[In the following essay, Beauregard addresses the nature of the allegory informing Venus and Adonis and analyzes this issue in terms of the Renaissance theory regarding the sensitive soul and its two parts: the “concupiscible” and the “irascible” powers.]

In the past thirty-five years or so, various attempts have been made at defining the meaning of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. Lu Emily Pearson early claimed that the poem portrays Venus as sensual love and Adonis as rational love, the final meaning being that “when Adonis is killed, beauty is killed, and the world is left in black chaos.” Similarly, T. W. Baldwin concluded that “Adonis is Love and Beauty, and when he dies Chaos is come again,” adding that Venus in arguing for procreation so that “Love-Beauty-Adonis may not die” is a benevolent figure (though oddly she is also made out to be Lust). Don Cameron Allen has more recently read the poem in terms of the double hunt: “Venus hunts Adonis; Adonis hunts the boar. The first hunt is the soft hunt of love; the second is the hard hunt of life.” And finally, A. C. Hamilton has explained it as a treatment of the mystery of creation and the Fall: Adonis, the perfection of unfallen Nature, blunders in ignoring the good counsel of Venus, who is Love seeking to preserve him against “all the enemies of Beauty,” and by his own will he goes to his ruin.¹

Along with these attempts at allegorical interpretation, there has arisen a triad of opinion concerning our affective responses to the poem, particularly to the figure of Venus. Some commentators have seen Shakespeare as supporting the claims of Venus against Adonis. Thus John Dover Wilson found the poem an example of the Elizabethan “fleshly school of poetry” in its acceptance of what Rossetti called “the passionate and just delights of the body.” And Kenneth Muir referred to its “daring sensuality” and maintained that in the first half “we feel that the poet supports the goddess in her designs on Adonis.”² This strain is also evident in Douglas Bush's criticism of the poem's failure to achieve its intended sensuality, and in Muriel Bradbrook's recent comment that “Venus and Adonis is … a justification of the natural and instinctive beauty of the animal world against sour moralists and scurrilous invective, a raising of the animal mask to sentient level, the emancipation of the flesh.”³

Opposed to this attitude, there is the tendency to take Venus as a comic or reprehensible figure. For Lu Emily Pearson, as I have already mentioned, Venus is “the destructive agent of sensual love.” For Rufus Putney, she is the comic type of the “frustrated, voracious woman.” Along more historical lines, R. P. Miller identifies her with the flesh and sensuality, which wars against the spirit and reason, and Franklin Dickey views her as Plato's Aphrodite Pandemos or Ficino's amor vulgaria, as the personification of the “mysterious stimulus for propagating offspring,” which is good only within limits.⁴

In the face of such opposed attitudes toward Venus and Adonis, it is perhaps predictable that there should arise a third tendency in interpretation, one which sees Venus as a “complex” figure and the poem itself in terms of “ambivalences,” “opposing points of view,” and “antinomies.” Miller himself, in spite of his identification of Venus with the flesh, concludes:

I do not suppose that Shakespeare intends us to choose between Venus and a sober Fulgentius. We are meant, rather, to delight in the playful ironies and wit which result from the interplay of two opposed attitudes. But in any case the conflict remains—the battle of attitudes which informs the entire poem. … What Shakespeare is treating and how he treats it should not be confused. What he deals with in Venus and Adonis is the psychomachic “interior warfare” between two contradictory aspects of human nature.⁵

The problem with this conclusion is that it conflicts with Miller's main thesis: that the Mars-Venus fable ironically undercuts Venus' courtship of Adonis. If the fable expresses the struggle between reason and sensuality, virtus and libido, and if Venus as sensuality is ironically dealt with, then it would seem that Shakespeare means at the very least humorously to deflate Venus' claims. What irony there is serves a moral function; it is not there for the sake of mere delight or for the sake of a “sophistication” that puts us above the conflict between good and evil. If Shakespeare does not intend us to choose between Venus and Adonis, he does intend us to form an attitude toward Venus.

The same tendency to view the poem in terms of polarities and oppositions appears more prominently in other critics. Kenneth Muir, in his later comment on the work, argues:

Although an interpretation that seeks to show that Shakespeare was writing a sermon against lust is clearly impossible, it is equally impossible to assume that the poem is a straightforward eulogy of sexual love. Almost everything in the poem appears to be ambivalent.

