The Glasgow Review Issue 1
Venus and Adonis and the death of Orpheus
R. W. Maslen
Venus and Adonis (1593) is Shakespeare's cheeky and disturbing contribution to the fierce contemporary debate over the function of poetry. The poem was his first published non-dramatic work, an opportunity for the young author to drop clues about his poetic agenda. Fourteen years previously, The Shepheards Calender (1579) had trumpeted Spenser's pretensions to becoming the official Eliza-bethan poet laureate, with its echoes of Virgil carefully annotated in E.K.'s obsequious gloss. Shakespeare, by contrast, offered his patron a poem which couldn't be placed in any of the traditional generic categories, and which incorporated its own sardonic commentary. He chose a topic that allied him, not with Virgil, the celebrant of Roman nationalism, but with a poet who was banished from Rome, Ovid. And in doing so, he announced his intention to participate in some of the hottest poetic controversies of the 1590s.
Just as Ovid wove together the stories of the Metamorphoses into a complex web, so Shakespeare weaves together several metamorphic fables to construct his own imaginative labyrinth. The most obvious subsidiary fables he makes use of are the stories of Narcissus and Hermaphroditus.[1] But another narrative can be detected more subtly woven into the fabric of the poem: the story of Orpheus.
In Ovid's poem, it's Orpheus who sings the tragedy of Venus and Adonis, before being torn apart by the Thracian women. But Shakespeare's treatment of the story goes back to an earlier stage of Orpheus' history, before his marriage to Eurydice. Shakespeare could have found an account of Orpheus' early career in a number of places; but the place where the story cropped up most frequently was in contemporary defences of poetry. Apologists repeatedly used the Orpheus myth to argue that poets were responsible for the foundation of civilisation itself. Perhaps the most elaborate account of the civilising powers of poetry available to Shakespeare could be found in the third chapter of George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589). Here Puttenham describes the state of anarchy that obtained `before any ciuil society was among men', when humanity subsisted in a violent state of nature:
vagarant and dipersed [sic] like the wild beasts, lawlesse and naked, or verie ill clad, and of all good and necessarie prouision for harbour or sustenance vtterly vnfurnished: so as they litle diffred for their maner of life, from the very brute beasts of the field.[2]
It was the poets who rescued mankind from this bestial state, drawing people together into the first communities with their intoxicating utterances, and supplying these communities with the first politicians, the first lawgivers, the first official historians. Both Orpheus and Amphion are allegories of the early poets' powers of speech. Amphion, who brought stones to life to build the walls of Thebes, represents the poet's gift of `mollifying ... hard and stonie hearts by his sweete and eloquent perswasion'; while Orpheus, who tamed wild beasts with his singing, represents the poetic orator who `by his discreete and wholsome lessons vttered in harmonie ... brought the rude and sauage people to a more ciuill and orderly life'.[3] For apologists like Puttenham, eager to show that poetry could be subjected to the discipline of rules like any other social activity, Orpheus as the first administrator provided eloquent testimony to the fundamentally `civill and orderly' functioning of the poetic art - to its qualifications as a supplement to other kinds of state policing.
Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis inhabit a landscape that closely resembles the wilderness colonised by Puttenham's Amphion and Orpheus. Coleridge, the poem's most sympathetic commentator, said that Shakespeare wrote his text `as if he were of another planet'.[4] But it might equally be said that Shakespeare's narrator writes the poem as if he were peering through the web of Elizabethan culture at another age, an age immeasurably distant from the sixteenth century but intimately bound up with it. Venus and Adonis live at a time before history has been subjected to what Puttenham calls the rules of art, before the `rude and sauage' condition of humanity has been rendered `ciuill and orderly'. A favourite Elizabethan metaphor for history was that of a mirror, in which the contours of present-day events could be traced, often with disturbing implications, in events of the past. Shakespeare's narrative dissolves the glass that separates the violent pre-Orphean state of nature from the `ciuill' world of Elizabethan social custom. In doing so it exposes the rudeness and savagery that Elizabethan culture strove to conceal under layers of allegory and rich brocade.
