Venus and Adonis

Critical Essays

Philip C. Kolin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781136744310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first collection of critical essays devoted exclusively to Shakespeare's first published work, his long narrative poem Venus and Adonis which established his reputation as the literary darling of London and the heir of Ovid. Particularly important is the book's coverage of the little-known presence of Venus and Adonis on stage.A s

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VENUS AND/OR ADONIS AMONG THE CRITICS

VENUS AND/OR ADONIS AMONG THE CRITICS

Philip C. Kolin

Venus and Adonis merits a special place in the canon as Shakespeare’s first published work. Entered into the Stationers’ Register on April 18, 1593, Venus and Adonis appeared in quarto predating the publication of the plays, though not their production, since Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, 3, The Comedy of Errors, and possibly Titus Andronicus were all performed before 1593. Happily, Venus and Adonis does not present the thorny textual problems of the plays; the poem was scrupulously printed from what must surely have been Shakespeare’s own fair copy, or manuscript that the play-wright-poet likely corrected and approved. In his 1992 Cambridge edition of the poems, John Roe relevantly asserted: “Because there are no grounds for believing that Shakespeare came back to either poem [Venus and Rape of Lucrece] with second thoughts … little of value can be gained by giving a full collation. There is even an argument for dispensing with collation altogether, apart from listing the substantive errors of Q1 (which number only two)” (75).

Shakespeare’s authorship of Venus and Adonis has never been in question. His prefatory epistle dedicating the poem to Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield, acknowledges the fact. In the spirit and language of high patronage, Shakespeare deprecated his own work—referring to it as “My unpolished lines” and a “weak … burden”—yet he assuredly christened Venus the “first heir of my invention,” dutifully announcing to the literary world his entrance as a poet. Although Ben Jonson caviled that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek,” Shakespeare’s classical learning shone through Venus and Adonis. Through the poem’s lush and arresting embellishment, Shakespeare attempted to “‘out-Ovid’ Ovid” (Baumlin 207), the most influential Latin poet in the Renaissance and the classical writer with whom Shakespeare was often admiringly compared. Significantly, too, Shakespeare chose to start his poetic career writing about the vagaries of love as “Chaucer and Spenser before him did” (Hamilton, “Venus and Adonis” 13).

Venus and Adonis was the early flower of Shakespeare’s reputation among a wide circle of Elizabethan readers, especially courtiers and students at the inns of court (Gent 722–23). Moreover, “the poem stimulated an extraordinarily rapid surge of excitement and emulation in all literary London” (Duncan-Jones, “Much Ado” 490). Demonstrating its immense popularity, Venus went through ten editions between 1593 and 1613 (six of them by 1599), and sixteen editions by 1640. Given the fact that the poem was reprinted so often, it is surprising so few copies survive. As S. Schoenbaum observes: “Multitudes bought Venus and Adonis…. No other work by Shakespeare achieved so many printings during this period. Readers thumbed it until it fell to pieces; so we may infer from the fact that for most editions only a single copy has survived” (Compact Documentary Life 176).

Although overshadowed by the plays, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which followed it by one year, are significant scripts in Shakespeare’s own creative development, a point fervently stressed by the critics who, starting with Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, saw the early signs of Shakespeare’s genius in the poem. In 1898, George Wyndham assigned to Venus and The Rape of Lucrece pride of place in Elizabethan poetry: “They are the first examples of the highest qualities in Elizabethan lyrical verse” (lxxix). In the mid-1940s, Hereward T. Price emphasized that while Shakespeare surely “borrows” from the pastoral tradition, he is “at the same time daringly original…. There is probably no other poem in which direct first-hand observation of nature has been used with such brilliant effect to create form” (“Function of Imagery” 289). Continuing the panegyric, J. W. Lever in the 1960s asserted:

These poems give a striking impression of the energy and range of the early Shakespeare; more so, indeed, than his first experiments on the stage. Written at a time when the theatres were closed on account of … plague in the capital, they belong to a phase of rapid maturing and awareness of latent powers. Into them was poured a ferment of intuitions, perceptions, speculations and fancies that had not yet found dramatic expression. (“Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems” 116)

Similarly, Nancy Lindheim stressed the importance of Venus and Adonis in the creation of Shakespeare’s art, particularly as “his earliest poetic or dramatic exploration of love.” She argued that the poem is thus a “pivotal work in its author’s technical as well as intellectual development” and “tonal complexity”; Venus and Adonis “integrates comedy with tragedy, parody with straight representations” (191). Superlatives have flowed from many critics, though not all, over Shakespeare’s descriptions of the power and pain of love. As one reviewer of an adaptation of Venus noted, “In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare combines erotica with brilliant symbolism and parallel evocations all couched in the most graceful, elegant imagery ever written” (Goodwin, “Irene Worth Brings a Love Poem to Life”).

