SOURCE: Bate, Jonathan. “Sexual Perversity in Venus and Adonis.” Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993): 80-92.

[In the following essay, Bate examines Venus and Adonis as an example of “Elizabethan Ovidianism,” in that its treatment of the myth is not intended as a moralization, but as a study of the psychological exploration of love and desire.]

Late in 1589, Thomas Lodge published his poem Scillaes Metamorphosis: Enterlaced with the unfortunate love of Glaucus. In so doing, he established a new poetic genre, the witty love-poem dressed in the manner of Ovid. Following in Lodge's wake, Marlowe wrote Hero and Leander and Shakespeare Venus and Adonis—to judge by frequency of allusions to the former and reprintings of the latter, two of the most popular poems of the age.

An earlier tradition, extending back through the middle ages, had moralized Ovid's tales: in the prose dedication to the first edition of his translation, Arthur Golding wrote that the myths of the Metamorphoses were ‘outwardly moste pleasant tales and delectable histories’, but that they were ‘fraughted inwardlye with most piththie instructions and wholsome examples’.¹ With not inconsiderable ingenuity, Golding peeled off the narrative skin and found hidden ‘inner’ moral meanings in the text; he thus contrived to make Ovid sound at least a little like the other major author whom he translated into English: John Calvin. Lodge's poem, by contrast, sets out to enjoy Ovid's poetry of passion, as the Roman poet did himself. Lessons may be learnt from this world of desire and metamorphosis, but they are lessons about the games and the anguish of love. The examples are not wholesome, the instruction is not moralistic. Lodge and his successors show how love is; they don't moralize about how behaviour should be. Golding's argument is that if you give in to passion, you will suffer, whereas the argument of late Elizabethan Ovidianism often seems to be that however you behave, whether you rein in your passion or not, love will make you suffer. Hero and Leander embrace love and end up dead. Adonis rejects love and ends up dead. In Lodge's poem, first Glaucus woos a reluctant Scilla, then Cupid fires an arrow that stops up his wound and cures him of his love; but Cupid also fires at Scilla, so she is in turn afflicted and tries to seduce a now reluctant Glaucus. Cupid, the blind, diminutive, and illegitimate child of Venus, is in every respect a contrary little bastard.

But these poems cannot be described as tragedies of love. This is partly because, as in Ovid, metamorphosis lets the characters off the hook: they are arrested in the moment of intense emotion and released into a vital, vibrant, colourful world of anthropomorphic nature. And it is also, pre-eminently, because the poet is ultimately more interested in the beginnings than the ends of love. The primary focus is upon the psychological causes of love—what is it that the lover desires?—and the linguistic arts with which the love-object is pursued. Lodge in Scillaes Metamorphosis, Marlowe in Hero and Leander, and Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis, devote most of their attention to the arguments of the characters, in particular to the topos of the persuasion to love. The pleasure for the Elizabethan reader resides in the cunning rhetoric; Shakespeare was above all known as a sweet, witty, mellifluous, honey-tongued writer.

The skill of the writers of erotic narrative poetry manifested itself in their way of combining two Ovids: the witty preceptor of love, the poet of arguing one's way into bed, as in the Amores and the Ars Amatoria, is brought together with the weaver of ‘interlaced’ mythological tales of metamorphosis. Thus Leander makes use of an argument from the Amores about how a woman's sexual treasure (her virginity) should, like all wealth, be used instead of hoarded.² In the terms of William Keach, the best modern reader of the genre, Ovid's irony is combined with his pathos—his witty detachment and his emotional intensity are fused.³ Love is acknowledged to be confusing and painful, but desire is also revealed to be comic and undignified. The world of these quintessentially Elizabethan poems is not so far from that of David Mamet's play, Sexual Perversity in Chicago: the language may be smooth where Mamet's is rough in the extreme, but in each world the characters wisecrack and bully their way in love because they are ultimately extremely uncomfortable in it. They try to be cool in their dealings with the opposite sex, but in fact they are constantly hot under the collar. Mamet's word ‘perversity’ is apt in suggesting the contrariness of desire, whilst also summoning up yet staving off the idea of ‘perversion’.

