[In the following essay, Halpern focuses on Venus and Adonis as a misogynist poem concerning female sexual frustration that places Venus in the symbolic role of the feminine reader.]

The prefatory material to Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis is a study in disingenuousness and misdirection, beginning with the epigraph from Ovid's Amores: “Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flavus Apollo / Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.”¹ (“Let cheap things dazzle the crowd; may Apollo serve me cups filled with water from the Castalian spring”). In what is at once a change of genre and a change of vocation, these lines apparently signal Shakespeare's conversion from popular playwright to classicizing poet.² (In Sonnet 111 he would similarly disparage his playwrighting as “public means which public manners breeds.”) But of course his abandonment of the stage was hardly voluntary; he turned to writing Ovidian verse in 1593 not because he heard a higher calling but because the theaters had been closed on account of the plague.³ Moreover, Venus and Adonis bears more than a little resemblance to the plays that Shakespeare seems to be rejecting. The poem divides rather neatly into comic and tragic halves, and the former of these explores issues central to Shakespeare's early romantic comedies. By depicting the sexual fascination exerted by a beautiful and androgynous young man, Shakespeare draws on the appeal that the boy-actors added to his crossdressing plays. Indeed, Venus' frustration at the sight of a physically compelling but sexually unforthcoming youth foreshadows Olivia's plight when confronted with the disguised Viola in Twelfth Night. Despite the Apollonian pretensions of its epigraph, Venus and Adonis is neither nobler nor purer than Shakespeare's “cheap” plays.

The suggestion that Shakespeare wanted to abandon a popular literary form for a more elite one is reinforced by the poem's dedication to the Earl of Southampton. Having deserted the crowd, Shakespeare apparently tries to accommodate the cultural tastes of the aristocracy. Yet if Venus and Adonis was meant to perplex and annoy the vulgar, it failed miserably. The poem was, in fact, immensely popular, going through sixteen editions by 1640.⁴ If the Earl of Southampton read it, so, according to contemporary accounts, did tapsters and courtesans.⁵

Shakespeare misidentifies not only the class composition of his audience but also its gender. The dedication to Southampton suggests an ideal or intended reader who is not only aristocratic but male. Recent critics of English Ovidian verse have had relatively little to say about the composition of its readership, but there seems to be a general if sometimes unstated assumption that such verse was written for, and read by, men. And there is good reason to think so. The humor of Venus and Adonis, like that of much Ovidian verse, is intensely and often viciously misogynist. Moreover, the English tradition of Ovidian poetry was fostered in the universities and the Inns of Court,⁶ exclusively male bastions that cultivated a homosocial style.⁷

While plausible, however, the hypothesis of a predominantly male readership is contradicted by most of the early references to Venus and Adonis. Contemporaries tended to depict Shakespeare's poem as the reading matter of courtesans, lascivious nuns, adulterous housewives, or libidinous young girls.⁸ In Thomas Middleton's A Mad World My Masters (1608), the jealous Harebrain confiscates his wife's copies of Venus and Adonis and Hero and Leander, declaring: “O, two luscious marrow-bone pies for a young married wife!” Conversely, in Thomas Heywood's The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607), Bowdler tries to seduce Mall Berry by reading passages aloud from Venus and Adonis.⁹ Young women were often imagined as hiding copies of the poem about their persons or rooms, and imbibing loose morals or illicit sexual pleasures from it. The most vivid portrait of the poem and its readers comes from John Davies' Paper's Complaint (1610-11):

Another (ah Lord helpe) mee vilifies
With Art of Love, and how to subtilize,
Making lewd Venus, with eternall Lines,
To tye Adonis to her loves designes:
Fine wit is shew'n therein: but finer twere
If not attired in such bawdy Geare.
But be it as it will: the coyest Dames
In private read it for their Closet-games:
For, sooth to say, the Lines so draw them on,
To the venerian speculation,
That will they, nill they (if of flesh they bee)
They will think of it, sith loose Thought is free.

(ll. 47-58)¹⁰

Davies himself, like the women he imagines, is rather coy here, for the very vagueness of his language prompts “venerian speculations” in the reader. What exactly are “closet games,” and what is the “it” about which female readers find themselves compelled to think (the poem? the sexual act?)? By implicating Venus and Adonis in an autoerotic, possibly masturbatory scene, Davies may tell us more about the way men fantasized female readers than he does about the fantasies of those readers; yet his lines reflect widely expressed anxieties about the effects of Venus and Adonis on women.