From one point of view, Venus and Adonis are completely Elizabethan. Adonis wears an Elizabethan bonnet, and his horse sports the rich trappings suitable for the mount of a young Elizabethan aristocrat. More importantly, Shakespeare's narrator is a detached and worldly Elizabethan spectator who likes to flaunt his familiarity with the social and economic conditions of London life. He knows the legal scene, offering his opinions on the fee Venus' `heart's attorney' ought to charge for its eloquent pleading (335).[5] He knows the points of a good horse by the book, quoting almost verbatim from a contemporary riding manual when he describes Adonis' palfrey.[6] He knows the drama scene, at one point describing Venus' actions as a dumbshow to which her tears act as an ineffectual chorus (359-60).
Above all, he is a cynic. Like other spectators in Shakespeare's work, the narrator of Venus and Adonis finds his greatest delight in spectacles that involve cruelty, frustration, and especially violence. He is the kind of spectator who takes pleasure in blood-sports like bear-baiting and hunting, and who can produce sophisticated com-mentaries on the pain these activities cause their participants, as Jaques comments on the wounded stag in As You Like It; who would rush with Rosalind to watch a wrestler breaking the necks of his challengers, or enthuse with Puck over the murderous violence he has stirred up between the lovers in A Midsummer's Night's Dream. Venus and Adonis is the poetic equivalent of a blood-sport, with the same indifference to the agony of its victims that Venus attributes to the hunters of the hare. The narrator is not interested in the feelings of his actors; he's aroused only by the intellectual games he can play with those feelings, as when at the emotional climax of the poem, as Venus approaches the dead Adonis, he contemplates the effect of her eyes and tears `lending and borrowing' from each other as if in an Elizabethan money-market (961). At times a note of overt sadism creeps into his text:
O what a sight it was, wistly to view
How she came stealing to the wayward boy!
To note the fighting conflict of her hue,
How white and red each other did destroy! (343-6)
(my emphasis).
To this jaded narrator, who confesses that conventional love language bores him (841-6), the only interesting relationship is a mutually destructive one. He may be sophisticated in the ways of court and city, but he is hardly `ciuill'.
And his readers are implicated in his cynicism. When Venus tells Adonis he need not be ashamed to kiss her because nobody can see them (121-6), we, the invisible spectators, become voyeurs, sharing the narrator's jokes as we ogle the couple. The narrator keeps re-minding us of our complicity, with cries of `Look' and `Lo'; and if at first this voyeurism seems no more than a harmless game, it soon becomes less comfortable, more openly an act of aggression committed on the actors.
Shakespeare's text can be broadly divided into two halves. In the first half, Venus tries with increasing desperation to entice Adonis into sex. The language she uses is a giddyingly inventive display of familiar Petrarchan tropes. She bombards him with oxymorons involving hot ice, showers him with floral metaphors, launches into an extended variation on the old carpe diem theme, cracks the familiar puns about harts and deer, and interpolates a parodic passage where she inscribes herself as a Petrarchan mistress, the Laura of an inverted sonnet-sequence composed by Laura herself (139-50). Venus seems to have imaginative control over her own body, putting it through whatever changes she pleases, making it heavy enough to need trees to support it, then giving the violets she lies on the strength of trees (152). For all its desperation, the first half is energetic and hopeful, emphasising Adonis' youth, Venus' constantly self-renewing flesh, and the sexual pride of the courting horses, who inject new life into Venus' own courtship just as she's running out of ideas.
But at the centre of the poem comes a change of mood. Adonis announces that he intends to hunt the boar tomorrow. Venus collapses with the boy on top of her, and there follows what ought to be the sexual climax of Venus' wooing. But all Venus gets from the encounter is frustration: `all is imaginary she doth prove', the narrator tells us (597), and compares her frustration to that of the birds who tried to peck at Zeuxis' temptingly painted grapes and found them to have no substance (601-4). After this the poem is wrapped in gathering gloom, a kind of post-coital lassitude rendered the gloomier because there has been no coitus. In the second half of the poem Venus speaks of fear, the fear of the boar and the terror of the hunted hare. Death, which has been a shadowy presence throughout the first half, becomes the tyrant of the second. Instead of urging Adonis to beget, Venus warns him that he will be murdering his own posterity if he fails to make love (757-60). The youthfulness which had been described in such vital terms in the first half, able to `drive infection from the dangerous year' (508), suddenly finds itself subjected to more infections than it can hope to cure:
As burning fevers, agues pale and faint,
Life-poisoning pestilence and frenzies wood,
The marrow-eating sickness whose attaint
Disorder breeds by heating of the blood (739-42).
