SOURCE: Belsey, Catherine. “Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis.” In Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, edited by Philip C. Kolin, pp. 261-85. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1995, Belsey observes that Venus and Adonis generates desire and promises to provide a definitive portrayal of love, yet it ultimately fails to deliver.]

I

The painter Zeuxis excelled in the art of trompe-l'oeil, a mode of painting that is capable of deceiving the eye by its simulation of nature. Zeuxis portrayed grapes with such success that birds flew toward his picture. His younger rival, Parrhasius, however, challenged Zeuxis to a competition to decide which painter's work was more true to life. Parrhasius won—by depicting a curtain so convincing that Zeuxis begged him to draw it and reveal the picture behind.¹ Jacques Lacan, in his seminar “Of the Gaze as Objet Petu a,” makes a distinction between the two pictures: only the curtain that Parrhasius painted is a true trompe-l'oeil, because its effect depends on what is missing, the absence of a secret concealed behind the paint. For Lacan it is not deception alone that defines the trompe-l'oeil: on the contrary, its determining characteristic is the promise of a presence that it fails to deliver. Trompe-l'oeil tantalizes.

At a critical moment in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, when the goddess has succeeded in maneuvering her reluctant suitor into a promising physical position, but without the consequence she seeks, the text compares Adonis to the painting by Zeuxis:

Even so poor birds deceiv'd with painted grapes
Do surfeit by the eye and pine the maw:
Even so she languisheth in her mishaps,
As those poor birds that helpless berries saw.
The warm effects which she in him finds missing
She seeks to kindle with continual kissing.

(ll. 601-6)²

But in Shakespeare's poem the grapes also represent a trompe-l'oeil in accordance with Lacan's definition. Deceptively promising oral gratification, the enticing picture of the grapes yields no pleasure for the stomach. In the same way, despite her best efforts, Venus finds that the provocative outward image of Adonis conceals nothing to her purpose: his beauty evokes a longing, which remains unsatisfied, for his desire—or for its phallic signifier.

In painting, deceit gives pleasure. “What is it,” Lacan asks, “that attracts and satisfies us in trompe-l'oeil? When is it that it captures our attention and delights us?” He proposes that the trompe-l'oeil pleases by presenting the appearance of a three-dimensional object which we go on to recognize as exactly that: no more than an appearance, painted in two dimensions. In order to enjoy the trompe-l'oeil, we have to be convinced by it in the first instance and then to shift our gaze so that, seeing the object resolve itself into lines on a canvas, we are no longer convinced; we have to be deceived—and then to acknowledge our own deception. The gap between these two moments is the place, Lacan affirms, of the objet a, the lost object in the inextricable real, the cause of desire.³ That which delights in art—the civilizing, sublimated product of the drive—is experienced in psychosexual life as a lack, the … minus phi, a source of indestructible longing.

The type of the desiring subject according to classical myth was Tantalus in the underworld, unable to reach the fruit that would allay his insatiable thirst. Shakespeare's Venus outdoes Tantalus in frustration, however, when she holds Adonis in her arms but can elicit no response. “That worse than Tantalus' is her annoy, / To clip Elizium and to lack her joy” (ll. 599-600). The desire of Adonis is not subject to her control: love cannot be commanded. The third dimension she wants is missing, and the absence she encounters serves only to intensify her longing.

In the event, nothing very much happens in this narrative of desire, Tantal-ized as she is, Venus cajoles and entreats. Adonis resists, rejects, and finally escapes her; he is killed by the boar, and Venus laments. The poem, exceptionally popular in its own period,⁴ prompts in the reader a desire for action that it fails to gratify. Meanwhile, the critical tradition in its turn, tantalized by the poem's lack of closure, has sought to make something happen, at least at the thematic level, by locating a moral center that would furnish the work with a final meaning, a conclusion, a definitive statement. It is possible, however, to read the text itself as a kind of trompe-l'oeil, moving undecidably between modes of address and sustaining the desire of the reader in the process. I propose that it is precisely in its lack of closure that Shakespeare's poem may be read as marking a specific moment in the cultural history of love. A literary trompe-l'oeil, a text of and about desire, Venus and Adonis promises a definitive account of love but at the same time withholds the finality that such a promise might lead us to expect. Instead, it tantalizes and, in so doing, throws into relief the difference between its historical moment and our own.

II

Venus and Adonis is a poetic record of the originating moment of desire. In Shakespeare's narrative poem the goddess of love, traditional object of all men's admiration, unexpectedly appears as a desiring subject, herself at the mercy of an intractable passion. Led by experience to expect the devotion of others and accustomed to master, imprison, and enslave her lovers (ll. 101-12), Venus is here reduced to the role of suitor (l. 6), overpowered by another's beauty and subject in her turn to indifference and disdain. The protagonist of the story thus comes to represent what the text identifies as a personification of desire itself, which is by definition unsatisfied: “She's love, she loves, and yet she is not lov'd” (l. 610). Lost, ironically, in the emotion she herself traditionally promotes, a subjection that “makes young men thrall, and old men dote” (l. 837), the queen of love has now become love's helpless victim, in her “own law forlorn” (l. 251). The goddess of love stoops—and fails to conquer.

Because she cannot command the desire of Adonis, or even protect his life, Venus finally delivers, over his mutilated body, a curse on the emotion that subjects her, condemning love itself to perpetual dissatisfaction and despair:

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 unsavoury end;
Ne'er settled equally, but high or low,
That all love's pleasure shall not match his woe.

(ll. 1135-40)

Though Venus has been unable to prevail upon her unwilling lover, she has authority, nevertheless, as the personification of love, to define the condition she both represents and shares. The goddess's words thus summarize her own story and at the same time “explain” proleptically the tragic endings of those romances that constituted the classic love stories of Shakespeare's period: Troilus and Cressida, Pyramus and Thisbe, Dido and Aeneas. As a result of Love's distress, suffering and loss have become the destiny of lovers.

All myth can be read as explanatory, a record of how things came to be the way they are: a sexual relation between the sky and the earth generates life; the story of the Fall explains the presence of evil in the world. Venus and Adonis is also a myth of origins. In this respect it is, of course, true to its source. Ovid's Metamorphoses records the origins of things and accounts in the process for their present character.⁵ The long narrative poem begins with the creation of the world, Jupiter's disappointment in the human beings he has made, and the consequent flood, from which only Deucalion and Pyrrha are saved. Under divine instruction, the couple throw stones over their shoulders and thereby generate a new race of human beings. The “stoniness” of their origins explains the hardy nature of the Romans as well as their capacity for work.⁶ More specific in its reference, the story of Daphne, which follows that of Deucalion and Pyrrha, accounts for the sacred character of the laurel. There was a time when Apollo was happy to wreathe his forehead with the leaves of any tree, but when Daphne eludes him, he feels a special warmth for the laurel she becomes and declares that from now on it will be the source of garlands for him and, ironically, for Roman generals returning in triumph.⁷ Later in Book 1, Argus asks how the reed pipe came to be invented, and Mercury responds by telling him the story of Pan and Syrinx.⁸ An assembly of classical narratives, the Metamorphoses retains the mythic character of much of the material it so elegantly rewrites.

