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Shakespeare's Myth of Venus and Adonis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

S. Clark Hulse
S. Clark Hulse*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Chicago Circle
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Abstract

Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis—both in the specific way the myth is understood and, more important, in the poetic and conceptual forms in which it is cast—is rooted in the mythography of the sixteenth century. As in the attribute system of allegorical painting, the physical characteristics of Venus and Adonis reveal their histories and signify the alternately comic and serious qualities of love. The traditional plot has been scrapped, with sexual harmony replaced by strife and the poem turned into a continual debate over the nature of love. This debate is never resolved rationally. Instead, the multiple aspects of love are periodically condensed into unified images, which then generate further paradox: Venus versus Diana, freedom versus bondage, red versus white, fire versus water. This dialogue of images, a familiar iconographic technique, becomes a characteristically Shakespearean method of esthetic resolution, with conceptual relations to the primary forms of myth.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 93 , Issue 1 , January 1978 , pp. 95 - 105
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1978

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References

Notes

1 Orphic Hymns, No. 56; Theocritus, Nos. 1, 3, 15; Bion, “Epitaphium Adonidis”; Ovid, Metamorphoses x; also Cicero, De Natura Deorum iii.59; Servius, commentary on Vergil's Aeneid vii.761; Hyginus, Fabulae, Nos. 164, 271; Fulgentius, Mythologia, Bk. in.

2 Titian's painting of 1554, delivered to Philip II in England, widely reproduced in etchings, and now in the Prado, is suggested as a source by Erwin Panofsky, Problems in Titian, Mostly Iconographie (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 150–54. For a sharp rebuttal to Panofsky, see Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian, iii (London: Phaidon, 1975), 188–89. Southampton's role is discussed by A. L. Rowse, in Shakespeare's Southampton: Patron of Virginia (New York: Harper, 1965), pp. 74–81, and, more judiciously, by G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 33–34, 195–98. Other classical and Renaissance sources are examined in the New Variorum Edition by Hyder Rollins (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938), pp. 390–400; Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (1932;.rev. ed., New York: Norton, 1963), pp. 137–45; T. W. Baldwin, On the Literary Genetics of Shakspere's Poems and Sonnets (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1950), pp. 2–48; and Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, i (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1957), 161–65.

3 “Venus and the Second Chance,” Shakespeare Survey, 15 (1962), 81–88. See also Lever's review of modern criticism in the same volume (pp. 19–22).

Among recent discussions, Heather Asals' “Venus and Adonis: The Education of a Goddess,” Studies in English Literature, 13 (1973), 31–51, argues that Venus progresses from lust to love through a Neoplatonic ladder of the senses, even though the banquet of sense (11. 433–50) moves in the reverse order. Christopher Butler and Alastair Fowler, “Time-Beguiling Sport: Number Symbolism in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis,” in Shakespeare 1564–1964, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 124–33, offer a provocative numerological reading. Paula Johnson, Form and Transformation in Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 143–52, describes a climactic progression, akin to a musical crescendo or to the rhythm of sexual experience. A “radically psychological” reading of the poem is advanced by Coppélia Kahn, “Self and Eros in Venus and Adonis,” Centennial Review, 20 (1976), 351–71.

4 Richard Wilbur, Introduction to the Narrative Poems, The Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), p. 1401.

Steps in this direction have been taken by Lever and by A. C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1967), who attempt to deal seriously with Venus and Adonis as mythic rather than dramatic characters; and by Eugene B. Cantelupe, “An Iconographical Interpretation of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare's Ovidian Comedy,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 14 (1963), 141–51. Closest to my own conclusion is Norman Rabkin's in Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (New York: Free Press, 1967), pp. 150–62 (see below, Sec. in). Appearing after this article was completed, William Keach's Elizabethan Erotic Narratives (New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1977), argues that Shakespeare's ambivalence is characteristically Ovidian.

6 The schools of modern mythography are surveyed in Myth: A Symposium, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1958). Lévi-Strauss' structuralism is tested against older views of Greek myth by G. S. Kirk, Mxth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970).

7 Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Su-sanne K. Langer (New York: Dover, 1953), pp. 17–41; Jane E. Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1912), pp. 327–31; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke G. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 213–23. Frazer's flirtations with the Cambridge ritualists are examined by Robert Ackerman, “Frazer on Myth and Ritual,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 36 (1975), 115–34.

8 The development of allegory is examined in detail by Jean Pépin, Mythe et allégorie: Les Origines greques et les contestations judéo-chrétiennes (Paris: Aubier, 1958); it is surveyed by Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 203–13; Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1970); Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. Barbara F. Sessions (New York: Pantheon, 1953); C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), pp. 44–111; and Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 21–53.