He concludes that Shakespeare sees “the situation from both points of view, so that we feel the force of Venus' arguments for love, as well as the reluctance of the unawakened adolescent. Both use reason to justify an irrational position.”⁶ A somewhat similar reaction, stressing more the subjective response of the reader, occurs with A. C. Hamilton, who, in pointing out that Venus adopts various roles, maintains,

Which aspect dominates in our total impression becomes a deeply personal question, and indeed that may be Shakespeare's point in centering the myth upon her. Not much adverse criticism, or praise, of Venus manages to go beyond the revelation of a critic's struggle with his anima. Our response to her must remain profoundly ambivalent.

The erotic element in Venus and Adonis is designed to turn the poem toward us; for Venus' temptation is not directed against Adonis—he is no more capable of responding than a flower—but against the reader. How can we answer her frank question:

‘What am I, that thou shouldst contemn me this?

Or what great danger dwells upon my suit?’ (ll. 205-206) A simple moral response is as irrelevant here as it is to Chaucer's Wife of Bath.⁷

Even more overtly, Norman Rabkin argues that Shakespeare views love as “hopelessly paradoxical” and based on “tragic antinomies,” and so he represents in Venus and Adonis two separate and opposed principles, two “incompatible views.” Art “explores reality by imitating its complexity,” and Venus and Adonis is “a convincing and searching mirror of a view of life that makes great poetry because it cannot be reduced to a critical formula.”⁸ What the proponents of this third position have in common, of course, is their belief that Shakespeare is of two contradictory minds toward Venus. In this sense, he is “complex.” Thus, it is not surprising to find them trying to avoid “shallow literalism” (Miller) and “a simple moral response” (Hamilton) in interpreting the poem. Shakespeare becomes something of a modern, tragically aware in being open to opposing “points of view” or “antinomies,” morally neutral (possibly even confused) in being ambivalent toward them. The reader is reduced to either delighting in the “interplay” of these contraries, or tragically contemplating them, or falling back on his own subjective impression.

Perhaps the strongest answer to such a critical position has been made by Rosemond Tuve and D. W. Robertson, Jr. Miss Tuve has reminded us that Renaissance poets sought not merely to delight but to move the will toward good and away from evil.⁹ And Robertson, in speaking of the Middle Ages, has dealt with the matter of “antinomies”:

the medieval world was innocent of our profound concern for tension. We have come to view ourselves as bundles of polarities and tensions in which, to use one formulation, the ego is caught between the omnivorous demands of the id on the one hand, and the more or less irrational restraints of the super-ego on the other. … But the medieval world with its quiet hierarchies knew nothing of these things. Its aesthetic, at once a continuation of classical philosophy and a product of Christian teaching, developed artistic and literary styles consistent with a world without dynamically interacting polarities.¹⁰

This is not to say, obviously, that tension and opposition may not exist within Medieval and Renaissance poems; it is merely to maintain that the final “view of life,” the psychological or metaphysical assumptions underlying such poetry, contain no irresolvable “tragic antinomies.” Reason and the passions may in fact be at odds, but they ought not to be.

If the aforementioned criticism has not dealt successfully with Venus and Adonis, it has raised some crucial questions. What is the allegory informing the poem? Is Shakespeare's intention in fact “erotic,” or does he condemn sensuality? And, finally, what response in the reader does Shakespeare seek to engender? All of these questions are closely linked, especially the last two, but the first is more easily separable from the others.