It is easy to share the cultivated Elizabethan reader's delight in the conceits of the genre. The resourceful Venus has many a memorable example:

I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer.
Feed where thou wilt, on mountains or in dale;
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.(4)

Shakespeare's handling of his source in the writing of Venus and Adonis is characteristic. Ovid tells the story in less than a hundred lines, Shakespeare in more than a thousand: the classical text provides a narrative framework into which the Elizabethan writer inserts elaborate arguments, thus demonstrating his own rhetorical skills. Because the persuasions given to the characters are the major interpolations into the source, critical readings tend to concentrate on them.⁵ But it will be the contention of this essay that within Shakespeare's poem there are signals that we must consider the Ovidian source-text to be much broader than the seventy or so lines of direct material. Golding's outward/inward distinction works differently in Shakespeare's reading of Ovid: whilst the moral translator claimed to find meaning ‘inwardlye’ but in fact imposed it from outside the text, the creative imitator interprets his source narrative partly by means of other narratives that lie both outside and inside, around and within it. Surrounding the text is a distinctly unwholesome context.

When Shakespeare read Book x of the Metamorphoses, the first thing he was told about Adonis was that he was the ‘misbegotten chyld’ of the union between Myrrha and her father, Cinyras.⁶ At the same time, he would have learned that the lovely boy was born not from his mother's womb, but by the splitting open through Lucina's agency of the tree into which his mother had been metamorphosed.⁷ Incest and a kind of posthumous caesarean section—a bizarre birth like that of Marvell's ‘Unfortunate Lover’—initiate the reader into a world of ‘unnatural’ swervings of gender and generation.

Ovid's story of Venus and Adonis is narrated by Orpheus as part of his long lament to the trees and wild animals after his loss of Eurydice. The Orphic section of the Metamorphoses begins with a series of tales of homosexual love. Orpheus says that after losing his Eurydice he shunned all love of woman and turned to boys instead:

And Orphye […] did utterly eschew
The womankynd. […]
He also taught the Thracian folke a stewes of Males too make
And of the flowring pryme of boayes the pleasure for too take.

(x. 87-92)

Orpheus is the patron saint of homosexuality, or, more precisely, of pederasty. Among the trees to which he sings is the cypress, etiologized as the metamorphosed form of a boy loved by Apollo, Cyparissus, who erroneously killed a tame stag whom he loved and consequently resolved to die himself, asking as a last boon that he should be allowed to mourn for ever. He is thus ‘sad cypress’—there is a resonance forward in Shakespeare's career, to the figuration of love's sorrows in Twelfth Night, where, as with Ovid's Orphic narration, the context is homoerotic, Orsino's desire for Cesario echoing Apollo's for Cyparissus. More locally, there is a prefiguration of and variation on Adonis: both boys are loved by gods, while one slays and the other is slain by accident.

Cyparissus homoeroticizes the audience of Orpheus. The singer himself then picks up the motif: he tells of Ganymede, loved by Jove (and impersonated, we may add, by the gender-bending Rosalind in As You Like It), then of Hyacinth, loved by Apollo. The latter is a second prefiguration of Adonis, in that he loves hunting. He is inadvertently killed by Apollo's discus while sporting with him; the flower that grows from his blood has Apollo's lament (‘AI AI’) inscribed upon it—as with Venus and Adonis, the story ends with the creation from the beloved boy's blood of a plant that is also a signifier of grief. George Sandys's commentary speaks of ‘an afflicted ingemination, charactred in the leaves’, a phrase nicely catching the two key elements which the story shares with that of Adonis: floral inscription and repetition (the story is retold with each year's new growth).⁸ Having argued that homoerotic desire is licensed by the fact that the gods practised it, Orpheus then turns to some examples of real perversion: the Propoetides, the first prostitutes; Pygmalion, who makes love to his statue; and Myrrha, who falls in love with her father.

Elizabethan and Jacobean interest in perverse sexuality found a strong focus in Book x of the Metamorphoses, as may be seen from Marston's Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image (1598) and William Barksted's Myrrha, the Mother of Adonis; or Lustes Prodegies (1607). The final act of The Winter's Tale is exceptional in its way of reworking the Pygmalion story without any implication of perversity or, in Paulina's term, unlawfulness. The traditional moralization of Book x is summarized by Golding in the epistle prefixed to his 1567 translation:

The tenth booke cheefly dooth containe one kynd of argument,
Reproving most prodigious lusts of such as have bene bent
Too incest most unnaturall.