If, as scholars have argued, the poem was written while the London theatres were closed because of plague, Shakespeare could hardly have given contemporary readers a more shocking reminder of the powerlessness of poetic discourse.
At the same time Venus loses control over her body. As she hurries through the woods after the sound of Adonis' horn, her body is subjected to the intrusive gropings of bushes: `Some catch her by the neck, some kiss her face, / Some twine about her thigh to make her stay' (872-3). The elaborate mythical structure she wove in the first half of the poem is abruptly unwoven. The second half is full of metaphors of unweaving; terrifying expansions of the oxymorons beloved of the petrarchans. The hare `turns, and returns' in the `labyrinth' of its flight (704, 684). Later, Venus re-enacts the flight of the hare as she searches for Adonis (`She treads the path that she untreads again.' [908]). Later still, in her efforts to persuade herself that Adonis is alive and well, she tells herself story after story, each one less convincing than the last: `Now she unweaves the web that she hath wrought' (991). By this stage, the mysterious power of poetic eloquence and imagination as it was celebrated by the Elizabethan apologists has been laughed out of court. The process of telling stories has become no more than a trick to procrastinate the inevitable confirmation of misery, a meaningless incantation to keep off the encroaching dark.
In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare weaves and unweaves the poetic fantasies of his contemporaries. The best known English treatment of the Adonis myth before Shakespeare's was the episode of the garden of Adonis in the Faerie Queene, the first three books of which were published in 1590. Expanding on a false etymology of Adonis' name, Spenser depicts the garden as a pagan Eden, a `joyous Paradise' constructed on the pattern of a female body, whose inexhaustible fer-tility nurtures flowers, throngs of babies and an unmutilated Adonis.[7] In the first half of Shakespeare's poem Venus struggles to create just such a poetic Eden out of the substance of Adonis' body and her own. She tells him that he is the `field's chief flower' (8), and urges him to join her on a bank of flowers, an enchanted circle from which serpents and other vermin are banned. She then proceeds to transform her own flesh into a metaphorical Paradise. Her cheeks become gardens (65), she assures him that `My beauty as the spring doth yearly grow' (141), and offers herself to him as a protective enclosure where he can shelter from the savage environment: `I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer:/ Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale' (231-2). But, as the central stanzas of the poem warn us, `all is imaginary she doth prove'. The landscape of the poem only ever becomes Edenic in the rhetoric of Venus. As the poem moves on, her rhetoric loses its persuasiveness, and a very different landscape emerges, a landscape which has more in common with Puttenham's pre-Orphean wilderness than with Spenser's idyll. Always present alongside Venus' imaginary Eden, always encroaching on its borders, is a savage environment where the sun scorches exposed flesh, and where forests seethe with wild beasts. As this wilderness emerges, its climate gets less Edenic. In the first half, Venus compares Adonis' breath to `heavenly moisture', a dew like the one God used to water the plants before he invented rain (62-6).[8] But the alternating weather conditions generated by the lovers' bodies grow steadily less moderate, passing from rain to parching heat and back again to rain in a bewildering flurry of changes. In the second half of the poem these changes become wholly violent, hurrying through the `wild waves' of the night (819) towards the tempest signalled by the `red morn' of Adonis' open mouth (453-6). The storm breaks during Venus' search for the boy (`Like a stormy day, now wind, now rain, / Sighs dry her tears, wind makes them wet again' [965-6]), and her discovery of his body unleashes a climactic earthquake: `As when the wind imprison'd in the ground, / Struggling for passage, earth's foundation shakes' (1046-7). Where Puttenham's Amphion brought stones to life with his poetry and used them to found a city, by the end of Shakespeare's poem the earth itself has been shaken to the foundation. And Venus' final prophecy bequeaths the same turbulent climate to future societies, whose sexual alliances will `bud, and be blasted in a breathing while' (1141).