The allegory of Venus and Adonis presents something of a problem. None of the proposed interpretations seems entirely satisfactory, though each seems to have its partial truth. Adonis has a rational conception of love, and yet if he is Reason itself, it is difficult to see why he should be made immature. Again, he can be identified with Beauty or with unfallen Nature, but in that case the cause of his ruin seems inadequately explained. Venus does indeed seem to represent Lust, but why then does Shakespeare have the boar destroy Adonis? If Venus pursues the soft hunt of love, why is Adonis killed after having taken up the more virtuous hard hunt? Each of these interpretations fall short of explaining the poem, if we take the allegory to consist of a set of philosophical or theological symbols translatable into a statement like “Adonis is Love and Beauty, and when he dies Chaos is come again.” This kind of allegory may exist, but I should like to suggest that Shakespeare is working in a different mode, a mode quite apparent in Renaissance criticism. Certainly Sir Philip Sidney's definition of poetry is applicable here: it is an “arte of imitation,” by which term he means “a representing, counterfetting, or figuring foorth.” The question of what is represented he answers by differentiating between nature and art; he asks whether nature “haue brought foorth so true a louer as Theagines, so constant a friende as Pilades, so valiant a man as Orlando, so right a Prince as Xenophons Cyrus, so excellent a man euery way as Virgils Aeneas.” And speaking of the art of painting, after describing poetry as a “speaking picture,” he points out that the true painter paints not the actual Lucrece but, rather, “the outwarde beauty of such a vertue,” the virtue being constancy. In other words, the poet figures forth “notable images of vertues, vices, or what els”; he represents in concrete form the abstract philosophical definitions of the virtues and vices.¹¹ Edmund Spenser's letter to Sir Walter Ralegh is in obvious accord with this, Spenser maintaining that the intention of his epic is “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline,” which, as he goes on to explain, means to represent in the epic hero a specific virtue. More applicable to Shakespeare's poem, but along the same lines, is George Puttenham's description of the poetic form most appropriate to the “utterance” of “amorous affections”:

it requireth a forme of Poesie variable, inconstant, affected, curious, and most witty of any others, whereof the ioyes were to be vttered in one sorte, the sorrowes in an other, and, by the many formes of Poesie, the many moodes and pangs of louers throughly to be discouered; the poore soules sometimes praying, beseeching, sometime honouring, auancing, praising, an other while railing, reuiling, and cursing, then sorrowing, weeping, lamenting, in the ende laughing, reioysing, & solacing the beloued againe, with a thousand delicate deuises, odes, songs, elegies, ballads, sonets, and other ditties, moouing one way and another to great compassion.¹²

The function of amorous poetry here, described rather empirically as “discouering” the “many moodes and pangs of louers,” is easily aligned with Sidney's more Platonic statement about the poet “fayning” images of the virtues and vices, both of which have to do with the affections and passions.¹³ And, indeed, Puttenham's statement aptly summarizes the essential characteristics of Shakespeare's poem: its structure, intention, style, and rhetorical effect. In particular, Shakespeare's intention would seem to be that of his contemporaries. He is, in fact, holding the mirror up to nature, “to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image.” Within Venus and Adonis itself there is some oblique evidence of this in the painting simile used by the narrator in the digression:

Look, when a painter would surpass the life
In limning out a well-proportioned steed,
His art with nature's workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed—
          So did this horse excel a common one
          In shape, in courage, color, pace, and bone.(14)

(289-94)

The immediate sense of this passage is clear enough: the painter “limns out” the portrait of a horse more excellent in physique than a “common one” actually found in nature. But when applied to the wider context of the digression, the passage takes on a different meaning: if the poet for the moment can be likened to the painter, then he is “limning out” not merely the physical points of the horses but their passionate antics, in Puttenham's phrase, their “moodes and pangs.” And if extended to the still wider context of the whole poem, the passage would suggest that Shakespeare is “limning out” the “moodes and pangs” of the figures parallel to the horses, namely, Venus and Adonis. The problem in explaining the allegory, then, is to determine precisely which “moodes and pangs” or virtues and vices are being represented. What I shall try to show is that the poem delineates the affections arising from the concupiscible and irascible powers of the sensitive soul.

The threefold nature of the human soul, its division into three parts or powers, was commonly held in the Renaissance. In “A Treatise of the Soul,” Sir Walter Ralegh concisely describes the vegetative, sensitive, and rational appetites:

The appetite and affection and desire of man is rooted in the soul also; our appetite, of what kind soever it is, is given to preserve us, and to make us avoid those things that hurt us. It is of three sorts: the first is natural, by which we desire (when we are hungry) meat, and when we are thirsty drink, and rest when we are weary; the second is that which we have in that we are endued with sense; and this is given, as by which we should first desire that which is good, even for that it is good, and avoid that which is evil; and to this end it maketh us love or hate, desire or shun, rejoice or be sorrowful; or else it is given us that we should strive for good things, and against evil things, as they are hard and difficult: to this end by it we have in us hope and despair, boldness and fear and anger. The third kind of appetite is that by which we desire that good which the understanding comprehendeth to be such indeed or in appearance, and flieth the contrary: This is our will, which we use to stir us up to seek God and heaven, and heavenly things, by which we rest also in these things, and are delighted and satisfied in them, being gotten. This is a part of the reasonable soul.¹⁵