9 Vincenzo Cartari, Le imagini de i dei de gli antichi (Venice, 1571), pp. 536–37. The etiology originates with Bion's “Epitaphium Adonidis” and is repeated in Jacobus Micyllus' commentary on Ovid (Basel, 1543), p. 243, and in Natali Conti, Mythologia (Venice, 1568), p. 230a. Its allegorical significance is expounded by Fulgentius, Mythologia (Paris, 1578), p. 136a, quoted by Giovanni Boccaccio, Généalogie Deorum Genti/ium, Bk. iii, Ch. xxiii, ed. Vincenzo Romano (Bari: Laterza, 1951), I, 152.

10 E. H. Gombrich, “Tobias and the Angel,” in his Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 26–30.

11 The XV. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, Entituled Metamorphosis (London, 1593), sig. A4r . This is a common understanding of the myth, shared by Geor-gius Sabinus in his commentary on Ovid (Cambridge, 1584), p. 419; by an early commentary on Bion (Bruges, 1565), p. 38; by Abraham Fraunce, The Third Part of the Countesse of Pemhrokes Yvychurch (London. 1592), p. 45b; and by Claude Mignault in his commentary on the Emhlcmata of Andrea Alciati (Antwerp, 1577), p. 288.

12 Micyllus, p. 243; probably based on Lucian. A much fuller account, based on Pausanius, is given in Bartholomew Merula's commentary on the De Arte Amandi, ed. Micyllus (Basel, 1549), p. 379. Theocritus, No. 15, describes an Alexandrian festival, cited in Lilio Gregorio Giraldi, De Deis Gentium (Basel, 1560), p. 397. Cf. Conti, p. 161b; Cartari, p. 553.

13 Genealogie, Bk. ii, Ch. liii, ed. Romano, I, 102. Boccaccio's source is Macrobius, Saturnalia, and derives ultimately from the Orphic “Hymn to Adonis.” Cf. Conti, p. 162a; Cartari, pp. 553–54; Fraunce, p. 45b; and Sabinus, p. 418, who attributes the allegory to Giovanni Pontano.

14 Metamorphoses x.737–39, Loeb ed., trans. Frank Justus Miller (London: Heinemann, 1916), ii, 116–17.

15 “Quod autem sit Adon transformants in florem, ob id fictum puto, ut nostri decoris brevitas ostendatur, mane quidem purpureus est, sero languens pallensque marcidus eflficitur, sic et nostra humanitas mane, id est iuventutis tempore, florens et splendida est, sero-autem, id est senectutis evo, pallemus et in tenebras mortis ruimus” (Genealogie, Bk. ii, Ch. liii, ed. Romano, I, 103). Andrea dell' Anguillara smuggles this interpretation into his Latin translation of Ovid (Venice, 1578), p. 186b. Cf. Regius-Micyllus, p. 243; Sabinus, p. 418; Fraunce, p. 45b. The garden of Adonis as a proverbial example of transience is cited in Erasmus' Adagia.

16 Lines 1–3, in Poems, ed. F. T. Prince, New Arden ed. (London: Methuen, 1960). All subsequent citations are to this edition.

17 The iconography of Venus is examined by Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology (1939; rpt. New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 129–230; Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1968), pp. 81–151; and E. H. Gombrich, “Botticelli's Mythologies,” in Symbolic Images, pp. 39–78.

18 George Wyndham, ed., The Poems of Shakespeare (New York: Crowell, 1898), pp. lxxxv-lxxxvi.

19 Fraunce, p. 45a. The etymology derives from Hesiod, Theogony, II. 188–204, allegorized by Fulgentius, Mythologia, p. 135b.

20 Micyllus (p. 243) attributes the anecdote to a Greek source; Giraldi (p. 397) traces it to Eusebius and Augustine; Conti (pp. 121b, 230a) wrongly derives it from Metamorphoses x; cf. Cartari, p. 537, and Ronsard's “Adonis,” in The Pastoral Elegy, ed. T. P. Harrison (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1939), pp. 161–65. A. T. Hatto, “‘Venus and Adonis‘—and the Boar.” Modern Language Review, 41 (1946), 353–61, examines the boar as a symbol of jealousy, but ultra-masculine and opposed to Venus.

21 The conceit of the boars kissing Adonis derives from the pseudo-Theocritan “Death of Adonis,” accepted as Theocritus, No. 30, in the Renaissance; see Bush, pp. 54, 137, and Baldwin, p. 42. It was translated anonymously into English in Sixe Idillia (1588; rpt. London: Duckworth, 1922); cited by Giraldi, p. 374; and imitated by Ronsard and by Minturno, “De Adoni ab Apro Interempto,” in Epigrammata et Elegiac, pp. 7a-8b, bound with Poemata (Venice, 1564).