The reactions of Davies and other contemporary moralists and playwrights underscore the ironies of Shakespeare's epigraph from Ovid. While Venus and Adonis announces itself as an Apollonian exercise as pure as the Castalian spring, it is in fact a piece of soft-core pornography. While it distinguishes itself from “cheap” drama, moralists feared it would provoke the same kinds of lascivious desires and acts as did stage comedies. And while it poses as an offering to a male, aristocratic readership, it actually appealed to a broadly popular and (to judge by contemporary accounts) a largely if not predominantly female audience. As I shall argue, however, the ironies of the poem's reception are by no means accidental. Venus and Adonis is largely “about” the paradoxical status of Ovidian verse, which is at once a high literary form and a source of pornographic thrills. It is also intensely self-conscious about the effect of such verse on female readers.

John Davies' lines on Venus and Adonis open the way to a reading of the poem by suggesting parallels between female readers and Shakespeare's Venus. Just as Venus is captured or overcome by Adonis' beauty, so the female readers of Shakespeare's text are depicted as the victims of a somewhat involuntary eros generated by the poem itself: the poem's lines “draw them on / To the venerian speculation,” so that “will they nill they … they will think of it.” Moreover, the phrase “venerian speculation” indirectly compares the readers' imaginations and Venus' more literal “speculation” or act of looking at Adonis. Shakespeare's Venus is, in fact, a prisoner in the realm of speculation or vision. Overcome by Adonis' charms but frustrated by his lack of sexual response, she can do nothing more than gaze at him. “Be bold to play,” she urges, “our sport is not in sight” (l. 124). Later, she invokes one of a series of interlocked Ovidian allusions by comparing Adonis in all but name to Pygmalion's statue:

Fie, liveless picture, cold and senseless stone,
Well-painted idol, image dull and dead,
Statue contenting but the eye alone,
Thing like a man, but of no woman bred!

(ll. 211-214)

Adonis is, according to Ovid, the great-grandson of Pygmalion and the transformed statue. Venus' phrase “of no woman bred” may thus refer not only to Adonis' birth from the myrrh tree but to his more distant descent from a piece of female sculpture.

In John Marston's poem “The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image,” Pygmalion actually attempts to make love to his statue; he kisses it, rubs its breasts, and lies against it: “Yet viewing, touching, kissing (common favour,) / Could never satiate his loves ardencie.”¹¹ This scene depicts the power of the artwork as its capacity to frustrate the viewer—to provoke, yet not fulfil, an erotic desire. Here the viewing subject is male, and when Pygmalion berates his uncooperative beloved as “relentless stone,” it is clear that she simply materializes the spiritual qualities of the traditional Petrarchan mistress. Shakespeare's innovation with respect to the Pygmalion myth—as in Venus and Adonis generally—is to explore the “comic” possibilites of reversing this situation. Hence he places Venus in Pygmalion's place, lusting hopelessly after an unresponsive image—a situation which is highly ironic, since it was Venus who granted Pygmalion's prayers by transforming the statue into a real woman. Here she proves unable to effect a similar change, and the failure of her erotic power is thus matched by the failure of her metamorphic power. Ironically, the first half of Shakespeare's Ovidian poem depends on the denial of a wished-for “metamorphosis.”

The interest of John Davies' analogy, with which I began, is that it is subject to reversal: that is to say, Venus' sexual frustration at the hands of an arousing but unresponsive artwork allegorizes the plight of the female reader of Shakespeare's erotic text. As a mildly pornographic poem, Venus and Adonis is meant to generate some kind of sexual thrill or tension. But since it is, in the end, only a book, the female reader, like Shakespeare's Venus, must content herself with “venerian speculation” alone. The theological gap that separates Venus from the merely mortal Adonis stands in for the ontological gap between the female reader and the empty imaginations generated by the poem.

