Abstract
In his verse to Shakespeare in the First Folio, Ben Jonson raised the question of Shakespeare’s learning in classical languages and placed him as a dramatist worthy at least of the greatest Greek writers of tragedy and comedy. Whatever the case may be, and however mixed Jonson’s touching and touchy tribute may be to his friend and rival, Shakespeare did show an interest in representing and reinterpreting antiquity. His favorite poet might well have been Ovid, whose tales of metamorphoses are as protean as Shakespeare’s reworking of classical myths and tales.
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Notes
Ovid, The. xv. Bookes of P. Ovidus Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into Englysh meeter, by Arthur Golding Gentleman, A worke very pleasaunt and delectable (London: Willyam Seres, 1567).
Jonathan Bate, “Sexual Perversity in Venus and Adonis,” Yearbook in English Studies 23 (1993): 80–92
Catherine Belsey, “Love as Trompe-l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995): 251–76
Gary Kuchar, “Narratives and the Form of Desire in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” Early Modern Literary Studies 5 (1999): 1–24.
Peter Hyland, An Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poems (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Dolce, Letter to Contarini, in G. G. Botari, Racolta di Lettere sulla Pittura, Scultura e Architettura (Rome, 1759), 3:257–60
Paola Tingali, Women in Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation, Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 141.
Ludovico Dolce, Dialogo della Pittura, in P Barocchi, ed., Trattati d’Arte del Cinqucento fra Manierismo e Controriforma (Laterza, Bari, 1960–62), 1:143–206.
Tingali, Women in Renaissance Art, 140, discusses the erotic aspect of Titian’s painting in Venus and Adonis and his other works. See Tingali, Women in Renaissance Art, 141–2. See also Mary Pardo, “Artifice as Seduction in Titian,” in James Grantham Turner, ed., Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 55–90
John Doebler, “The Reluctant Adonis: Titian and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 480–90.
For a discussion of Ronsard, Sonnet XC, lines 9–14, in this context, see Lawrence D. Kritzman, The Rhetoric of Sexuality and the Literature of the French Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 127.
For a discussion of Venus’ female independence in this garden, see Pamela Joseph Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England (University Park: Penn State Press, 1992), 253–57.
Christopher Hibbert, The Virgin Queen: Elizabeth I, Genius Of The Golden Age (London: Da Capo Press, 1992), 130–31.
Susan Doran, Queen Elizabeth I (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 116–17.
On the dedication, see, for example, Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 20.
Stephen Greenblatt provides a good context for Southampton’s life and the relation to Lord Burghley as background to Shakespeare dedicating the poem to Southampton: see his Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), esp. 228–30.
For an interesting discussion of this in the context of republicanism, in which he implies that Venus and Adonis is not overtly political but reads the poem as a critique of Elizabeth’s failure to procreate and to have the monarchy survive in contrast to the virtue of Lucrece set out in his later narrative poem, see Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 80
John Clapham, Narcissus. Siue amoris iuuenilis et praecipue philautiae breuis at que moralis descripto (Londini: Excudebat Thomas Scarlet, 1591).
Citations and quotations are from William Shakespeare, The Poems, ed. F. T. Prince (London: Methuen, 1960).
For a fine and detailed discussion of the relation between rhetoric and character in the poem, see Heather Dubrow, Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 15–80.
Gordon R. Smith, “Mannerist Frivolity and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” Hartford Studies in Literature 3 (1971): 1–11
Michael Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 12–19
Heather Asals, “Venus and Adonis: The Education of a Goddess,” Studies in English Literature 13 (1973): 31–51
Lucy Gent, “Venus and Adonis: The Triumphs of Rhetoric,” Modem Language Review 69 (1974): 721–9
Richard A. Lanham, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976): 82–94
Hallet Smith, “The Non-Dramatic Poems,” in Shakespeare: Aspects of Influence, ed. G. B. Evans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 43–53
William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1977), 52–85
Clark Hulse, Metamorphoric Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 143–75.