In the same way, the text reverses Orpheus' transformation of `brute beasts' into civilised human beings. Shakespeare's works are full of animals, but not even King Lear has such a high proportion of beasts to humans as Venus and Adonis. The animals range from horse and hare to lions, tigers, bears and boars; and these beasts repeatedly swap characteristics with people. Adonis becomes a deer, a `dive-dapper', a snarling wolf, while Venus changes into a vulture, a pregnant doe, a snail, a boar, a falcon, until the dividing line between humans and `beasts of the field' becomes as imprecise as it was in Puttenham's state of nature. Even as she promises to protect the boy from serpents, Venus transforms herself into the most terrifyingly voracious eagle the Elizabethans had ever read about, who `Tires with her beak on feathers, flesh and bone' (56). This eagle either has not yet assumed its emblematic function as a royal bird, or else must act as emblem for a very violent and barbaric sort of royalty. Ascham, Gosson and others warned that erotic poetry subjected its readers to a Circean metamorphosis from humanity to bestiality. Shakespeare's poem makes explicit what Ascham and Gosson imply: that the human body trembles on the borderline between beast and rational being.
At the same time, the closer one looks into the text, the more disruptively it seems to parody the posturings of contemporary apologists. Even the Latin motto Shakespeare prefixes to the poem is ironised by the narrative that follows it. In Marlowe's translation the lines read:
Let base-conceited wits admire vile things:
Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muse's springs.[9]
Outside their context in Ovid's Amores these lines sound like an arrogant repudiation of `inferior' art (although in Ovid's elegy they form part of a witty demolition of poetic hierarchies). But in Shakespeare's poem Phoebus is only one of the aggressive inhabitants of the pre-Orphean wilderness. The first we see of him, he is blushing violently and breaking away from a weeping woman:
Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn. (1-2).
This sounds suspiciously like the aftermath of a rape, the same kind of sexual violence that leads the boar to gore Adonis at the end of the poem, or which generates Venus' mutation into the eagle. When Apollo reappears a few stanzas later he's as randy as ever, this time lusting after Venus, and prepared, without any of the misgivings that afflicted Phoebus in the Metamorphoses, to let Adonis guide his chariot like a second Phaethon, while he takes his pleasure for the second time that day (177-80). In this poem the classical patron of the poetic art is an irresponsible lecher.
The other gods are equally savage. The god of war spends his time in violent conquest, before being reduced to slavery in his turn by Venus (97-102). The moon goddess, who had so often stood in for Queen Elizabeth, proves as unstable as any of the others; in her jealousy of Adonis she bribes the destinies to make beauty `subject to the tyranny / Of mad mischances and much misery' (737-8). No more gods are mentioned. There is no overruling authority, no Jove or Nature to make up for the demotion of the lesser gods; and Shakespeare's `tyranny / Of mad mischances' has none of the compensatory `eternity in mutability' Spenser placed at the heart of the garden of Adonis.[10] In place of the dignified Olympian structure implied by the poem's Latin motto, the mocking narrator presides over a text that disintegrates into an unruly brawl. And his interpolations keep drawing unnerving parallels between this brawl and conditions in his own culture; a culture that constructed an elaborate mythology of its own stability, which Shakespeare's alternative mythology system-atically demolishes.