The misogynist humor of Venus and Adonis centers on Shakespeare's debasing and slightly grotesque portrayal of female sexual desire. The resentment of every male sonneteer who ever wooed a lady in vain doubtless found satisfaction in the spectacle of Venus, the very embodiment of female sexual power, grovelling helplessly before a beautiful, androgynous man. But Shakespeare considerably deepens this troubling strain by extending it allegorically to his female readers. Venus and Adonis, in other words, is not only a poem about female sexual frustration; it is meant to produce such frustration. Just as Adonis' beauty arouses Venus but refuses to satisfy her, so Shakespeare's poem aims to arouse and frustrate the female reader. If Shakespeare was himself no Adonis, his art produced a similar though somewhat mediated effect.

This somewhat peculiar allegory of reading becomes unmistakably evident in the three stanzas that occupy the numerical center of the poem. Adonis has announced his intention to hunt the boar, whereupon Venus, overcome with both sexual frustration and fear for his life, faints, pulling Adonis on top of her as she falls:

“The boar!” quoth she, whereat a sudden pale,
Like lawn being spread upon the blushing rose,
Usurps her cheek; she trembles at his tale,
And on his neck her yoking arms she throws.
          She sinketh down, still hanging by his neck,
          He on her belly falls, she on her back.
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,
          That worse than Tantalus' is her annoy,
          To clip Elysium and to lack her joy.
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.
But all in vain, good queen, it will not be!

(ll. 589-607)

Commentators on Shakespeare's poem have scrupulously avoided this tasteless passage. Venus' sexual pratfall, her vain attempts to coax Adonis into an erection by kissing him, and the crude sexual innuendo behind the figure of the useless grapes, are both socially offensive and erotically unappealing. Nevertheless, these lines offer a rather complex statement on the relation between eros and art, and manage in some sense to move through, if not quite beyond, their own misogyny.

At least three classical references, all of them more or less implicit, organize this passage: the Ovidian myths of Pygmalion and Narcissus, and Pliny's story of the competition between the painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios. All three, moreover, pertain to Shakespeare's extended allegory of the female reader of the erotic text. Pygmalion returns in the general problem of the appealing and unresponsive image, but in reversing the genders of Ovid's tale Shakespeare anatomically specifies the failure of the artwork: it lacks the phallus. The female reader who is somehow aroused by Shakespeare's poem will find herself in Venus' position, missing the member which, this poem assumes, provides the only possible satisfaction for female sexual desire.¹² I think it is safe to assume two things here. First, while Shakespeare meant his poem to be mildly titillating, he could not possibly belive that it would produce the kind of desperately intense desire experienced by Venus. Second, he surely knew that in the unlikely event that any female reader of the poem found it seriously arousing, she possessed the means to satisfy her own needs, and did not require the magical incarnation of an imaginary phallus. Nevertheless, the strategic absence of Adonis' erection locates the ontological lack structuring the literary artwork, and particularly the erotic artwork. The point is that literary imagination, without some sort of physical intervention, lacks the means to satisfy erotic desire.

This moral is reinforced by the allusion to Pliny's famous story of the Greek artist Zeuxis, whose painted grapes were so realistic that they fooled birds into trying to eat them. Zeuxis, who thinks he has thus won his competition with the painter Parrhasios, nevertheless finds that he has lost when he tries to part the veil covering Parrhasios' painting and discovers that the veil is the painting. The point of this little parable is missed, I think, if it is read as suggesting that the power of art rests solely in mimesis or illusion. For Pliny's tale suggests that the power of mimesis depends in turn on its ability to frustrate the viewer, to arouse a desire which it then does not fulfill. The force of art lies not its capacity to grant some kind of aesthetic satisfaction, but precisely in its capacity to deny satisfaction and thus assert its mastery over the viewer.

The tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios offers a stunning riposte to a Platonic ontology of art. For Plato, the mimetic work of art is a mere simulacrum, an empty shadow of the real. The painting of a grape is an ontological nullity in comparison with a real grape, just as the shadows on the wall of the cave are nothing in comparison with the real objects that cast them. Pliny's tale also contains a moment that manifests the merely simulacral status of the image. But now to reveal the image's emptiness is precisely to confirm its power. Zeuxis' temporary victory occurs when his grapes prove unable to feed the birds; and Parrhasios' ultimate victory comes when he subjects Zeuxis in his turn to the emptiness of the image. Indeed, a kind of metamorphic inversion occurs between viewer and object, for the unsatisfied hunger of the birds indicates their own emptiness in relation to the image, which is complete unto itself. In the paradoxical ontology of the artwork, it is the real birds who are hollow and the painted grapes that are full.