According to some famous readers, the poem also reflected a tremendous change in Shakespeare’s personal development in love. In The Portrait of Mr W.H., Oscar Wilde identified a specific Elizabethan cohort of Shakespeare’s as the young Adonis and the object of the playwright’s eye:

Yes, the “rose-cheeked Adonis” of the Venus poem, the false shepherd of the “Lover’s Complaint,” the “tender churl,” the “beauteous niggard” of the Sonnet was none other but a young actor; and as I read through the various descriptions given of him, I saw that the love that Shakespeare bore him was as the love of a musician for some delicate instrument on which he delights to play, as a sculptor’s love for some rare and exquisite material that suggests a new form of plastic beauty, a new mode of plastic expression. (205–06)

Reflecting his own self-indulgence and fin de siécle emphasis on sexual pleasures, Wilde continued that “There was, however, more in [Shakespeare’s] friendship than the mere delight of a dramatist in one who helps him to achieve his end. This was indeed a subtle element of pleasure, if not of passion, and a noble basis for an artistic comradeship” (207).

Looking closer to Shakespeare’s family than Wilde did for a real-life person in Venus and Adonis, Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses offers an even more ingenious explanation. Shakespeare, 28 when he wrote Venus, was a man who was commencing his eleventh year of matrimony. Eager to display his learning by puffing himself up in his readers’ eyes, Dedalus speculates that Shakespeare was none too happy in that conjugal state: “If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame. She put the comether on him, sweet and twentysix. The greyeyed goddess who bends over the boy Adonis, stooping to conquer, as prologue to the swelling act, is a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself” (Ulysses [Random House Edition] 191). No less a person than Ann Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, who was older than he by at least eight years, was the impetus and model for Venus, according to Dedalus’ reasoning. However ingenious this approach may be, Venus and Adonis is much more than Shakespeare’s bildungsroman. The poem may not be the key that unlocks Shakespeare’s heart.

VENUS AND ADONIS AND THE PLAYS

Since Venus and Adonis itself is dramatic, the poem has been compared invariably to Shakespeare’s plays, early and late, by critics who find parallels, analogues, and illustrations of intertextuality everywhere. Arguing that the “influence of [Marlowe’s] Hero and Leander may go beyond the cult of the epyllion,” Clifford Leech suggests that these narrative poems “may have constituted a mode of approach that could be, and was carried on in the dramatic form” (“Venus and Her Nun” 250). For Michael Goldman, “Shakespeare’s non-dramatic poetry [including Venus] reflects his dramatic bent as anything about his life might be expected to” (6). In Venus, as in Lucrece and the sonnets, Goldman discerns “certain situations and arrangements of material which draw attention to what Shakespeare calls the ‘unsounded self,’ a condition of being that can be fully explored only in the drama” (10). Accordingly, the first chapter of Goldman’s Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama is occupied with the poems.

Significantly, then, Venus and Adonis seems to have been a governing influence on the plays, thus adding to the poem’s immense dramatic significance. Venus and Adonis has much in common, therefore, with Shakespeare’s early plays, especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Love’s Labor’s Lost, all of which were written close to the time Shakespeare prepared Venus for the Earl of Southampton. Nancy Lindheim believes that Venus came in between these “apprentice comedies” (190–91). Lever usefully generalizes regarding Venus’ relationship to the comedies:

The follies of lovers, and the graver follies of those who refuse to love, make up the fabric of Shakespeare’s comedies: Titania wasting her raptures upon a mortal; Lysander and Demetrius prating of reason… ; Silvius scorning Phebe; Bertram, another would-be hero, refusing Helena. In the comedies, tragic catastrophe is always potential, though happily averted. Tragedy is waiting for Adonis, too, in the inseparable Shakespearean antinomies of beauty and destruction, love and death, creation and chaos. (“Second Chance” 84)

Concentrating on one of the earlier comedies in particular, Price proclaimed that “A Midsummer Night's Dream is the most pagan poem in English literature, and in the same class we may put Venus and Adonis” (“Function of Imagery” 288).