Shakespeare's poem has no context. Few characters apart from Venus and Adonis themselves are given names. The genealogy of the protagonists is never mentioned, and the land they find themselves in is nameless, in marked contrast to Spenser's Faerie land, or Lodge's Isis, or Marlowe's Sestos.[11] The struggles in the text take place in a topographical and historical vacuum, outside the orderly records of Elizabethan classicists and chroniclers. Venus and Adonis are dislocated, in fact, from all the verbal conventions that give a semblance of structure to Elizabethan affairs. Even their conversations are incoherent, not so much acts of communication as a kind of verbal autoeroticism, ornate variations on guttural moans. They never really talk to one another. The only form of speech Venus is really interested in is her own minute register of the changes that take place in Adonis' body, as it responds to arousal, to embarrassment, to violence; and the narrator with his rhapsodies over Venus' body shares her limited interests. Venus hardly listens to Adonis; she shuts him up with kisses (48) or with word-play (`Speak, fair, but speak fair words, or else be mute' [208]). When he does manage to get a word in edgeways, she first waxes eloquent about the sound of his voice, then faints dead away as he opens his mouth to speak again. In the second half of the poem the language of Venus loses all pretence of conveying meaning, as she quibbles with echoes which respond like `shrill-tongu'd tapsters' (849), or stops to talk with one of Adonis' dogs which `replies with howling' (918).
Running through this dissonant wilderness is a series of `speaking pictures', the verbal evocations of the visual which Horace and Sidney identified as the poet's chief source of persuasive power. Shakespeare's recalcitrant speaking pictures rebel against the functions they performed in contemporary theory. At the centre of his narrative he sets a picture whose power is solely that of stressing its own uselessness: the trompe l'oeil painting of grapes, that at once arouses and frustrates the appetites of birds. Earlier in the poem, Venus accuses Adonis of being another such useless artefact, a `lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone, / Well-painted idol, image dull and dead' (211-2). These two empty works of art mockingly enact the repressive uses poetry was put to in Elizabethan apologetics. The policing of sexual desire was one of these functions; Sidney's exemplary speaking picture was a verbal portrait of Lucretia killing herself.[12] Yet at the same time Sidney himself maintained that the advantage `speaking pictures' had over other forms of discourse was that they stimulated emotions in their readers: whether appetite, like the painting of the grapes, or battle-lust, like the old song of Percy and Douglas in Sidney's Apology, or sexual desire, like Venus' statuesque Adonis. For the moralists, poetry was designed to regiment and frustrate the feelings it played on: to arouse emotion only to crush emotion.
In contrast to these useless and frustrating speaking pictures, Shakespeare intersperses his text with very different verbal paintings. The extended descriptions of Adonis' horse (259-324), the boar (615-72) and the hare (673-708) all refuse to perform the functions the apologists would have demanded of them. The description of the horse comes just at the point when Venus' eloquence has failed her: `Now which way shall she turn? what shall she say?' (253). At this moment of creative crisis Adonis' horse snaps its reins and so lends a new energy to Venus' poetic improvisations. The narrator invites us to compare the animal to an equestrian painting, an idealised re-presentation that possesses all the points an artist would choose `when a painter would surpass the life / In limning out a well-proportion'd steed' (289-90). But this is no conventional Renaissance painting, gracefully instructive; it is the picture of something out of control, a beast that defies its master, crushes its bit, and gallops off in mad pursuit of a mare. Unlike Sidney's speaking pictures, it forms no part of any pedagogic or political agenda: and the `moral' Venus derives from it stresses the horse's exuberant resistance to the constraints of morality.[13]
The same is true of the boar. Commentators have repeatedly tried to read the boar as an allegory, whether of winter, of war, or of homosexual desire, but it resists moral or generic classifications. Venus recreates the boar verbally in order to scare Adonis from hunting it; but she succeeds only in scaring herself, with
The picture of an angry chafing boar,
Under whose sharp fangs on his back doth lie
An image like thyself, all stain'd with gore (662-4).
This vatic prediction is vouchsafed her, not by the Muses appealed to in the poem's motto, but by fear and `dissentious jealousy' (657), a form of imagination that cannot be trusted, since it `sometime true news, sometime false doth bring' (658). And like Venus' other speaking pictures, it has no effect on its audience whatever.