22 “Persona …. dubitàre potrebbe di cio, che io dico d'Amore come sesfosse una cosa per sè, e non solamente sustanzia intelligente, ma si come fosse sustanzia corporate: la! quale cosa, secondo la'yeritade, è falsa; chè Amore non è per sè si come sustanzia, ma è uno accidente in sustanzia” (La vita nuova xxvA, ed. Michèle Bàrbi [Milan, Hoepli, 1907], p. 67). The English version is from Dante's Vita nuova, trans. Mark Musa, rev. ed. (Blbomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973), p. 54.

23 J. G. E. Lessing, Laocoon, trans. Sir Robert Philli-more (London: Macmillan, 1874), p. 149. The very real difficulties in comparisons between art and literature are demonstrated by René Wellek, “The Parallelism between Literature and the Arts,” in English Institute Annual, 1941 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1942), and by Svetlana and Paul Alpers, “Ut Pictura Noesis? Criticism in Literary Studies and Art History,” New Literary History, 3 (1972), 437–58.

24 “Qualia namque / corpora nudorum tabula pingun-tur Amorum, / talis erat, sed, tae faciat discrimina cul-tus, / aut huic adde levés, aut illi deme pharetras” (Metamorphoses x.515–18).

25 Titian's Adonis-Cupid may also be compared with the figure of the dead Adonis in two paintings of the Death of Adonis, one by Sebastiano del Piombo and one by Baldassare Peruzzi, reproduced in S. J. Freed-berg's Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence, 2 vols. (1961; rpt. New York: Harper, 1972), pis. 200 and 481.

26 The rhetorical development of Renaissance painting is examined by Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poe-sis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (1940; rpt. New York: Norton, 1967); John R. Spencer, “Ut Rhetorica Pictura: A Study in Quattrocento Theory of Painting,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 20 (1957), 26–44; Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971); and, especially pertinent here, David Rosand, “Ut Pictor Poeta: Meaning in Titian's Poésie,” New Literary History, 3 (1972), 527–46.

27 Aeneid 1.320. The passage became a Neoplatonist allegory of the chaste Venus; see Wind, pp. 73–77, 85–88.

28 Regius (p. 239) suggests that Adonis goes to the hunt in pursuit of glory, while Sabinus (p. 418) concludes that Adonis' death shows that such weaklings should leave the sport to real men. Don Cameron Allen's study of the hunts, “On Venus and Adonis” in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959), pp. 100–11, has recently been amplified by W. R. Streitberger, “Ideal Conduct in Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 26 (1975), 285–91.

29 Hesiod, Theogony, 11. 934–37, and Plutarch, De lside et Osiride, Sec. 48, record that Harmony is the daughter of Venus and Mars. See Panofsky, Iconography, pp. 163–64, and Titian, p. 127; Wind, pp. 85–89; and Gombrich, “Botticelli's Mythologies,” pp. 66–69.

30 Lever objects that Plato's dark horse is vicious and misshapen, no fit ancestor for Shakespeare's stallion (p. 83). However, Achilles Bocchi, Symbolicae Quaes-tiones (Bologna, 1555), No. 115, depicts a bridled beast in good point as an emblem of contained lust, as does Titian in the sculptural frieze in the Sacred and Profane Love. Harington sees Renaldo's charger Bayardo as a symbol of lust in Orlando furioso, Canto ii. See Guy de Tervarent, Attributs et symboles dans l'art profane: 1450–1600, ii (Geneva: Droz, 1959), 418, and Panofsky, Titian, p. 118.

31 Metamorphoses 1.16–68. Cf. Plato, Timaeus, 32c; Macrobius, Expositio in Somnium Scipionis vi.24—33.

32 “At gravissimus & suavissimus scriptor Euripides multô etiam clarius demonstravit rerum omnium pro-creationem ex elementorum esse symmetria; atque vim illam sive divinam quem nascitur è motu coelestium corporum, sive naturalem vocemus, quae facit ut in hanc commistionem elementa ipsa deducantur, vel potius deducit, Venerem appellavit” (Conti, p. 125a).

33 A Platonick Discourse upon Love …in Explication of a Sonnet by Hieronimo Benivieni, Bk. ii, Ch. v, trans. Thomas Stanley (1651; rpt. Boston: Merrymount, 1914), p. 26.

34 “Icônes Symbolicae: Philosophies of Symbolism and Their Bearing on Art,” in Symbolic Images, p. 170.

35 A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (New York: Theatre Arts, 1961), pp. 116–17.

36 “The Argument of Comedy,” in English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D. A. Robertson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 60–61.

37 An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), esp. pp. 59–60, 104–07.