According to James Schiffer, “Cousins to the aggressive Venus can be found in Nell the kitchen wench in pursuit of Dromio of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors, Helena in pursuit of Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and that very different Helena who substitutes herself into Bertram’s bed in All’s Well That Ends Well.” In his Shakespeare (1970), Anthony Burgess links Venus with The Comedy of Errors in their interest in natural, even “coarse” love. Certainly, too, Venus, like Dream and many other early Shakespearean plays, is set in a pastoral world of enticements and entrapments, a place Jeanne Addison Roberts calls “The Shakespearean Wild”:

The Wild World in Shakespeare’s early works is frequently a forest—mysterious, magical, and ambiguous. Elaborated or suggested forests occur in at least seven of Shakespeare’s early works: Venus and Adonis, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Love’s Labor’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and As You Like It. (25)

Aptly enough, in all of these works the hazardous landscapes mirror the erotic dangers awaiting the lovers who venture into them.

Several readers have identified common elements between Venus and Adonis and Romeo and Juliet, four star-crossed lovers to be sure, and Love’s Labor’s Lost. The infamous description of Venus’ “sweet bottom grass” (lines 229–40) is for Eugene Cantelupe “worthy of Mercurio” (144), and both Cantelupe and Peter Dow Webster (302) urge strong parallels between Venus and Juliet’s bawdy Nurse. Linking Venus and Love’s Labor’s Lost, Heather Dubrow finds that “By dramatizing linguistic behavior … [Shakespeare] is highlighting the psychological traits that it reflects—an issue that he was, of course, exploring at roughly the same time in Love’s Labor’s Lost and in so many of his later works” (Captive Victors 45). And Wayne Rebhorn contends that Venus, like Love’s Labor’s Lost, seriously questions, and even mocks, the entire world of courtly love (“Mother Venus” 16–17).

Perhaps an even closer kinship exists between Titus Andronicus and Venus and Adonis than between the poem and Love’s Labor’s Lost, a connection that goes far beyond what Walter Raleigh observed at the turn of the twentieth century: “His early play of Titus Andronicus, which is like the poems, shows how strangely hard-hearted this love of beauty can be, and makes it easier to understand how he was fascinated and dominated, for a time, by Marlowe” (85). Yet the influence of Ovid is even stronger than that of Marlowe on Titus and Venus. Both Titus and Venus, Ovidian in origin, contain rape (or attempted rape), transformations, heavily embellished poetry to express the deepest physical and psychic wounds, the curse of doomed love, and the powerlessness of gods and goddesses to protect.

The one later Shakespearean play in which critics most often hear echoes of and/or parallels to Venus and Adonis is Antony and Cleopatra. The connections between the early poem and the late play are palpable. Cleopatra, the priestess of Isis, provocatively dresses as Venus. Both femmes fatales, Venus and Cleopatra are witty, aggressive, bestriding the world of love like a Colossus. The Queen of Love and the Queen of Egypt radiate immense desire, simultaneously ennobling and destroying. Paradoxically, each undermines her lover’s manliness, and then apotheosizes him in a new heaven. Critics have compared the two couples, if only briefly—F.T. Prince (xxxiii); Heather Dubrow (25); and Hereward Price (281). Doebler wryly observes that “an even better parallel to Venus [than Falstaff] is Cleopatra, a glamorous tramp with a capacity for both Chaucerian bawdry and transcendent immortality of fame” (“Many Faces” 38). Schiffer is concerned with “the absence of the phallus” in both Venus and Antony and Cleopatra. Adrien Bonjour also traces numerous parallels between the couples.

Beyond doubt, though, the most impassioned discussion of the two Shakespearean scripts comes from Lever, whose thesis is that in “Shakespeare’s maturity he won through to the concept of tragic drama as a paradoxical triumph. It was thus that the Venus and Adonis myth received its full explication in the late love-tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra.” According to Lever, “Antony is Adonis allowed … to grow up [yet] … unlike the chaste, self-regarding boy, he willingly acts Mars to Cleopatra’s Venus.” And Cleopatra is Venus “In this lost paradise of her wooing of Antony [which] is comical and sensual, immoral and thoroughly reprehensible” (“Second Chance” 87). Ultimately, Lever argues, “Venus and Adonis, fallen and risen as Cleopatra and her Antony, live to triumph in the kingdom of the second chance” (88). The first chapter of Ted Hughes’ Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being is also relevant to a discussion of Antony and Cleopatra and Venus. Hughes “trace[s] connections between the Sonnets and Venus and Adonis, and between Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, suggesting how the group of works came to be the foundation of the mythic form of the Tragic Equation as it appears ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• General Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Venus and/or Adonis among the Critics
• Part II: Venus and Adonis and the Critics
• Part III: Venus and Adonis in Production
• Part IV: New Essays on Venus and Adonis
• Part V: A Chronological Bibliography