In fact, the deeper we plunge into the second half the more undisciplined and ineffectual Venus' imagination becomes. Her inventiveness comes more and more to resemble the hapless cunning she ascribes to the hare, which designs a random `labyrinth' in a vain attempt to elude its enemies. What Venus says of the hare is equally true of herself: `Danger deviseth shifts, wit waits on fear' (690). The creative intelligence that Venus shares with the hare, the wit that `waits on fear', has little in common with the semi-divine `erected wit' that governs Sidney's aristocratic poet.[14] It is the wit of the poor, generating the same fantasies that inhabit the streets and taverns of Elizabethan London, as the similes in the text increasingly remind us. After Adonis has left her, Venus begins a conversation with Echo. The poet who converses with Echo was a favourite device used by courtly poets like Sidney; but Venus' Echo is no courtier but a barman, who is well used to soothing the imaginative humours of `fantastic wits' (850). Later, Venus' fearful imaginings about Adonis' fate are nothing nobler than a child's nightmares - she describes them as `causeless fantasy, / And childish error' (897-8). The predictions she makes when she sees Adonis' hounds resemble the superstitious predictions made by `the world's poor people' when they see a comet (925-6). Venus started the poem as a strong-armed poet-queen rather like Puttenham's Queen Elizabeth; but by mid-way through the second half she has lost all her mythical and cultural potency and become as helpless as the poorest of her subjects.
She herself stresses her own helplessness when she imaginatively evokes the ruler of this wilderness, as she approaches Adonis' body. Where Spenser's April eclogue concluded with a hymn to Eliza, the queen of the shepherds, safely inscribing the Shepheards Calender as a royalist tract, the highest authority in Shakespeare's poem is a vague and menacing shadow, a force that has no identity at all: Death. Venus describes it twice over as she hurries towards Adonis' corpse. At first, when she has convinced herself that the boy is dead, Death is a `Hard-favour'd tyrant' who drinks the tears of his victims (931). Later, thinking Adonis might still be alive, she abruptly changes her tune; in an outburst of renewed hope and gratitude she `clepes him king of graves, and grave for kings, / Imperious supreme of all mortal things' (995-6). Venus' two contradictory versions of Death mimick the sycophantic carollings of court poets, whose celebrations of the sovereign waxed more lyrical as their hopes of preferment grew stronger. But like his treatments of the traditional royal emblems, the eagle, the sun, and Cynthia, Shakespeare's treatment of the myth of monarchy itself has been drained of all glamour, all civility, reduced instead to the savagery of arbitrary power: a power that cannot create, only destroy.
In fact, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis enacts a process which is the precise obverse of the civilising influence ascribed to poetry in Puttenham's myth of Orpheus. If Venus and the narrator are Shakespeare's poets, their words and actions expose the barbarity that lurks beneath the elegant surface of Elizabethan court culture. And the poem's commentator recognises this fact. As Venus composes her seductive poetry, Adonis acts as her surly critic, a disgruntled version of Spenser's E.K., who fails miserably to respond to the force of poetic discourse. He tells her that her fictions are hackneyed and unprofitable (`this idle theme, this bootless chat' [422]). He informs her, as Ascham or Gosson might have done, that her eroticism is unwholesome for adolescents (524-8)); tries to cut short her endless story-telling (716); and finally launches into an extended attack on her ideological stance, made up of phrases that might have been culled from the works of the `poet-haters'. Her discourse is the song of a mermaid or siren, which incites its hearers to lust rather than rational love; her poetry is made up of `forged lies' (804) and offensive to chaste ears. However redundant Adonis' distinction between lust and love may be, it incorporates one insight which the poem bears out: that Venus' poetry represents just one more effort to gain power, and that her wit fails to hide the fact that she serves a `hot tyrant' who is potentially as destructive as Death (797). From the beginning of the poem, Venus was at her most savage when she came closest to getting what she wanted:
Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil,
And careless lust stirs up a desperate courage,
Planting oblivion, beating reason back,
Forgetting shame's pure blush and honour's wrack (555-8).
Where Orpheus tamed the bestial hearts of wild men, Venus urges a return to bestial action; where Puttenham's early poets planted the artificial memory of history, Venus plants `oblivion'.