In Shakespeare's poem, of course, it is not birds but women who “surfeit by the eye [but] pine the maw.” Caught in the toils of the erotic text, the female reader is presumed to be afflicted with need, mastered by the mimetic power of a poem that renders her unsatisfied, empty. Earlier, the text seemed ontologically hollow in relation to the reader because it lacked the phallus. Now the text is full and the reader is empty. It is not the text but the reader—particularly the female reader—who represents the void of castration.

This ontological reversal is represented within the poem by the fact that Adonis, a mere mortal, triumphs over the divinity of Venus. I say “triumphs” because, paradoxically, in this episode of sexual failure or uninterest it is Venus, not Adonis, who appears more ridiculous. Adonis' presumed incapacity is balanced by his emotional self-containment, while Venus is made risible by the intensity of her unsatisfied need. Like the birds in Pliny, she is left absurdly pecking at a painted grape. Venus' “pining maw” has become the poem's primary signifier of lack.¹³

I remarked earlier that this episode provides an allegory of reading, but it is more accurate to say that its allegory concerns textual consumption. After all, the birds in Pliny do not “read” the grapes, they try to eat them. Earlier in the poem, Venus is likewise depicted as trying to “consume” Adonis sexually:

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 stuff'd, or prey be gone;
Even so she kiss'd his brow, his cheek, his chin,
And where she ends, she doth anew begin.

(ll. 55-60)

Venus as eagle is a frighteningly powerful magnification of Pliny's delicate birds. Her frenzied efforts at sexual consumption make her precisely into an image of the consumer of a pornographic text. Such a consumer does not “read” in the academic sense, insofar as this activity suggests some attention to the literary or figurative status of the text. Rather, pornography requires, at least at some level, a naive submission to the representational claims of the work. Venus and Adonis is, as I shall argue later, intensely aware of the mimetic claims of pornography. If Pliny's bird is to represent the frustrated consumer of the text, the text itself must aspire to the condition of a perfectly painted grape, a pure mimetic surface without textual depth.

While the passage I have have been interpreting is ostensibly organized by Pliny's tale of Zeuxis, it is also more subtly permeated by another, Ovidian, tale: that of Narcissus. Various commentators have noted the importance of Narcissus to Shakespeare's poem, but they invariably identify Adonis as the poem's Narcissus-figure. In so doing they are following Venus' lead, for she herself berates Adonis by comparing him to the self-absorbed youth:

Is thine own heart to thine own face affected?
Can thy right hand seize love upon thy left?
Then woo thyself, be of thyself rejected;
Steal thine own freedom, and complain on theft.
Narcissus so himself himself forsook,
And died to kiss his shadow in the brook.

(ll. 157-162)

One of the ironies of the passage I have been addressing is that Venus, not Adonis, now occupies the narcissistic position. For it is she who attempts to kiss a shadow or empty image in the reluctant Adonis. Like Narcissus, who wastes away while peering at his reflection, Venus “surfeits by the eye and pines the maw.”

In one sense, Narcissus just rounds out the cast of mythological characters who unsuccessfully attempt to embrace an image. In his De Pictura, Leon Battista Alberti employs the myth of Narcissus to depict art's attempt to grasp the world of alluring surfaces: “Consequently, I used to tell my friends that the inventor of painting, according to the poets, was Narcissus, who was turned into a flower; for, as painting is the flower of all the arts, so the tale of Narcissus fits our purposes perfectly. What is painting but the art of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool? (Quid est enim aliud pingere quam arte superficiem illam fontis amplecti?)”¹⁴ Like Pygmalion, who makes love to a statue, or the birds in Pliny who peck at the painted grapes, Narcissus falls prey to the power of the image and mistakes it for the real. He thus represents once more the ontological and sexual dilemmas of Shakespeare's imagined female reader.¹⁵ Yet Narcissus diverts the problem of frustration into new directions. In the story of Pygmalion, the spectator's desire eventually wins out over the coldness of the image when the statue is metamorphosed, with Venus' aid, into a real woman. But the tale of Narcissus reverses this plot, for here the image remains intransigently empty, and it is the viewer himself who is therefore transformed by his own desire. In Golding's translation of Ovid (1567), Narcissus perfectly reverses the Pygmalion story by becoming like a piece of sculpture: “Astraughted like an Ymage made of Marble stone he lyes, / There gazing on his shadowe still with fixed staring eyes.”¹⁶ Narcissus' tale differs from that of Zeuxis' birds as well, for after his initial mistake, Narcissus comes to understand that what he loves is his own reflection. But he is no less captured for having recognized the emptiness of the image, and he continues to adore it until he dies and is metamorphosed into a flower. Pliny's birds, one assumes, eventually abandon the painted grapes once they come to learn that they cannot be eaten. The birds, that is, are temporarily fooled by an illusion. But the desire of Narcissus survives even this moment of disillusionment and remains impossibly attached to its object. If Pliny's birds are captured by some ontological misrecognition, Narcissus' desire absorbs into itself the ontological discrepancy between spectator and image.