(Epistle, l. 213)

But the intentions of Ovid's Orpheus are not quite this simple: he sings with a lighter touch (‘leviore lyra’)⁹ of the delights as well as the dire consequences of sexuality. And insofar as Orpheus's songs are an apology for homoeroticism, the moralizing Golding is forced to read the text against the grain.

Even in the case of incest, Ovid is more interested in exploring the lover's mental state than condemning her. Myrrha may resort to a bestial comparison (‘animals commit incest, so why shouldn't humans?’), but she is revealed to be a tortured victim of desire, as she lies restlessly at night:

Shee wisshes and shee wotes not what too doo, nor how too gin.
And like as when a mightye tree with axes heawed rownd,
Now reedye with a strype or twaine to lye uppon the grownd,
Uncerteine is which way to fall and tottreth every way:
Even so her mynd with dowtfull wound enffeebled then did stray
Now heere now there uncerteinely, and tooke of both encreace.

(x.419)

This kind of representation of the mind under the stress of conflicting emotions is Ovid's prime gift to the Elizabethan narrative poets. Like their master, Marlowe and Shakespeare as poets are psychopathologists rather than moralists.

As so often in the Metamorphoses, a festival in honour of a god provides the occasion for resolution of the Myrrha story; rather as the ‘holiday’ moment in Shakespearean comedy precipitates transformative action, the festival's interruption of the quotidian provides the impulse which causes the tottering tree to fall. With characteristic Ovidian irony, the festival in question is that of Ceres, goddess of fertility—in these circumstances, foison is the last thing Myrrha needs. Sandys's commentary reminds the Renaissance reader of the distance between Myrrha and Ceres, to whose worship ‘none were admitted that were either uncleane, or whose consciences accused them of any secret crime’ (p. 363). Cinyras's wife goes off to celebrate this distinctively female festival, leaving him alone in his bed for nine nights; a nurse offers to provide him with comfort in the form of a girl who loves him. She gives a false name, but says that the ‘pretye lasse’ is Myrrha's age; she escorts her to the bedroom in the dark and father makes love to daughter, ignorant of her identity. Ovid observes the behaviour of the lovers with his usual perspicuity and irony: ‘by chaunce as in respect of yeeres / He daughter did hir call, and shee him father’ (x. 536-37). The encounter ends with his ‘cursed seede in [her] wicked womb’ (l. 538). Adonis is the fruit of that seed.

The Venus and Adonis story must be seen in the broader context of this series of narratives concerning destructive passion, female desire—Book x teems with aggressive female wooers—and homoerotic charm. Venus the lover is also Venus the mother: ‘hot, faint, and weary with her hard embracing […] like the froward infant stilled with dandling, / He now obeys’ (ll. 559-63); ‘Like a milch doe whose dwelling dugs do ache, / Hasting to feed her fawn hid in some brake’ (ll. 875-76). Such juxtapositions of sexuality and parenting suggest that Adonis is forced to re-enact, with gender and generational roles reversed, his mother's incestuous affair.

The contextual pressure of Myrrha is signalled by Shakespeare's two explicit allusions to Adonis's mother. As part of her argument that the lovely boy should accept love, Venus says:

Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel?
Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth.
Art thou a woman's son, and canst not feel
What 'tis to love, how want of love tormenteth?
O, had thy mother borne so hard a mind,
She had not brought forth thee, but died unkind.

(l. 199)

She suggests that he somehow owes it to his mother's experience of love to love himself. In the light of Book x, it is a richly ironic suggestion: Myrrha found that love ‘tormented’ as much as—more than—‘want of love’ did. The ‘mind’ that she bore was hardly exemplary; the child ‘brought forth’ by her, the fruit of incest, would have been better unborn. She would have ‘died unkind’ if she hadn't loved a man and thus borne a child, says Venus—but it would have been better if she had died untouched by her own kind, her kin. In the incestuous bed she was a little more than kin and more than kind. As for Venus's phrase ‘died unkind’, ironically it was only in death that Myrrha achieved a kind of kindness or softness. She is metamorphosed into the ‘weeping’ myrrh tree, oozing drops that signify her repentance.