The stories from this familiar grammar-school text⁹ which were most widely reproduced, elaborated, and imitated in the Renaissance concern the quest for a prohibited sexual pleasure either frustrated or compensated by metamorphosis: Daphne and Syrinx saved from rape in the nick of time; Narcissus unable to satisfy the erotic impulse his own image arouses and transformed into a flower. If desire is a quest for presence, for the full (imaginary, impossible) presence of the beloved to the lover, and to the degree that its perpetuation is an effect of presence deferred, these Ovidian narratives surely constitute perfect fables of desire. Daphne in flight, still out of reach, represents an emblem of the condition that subsists on the basis that possession eludes it; Daphne immobilized, meanwhile, putting down roots, fixed, remains the figure of unfulfilled desire, precisely because she is no longer Daphne. What Apollo now holds is not the nymph he wanted, though he loves the laurel and takes it for his tree.

In the case of Ovid's Venus and Adonis, presence is doubly deferred, gratification doubly displaced. The mythic story is explanatory, an account of the origin of the annual Adonia. This festival, the rite of Adonis, appears to have taken place in spring or summer all over the Mediterranean region.¹⁰ It seems that on the first day of the Adonia, the reciprocal love of Venus and Adonis was celebrated, with ripe fruit and sweet cakes, in the presence of their images as lovers, while on the second, the body of the hero was ritually consigned to the waves with bitter lamentation.¹¹ Love and death were thus brought into close conjunction, the intensity of desire affirmed by the emphasis on its transience.

Ovid's version of the story begins with the passing of time and the swift succession of the years; it ends with the short-lived anemone.¹² The flower that springs from the blood of Adonis is explicitly identified as a reminder of Venus's grief, her longing for the lost presence; but by insisting on its ephemeral character, the text presents the flower itself as the emblem of yet another absence. Venus promises that the metamorphosis she brings about will constitute an everlasting memorial, but it is at once made clear that this is to be no more than an annually recurring image, and an image that is in turn especially fleeting, since the winds for which it is named so easily destroy it. In this way Ovid's lyrical narrative progressively withdraws the compensating presence it promises. The flower—beautiful, fragile, mutable, and all that remains of a youth who became an object of desire for the goddess of love—thus appears in its elusiveness the quintessential signifier of desire itself. Nor is it named: even the identity of the windflower is deferred for the reader, the unspecified answer to a kind of riddle constructed by the text.¹³

Shakespeare's Venus, however, unlike Ovid's we are to assume, never succeeds in eliciting the desire of Adonis. All she gets is the flower; but in Shakespeare's poem she does possess it, indeed, cradles it in her breast next to her throbbing heart, and kisses it (ll. 1173, 1185-86, and 1188). And yet its destiny there, she recognizes, is to wither, and in Shakespeare's version there is no mention even of its annual reappearance. What the Renaissance in general and this text in particular adopt from Ovid is above all the notion of erotic metamorphosis itself: the object the lover finally possesses is not the object of desire but something else, a substitute, a stand-in. At the moment when the desiring subject takes possession of the object, something slips away, eludes the lover's grasp, and is lost.

But if Ovid's tale of Venus and Adonis offers absence as the recurring figure of desire, Shakespeare's poem surpasses its source, in audacity as well as length, by setting out to explain the origin of desire in its entirety. Love, we are invited to understand, was once reciprocal, which is to say that its conquest was absolute: Mars, stern god of war, became Venus's prisoner and learned to be a lover (ll. 97-114). But Venus's new love is unrequited: now the goddess is “Sick-thoughted” and Adonis “sullen” (ll. 5 and 75). When Adonis's insistence on hunting the boar brings his death and her irretrievable loss, Venus decrees that henceforth love will always be anarchic in character:

It shall suspect where is no cause of fear,
It shall not fear where it should most mistrust;
It shall be merciful, and too severe,
And most deceiving when it seems most just;
          Perverse it shall be, where it shows most toward;
          Put fear to valour, courage to the coward.

(ll. 1153-58)

Her words are necessarily authoritative. As the personification of love, Venus does no more here than proclaim her own nature. Shakespeare's myth of origins is also a definition of love.

III

A definition, however, ought surely to be definitive, a characteristic account of a representative state of affairs. And yet this narrative is hardly a typical love story. By conventional standards the gender roles of the central figures are disconcertingly reversed; meanwhile, the genre of the narrative, now lyrical, now bordering on farce, seems oddly unresolved. As a result, love itself appears at one moment grossly material and at another delicately insubstantial, no more than airy nothing. Is there, then, a definition here or only a bravura display of a range of skills on the part of a young and ambitious poet, in a text as anarchic as the emotion its central figure both demonstrates and defines?

First, gender. There can be little doubt that Elizabethan heroines, whether tragic or comic, whether Juliet or Rosalind, are permitted to be more outspoken in love than their Victorian counterparts. Even so, the voluble and unremitting pursuit of a coy young man by a relentless goddess wildly exceeds romantic convention. As is commonly noted, it is “Rose-cheek'd Adonis” (l. 3), with his white hands (ll. 362-64) and his voice like a mermaid's (l. 429), who blushes and pouts (l. 33), while Venus pulls him off his horse and tucks him under her arm (ll. 30-32). The “tender boy” (l. 32) is inert, like a bird in a net (l. 67), but Venus resembles an eagle (l. 55). And in case the reader should forget how these things are traditionally done, the poem gives us horses that behave in a much more predictable manner. Adonis's coursers neighing and bounding imperiously at the sight of the jennet (l. 265) and majestically asserting control (l. 270). The text makes witty capital out of the scandal it creates when Venus draws explicit attention to the role reversal. Adonis is, she tells him, “‘more lovely than a man’” (l. 9); if only, she sighs, things were the other way round: “‘Would thou wert as I am, and I a man’” (l. 369).¹⁴

But palpably she is not, and the result is a good deal of slightly salacious comedy at the level of the poem's action, or rather lack of action: “Backward she push'd him, as she would be thrust, / And govern'd him in strength, though not in lust” (ll. 41-42). Venus pins Adonis to the ground as she kisses him goodnight, “And glutton-like she feeds, yet never filleth” (l. 548). The exhausted Adonis eventually ceases to struggle. “While she takes all she can, not all she listeth [i.e., wants]” (l. 564). A good joke is evidently worth repeating. Even when their physical positions are reversed, the text explains, the case of Venus remains hopeless:

Now is she in the very lists of love,
Her champion mounted for the hot encounter.
All is imaginary she doth prove;
He will not manage her, although he mount her.