This difference between human and animal desire occupies Jacques Lacan at the opening of his famous essay on the mirror stage, where he contrasts the responses of a monkey and a human child when confronted with their images in a mirror: “This act, far from exhausting itself, as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it duplicates—the child's own body, and the persons and things, around him.”¹⁷ In this moment, which constitutes the birth of the imaginary, the child moves through the emptiness of the image, thereby incorporating the simulacrum as such into the structure of its desire. The power of the image no longer resides exclusively in its capacity to “dupe” the spectator, to make a monkey of him or her.

It is in this Lacanian and anachronistic sense that one must read the word “imaginary” in Shakespeare's line: “All is imaginary she doth prove.” Like Pliny's birds, Venus is duped into hoping for real sustenance from a mere image. But unlike the birds, she does not abandon the image once it is ascertained to be empty. Her impossible love for Adonis survives even this decisive proof that she can expect nothing from him in the way of sexual satisfaction. Here we discover the difference between an erotic ontology and a philosophical one. Desire sustains the reality of its object even when that object has proven disappointing or frustrating.

If Venus' continued attachment to Adonis, beyond any hope of sexual consummation, signifies a kind of enslavement and hence a continued degradation, the tone of her representation nevertheless undergoes a change. After this episode she takes on an increasing grandeur, becoming less a comically failed suitor than a tragically failed protector. Just as the unresponsiveness of his reflected image provokes a metamorphosis in Narcissus as spectator, so Adonis' unresponsiveness causes a change in Venus. It is as if these stanzas, occupying the very center of the poem, were the mirroring pool in which the two halves engage in a chiastic and transformative reflection.

The erotic ontology of the text, which sustains it beyond the exhaustion of its sexual use-value, also transforms Venus' role as symbol of the female reader. For the frustration of sexual need has enabled the emergence of a desire which accords more harmoniously with the nature of the poetic object. The failure to receive physical satisfaction from the text passes over into a state in which the text is desired as a simulacrum. In effect, then, this episode registers the birth of the aesthetic from the sexual. And none too soon, for from this point on the poem offers nothing in the way of erotic pleasure or titillation. As the poem metamorphoses from a comically erotic to a tragic mode, so Venus as representative of the female reader evolves from the frustrated consumer of a pornographic text to the subject of an (aesthetic) desire which incorporates the death or emptiness of its object. I am not claiming that this movement in any way mitigates the misogyny of Venus and Adonis. It may even be said to deepen it. The best that can be said here is that Venus transcends her own degradation. Like Narcissus' image, she is not depleted by being emptied out.

Notes

1. Ovid, Amores, I.xv.35-36. All quotations of Shakespeare's works are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, Harry Levin et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. In Amores I.xv, Ovid gives thanks for the privacy and leisure needed for lyric poetry. Early in that poem he thanks Envy for not “prostituting my voice in the ungrateful forum” (“me / Ingrato vocem prostituisse foro”) (5-6), thus clarifying what he later means by the “vilia” that please the crowd. Ovid, Les Amours, ed. and trans. Henri Bornecque (Paris: Société d' Edition des Belles Lettres, 1968). This reference to public oratory makes it even likelier that Shakespeare takes “vilia” to refer to public theater.

3. See, e.g., Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague, and Shakespeare's Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991), 17.

4. Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1987), 15.