Later, Venus addresses the sun: ‘There lives a son [i.e. Adonis] that sucked an earthly mother / May lend thee light, as thou dost lend to other’ (ll. 863-64). The sun/son pun invokes Adonis's mother for a second time. Again the irony rebounds on Venus: Myrrha never did suckle Adonis, since he was born from the tree after her death. Instead, Venus herself eventually becomes a surrogate mother, suckling Adonis—she ends the poem with his flower in her breast, imaged as the ‘cradle’ in which she ‘rock[s]’ him (ll. 1185-86). Adonis's life begins with a father and daughter in bed together, and ends with sexual desire for him being sublimated into an image of a mother by the bed of her baby son. For Ovid, Venus's love for Adonis is the direct consequence of Myrrha's illicit desire: ‘Dame Venus fell in love with him: whereby / He did revenge the outrage of his mothers villanye’ (x. 604-05). Venus is held responsible for Myrrha's love, since she is the goddess of love, even in its illicit forms, and she is punished by being smitten with unrequited love herself.

The Myrrha story, then, provides an ironizing, darkening pre-text for the tale of Venus and Adonis, which points to the perverse origins of desire. A second parallel narrative occupies a position as what might be called an in-text. When Ovid's Venus advises Adonis not to hunt the boar, she tells a story to support her case. Embedded within Orpheus's tale of Venus and Adonis is Venus's tale of Atalanta, a girl who has been told by an oracle that if she takes a husband she will die. Being a fast runner, she repels her suitors by saying that they must race her: if they win she will be the prize, if they lose they will die. The youthful Hippomenes initially scorns men who are willing to risk their lives in a race for a girl, but when Atalanta strips off to run, he is won over by her beauty, ‘the which was like too myne, / Or rather (if that thou wert made a woman) like too thyne’ (x. 674-75) explains Venus, taking the opportunity to dwell on Adonis's female charm, which is further echoed in Hippomenes's ‘maydens countenance’ (l. 742). Atalanta promptly falls in love herself: suddenly she is uncertain whether she wants to win or lose this race. Golding's translation is flat-footed at this point; a modern version catches more concisely Ovid's exquisite account of Atalanta's attempt to rationalize her faltering:

                                                                                It's not his beauty
That touches me (though that could touch me too);
But he is still a boy; it's not himself
That moves me but his tender years, his youth.
Think of his courage, unafraid of death.(10)

The parenthesis is a wonderfully revealing moment. His beauty has of course touched her. As with Myrrha, the mind is pulled in conflicting directions, love induces weakness, and then a disastrous mistake is made: the oracle is disregarded.

Hippomenes, being in love, invokes the assistance of the love-god Venus. She assists him by throwing three golden apples at strategic moments during the race, causing Atalanta to go off course and pick them up. Hippomenes thus wins both the race and her. Venus points the moral:

Thinkst thou I was not woorthy thanks, Adonis, thinkest thow
I earned not that he too mee should frankincence allow?
But he forgetfull, neyther thanks nor frankincence did give.
By means wherof too sooden wrath he justly did me drive.

(x. 798)

She accordingly turns against the young lovers, determining to have her revenge and make an example of them. She inflames them with sexual desire while they are in the temple of Cybele; they defile it by making love there, and Cybele transforms them into lions.

Ostensibly, Venus tells Adonis this story in order to persuade him not to go hunting dangerous beasts like lions and boars. But it's not really a tale warning against wild animals; it is Venus saying ‘don't rile me’, ‘do as I say, I'm a powerful woman’. The key moment is the one where she addresses Adonis directly, demanding that he assent to her claim that she deserved a thank-offering and was justified in taking revenge when not given one. She tells the story to demonstrate her power. But the song is still that of Orpheus—it is a narrative within a narrative, creating the kind of multiple perspective allowed for by the Shakespearean play within a play. For Orpheus, the story is another warning against love: Atalanta submitted to desire and no good came of it. So Venus is saying to Adonis ‘do not resist love’, while simultaneously Orpheus is saying to his audience ‘resist love’. The Orphic context undercuts Venus's rhetoric. The story is being used by both characters; narratives about love, Ovid seems to be saying, are never disinterested. The narrator always has ulterior motives, is always driven by his or her own desires.