The sensitive soul, then, has two parts or powers: concupiscible and irascible. The former desires the good, and in so doing gives rise to love, desire, and joy; it also avoids evil, and thus provokes hatred, aversion, and sorrow. The irascible part has as its object good or evil insofar as it is “hard and difficult”; the respective emotions springing from it are hope and despair, courage and fear, and anger. Such a twofold division explains the structure of Venus and Adonis. The poem falls obviously into two parts: in the first Venus is a comic figure who pleads with the reluctant Adonis; in the second she is a pathetic figure who fears and then laments the death of Adonis. In the first part, all the aspects of the concupiscible power are “figured forth.” Venus is the concupiscible power in pursuit of the good, the beautiful Adonis; Adonis is the concupiscible power attempting to avoid evil, the voracious and lustful Venus. Thus, the affections that arise in the concupiscible power with respect to good and evil are those expressed by Venus and Adonis: the former displays love, desire, and joy; the latter hatred, aversion, and sadness. In the second part of the poem, the irascible power is represented. Adonis, formerly a present good, becomes an absent good which Venus must strive for because it is now “hard and difficult”; and the boar, the exact contrary of the beautiful, rose-cheeked boy in part one, brings in the hard reality of present evil, which Venus strives against. Consequently, Venus displays the emotions corresponding to the irascible power: fear, boldness, hope, despair, and anger. In terms of the objects of the concupiscible and irascible powers, then, the presence of the three main figures in the poem can be explained. Adonis and the boar are not univocal symbols (though certainly Adonis is beautiful and the boar is deadly, ugly, hard, etc.); rather, they exist primarily as objects which provoke the concupiscible and irascible affections. Venus exists as the subject experiencing (in Sidney's terminology, “figuring forth”) these affections or emotions in relation to these objects, except where she becomes the object and Adonis the subject in order to complete the “representation.” To apply the quotation from Puttenham: in the first part of the poem, where Adonis is the beautiful object of Venus' passion, the joys of love predominate, and we see her “praying, beseeching, sometime honouring, auancing, praising.” In the second part, we see the sorrows “uttered,” with Venus “railing, reuiling, and cursing, then sorrowing, weeping, lamenting.” In short, the “many moodes and pangs” of Venus are “throughly … discouered.”

It remains to show that the affections of the sensitive soul are actually depicted within the poem. Generally, their differences depend on the nature of their objects, whether good or evil, present or anticipated. Thus Robert Burton remarks:

They are commonly reduced into two inclinations, irascible, and concupiscible. The Thomists subdivide them into eleven, six in the coveting, and five in the invading. Artistotle reduceth all to pleasure and pain, Plato to love and hatred, Vives to good and bad. If good, it is present, and then we absolutely joy and love: or to come, and then we desire and hope for it: if evil, we absolutely hate it: if present, it is sorrow; if to come, fear.¹⁶

St. Thomas provides perhaps the most comprehensive and clear analysis of the passions, one with which sixteenth-century sources very often agree.¹⁷ Moreover, the Thomistic scheme of the passions seems to explain the poem best. Love, according to St. Thomas, is the root of all the passions. It is initially a simple change in the appetite, an immediate experience of pleasure or complacency in some desirable object because of a natural affinity. It is caused by the good and by the beautiful.¹⁸ Thus, three salient characteristics of Venus' relationship with Adonis are intelligible. She praises him as beautiful, as “the field's chief flower, sweet above compare.” She “makes amain unto him” in the second stanza, wooing him immediately and without delay. And she is described as “sick-thoughted” in loving a “tender boy,” her love being disordered in that Adonis lacks the required natural affinity of sexual maturity. Moreover, in discussing hatred, St. Thomas maintains that “absolutely speaking” love is stronger than hatred, because the movement toward a good is stronger than the aversion to an evil (ST [The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas], II, i, 29, 3). Venus' superior strength in pinning down Adonis can therefore be accounted for: she is pursuing a good, while he in trying to flee from her is simply avoiding an evil.

The distinction between love, desire, and joy is clarified by St. Thomas in the following passage:

In the first place … good causes, in the appetitive power, a certain inclination, aptitude of connaturalness in respect of good; and this belongs to the passion of love. … Secondly, if the good be not yet possessed, it causes in the appetite a movement towards the attainment of the good beloved: and this belongs to the passion of desire or concupiscence. … Thirdly, when the good is obtained, it causes the appetite to rest, as it were, in the good obtained: and this belongs to the passion of delight or joy.