(ll. 595-98)

At the same time, however, Venus and Adonis is lyrical about the passion it also presents as absurd and, at Adonis's death, is unaffectedly elegiac in its lament for perfection destroyed:

Alas, poor world, what treasure hast thou lost!
What face remains alive that's worth the viewing?
What tongue is music now? what canst thou boast
Of things long since, or any thing ensuing?
          The flowers are sweet, their colours fresh and trim
          But true sweet beauty liv'd and died with him.

(ll. 1075-80)

Throughout the text one mode of address displaces another with remarkable agility. For earlier generations of critics the resulting question of genre represented the central critical problem of the poem. Was it primarily comic, or mainly tragic, or possibly satirical?¹⁵ Or was it simply so confused in its rapid shifts from high camp to low mimetic that it was impossible to make any real sense of it at all?¹⁶ Despite stylistic and thematic debts to the Metamorphoses, the text is no mere imitation of Ovid's disengaged and economical narrative; neither is it a generic copy of any existing Elizabethan text, regardless of parallels with Lodge's Glaucus and Scilla. In terms of poetic decorum, this tragical-comical-pastoral (-mythical) love story defies the literary classifications of its period.

Where, then, in all this indeterminacy, is any consistent definition of love to be found? Is passion no more than the crude appetite of an overheated, “love-sick queen” (or quean [l. 175])? Or is it, conversely, the effect of a delicate appeal to the finest senses?

Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear.
Or like a fairy trip upon the green,
Or like a nymph, with long dishevell'd hair
Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen.
Love is a spirit all compact of fire,
Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire.

(ll. 145-50)

What exactly is the significance of the personification of love as a goddess who leaves no imprint on the sand, makes no dent in a bank of primroses, and has no impact on her beloved either? Is her reiterated lightness (ll. 151-52, 155, and 1192) an indication of lyric grace or vacuous triviality? What is the character of the desire that finds its inaugural moment in this myth of origins?

IV

At one place the poem makes what appears to be a categorical statement, and the text seems, indeed, definitive. Adonis is speaking. He insists that Venus' desire is not love at all but rather its promiscuous, irrational, destructive simulacrum, lust (ll. 789-98). The goddess has misrepresented the true nature of her desire: “‘Call it not love, for love to heaven is fled, / since sweating lust on earth usurp'd his name’” (ll. 793-94). And Adonis undertakes to disentangle the two, specifying each as the antithesis of the other:

Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
But lust's effect is tempest after sun;
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done;
Love surfeits not, lust like a glutton dies;
Love is all truth, lust full of forged lies.

(ll. 799-804)

A grateful critical tradition, eager to regulate the wayward textuality of the poem by locating within it a clear thematic statement, the expression of an authoritative design, has tended to reproduce Adonis' values as the key to the moral truth of the text.

The tradition goes back at least to Coleridge, who was relaxed about the identification of Venus with lust, arguing that although the poem was about concupiscence, it was not morally dangerous because Shakespeare had directed the reader's attention beyond “the animal impulse itself” to the images and circumstances in which it is presented.¹⁷ A century later, however, Lu Emily Pearson emphasized how much was at stake in the antithesis Adonis had affirmed:

Venus is shown as the destructive agent of sensual love; Adonis, as reason in love. The one sullies whatever it touches; the other honors and makes it beautiful. The one is false and evil; the other is all truth, all good. Reason in love, truth, beauty—these are the weapons with which lust must be met, or the ideals of man must go down in defeat before the appetites.¹⁸

Pearson's moral vehemence sounds archaic now, but what surprises is the degree to which Adonis's condemnation of Venus and lust has survived the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Heather Dubrow is much kinder than Pearson, but the term lust reappears in her account, however softened by the attribution to Venus of motherliness: “Though lust is Venus' primary motive, it is by no means her only one and by no means an adequate label for her behavior; tender maternal love is commingled with her lust. …”¹⁹ Male critics, meanwhile, are relentless: according to one writer who echoes the view of his fellows, Shakespeare “casts Venus as a frenzied older woman driven by comic lust for a very young man barely emerging from boyhood.”²⁰ And although the poem has nothing to say about her age except that her beauty is perfect and annually renewed (ll. 133-34), the goddess's supposed decline has nonetheless proved explanatory for some male readers: “Her vulnerability is that of the older woman, desperate to renew her youth in the arms of a young lover.”²¹ Even a critic who allows that Venus represents “the drastically imperfect amalgam of lust and caring that is likely to be found in all lovers” finds it necessary to point out that “the suffocating, devouring lust of Venus is too ‘vicious’ (in both the antique and the modern senses) to escape censure.”²² In this way criticism provides itself with a definitive signified, a univocal thematic “message” beyond the undecidabilities of the text, beyond, that is to say, the heterogeneity of its mode of address.²³

V

This critical reiteration of the taxonomy of desire that Adonis so confidently delivers is problematic, however, because it inevitably attributes the central affirmation of the poem to a hero who is, as the text repeatedly reminds us and the plot of the story insists, so young that he knows nothing of love (ll. 127-28, 409, and 806). It is, of course, not inconceivable that Adonis could be speaking with preternatural wisdom: Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream speaks of love with an insight that her role in the story might not lead us to expect (1.1.232-39).²⁴ But if Helena speaks “out of character” here, her observations are confirmed, in the absence of a controlling narrative voice, by the events of the play. The narrative voice in Venus and Adonis, however, does not reproduce the neat antitheses the hero enunciates. On the contrary, while Adonis urges Venus to call it not love but lust, the text names desire both love and lust with apparent indifference:

The studded bridle on a ragged bough
Nimbly she fastens—O how quick is love!—
The steed is stalled up, and even now
To tie the rider she begins to prove:
          Backward she push'd him, as she would be thrust,
          And govern'd him in strength, though not in lust.

(ll. 37-42 [emphasis added])

Meanwhile, the steed in question leaps, neighs, and bounds (l. 265) in response to a jennet identified as his “love” throughout (ll. 287, 307, and 317). The animal's condition is variously “love” and “desire” (ll. 311 and 276). As for Venus, “desire doth lend her force” (l. 29); her language is “lustful” (l. 47); still, “she cannot chose but love” (l. 79). In her case “careless lust stirs up a desperate courage,” but “love,” too, lacks moral scruples and picks locks to get at beauty (ll. 556 and 576). Venus, of course, calls it love, but the text calls her “love” the moment Adonis has completed his disquisition:

With this, he breaketh from the sweet embrace
Of those fair arms which bound him to her breast,
And homeward through the dark laund runs apace;
Leaves love upon her back deeply distress'd.