For some other views of imagery in the poem, see Hereward T. Price, “Function of Imagery in Venus and Adonis,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 31 (1945): 105–15
Robert S. Jackson, “Narrative and Imagery in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters 43 (1958): 315–20
Eugene B. Cantelupe, “An Iconographical Interpretation of Venus and Adonis: Shakespeare’s Ovidian Comedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 14 (1963): 141–51
Alan B. Rothenberg, “The Oral Rape Fantasy and Rejection of Mother in the Imagery of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 40 (1971): 447–68
Robert J. Griffin, “‘These Contraries Such Unity Do Hold’: Patterned Imagery in Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems,” Studies in English Literature 4 (1964): 43–55
Michael J. B. Allen, “The Chase: The Development of a Renaissance Theme,” Comparative Literature 20 (1968): 301–12.
Besides the contrasting positions of Lanham and Dubrow on the rhetorical relation of Venus and Adonis, see Robert P. Miller, “Venus, Adonis, and the Horses,” English Literary History 19 (1952): 249–64
Clifford Leech, “Venus and her Nun: Portraits of Women in Love by Shakespeare and Marlowe,” Studies in English Literature 5 (1963): 247–68
J. D. Jahn, “The Lamb of Lust: The Role of Adonis in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare Studies 6 (1970): 11–25
William E. Sheidley, “‘Unless It Be a Boar’: Love and Wisdom in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” Modern Language Quarterly 3, no. 5 (1974): 3–15
David N. Beauregard, “Venus and Adonis: Shakespeare’s Representation of the Passions,” Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 83–98
Wayne A. Rebhorn, “Mother Venus: Temptation in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare Studies 11 (1978): 1–11
Donald G. Watson, “The Contrarieties of Venus and Adonis,” Studies in Philology 75 (1978): 32–63
Lennet J. Daigle, “Venus and Adonis: Some Traditional Contexts,” Shakespeare Studies 13 (1980): 31–46
James J. Yoch, “The Eye of Venus: Shakespeare’s Erotic Landscape,” Studies in English Literature 20 (1980): 59–71.
Not enough has been said about rhetoric in this poem, although, as I have said, Lanham and Dubrow make contributions. Surprisingly, critics have said too little on the relation between art and nature, the role of mimesis, and the use of narrative in the poem. In part, my analysis attempts to contribute in these areas. For brief discussions of narrative, see, for example, Huntington Brown, “Venus and Adonis: The Action, the Narrator, and the Critics,” Michigan Academician 2 (1969): 73–87
I have not come across an argument for art as a supplement of nature in Venus and Adonis. For works that relate to mimesis and genre in the poem, and so are related to art as supplement, see R. H. Bowers, “Anagnorisis or the Shock of Recognition in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” Renaissance Papers (1962): 3–8; Kenneth Muir, “Venus and Adonis: Comedy or Tragedy?” in Shakespearean Essays, ed. Alwin Thaler and N. Sanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1964)
James H. Lake, “Shakespeare’s Venus: An Experiment in Tragedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly 25 (1974): 351–5
For a detailed view of allegory in the poem and its relation to Spenser’s representation, see Sayre N. Greenfield, “Allegory to the Rescue: Saving Venus and Adonis from Themselves,” in The Ends of Allegory (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 86–110.
Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), esp. 38
See Hadfield, 130–33. For republicanism in Stuart England, see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
“Sylvan historian” occurs in John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1820)
There are differing views on Keats and this poem, especially the last lines, even as a tale of the two Cambridges in a relatively short period of time, as can be seen in I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929), esp. 186
T. S. Eliot, “Dante,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), esp. 230
Douglas Bush, “Introduction,” in John Keats: Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1959)
Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963), esp. 510.
Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1984).
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© 2009 Jonathan Hart
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Hart, J. (2009). Venus and Adonis. In: Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230103986_2
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