I have described the embedded Atalanta narrative at some length because of a striking fact about the structure of Ovid's Venus and Adonis. Forty lines are devoted to Venus falling in love with Adonis, then one hundred and forty-seven lines to Venus telling her admonitory tale, and finally thirty-two to Venus's departure and Adonis's being gored by the boar and metamorphosed. The discourse of Venus thus occupies twice as much space as the story's action. The narrative of Atalanta fulfils the role in Ovid that Venus's rhetorical persuasions to love do in Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Venusian discourse—the traditional carpe diem arguments of the male lover put into the mouth of the aggressive female wooer—is engendered by Adonis's active resistance to love, a resistance which is the major alteration to the source (Ovid's Adonis likes hunting, but does not object to love on principle as Shakespeare's does). Like all good imitators, Shakespeare enters into the same arena as his model, but does his own turn there. His version is very much his own, as Ovid's is his (the Metamorphoses do not lean particularly on the older versions of the Venus and Adonis story, such as that of Theocritus). In Ovid, Atalanta goes against the advice of the oracle in falling for Hippomenes; in Shakespeare, Adonis goes against the advice of Venus in hunting the boar. Atalanta's death results from the way that she does not resist love, Adonis's from the way that he does resist it. Put the two stories together and one reaches the irresistible conclusion that whichever way you turn love will destroy you. It is essentially something out of your control, a force that drives you rather than vice versa.

In both Ovid and Shakespeare the story ends with the death of Adonis, described as a pattern which will be repeated perpetually. This sense of inevitable future repetition is what gives the story its mythic, archetypal quality. In Ovid, Venus creates a flower (the anemone) from Adonis's blood as a ‘resemblance’ (l. 848) of her suffering. The passing of the seasons will be a figuration of love's sorrows; the flower symbolizes the transience of beauty. Venus and Adonis moves towards an etiology of love's anguish: ‘Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy / Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend’ (ll. 1135-36). Ovid closes Book x with an image of the flower blasted by the wind and shed all too soon; so too, according to Shakespeare's Venus, love will ‘bud, and be blasted, in a breathing-while’ (l. 1142). Adonis's flower is the purple of the blood from which it springs, the colour a reminder of the violence and death that will attend on love. Venus then plucks it: ‘She crops the stalk, and in the breach appears / Green-dropping sap, which she compares to tears’ (ll. 1175-76). This comparison between liquid drops falling from vegetable matter and tears reintroduces Myrrha, whose guilt and sorrow are symbolized by the gum that drops from the Arabian tree into which she is metamorphosed. ‘“Poor Flower,” quoth [Venus], “this was thy father's guise—/ Sweet issue of a more sweet-smelling sire”’ (ll. 1177-78). It is a brilliant variation: where Ovid begins his tale with Adonis as a son issuing from a tree, Shakespeare ends his with a flower issuing from Adonis, who thus becomes a father. Shakespeare's Venus acts out an extraordinary family romance. By imaging her lover as a father, she makes herself into the mother and the flower into the fruit of their union. But the logic of the imagery dictates that the flower is her sexual partner as well as her child, for it clearly substitutes for Adonis himself—she comforts herself with the thought that it is a love-token, which she can continually kiss. The fusion of lover and mother in the context of vegetative imagery makes Venus into Myrrha once again. It is as if, having slept with her father, the girl is now sleeping with her son.

In the next and last stanza, Venus flies off to Paphos, the site of her principal temple on Cyprus. The naming of the place takes the mythologically literate reader back to Orpheus's narrative in Book x, for Cyprus is the location of the stories of the Propoetides, Pygmalion, and Myrrha, the figures associated with Venus and with the rapacious female sexuality that Orpheus uses to justify his misogyny. Ovid explicitly states that the name Paphos derives from the child of the union between Pygmalion and his statue; Paphos in turn produces Cinyras, who, thanks to the incestuous union with Myrrha, is both father and grandfather of Adonis. Golding and Sandys took Paphos to be a boy (‘a Sun that Paphus hyght’, Golding, x. 323), presumably because they read ‘quo’ as ablative masculine in Ovid's line ‘Illa Paphon genuit; de quo tenet insula nomen’ (x. 297: ‘she [the statue] bore Paphos, from whom the island takes its name’), but the next line makes the child feminine: ‘Editus hac ille est’ (‘he [Cinyras] was borne by her’). Ovid could be deliberately confusing the gender—that would be in accordance with the sexual ambiguity of Book x—but it is more likely that ‘quo’ is a manuscript error for ‘qua’ and a girl is intended. The Renaissance, however, stuck to the masculinized name Paphus: Marston ends his Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image with the lines: ‘Paphus was got: of whom in after age / Cyprus was Paphos call'd, and evermore / Those Ilandars do Venus name adore.’¹¹ Whatever the gender, the identification of Venus with Paphos further embroils her in the incest plot.