(ll. 811-14)

It is not obvious that one set of terms is used ironically: indeed, irony is precisely the quality that the polyphony of the text renders elusive. The poem seems to invest with a certain indeterminacy the terms Adonis so categorically distinguishes.

In this respect the narrative voice is characteristic of its historical moment. In the early modern period love and lust are not consistently used as antitheses: on the contrary, both terms are synonyms for desire, each innocent or reprobate according to the context, and occurring interchangeably without apparent irony. The emergence of a radical distinction between the two—a process inadvertently encouraged, as it turns out, by the voice of Adonis—marks a moment in the cultural history of desire which, as modern criticism unwittingly reveals, has proved formative for our own cultural norms and values.

In the mid-sixteenth century William Baldwin published A treatise of Morall Phylosophie, a collection of precepts derived from a range of classical authorities, each duly named in the margins of the page. The work was exceptionally popular: twenty-four editions appeared between 1547 and about 1640. The earliest editions allow a certain overlap between the categories of love and lust: indeed, in 1550 the chapter heading “Of the worlde, the loue, and pleasures therof” appears in “The Table” as “Of the worlde, the lustes, and pleasures therof.”²⁵ While this might be no more than a printer's error, we should note that Baldwin places “Loue, luste, and lecherye” together in a single short chapter.²⁶ The love in question is mainly caritas, which has no sexual connotations, except that in one instance he defines “Repentaunce” as “the ende of fylthy loue,” where the adjective has the effect of aligning love with the sin of lechery. At the same time, “Luste is a lordlye and disobedient thynge,” whereas, “Dishonor, shame, euell ende and damnacion, wayte upon lecherie, and all other like vyces.”²⁷ The implication seems to be that lust is a powerful impulse but in itself morally neutral, so that, like the will, it needs to be brought under control in the interests of virtue, while lechery is by definition wicked.

Later editions of the Treatise are modified by the intervention of Thomas Paulfreyman, who repeatedly edited and enlarged Baldwin's text. By 1564 love has been removed from the chapter heading and from the table of contents. But if this simplifies the position in respect of love, lust remains as equivocal as before. Appropriately qualified, it evidently belongs with lechery, as in “Flie lecherous lusts” or “fired to the filthy luste of lecherie.”²⁸ On the other hand, in a different context it might equally well be morally neutral: “Enforce thy self to refraine thine euill lustes and folow the good: For the good mortifieth and destroieth the euill.”²⁹ Evidently at this moment lust is not necessarily to be condemned out of hand.

In 1594, a year or more after the publication of Venus and Adonis, Thomas Bowes issued an English translation of Pierre de la Primaudaye's Academie Francoise. There is in Bowes' translation some uncertainty about the moral implications of lust: “I will begin then with the affection of loue, which is a motion whereby the heart lusteth [appete] after that which is good. …”³⁰ Almost immediately, however, a tentative moral distinction begins to appear. The will is drawn to what is good and desires to embrace it, “and this loue is called Cupiditie, Lusting, or Coueting [cupidité, ou concupiscence, ou convoitise].” But this love is not “true love,” which is the love of the good for itself and not for the sake of possession.³¹ Here lust is evidently not to be endorsed since it is proprietary, but at the same time, it has no specifically sexual connotations; as in Baldwin, it is possible to lust after the good.

In the longer term, however, a change was taking place. During the course of the sixteenth century, lust was to lose its innocence, or at least its potential innocence, since a reprobate meaning was always available. Understood in the Middle Ages as delight, pleasure, desire, or sinful passion, according to context, by the mid-seventeenth century the term had acquired a primary sexual and strongly pejorative meaning. Coverdale's version of Numbers 14:8, “Yf the Lorde haue lust vnto us,” was evidently acceptable in 1535; but in the Authorized Version of 1611, the phrase appeared as “If the Lord delight in us.”³² In 1533 the translator of the popular Enchiridion of Erasmus thought it appropriate to render libido as “bodyly luste,” “the luste of the body,” “lechery,” “fylthy lust,” or “unclenly lustes.”³³Lust alone was evidently considered not specific enough:³⁴ a qualifier of some sort was necessary to do justice to a condition in which human beings, God's handiwork, are reduced to “fylthy swyne / to gotes / to dogges / and of all brute beestes / unto ye most brute,” and which, in Erasmus's humanist analysis, wastes time, destroys health, hastens old age, and (perhaps worst of all) obliterates the use of reason.³⁵ Just over 150 years later, a new translation of the Enchiridion was published as A Manual for a Christian Soldier. Here the qualifying words and phrases have disappeared, and libido is translated simply as “lust.” Without in any way softening the value judgments inscribed in Erasmus's text, the version of 1687 leaves it to “lust” alone to do the work of defining a condition that reduces human beings to the level of beasts.³⁶ (Twentieth-century translators also tend to render libido as “lust.”)³⁷

This handful of examples, most of them taken from repositories of popular morality, merely amplifies what the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] already indicates: in the course of the early modern period, with whatever advances and reversals, lust gradually became exclusively sexual and specifically reprobate. But the dictionary, which defines individual words in isolation, on the assumption that they are “full” of their own meanings, does not record the network of differences which constitutes a taxonomy. The shifting meaning of lust depends, at least in part, on the emergent difference between lust and love. Predictably, therefore, in this period of change the connotations of love are no less problematic. The name of a condition that may be divine, purely social, romantic, or exclusively sexual, but which is in all these cases intense, leads to semantic indeterminacies and gives rise to anxieties in the process. Sir Thomas More, for example, was deeply critical of William Tyndale because Tyndale translated the biblical “charity” as “love.” The problem, from More's Christian humanist point of view, is that love carries the wrong connotations unless it is appropriately qualified by an adjective that distinguishes between the divine and the sexual, since sexual love is not, of course, highly valued.³⁸ Tyndale, however, to More's disgust, consistently repudiates the adjective:

If he called charitie sometyme by the bare name of loue: I wold not stick therat. But now wheras charite signifieth in english mens eares, not euery common loue, but a good vertuous & wel ordred loue, he … wyl studiously flee fro ye name of good loue, & alway speke of loue, & alway leaue out good.³⁹

The problem, as More identifies it, is that Tyndale's practice is motivated by the Lutheran project of elevating faith at the expense of charity. Because their theology makes salvation a question of faith and not good works, the Reformers deliberately conflate charity with the merely erotic love that exists between a man and his paramour:

and therfore he chaungeth ye name of holy vertuous affeccion, into ye bare name of loue comen to the vertuous loue that man beareth to god, and to the lewde loue that is betwene flecke & his make.⁴⁰