5. In George Peele's Merry and Conceited Jests, Shakespeare's poem is read by “a tapster … much given to poetry.” Dramatic and Poetical Works of Robert Greene and George Peele, ed. Alexander Dyce (London: Routledge, [n.d.]), 619. Venus and Adonis is listed as part of the courtesan's library in Thomas Cranley, The Converted Courtezan (1639) sig. E4^v.

6. William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and their Contemporaries (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1977), 31-33.

7. See Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 25-37: “The Inns of Court as a Socioliterary Milieu.”

8. See the references to Venus and Adonis in volume one of The Shakespere Allusion-Book: A Collection of Allusions to Shakespere From 1591 to 1700, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1932).

9. Shakespere Allusion-Book, 1: 189, 177.

10. The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 2 vols. (New York: AMS, 1967).

11. John Marston, “The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image,” Elizabethan Minor Epics, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York: Columbia UP, 1963), stanza 20.

12. The image of the phallic text appears in Richard Brathwait's The English Gentlewoman (1631), which warns women against reading Shakespeare's poem: “Venus and Adonis are unfitting Consorts for a Ladies bosome. Remove them timely from you, if they ever had entertainment by you, lest, like the Snake in the fable, they annoy you” (139; quoted in The Shakespere Allusion-Book, 354). In Brathwait's imagination, Shakespeare's Ovidian poem undergoes something very like a metamorphosis. Brathwait's image of the snake at the bosom recalls Shakespeare's Cleopatra and her phallic “joy o' the worm.” (Cleopatra, it should be recalled, fashions herself after Venus in Shakespeare's play.) Paradoxically, then, Brathwait's warning constitutes a virtual wish-fulfillment for Venus, since the text becomes the living phallus that she longs for. The danger of the poem is precisely its capacity to produce pleasure.

    An interesting inversion of this problem occurs in Sonnet 20, which compares Shakespeare's “master-mistress” to the painting of a woman: “A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted / Hast thou. …” (1-2). Here, however, it is the presence, rather than the absence, of a penis which inhibits sexual consummation:

    And for a woman wert thou first created,
    Till Nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting,
    And by addition me of thee defeated,
    By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
                        But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,
                        Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.

    (9-14)

    The image of Nature as an artist or sculptor who “fell a-doting” over her creation recalls Venus' position as female Pygmalion.

13. The association of Venus and castration is made explicit by sonnet IX of The Passionate Pilgrim:

    Fair was the morn when the fair queen of love,
    .....Paler for sorrow than her milk-white dove,
    For Adon's sake, a youngster proud and wild,
    Her stand she takes upon a steep-up hill.
    Anon Adonis comes with horns and hounds;
    She, silly queen, with more than love's good will,
    Forbade the boy he should not pass those grounds.
    “Once,” quoth she, “did I see a sweet fair youth
    Here in these brakes deep-wounded with a boar,
    Deep in the thigh, a spectacle of ruth!
    See in my thigh,” quoth she, “here was the sore.”
                        She showed hers, he saw more wounds than one,
                        And blushing fled, and left her all alone.

14. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture, trans. and ed. Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972), II.26. Leonardo da Vinci probably has Narcissus' pool in mind, although he does not directly mention it, in the section of his Treatise on Painting entitled “How the mirror is master of painters”: “The painting is intangible insofar as that which seems round and detached cannot be surrounded [circondare] with the hands, and the same is true of a mirror” (Leonardo da Vinci, Treatise on Painting, trans. A. Philip McMahon, 2 vols. [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1956], 1:160).

15. The ontological dilemmas of the reader are suggested by Shakespeare's apostrophe to Venus at the end of the above-quoted passage: “But all in vain. Good Queen, it will not be!” (l. 607). It is no accident that the pretense of direct address to a fictional character occurs just at the end of a passage depicting the non-responsiveness of the work of art. Here, I think, Shakespeare imitates Ovid's apostrophe to Narcissus in Metamorphoses III.432-436, which in turn anticipates Narcissus' vain address to his own image in lines 477-479. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921).

    Shakespeare has in effect “split” the attributes of Narcissus between his two protagonists. Adonis embodies the problem of self-love while Venus represents desire for the image.

16. Shakespeare's Ovid, Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1961), III.523-524.

17. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977), 1.