If we are alert to the signals in Venus and Adonis that activate the other parts of Book x of the Metamorphoses, it becomes much clearer that this is a poem about transgressive sexuality. And since it is supposed to be an etiology of sexual love—the goddess of love's own experience of desire sets the tone for everybody else's—there is a strong implication that sexual love is always at some level transgressive. The broader Ovidian context reveals two persistent characteristics of sexual desire: it is bound up first with the polymorphous perversity of family romance and second with a dissolution of the conventional barriers of gender, for in these stories women take the active role usually given to men and young men always look like girls. The first characteristic is an essentially destructive one, associated above all with the Myrrha pre-text. The second, which is partly a function of Orpheus's conversion to homosexuality, is also potentially destructive, as may be seen from the fate of the singer at the beginning of Book xi. Orpheus's narratives may charm rocks and trees and birds, but they cut no ice with a horde of Thracian women who descend on him in bacchic fury and tear him to pieces in punishment for his attitude to their sex.

The girlish-boy motif also takes the reader to other parts of the Metamorphoses. Adonis is one of Ovid's many beautiful young men on the threshold of sexual maturity; like the sixteen-year-old Narcissus, ‘he seemde to stand beetwene the state of man and Lad’ (III. 438). Venus herself makes the link, first in her persuasion to love—‘Is thine own heart to thine own face affected? […] Narcissus so himself himself forsook, / And died to kiss his shadow in the brook’ (ll. 157-62)—and again in her final lament to the flower, ‘To grow unto himself was his desire’ (l. 1180). Coppélia Kahn sees this association as the key to the poem: ‘In Adonis, Shakespeare depicts not only a narcissistic character for whom eros is a threat to the self, but also a boy who regards women as a threat to his masculinity. But the real threat is internal, and comes from this very urge to defend against eros.’¹² Narcissism, then, is another aspect of destructive sexuality in Venus and Adonis. What is it that the lover desires? If not her parent, like Myrrha, then himself, like Narcissus—it is not a happy prognosis.

But Echo never gets near Narcissus; the physical interplay between a desiring female and a resistant male, the poem's body-contact, derives from neither the tale of Adonis nor that of Narcissus but another Ovidian narrative, that of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus.¹³ Golding moralized the fate of Hermaphroditus as a warning against effeminacy (Epistle, l. 116), but Shakespeare, I would suggest, read it very differently. If the perverse, quasi-incestuous aspects of Venus and Adonis are derived primarily from Book x of the Metamorphoses and the self-consuming absorption of Adonis from Narcissus, the poem's playfulness and delicate eroticism, its enjoyment of sexuality and the dissolution of gender barriers, owe much to the Hermaphroditus tale in Book iv.

The nymph Salmacis's wooing of the coy youth Hermaphroditus is a bravura performance, in which the norms of seduction poetry are systematically reversed. It is the boy who blushes and looks more sexually desirable as a result, the boy who has a perfectly-formed body resembling a work of art (swimming in the translucent water, he looks like an ivory figure encased in glass), the girl who hides in a bush and watches the object of desire undress to bathe. Both Ovid and the Elizabethans usually give the male reader the pleasure of a prurient gaze on the gradual stripping of Diana, Arethusa, and the rest; but here the tease is for the benefit of the reader (male or female) who likes fresh-limbed boys:

                                                                                                    and by and by amid
The flattring waves he dippes his feete, no more but first the sole
And to the ancles afterward both feete he plungeth whole.
And for to make the matter short, he tooke so great delight
In cooleness of the pleasant spring, that streight he stripped quight
His garments from his tender skin.