While poetry and romance idealize love, humanist morality holds it in contempt. Erasmus has no greater patience than does his friend More with sexual love (amor), and he includes it under the heading of libido in the Enchiridion. Love is just as absurd and just as reductive as all erotic desire:

Set before thyne eyen howe ungoodly it is / howe altogyder a mad thing to loue / to waxe pale / to be made leane / to wepe / to flatter / and shamfully to submyt thy selfe unto a stynkyng harlot most fylthy and rotten / to gape & synge all nyght at her chambre wyndowe / to be made to the lure & be obedyent at a becke / nor dare do any thing except she nod or wagge her heed / to suffre a folysshe woman to reigne ouer the / to chyde the: to lay unkyndnesse one agaynst ye other to fall out / to be made at one agayne / to gyue thy selfe wyllynge unto a queene / that she myght mocke / k[n]ocke / mangle and spolye the. Where is I beseche the amonge all these thynges the name of a man? Where is thy berde? Where is that noble mynde created unto moste beautyfull and noble?⁴¹

In view of our own taxonomies, it is tempting to speculate on the meaning of love in this instance. The emotions described are romantic, even Petrarchan. “Harlot,” however, is not appropriate in the context of romantic love; nor, of course, is violence, which evokes the fabliau genre rather than romance. But the point, presumably, is that Erasmus does not distinguish among them: all passion is degrading.

The humiliating harlot reappears in the first part of The French academie; evidently she had entered into the European popular consciousness, along with the corresponding value judgment on love. “True” love, by contrast, is not sexual:

For we see some men so bewitched with a harlot, that if neede bee, and shee command it, they will hazard their honour and credit, and oftentimes make themselues an example to a whole countrey vpon an open scaffold. And then they labour to couer their folly with this goodly name of Loue, which is better tearmed [of] Euripides by the name of Fury and madnesse in men. For true and good loue, which is the fountaine of friendship, is alwaies grounded vpon vertue, and tendeth to that end: but this slipperie and loose loue, is a desire founded vpon … the opinion of a Good, which indeede is a most pernitious euill.⁴²

It is not clear that the moralists commonly recognize a radical difference between love and lust, or even between love and lechery. As late as 1616, Thomas Gainsford's commonplace book The Rich Cabinet demonstrates that there was still some uncertainty about whether these two categories were antithetical or synonymous. Gainsford at first sets up a contrast between the two, but this gradually gives way to similarity. His observations are divided under topics and are listed alphabetically. “Love” therefore comes immediately after “Lechery.” If this is simply a trick of the alphabet, Gainsford nonetheless exploits its effect by setting up love initially as the contrary of lechery. While lechery reduces human beings to the level of beasts and generally performs much as love does in Erasmus, love in Gainsford at first uplifts and ennobles. But the simple opposition does not hold for long. Gradually there is a reversion to type, as it emerges that love is irrational, frivolous, a form of madness, like a monster, and then “libidinous and luxurious like a Goat.”⁴³ Eventually all the old commonplaces are reaffirmed, and any clear distinction between love and lechery can no longer be detected: “Love doth trouble wit, hinder Art, hurt nature, disgrace reason, lose time, spoile substance, crosse wisedome, serue folly, weaken strength, submit to beautie, and abase honour.”⁴⁴ Meanwhile, it is worth noting, lechery is a kind of love and a form of lust, the differences once again specified only by the appropriate adjectives: “Lechery is in plaine tearmes extreame lust, vnlawfull loue, brutish desires, beastlie wantonnesse, and the itch or scab of old concupiscence.”⁴⁵

VI

Evidently, the terms love and lust were changing in relation to one another: a new system of differences, which is to say a new taxonomy, was in the process of construction. But there is no single moment of transformation: the vocabulary of the period is marked by attempts at policing the language on the one hand and by constant slippages on the other. While the sharp and unconditional antitheses of Adonis are evidently one option in the 1590s, the indeterminacies of the narrative voice in Shakespeare's poem are another and were probably a more familiar practice in the period. Critics with a strong sense of cultural history, who have nevertheless wanted to identify Adonis as the conscience of the text, have been driven to invoke Neoplatonism, somewhat incongruously, as the moral framework of this racy, salacious Ovidian narrative.⁴⁶

As for Venus herself, she was capable of signifying a whole range of meanings. While the Neoplatonists were anxious to distinguish the heavenly from the earthly Venus, others were content to acknowledge her heterogeneity. Richard Linche's The Fovntaine of Ancient Fiction, an early instance of cultural history, derived from Vincenzo Cartari's mid-sixteenth-century Italian book on images of the gods of the ancients, explained to English readers why there were so many classical statues and pictures of the goddess. The reason was that she represented “several natures and conditions,” from lechery to holy matrimony:

According therfore to the opinion of the Poets, Venus was taken to be the goddesse of wantonnes & amorous delights, as that she inspired into the minds of men, libidinous desires, and lustfull appetites, & with whose power & assistance they attained the effect of their lose concupiscence: whervpon also they entermed her the mother of loue, because that without a certaine loue and simpathie of affections, those desires are sildome acomplished. And vnto hir they ascribe the care and charge of marriages and holie wedlockes. …⁴⁷

Linche does not reveal how anomalous he finds this range of natures and conditions in 1599.

But history was on the side of Adonis. In 1615, more than twenty years after the poem was first printed,⁴⁸ Alexander Niccholes cites Adonis, without naming him, as a proper authority on the contrast between love and lust. Niccholes quotes Shakespeare's text anonymously with two minor variations, both well within the range of likely errors in transmission. Love and lust are contraries, Niccholes declares, and in support of this position, he urges, “one thus writeth”:

Loue comforteth like sunne-shine after raine,
But lusts effect is tempest after sunne.
Loves golden spring doth euer fresh remaine,
Lusts winter comes ere summer halfe be done.(49)

In the account Niccholes gives, lust is everything that love is not, so that love is defined by the exclusion of its differentiating opposite. Lust is what does not last, for example, and does not discriminate its objects. It is also impoverished, lacking. Niccholes turns Adonis's “glutton” (l. 803) into a beggar: “In Loue there is no lacke, in Lust there is the greatest penury, for though it be cloyed with too much, it pines for want. …” Moreover, lust destroys the domestic enclave that love creates: “the one, most commonly, burnes downe the house that the other would build up.”⁵⁰ The context of this sequence of antitheses is a treatise giving advice on how to achieve the great blessing of conjugal happiness, A Discourse, of Marriage and Wiving: and of The greatest Mystery therein contained: How to choose a good Wife from a bad. The book represents an argument, the title page assures its readers, “Of the dearest vse, but the deepest cunning that man may erre in: which is, to cut by a Thrid [i.e., thread] betweene the greatest Good or euill in the world.”

