcross, II (Oxford, 1907), 15. The dramatic potential of this poem has been recognized recently by J. D. Jahn, “The Lamb of Lust: The Role of Adonis in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare Studies, VI (1970), 11-25.

6. The Romance of the Rose, trans. Harry W. Robbins (New York, 1962), pp. 332-33. For full treatment of Shakespeare's sources see T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana, 1950). See also Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, I (London, 1964).

7. Miller, 262.

8. Paul N. Siegel, “The Petrarchan Sonneteers and Neo-Platonic Love,” SP [Studies in Philology], XLII (1945), 164-82.

9. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. (1561) Sir Thomas Hoby (London, 1956), p. 315. See also Nicolas James Perella, The Kiss, Sacred and Profane: An Interpretive History of Kiss Symbolism and Related Religio-erotic Themes (Berkeley, 1969).

10. Castiglione, p. 315.

11. I use peripeteia here as a reversal of intention rather than situation: see Lane Cooper, Aristotle on the Art of Poetry (New York, 1913), pp. 35-36.