(iv. 421)

And in the scene of aquatic love-making, it is the male breast that is reached for: ‘And willde he nillde he with hir handes she toucht his naked brest’ (l. 446), the female who presses down ‘with all hir weight’ (l. 458). Salmacis ultimately achieves total intercourse with her object of desire (notice how the force which effects the union is ‘hir hugging and hir grasping’):

                                                                                                    The bodies of them twaine
Were mixt and joyned both in one. To both them did remaine
One countnance. Like as if a man should in one barke beholde
Two twigges both growing into one and still togither holde:
Even so when through hir hugging and hir grasping of the tother
The members of them mingled were and fastned both togither,
They were not any lenger two: but (as it were) a toy
Of double shape: Ye could not say it was a perfect boy,
Nor perfect wench: it seemed both and none of both to beene.

(iv. 462)

At one level the story is meant as an etiology of the Hermaphrodite. Hermaphroditus gets the last word—just as he, not Salmacis, keeps his name—and the final image is of enfeeblement, of the waters in which the union took place having the power to convert a man into a half-man (‘semivir’, IV. 386). This is the basis of Golding's moralization in terms of effeminacy. The description of interpenetration, however, with its wonder-filled sense of total coition, suggests not halving of strength but doubling of perfection. As so frequently in Ovid, the moment of wild passion paradoxically seems to outlast the subsequent stasis. This, we feel, is an image of how sex should be.

So it was that the Renaissance did not always read the hermaphrodite as a transgressive abomination. An alternative interpretation made it into an image of the complete union and interpenetration that Donne strives for in ‘The Extasie’: ‘the form of the hermaphrodite was uniquely that of perfect love because it alone imaged that mystical union wherein the two sexes became one self-sufficient sex that contains both’.¹⁴ The paradox of the hermaphrodite is even more condensed than Stephen Greenblatt supposes: in his essay ‘Fiction and Friction’, he argues that the discourses of hermaphroditism and ‘normal sexuality’ are ‘the same discourse, for the knowledge that enables one to understand the monstrous conjunction in one individual of the male and female sexes is the identical knowledge that enables one to understand the normal experience of sexual pleasure’;¹⁵ Greenblatt's sense of ‘identical’ depends on the Foucauldian notion of discourses containing their own opposites, whereas in the positive Renaissance reading of Ovid the figure of the hermaphrodite is more directly, indeed is precisely, an image of the normal experience of sexual pleasure. Spenser used the figure thus when describing the passionate union of Amoret and Scudamour in the 1590 ending of The Faerie Queene:

                    No word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt,
But like two senceles stocks in long embracement dwelt.
Had ye them scene, ye would have surely thought,
                    That they had beene that faire Hermaphrodite.(16)

It is, I think, highly significant that the story which provides the ideal image of union between a man and a woman is one in which the initial desire for that union stems from the woman. Women in both Ovidian and Elizabethan poetry usually have to be seduced and hence to some degree coerced—the dividing-line between the verbal coercion of rhetoric and the physical one of rape is thin, as Shakespeare shows in The Rape of Lucrece and the Countess of Salisbury scenes in Edward III. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus is a rare example of a union that is not tainted by the exercising of male power.

‘How does all this relate to Venus and Adonis?’, it will be asked. Surely the point there is that coitus is not achieved. Granted, Shakespeare derives the style of Adonis's behaviour from Hermaphroditus and the ‘woman on top’ position from Salmacis, but there the resemblance ends. The nymph's love for her boy is never aggressive to the point of grotesquerie, as the goddess's is in, for example, the stanza concerning her kisses:

Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast,
Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh, and bone,
Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste
Till either gorge be stuffed or prey be gone,
          Even so she kissed his brow, his cheek, his chin,
          And where she ends doth anew begin.

(l. 55)

But perhaps the difference is the point. The resemblance of Adonis to Hermaphroditus is denoted by his beauty, his blushing, and his petulance. The reader who recognizes those marks will perceive Adonis's potential to participate in an ideal Salmacian/Hermaphroditic union. But such a union never takes place—coitus only occurs in the form of perverted, parodic variations, as Adonis is nuzzled by the boar¹⁷ and Venus cradles the flower—because the partners are not equals. An oppressive power-relation has to exist: after all, this is a goddess dealing with a mortal. Shakespeare has some fun inverting the traditional power structure—Venus's problem is that she can't actually rape Adonis, as Jove rapes Danaë, Neptune Theophane, and Apollo Isse—but in the end the poem shows that a sexual relationship based on coercion is doomed. The inequality is highlighted by the difference in age of the two characters; one function of the allusions to Adonis's mother is to suggest that the sexual dealings of partners of greatly unequal age are bound at some level to replicate the archetypal relationship based on an unequal power-structure, incest between a parent and a child.