As Niccholes' text indicates, the realignment of love and lust is motivated by the newfound valorization of marriage in the course of the century following the Reformation rejection of the celibate ideal. In this context the radical distinction between love and lust is a critical issue. “Lvst,” Niccholes affirms, is “the most potent match-maker in all Marriages under thirty, and the chiefe breaker of all from eighteene to eight[y]. …”⁵¹ Lust makes unstable marriages. Love holds the family together; lust endangers it. In consequence, love is now endorsed by the moralists and lust repudiated. The difference between them, and not the irrationality of both, has become the concern of a prescriptive morality.

What philology records, it cannot be too strongly stressed, is not a fall from a merry Middle Ages, when sexual desire was innocent and the body and its pleasures beyond the range of moral judgment. On the contrary, in the earlier epoch lechery was a deadly sin, celibacy the way of perfection, and asceticism the privileged way of life for those capable of sustaining it. Love belonged in romances, which were held to be essentially trivial, mere entertainment. But the celebration of love as the foundation of a lifetime of concord, and the inclusion of desire within the legality of marriage, brought with it an imperative to distinguish between true love, which would lead to conjugal happiness on the one hand and, on the other, appetite, which was the worst possible basis for a stable social institution. True love was sexual, but it was also companionable; lust, by contrast, was precipitate, inconsistent, turbulent, and dangerous.

As markers of a cultural shift, the semantic changes may perhaps be indicated, however sketchily, by comparing two considerations of marriage, widely separated chronologically, both of which address the problems of love and lust. First, in 1411-12, Thomas Hoccleve discusses the question in his Regement of Princes, addressed to the Prince of Wales on the eve of his accession to the throne as Henry V. In Hoccleve's account, celibacy is evidently preferable to marriage, but within marriage it is best to struggle against fleshly lusts. A man should take care to choose a wife on the basis of virtue: marrying for lust is bound to lead to disaster.⁵² This sounds familiar, but the problems begin, predictably, with the respective meanings of the terms. Hoccleve confesses that he finally gave up waiting for a benefice and took a wife, whom he married for love (l. 1561). His interlocutor, the Beggar who has become his moral guide, is not satisfied with this account; he suspects, rightly as it turns out, that Hoccleve does not know the difference between love and lust, that he sees them as “conuertible” (i.e., interchangeable [l. 1563]). This is a serious error: love, that is, “goode” love (l. 1628), is love of virtue, “loue of the persone” (l. 1633), and it lasts; lust, meanwhile, is sexual desire or pleasure, and though lawful lust is necessary for procreation, lust for lust's sake is against God's commandments. Nowadays, he writes, people use aphrodisiacs, but this is contrary to the will of God.

The Regement of Princes thus holds apart love and lust by identifying as lust everything that has to do with sex. No sooner, however, has the text established this taxonomy than the precarious system of differences it has created with such difficulty collapses in a verse that precisely treats love and lust as “conuertible.” Love's heat is suddenly synonymous with lust, and both are sexual:

Also they that for luste chesen hir make
Only, as other while it is vsage,
Wayte wel, that whan fir luste is ouerschake,
And there-with wole hir loues hete asswage,
Thanne is to hem an helle, hire marriage.

(ll. 1653-57)⁵³

The Beggar, a kind of Adonis avant la lettre but invested by the text with a good deal more authority, cannot in the event hold apart the terms he sets out to define as antithetical. There is nothing here about marriage as companionship, no endorsement of nuptial love, no idealization of married pleasure. In the circumstances the only way to differentiate love from lust is to purge it of all sexual reference, and so rigorous a policing of its meaning cannot, it appears, be effectively sustained, since meaning is not at the disposal of the individual speaker.

We have reached a quite different and recognizably modern world, however, when in 1638 Robert Crofts provides a rhapsodic account of the romantic and companionable happiness of married love and family life:

It is said, there is no pleasure in the world like that of the sweet society of Lovers, in the way of marriage, and of a loving husband and wife. Hee is her head, she commands his heart, he is her Love, her joy, she is his honey, his Doue, his delight.

They may take sweet councell together, assist and comfort one another in all things, their joy is doubled and Redoubled.

By this blessed vnion, the number of Parents, friends, and kindred is increased; It may be an occasion of sweet and lovely Children, who in after times may bee a great felicity and joy to them. …

A multitude of felicities, a million of joyfull and blessed effects, spring from true Love.

And indeed this Nuptial Love and society sweetens, all our Actions, discourses, all other pleasures, felicities, and even in all Respects, Encreases true Joy and happinesse.⁵⁴

Crofts sees no reason why married lovers should not have recourse to the arts of love to enhance their pleasure, and he advises husbands to talk to their wives about love and its value or to tell them love stories, both happy and sad. He even includes a selection of sample poems and songs for the purpose. Some people, he continues would think this sort of advice profane:

But wee may know that it is good and commendable, for such as doe, or intend to liue in that honourable and blessed estate of marriage, to bee possest with conjugall Love, and consequently such honest love discourses, deuices, and pleasures, as encrease the same, are to bee esteemed good and commendable.⁵⁵

On the other hand, Crofts is entirely explicit in his condemnation of lust. He reaffirms the dichotomy between “true,” which is to say married, love and those extramarital desires for forbidden objects, which destroy the family and destabilize society: “Let us also (while wee view the excellency of Lawfull and true Loue) beware of unlawfull and Raging Lusts. There is wel nigh as much difference betweene true Love and unlawfull Lusts, as betweene heaven and hell.”⁵⁶ In Crofts's text the antithesis between love and lust is clear and is beginning to be familiar from a twentieth-century point of view. We could find something of the same taxonomy of desire in any Harlequin romance, where the happy ending depends on the ability of the protagonists to distinguish between true love, on the one hand, and, on the other, an infatuation of the senses, which is no basis for marriage. And yet it is worth noting, first, that Crofts still apparently feels it necessary to invoke an adjective: the repeated phrase in this chapter is “unlawfull lusts.”⁵⁷ Second, the term is not arbitrary: the text does not base the distinction between love and lust on a dualism of mind and body,⁵⁸ but on a duality of lawful and unlawful, married and unmarried: unlawful lusts lead to fornication, adultery, incest, rape, breach of promise. The fully fledged dualism of caring and sensuality in current popular romance is an effect of the Cartesian crystallization of the cogito, identity as mind, which was evidently not yet part of Crofts' culture.⁵⁹ And third, “love,” too, still benefits from a defining adjective: “true love,” of course, has survived unchanged into the modern era.