(ST, II, i, 23, 4)

Desire occurs, then, when the object is unpossessed, the object in Venus' case being sexual fulfillment with Adonis. Lacking this, Venus desires and “moves toward” its attainment by elaborate pleading and physical aggressiveness. Finally, however, after she has pulled Adonis down on top of her, she is not able to “rest” in the possession of her object; in Shakespeare's words, “worse than Tantalus' is her annoy, / To clip Elizium and to lack her joy” (ll. 599-600). If Venus displays joy, it is only in a visual sense, her eye finding repose in Adonis' beauty; insofar as her object is sexual gratification, she finds only frustration, a fact underlined by the humorous grapplings and falls in the action of the first half. Her initially disordered love of Adonis calls forth desire but does not culminate in joy.

Adonis' various reactions to Venus—his disdain, his coldness, his pouting, his frowning—are probably not all ultimately traceable to hatred, but his general attitude expresses its essential marks.

So … in the animal, or in the intellectual appetite, love is a certain harmony of the appetite with that which is apprehended as suitable; while hatred is dissonance of the appetite from that which is apprehended as repugnant and hurtful. Now, just as whatever is suitable, as such, bears the aspect of good; so whatever is repugnant, as such, bears the aspect of evil.

… Consequently love must needs precede hatred; and nothing is hated, save through being contrary to a suitable thing which is loved. And hence it is that every hatred is caused by love.

(ST, II, i, 29, 1-2)

Venus is apprehended as repugnant by Adonis for two reasons: first, he is too young for love and so is unsuitable for Venus (he twice protests that he is “unripe”); second, he loves to hunt the boar, an activity contrary to Venus' sport, and so he possesses a prior love which provokes his hatred of Venus. This hatred naturally causes aversion in Adonis, aversion being to hatred what desire is to love, namely, a flight from an unrealized evil, as opposed to a movement toward an unpossessed good (ST, II, i, 23, 4). Thus Adonis resists Venus' proposals and tries actively to leave her presence. Unable to do so until midway in the poem, he experiences sorrow or sadness: “sorrow is caused by a present evil: and this evil, from the very fact that it is repugnant to the movement of the will, depresses the soul, inasmuch as it hinders it from enjoying that which it wishes to enjoy” (ST, II, i, 37, 2). Adonis wishes to hunt the boar, but he is hindered from doing so by Venus and thus he becomes markedly sad.

And now Adonis with a lazy sprite,
And with a heavy, dark, disliking eye,
His louring brows o'erwhelming his fair sight,
Like misty vapours when they blot the sky:
          Souring his cheeks, cries, “Fie, no more of love!
          The sun doth burn my face, I must remove.”

(181-86)

The second half of the poem, beginning approximately at Adonis' mention of the boar (l. 588), ushers in the irascible passions: fear and daring, hope and despair, and anger. Their distinguishing characteristic is that with the exception of anger they spring from a good object not yet obtained or an evil object not yet present. The first of these, fear, arises from the imagination of future evil difficult to avoid (ST, II, i, 41, 2). Venus is obviously fearful in these terms when she excitedly describes the boar in an attempt to persuade Adonis not to hunt him. She remarks that her jealous love of Adonis

… presenteth to mine eye
The picture of an angry chafing boar,
Under whose sharp fangs on his back doth lie
An image like thyself, all stain'd with gore;
          Whose blood upon the fresh flowers being shed,
          Doth make them droop with grief and hang the head.

(661-66)

Later, in order to discover what has happened to Adonis, Venus must conquer her fear with the opposite passion of daring or boldness. Aquinas mentions that “the movement of daring towards evil presupposes the movement of hope towards good,” which nicely explains Venus' movement toward the boar in the hope that Adonis is still alive. He also distinguishes between daring and fortitude: the daring man turns on a threatening object in hopes of overcoming it, not like the courageous man “on account of the good of virtue,” but, rather, “on account of a mere thought giving rise to hope and banishing fear” (ST, II, i, 45, 4). Venus does as much when, after giving way to thoughts of despair, she hears a huntsman's cry, believes that it is Adonis' voice, and runs toward it, the narrator remarking that hope flatters her “in thoughts unlikely” (ll. 973-90).