Venus and Adonis is a disturbing poem in that perversity takes the place of the unfulfilled Salmacian/Hermaphroditic potential. But stylistically it is a poem that bubbles along in the manner more of the story it is not telling than of the one that it is. Of the later poems in the genre, the one that is closest to it is not Barksted's prurient Myrrha, the Mother of Adonis; or Lustes Prodegies, but Beaumont's glittering Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, a narrative full of youthful energy and unabashed sexuality, of ‘lovers sweet delight’.¹⁸ Salmacis and Hermaphroditus achieve oneness because they are of the same age and the same kind (a naiad and a boy who has been nursed by naiads), as well as because the girl has attributes that are traditionally seen as male and the boy ones that are traditionally female. Their union is an enduring reminder of the creative potential of sexuality. By incorporating the tone of their tale, its lightness of touch and its delight in the charm of androgyny, Shakespeare makes his poem into a celebration of sexuality even as it is a disturbing exposure of the dark underside of desire.

Notes

1. The Fyrst Fower Bookes of P Ovidius Nasos Worke, intitled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into Englishe meter by Arthur Golding Gent. (London, 1565), dedication to Leicester, dated December 1564.

2. Hero and Leander, 1.231-40 is a translation and expansion of Amores, 1.8.51-53 (also trans. by Marlowe in his Ovid's Elegies).

3. Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1977).

4. Venus and Adonis, ll. 231-34. The poem is quoted from The Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986).

5. See, for example, the strong rhetorically-orientated reading of the poem by Heather Dubrow in her Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).

6. The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meeter, by Arthur Golding Gentleman (London, 1567), quoted from Shakespeare's Ovid: being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses, ed. by W. H. D. Rouse (London: Centaur Press, 1961), x. 577.

7. Should we think forward to Ariel's re-birth from a tree through Prospero's agency in The Tempest and thence to the other strange re-births of that play, such as Prospero's extraordinary image of his own labour on the sea-voyage?

8. Sandy's Ovids Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures (Oxford, 1632), p. 359.

9. Metamorphoses, x. 152. Latin quotations are from the Loeb edn. (London: Heinemann, 1916, repr. 1976).

10. Metamorphoses, x. 614-16, trans. by A. D. Melville, Worlds Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

11. Stanza 39, in Elizabethan Minor Epics, ed. by Elizabeth Story Donno (NY: Columbia University Press, 1963).

12. Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1981), p. 33.

13. This story has long been recognized as a supplementary source for Venus and Adonis: see, for example, Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. i (London: Routledge, 1957, repr. 1966), pp. 161-63.

14. A. R. Cirillo, ‘The Fair Hermaphrodite: Love-Union in the Poetry of Donne and Spenser’, SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900], 9 (1969), 81-95 (p. 94). Cirillo here cites Benedetto Varchi, Lezzioni (Venice, 1561). For a more complex and less affirmative reading of the hermaphrodite in The Faerie Queene, see Lauren Silberman, ‘The Hermaphrodite and the Metamorphosis of Spenserian Allegory’, ELR [English Literary Renaissance], 17 (1987), 207-23.

15. Shakespearean Negotiations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 77.

16. The Faerie Queene, III, 12, stanzas 45-46, in the 1590 edn, quoted from the edn by A. C. Hamilton (London: Longmans, 1977). The ‘two stocks’ recall Ovid's image of the two twigs growing into one.

17. The image of the boar kissing Adonis (l. 1114) is traditional to the story (it is to be found in Theocritus, a Latin epigram by Minturno, and elsewhere—see Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 140n.), but in Shakespeare it adds to the flavour of perverse, violent sexuality. Ovid's Calydonian boar also lies behind some of the details of the Shakespearean hunt.

18. Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (1602, attributed to Beaumont in edn. of 1640), line 254, quoted from Elizabethan Minor Epics.