VII

The power and the durability of the cultural change brought about by Shakespeare's Adonis and Niccholes and Crofts, assisted by countless Puritan divines, is evident in the readings of Venus and Adonis I have already cited. A substantial proportion of twentieth-century criticism, by endorsing the opposition Adonis formulates and finding in it the thematic truth of the poem, reproduces the taxonomy he helps to cement; such criticism thereby enlists Shakespeare in support of family values, the naturalization of the nuclear family as the only legitimate location of desire. Interpretation takes place within a framework, often unacknowledged, of value judgments about true and false love, “healthy” sexual dispositions, or the proper (which is to say “natural”) relations between men and women. True love is identifiable in terms of a set of norms produced in the early modern period, norms now so familiar that they pass for nature. They represent the means by which a culture subjected an anarchic passion to the legality that is marriage, the terms on which unpredictable sexual desire was conscripted as the foundation of a stable social institution. True love is, or ought to be, we are to understand, companionable and based on shared convictions; the rhetoric of lovers is properly transparent, their exchanges honest, not designed to persuade; and genuine love occurs only between equals or near-equals, who treat each other with respect.

Venus, of course, fails on all counts. The love she represents is in these terms palpably unhealthy and contrary to nature. She is altogether too passionate, too persistent, too manipulative, too old. The phrase “Sick-thoughted Venus,” virtually a circumlocution for lovesickness, as the Arden editor recognizes, comes in the criticism to justify the diagnosis of a sexual pathology: critics write, for example, that “She is introduced as ‘Sick-thoughted’ (l. 5), the primary notion of amorous languishment being overlaid with that of sick excess”;⁶⁰ “in the light of that epithet her desire for the young Adonis can only be taken as unnatural and disorderly.”⁶¹ Leonard Barkan's account of the poem finds the love it defines “passionate and excessive,”⁶² and Jonathan Bate considers the desire of Venus “perverse,” while noting that perversity is also a common element of love. The poem, he proposes, is about transgression as a component of passion; it is thus “a celebration of sexuality even as it is a disturbing exposure of the dark underside of desire.”⁶³

But what exactly is it that is transgressed in Venus and Adonis? Or, what is the “wholesome” arrangement that constitutes the criterion for the critical identification of psychosexual pathology here? Whatever Venus is proposing for Adonis, it is not marriage. In the first place, she is married already. The text does not mention Vulcan, but the invocation of Mars would surely remind most readers of the humiliating story of the adulterous couple caught in her husband's net and exposed to view in the very act of love.⁶⁴ And in the second place, it was not yet obvious in the early 1590s that the only proper destiny of lovers was to found a nuclear family. That belief, I have suggested, was still in the process of construction. The condition the poem records is not true love as the basis of marital concord but the tragic passion of the classic love stories, and the narrative bears out the characterization of desire in the goddess' final curse, a definition that applies prophetically for others and retrospectively for her.

The invocation of family values as a framework for making sense of Venus and Adonis betrays, it seems to me, both the complexity of cultural history and the polyphony of Shakespeare's text, which draws on Ovid and the poetic and romance traditions as well as on popular morality. If the poem is definitive for the period, it is so to the degree that it brings an emergent taxonomy into conjunction—and conflict—with a residual indeterminacy,⁶⁵ an understanding of sexual desire as precisely sensual, irrational, anarchic, dangerous but also, and at the same time, delicate, fragile, and precious.

Family values represent an effort to bring desire into line with Law, in the Lacanian sense of that term, with the taxonomies and the corresponding disciplines inscribed in the symbolic order. The family promises gratification in exchange for submission to the rules: true love is desire that is properly regulated; it is for an appropriate (heterosexual) object; and its story is told in Shakespearean comedy and, in due course, in the nineteenth-century novel. True love obeys the rules of gender and genre, and its moment of closure is marriage, the metonym of a lifetime of happiness.

Venus and Adonis tells a quite different story. It is at the moment when Venus is compelled to realize that gratification is not an option (“All is imaginary she doth prove” [l. 597]) that the text invokes the trompe-l'oeil of the painted grapes. Venus perceives that the fulfillment of her desire is “imaginary” because her entreaties, arguments, threats, and promises fail to arouse any response in Adonis. Passion is not subject to reason or entreaty, to regulation or Law. On the contrary, desire is anarchic, and its cause is not, in the end, the persuasive powers of another person, not even a goddess, but the missing objet a, the presence that the ordering mechanisms of the symbolic both promise and withhold. Irrational, irregular, incited by prohibition, and thus quite unable to take “no” for an answer, desire is in every sense of the term an outlaw.

It follows that desire repudiates the rules, the classifications, and the proprieties that historically take up their place in the symbolic order. The queen of love has her own law, the poem affirms (l. 251), but it is a topsy-turvy one that enslaves only the ruler. What the text proposes is that desire rejects the taxonomies of both gender and genre. Love is for a boy who looks like a girl and who is in some sense too young for the difference to matter; its modes of address are at once absurd and lyrical and tragic. Passion is contrary, contradictory; “love is,” the text affirms, “wise in folly, foolish witty” (l. 838).

Venus and Adonis, which participates in the construction of family values, can also be read as indicating the altogether utopian character of a social project that sets out to subject desire to discipline, regulation, legality. Itself a trompe-l'oeil, moving between genres, unclosed, unfurnished with a final signified, the poem sustains the desire of the reader-critic to the degree that it refuses to yield the gratification of a secret meaning, a moral truth concealed behind the folds of its heterogeneous textuality.

Notes

1. Pliny Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 10 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1938-63), Bk. 35, sec. 36.

2. Quotations of Venus and Adonis follow the Arden Shakespeare edition of The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (London: Methuen, 1960), 6-12.

3. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1977), 112.

4. There were sixteen editions by 1640.

5. Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1986), 19, 27, and passim.

6. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols., rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984), Bk. 1, ll. 414-15.

7. Ovid, Bk. 1, ll. 450-567.

8. Ovid, Bk. 1, ll. 687-712.

9. T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1944), 2:417-55. For an account of Ovid's appeal in the Renaissance, see William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1977), 3-35; and Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 1-47.

10. Barkan, 80.

11. See Theocritus, “The Festival of Adonis” in The Idylls of Theocritus and the Eclogues of Virgil, trans. C. S. Calverley (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913), 82-91; Bion, “Lament for Adonis” in The Greek Bucolic Poets, trans. A. S. F. Gow (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1953), 144-47; Plutarch, “Alcibiades” in Plutarch's Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, Loeb Classical Library, 11 vols. (London: William Heinemann, 1914-26), 4:1-115, esp. 4:47-49.

12. Ovid, Bk. 10, ll. 519-739.

13. Ovid, Bk. 10, ll. 725-39.

14. Ironically, even the boar, she complains, inadvertently achieves a kind of consummation denied her as a woman:

    'Tis true, 'tis true, thus was Adonis slain
    He ran upon the boar with his sharp spear,
    Who did not whet his teeth at him again,
    But by a kiss thought to persuade him there:
    And nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine
    Sheath'd unaware the tusk in his soft groin.