Implied in Venus' daring are two other passions, despair and hope. The former is defined as a withdrawal in the face of a future good considered unobtainable, and the latter by contrast as an attraction of the appetitive power toward a future good difficult but obtainable (ST, II, i, 40, 1-4). Venus' two successive addresses to Death, the one arising out of her despair at seeing the boar's bloody tusks and the other arising out of her hope upon hearing the huntsman's cry, elicit the narrator's comment that

O hard-believing love, how strange it seems
Not to believe, and yet too credulous!
Thy weal and woe are both of them extremes;
Despair and hope makes thee ridiculous:
          The one doth flatter thee in thoughts unlikely,
          In likely thoughts the other kills thee quickly.

(985-90)

Indeed, Shakespeare's manipulation of the situation seems designed to point up Venus' vacillation from one emotion to the other. First, apprehending the bloodied boar and several bleeding hounds, Venus despairs, declaims against Death, and breaks into tears and “variable passions.” But then she hears the huntsman's cry, which she takes as Adonis' voice, and she is moved to hope, taking back all she has said against Death. The future good at first seems unobtainable when Venus sees the boar's bloody tusks, and so she is stimulated to “likely thoughts” of despair. With the mistaken apprehension that the huntsman is Adonis, she is moved to “unlikely thoughts” of hope, to the belief that the future good is difficult but obtainable, and so she moves toward that good: “As falcons to the lure, away she flies” (l. 1027).

The final passion, anger, arises both out of sorrow at an evil already present, and out of desire for vengeance (ST, II, i, 46, 1). Two additional observations must be made. If the evil is an injury done to us through ignorance or passion, then anger is lessened, and to some extent mercy and forgiveness are called for. And, of all the passions, anger presents the greatest hindrance to “the judgment of reason” (ST, II, i, 47, 2; 48, 3). When Venus comes upon the dead Adonis and is stunned by what she sees, she obviously grieves over a present evil. But, instead of retaliating against the boar, she imagines that it has acted out of ignorance.

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;
Witness the entertainment that he gave.
          If he did see his face, why then I know
          He thought to kiss him, and hath kill'd him so.

(1105-10)

Consequently, Venus' anger at the boar is lessened and irrationally directed at future lovers. The final prophecy that “sorrow on love hereafter shall attend” occurs twice in conditional form and seems vindictive: because Adonis is dead, in the future love will be a sorrowful matter (ll. 1135-36, 1163-64). Thus, Venus' angry resentment hinders “the judgment of reason,” which should find the boar at fault, and leads her to punish the wrong object.

If, then, Venus and Adonis portrays the “moodes and pangs” of the goddess of love, or more specifically the concupiscible and irascible passions, the question of the proper response to the poem remains. The researches of D. C. Allen, Robert Miller, and Franklin Dickey have, I think, conclusively established Venus as the representative of an inferior love, whether in Platonic or other terms. In the poem's first stanza, moreover, she is called “sick-thoughted,” and in the light of that epithet her desire for the young Adonis can only be taken as unnatural and disorderly. Her arguments urging Adonis to procreate, though they might be proper when addressed to the young man of the Sonnets, are quite inapplicable in Adonis' case; he is simply not ripe for love. The obvious literary parallel occurs in Hero and Leander with its long persuasion to love spoken by the “bold, sharp sophister,” Leander (l. 297). In both poems, because of the obviously immoral intentions of the orators, the ingenious persuasions are not to be taken seriously. In short, the conventional significance of the figure of Venus, the generally comic-pathetic situation, the convention of the persuasion to love, the unfavorable imagery used to characterize Venus, all point to the impossibility of taking the poem as an “emancipation of the flesh.” To take it as such, to assume that Shakespeare intended to produce a “sensual orgy,” that he “fiddles on the strings of sensuality … without even being robustly sensual,”¹⁹ is to do violence to the right order of the poem. The artifice and much of the detail must then become offensive and confusing, because they do not serve the intention. The response of C. S. Lewis is a case in point:

… Venus and Adonis reads well in quotation, but I have never read it through without feeling that I am being suffocated. I cannot forgive Shakespeare for telling us how Venus perspired (175), how “soft and plump” she was, how moist her hand, how Adonis pants in her face, and so forth. I cannot conceive why he made her not only so emphatically older but even so much larger than the unfortunate young man. She is so large that she can throw the horse's rein over one arm and tuck the “tender boy” under the other. She “governs him in strength” and knows her own business so badly that she threatens, almost in her first words, to “smother” him with kisses. The word “smother,” combined with these images of female bulk and strength, is fatal: I am irresistibly reminded of some unfortunate child's efforts to escape the voluminous embraces of an effusive female relative. … Shakespeare shows us far too much of Venus' passion as it would appear to a third party, a spectator—embarrassed, disgusted, and even horrified as any spectator of such a scene would necessarily be.²⁰

The source of Lewis' confusion and puzzlement is his assumption that Shakespeare means to portray Venus in flattering terms. Thus, Venus' strength, her comparative size and age, her sweating—even, I might add, her comparison to a predatory eagle—her aggressiveness, her vacillations, and her sophistry, cannot be accounted for except as “mistakes” on the part of the author. In spite of this confusion, however, Lewis indicates another possible response to Venus, that of a mildly disgusted spectator. Something of the same reaction is recorded by Coleridge, though it is accounted for differently.

… Hence it is, that from the perpetual activity of attention required on part of the reader; from the rapid flow, the quick change, and the playful nature of the thoughts and images; and above all from the alienation, and, if I may hazard such an expression, the utter aloofness of the poet's own feelings, from those of which he is at once the painter and the analyst; that though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account. … Shakespeare has here represented the animal impulse itself, so as to preclude all sympathy with it, by dissipating the reader's notice among the thousand outward images, and now beautiful, now fanciful circumstances, which form its dresses and its scenery; or by diverting our attention from the main subject by those frequent witty or profound reflections, which the poet's ever active mind has deduced from, or connected with, the imagery and the incidents. The reader is forced into too much action to sympathize with the merely passive of our nature.²¹

Here the central intention of the poem is correctly apprehended: Shakespeare is representing the feelings attached to the “animal impulse,” and the function of various aspects of the poem—the similes, situations, narrator's comments—are seen in their right relation as moving us away from sympathy with Venus. Thus, though the subject is erotic, the poem itself is not dangerous “on a moral account.”

Howsoever accurate is Coleridge's reading of the poem, it is not completely satisfactory. The modern intuition of the poem's “complexity” has a certain substance to it, and I suggest that although the effects on the reader intended by Shakespeare are locally multivarious, two in general stand out. Francis Bacon in his essay “Of Love” remarks that “love is ever a matter of comedies and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief, sometimes like a syren, sometimes like a fury.” Venus and Adonis, in its first half, is certainly matter for comedy, but, to depart from Bacon somewhat, in its second half it is more matter for “the lamenting Elegiack,” to use Sidney's phrase, in that what is depicted is not the “tirannicall humors” of kings but, rather, the passions that follow on the absence and death of a beloved. The poem, then, moves us to laughter at the ridiculous antics of Venus and to compassion for her sufferings. The intricacies of such a twofold affective response are described by Timothy Bright in terms which fit Venus and Adonis:

… the affection which moueth vs to laugh … we cal merinesse wherewith we with some discontentment, take pleasure at that, which is done or sayd ridiculously: of which sort are deeds, or wordes vnseemely or vnmeet, and yet moue no compassiõ; as when a man scaldeth his mouth with his potage or an hote pie, we are discõtented with the hurt, yet ioye at the euent vnexpected of the partie, and that we haue escaped it; frõ whence commeth laughter: which because it exceedeth the mislike of the thing that hurteth, bursteth out into vehemency on that side, and procureth that merie gesture. If on the other side the thing be such as the mislike excedeth the ioy we haue of our freedome from that euill, then riseth pity and compassion.²²

In the first half of the poem, Venus' “unseemely” words and deeds move us to laughter and amusement, with such details as the predatory-eagle simile serving to prevent us from sympathizing with her; in the second half of the poem, the object of our “mislike” becomes the greater evil of Adonis' death, and we are made to pity the grief-stricken Venus, with a corresponding shift in detail (Venus is sympathetically compared to a “milch doe” aching to get to her fawn, to a snail whose tender horns have been hit, and so on, though it should be noted that a strong sense of detachment is preserved in the narrator's comment that Venus' emotional vacillations make her ridiculous). The supposed “ambivalence” discerned by modern commentators has therefore some basis in the shift of rhetorical intention between the two part of the poem, but if Shakespeare is “ambivalent” he is not so in the modern sense of being afflicted with emotional contradictions and divided against himself. Rather, through laughter and then pity, he intends to free us from the absurdities and evils attached to passionate love; like Coleridge and Lewis, we become detached spectators viewing the affections of love in two different situations. Certainly, Shakespeare's epigraph suggests the desirability of such detachment:

Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo
          Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.
Let base conceipted witts admire vilde things,
Faire Phoebus lead me to the Muses springs.(23)

Notes

1. Lu Emily Pearson, Elizabethan Love Conventions (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1933), p. 285; T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. 73, 84; Don Cameron Allen, “On Venus and Adonis,” in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies: Presented to Frank Percy Wilson, ed. H. Davis and H. Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 106; A. C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967), pp. 155-56.

2. Wilson is quoted in Shakespeare: The Poems, ed. Hyder Rollins (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938), p. 515; Kenneth Muir and Sean O'Loughlin, The Voyage to Illyria (London: Methuen, 1937), pp. 51-55.

3. Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 145; Muriel C. Bradbrook, “Beasts and Gods: Greene's Groats-Worth of Witte and the Social Purpose of Venus and Adonis,” in ShS [Shakespeare Survey], 15 (1962), 70.

4. Pearson, loc. cit.; Rufus Putney, “Venus Agonistes,” Univ. of Colorado Studies, No. 4 (July 1953), p. 58; Robert P. Miller, “The Myth of Mars's Hot Minion in Venus and Adonis,” ELH, 26 (December 1959), 470-81; Franklin M. Dickey, Not Wisely but Too Well (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1957), pp. 47-48.

5. Miller, pp. 480-81.

6. Kenneth Muir, “Venus and Adonis: Comedy or Tragedy,” in Shakespearean Essays, ed. Alwin Thaler and Norman Sanders, TSL [Tennessee Studies in Literature], Spec. No. 2 (Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press, 1964), pp. 9-13.

7. Hamilton, p. 164.

8. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. 162.

9. Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1947), pp. 398-400.

10. D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), p. 51.

11. G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1904), I, 158, 156-57, 159, 160.

12. Smith, II, 47.

13. See also George Chapman's dedication to his continuation of Hero and Leander: “I present your Ladiship with the last affections of the first two Louers that euer Muse shrinde in the Temple of Memorie. … I can, and will, ere long, single, or tumble out as brainles and passionate fooleries, as euer panted in the bosom of the most ridiculous Louer,” The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis Bartlett (New York: MLA, 1941), p. 132.

14. All quotations are from The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (London: Methuen, 1960).

15. The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, Kt. (New York: Burt Franklin, 1964), VIII, 586-87.

16. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor, 1927), p. 224. The quotation occurs in the First Partition, Sect. 2, Memb. 3, Subs. 3.

17. My reliance upon Aquinas is perhaps rhetorically unwise, but the quotation from Burton indicates an English awareness of Thomistic tradition, and the quotation from Ralegh is undeniably Thomistic. Lily B. Campbell, in Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes (1930; rpt. London: Methuen, 1961), p. 69, maintains that Aquinas' division of the passions was generally popular. Though Pierre de la Primaudaye's The French Academie (trans. 1586) and Timothy Bright's A Treatise of Melancholie (1586) are closer in time to the composition and publication of Venus and Adonis, they are not as thorough and clear as Aquinas; like St. Thomas, however, they both define the various passions in terms of the object being good or evil, present or to come, and with la Primaudaye at least the list of passions is essentially that of Aquinas.

18. All quotations of Aquinas are from The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd. ed. (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1927), Pt. II, 1st pt; the relevant section on the passions includes questions 22-48, a clear and accurate summary of which is available in Etienne Gilson's The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (London: Victor Gollancz, 1957), pp. 271-86. On love, see ST [The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas], II, i, 26-28; Gilson, pp. 272-78.

19. Bush, pp. 145, 148.

20. C. S. Lewis, “Hero and Leander,” in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul J. Alpers (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 236-37.

21. S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. J. Shawcross (1907; rpt. London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), II, 15-16.

22. Timonthy Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie, ed. Hardin Craig (1586; facsimile rpt. New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1940), pp. 82-83.

23. Marlowe's translation of Ovid is from The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (1910; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 580.