Venus is no Orpheus; but then, neither is the frigid Adonis. Standing over his corpse, Venus finds herself quite incapable of giving an accurate account of his death; far less of his life, which is much less verifiable. Like distorted glasses, her tears make his wounds look twice as bad as they are; she therefore seeks to console herself by mythologising his biography. As she narrates her own version of his history she transforms him into a voiceless Orpheus, taming wild animals wherever he went. `To see his face the lion walked along / Behind some hedge, because he would not fear him', she croons (1093-4), and we might be inclined to believe her, if we didn't remember her terror when she found he was hunting `the blunt boar, rough bear, or lion proud' (884). In Shakespeare's text, myth is no allegory of actual events but a falsification of history, a consoling lie designed to conceal the `black Chaos' that underlies the veneer of historical order.
The implications of this go far beyond a critique of Elizabethan poetic theory. After all, Queen Elizabeth herself was to a great extent a construct of poetic myth-making. It's always tempting when confronted with a powerful queen in Elizabethan poetry to transform her into one of the many aspects of Elizabeth. The problem with Shakespeare's Venus is that she seems to present the queen and sexual politics at court in such a darkly satirical light. Yet the more one looks at the poetry of the 1590s, with its blossoming of satire in verse and prose, the less unlikely such a reading looks. Two years before Shakespeare published his poem, the patriotic Spenser produced his most satirical collection of verse, the Complaints (1591). One of the poems in the collection, The Teares of the Muses, recounts a reversal of the civilising process very like the descent into savagery enacted in Venus and Adonis. One after another the Muses complain that their verses have lost their potency and that the social structure is collapsing as a result. The one hope they have of reversing the process of degeneration is a queen called Pandora. Of course, officially speaking, the name Pandora as applied to Elizabeth could only invoke its most complimentary etymological derivation. But Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland shows that he knew the myth of Epimetheus very well, and was fully aware that Pandora did not bring civilisation to early mankind, but `black Chaos' (he doesn't mention hope).[15] Might he be insinuating that Elizabeth/Pandora is the cause of, as well as the potential solution to, the collapse of Elizabethan court culture?
By the 1590s, the rich poetic mythology that had been woven into Elizabethan culture, and which had looked so alluring at the time Spenser wrote the Shepheards Calender, seems to have begun to fray and fall apart. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis wittily charts that disintegration. And it ends with an echo of the myth that had been most closely identified with the reign of Elizabeth: that of Astraea. The English queen was said to be the reincarnation of Astraea, dedicated to restoring the Golden Age on Earth.[16] But Shakespeare's poem ends like the beginning of Juvenal's sixth satire, with a disappointed and bitter goddess - no longer the goddess of justice, nor even effectively the goddess of love - retiring in disgust from a wilderness in which she no longer has a place.
Notes
[1] For Shakespeare's use of the fable of Hermaphroditus, see the Arden Edition of The Poems, ed. F.T. Prince (London: Methuen, 1960), Introduction and Appendix I. All references to Venus and Adonis are taken from this edition. For allusions to the fable of Narcissus, see Prince, p. 12, l. 157-62, and pp. 47-8, l. 829-52
[2] The Arte of English Poesie (London: Richard Field, 1589) fols. 3-4.
[3] Puttenham, fol. 4.
[4] The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge (London: William Pickering, 1836), vol 2, p. 59.
[5] `Her pleading hath deserv'd a better fee'. l. 609.
[6] See Prince, p. 19, l. 295-8, fn.
[7] The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (New York and London: Longman, 1977), III vi 29-50; `joyous Paradize', III vi 29.
[8] Genesis, 2,6.
[9] The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 135, l. 35-6.
[10] Spenser's Adonis is said to be `eterne in mutabilitie'. III vi 47.
[11] A bank of the river Isis is the setting for Lodge's Glaucus and Scilla (1589); Sestos is the setting for Marlowe's Hero and Leander (1598). Both poems can be found in Elizabethan Minor Epics, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963).
[12] See An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Nelson, 1965), p. 102, l. 21-37.
[13] `The sea hath bounds, but deep desire hath none;
Therefore no marvel though thy horse be gone.' l. 389-90.
[14] See Shepherd, p. 101, l. 14-24.
[15] See A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), p. 2.
[16] For an account of Elizabeth as Astraea and of Juvenal's treatment of Astraea in his sixth satire, see Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (Sussex: Harvester, 1983), Chapter 6.