    (ll. 1111-16)

15. For the range of literary classifications, see John Doebler, “The Many Faces of Love: Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare Studies 16 (1983): 33-43; and John Klause, “Venus and Adonis: Can We Forgive Them?” Studies in Philology 85 (1988): 353-77, esp. 353-55. Not everyone, however, has supposed that the poem can be easily classified: New Criticism characteristically celebrates the ambiguity of the text. See, for instance, Kenneth Muir, “Venus and Adonis: Comedy or Tragedy?” in Shakespearean Essays, Alwin Thaler and Norman Sanders, eds. (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1964), 1-13; Norman Rabkin, “Venus and Adonis and the Myth of Love” in Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, Waldo F. McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield, eds. (Eugene: U of Oregon Books, 1966), 20-32.

16. Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1932), 139-49, esp. 149. See also C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 498-99.

17. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 2:16.

18. Lu Emily Pearson, Elizabethan Love Conventions (Berkeley: U of California P. 1933), 285.

19. Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1987), 46. Cf. “Venus lusts after Adonis, but she is also maternally protective of him” (Keach, 77).

20. John Doebler, “The Reluctant Adonis: Titian and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 480-90, esp. 484. Doebler repeats the earlier judgment of Don Cameron Allen, who proposes that Venus is “a forty-year-old countess with a taste for Chapel Royal altos.” Later in the poem Venus comes “to discourse foolishly on love like a fluttery and apprehensive Doll Tearsheet of forty”; see Allen's Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1968), 43 and 57.

21. Gordon Williams, “The Coming of Age of Shakespeare's Adonis,” Modern Language Review 78 (1983): 769-76, esp. 776.

22. Klause, 371 and 364.

23. The most perceptive account I have found of the poem's “tonal shifts” is Nancy Lindheim, “The Shakespearean Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 190-203.

24. See the Arden Shakespeare edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1979).

25. William Baldwin, A treatise of Morall Phylosophie … (London, 1550), sigs. 18^r and R6^r. I owe this observation to Peter Blayney.

26. William Baldwin, sig. O2^r-v.

27. William Baldwin, sig. O2^v.

28. William Baldwin, A treatyce of moral philosophy … (London, 1564), fols. 185^v and 186^r.

29. William Baldwin, A treatyce, fol. 185^r-v.

30. Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French academie. … (London, 1618), 479; see also Pierre de la Primaudaye, Academie Françoise (Paris, 1580), fol. 166^r.

31. La Primaudaye, The French academie, 480; Academie Francoise, fol. 166^v.

32. Oxford English Dictionary, sv lust, sb., 1d.

33. Erasmus, A booke called in latyn Enchiridion militis christiani and in englysshe the manuell of the christen knyght. … (London, 1533), sigs. N1^r, Q5^v, Q6^r, and R2^v. This English translation of the Enchiridion may have been made by William Tyndale; see E. J. Devereaux, Renaissance English Translations of Erasmus: A Bibliography to 1700 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1983), 104.

34. There is one counter-example: the next chapter heading (an epilogue of remedies against incentives to libido) is translated as “A shorte recapitulacyon of remedyes agaynst the flame of lust” (sig. R3^v). Here I think the destructive “flame” does some of the work of the other qualifying words or phrases.

35. Erasmus, sigs. Q5^v and Q6^r-v.

36. Erasmus, A Manual for a Christian Soldier (London, 1687), 184-92.

37. See, for instance, the following modern editions: Erasmus, Handbook of the Militant Christian, trans. John P. Dolan (Notre Dame, IN: Fides Publishers, 1962), 147-59; and The Enchiridion of Erasmus, ed. and trans. Raymond Himelick (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1963), 177-84.

38. Cf. Sir Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Raphe Robynson, ed. Israel Gollancz (1551; London: Dent, 1898), 102-3.

39. Sir Thomas More, A Dialogue concernynge heresyes & matters of Religion. … in The Workes of Sir Thomas More Knyght. … (London, 1557), 103-288, esp. 221.

40. More, A Dialogue concernynge heresyes, 222.

41. Erasmus, A booke called latyn Enchiridion, sig. Q7^r-v.

42. La Primaudaye, The French academie, 98-99.

43. Thomas Gainsford, The Rich Cabinet Furnished with varietie of Excellent discriptions. … (London, 1616), fol. 86^r. For the section on “lechery,” see fols. 82^v-84^r; for “love,” see fols. 84^v-87^v.

44. Gainsford, fol. 87^r.

45. Gainsford, fol. 84^r.

46. See T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1950), 73-93; and Heather Asals, “Venus and Adonis: The Education of a Goddess.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 13 (1973): 31-51.

47. Richard Linche, The Fovntaine of Ancient Fiction. … (London, 1599), sig. Cc2^r-v.

48. By this time there had been nine more editions.

49. Alexander Niccholes, A Discourse, of Marriage and Wiving. … (London, 1615), 31-32.

50. Niccholes, 32.

51. Niccholes, 30.

52. Thomas Hoccleve, The Regement of Princes (1405) in Hoccleve's Works, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society ES 72, 3 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1897), Vol. 3, ll. 1555-764.

53. Marrying for lust was still a danger in 1585. In one instance, however, lust is identified as a component of love, but the two are not interchangeable; see “The wanton wyfe, whose love is all for luste. …” in Geoffrey Whitney, Ms. Harvard Typ. 14, fol. 48. I owe this reference to Steven W. May.

54. Robert Crofts, The Lover: or, Nvptiall Love (London, 1638), sigs. A7^v-A8^r.

55. Crofts, sig. C6^v.

56. Crofts, sig. D6^v.

57. Crofts, sigs. D6^v-D8^r.

58. There is dualism elsewhere, but “sensual” love is not generally identified in this text as “lust” (Crofts, sigs. B1^v-B2^r).

59. See Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), 21-41.

60. Williams, 770. See also Keach, 66.

61. David N. Beauregard, “Venus and Adonis: Shakespeare's Representation of the Passions,” Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 83-98, esp. 94.

62. Barkan, 271.

63. Bate, 48-65, esp. 65.

64. Ovid, Bk. 4, ll. 171-89.

65. For another symptom of this indeterminacy, see Margaret Mikesell's astute account of an unconscious regression to the praise of celibacy within the humanist defense of marriage in Vives' influential conduct book for women (“Marital and Divine Love in Juan Luis Vives' Instruction of a Christen Woman” in Love and Death in the Renaissance, Kenneth R. Bartlett, Konrad Eisenbichler, and Janice Liedl, eds. [Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1991], 113-34)].

This essay was written at the Folger Shakespeare Library. It owes a great deal to the stimulus of that environment and to the intellectual generosity of the readers and the staff.