³⁴ See Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1995): ‘[l]et us reiterate that Marx did not produce a theory of “class consciousness” here, in the sense of a system of ideas which might be said, consciously or otherwise, to express the “aims” of a particular class. He produced, rather, a theory of the class character of consciousness’ (47–8).

³⁵ The question of the poem’s relation to Spenser has a long critical history. See Vickers, Shakespeare, A Lover’s Complaint, and John Davies of Hereford, 47–75.

³⁶ William Shakespeare, ‘Venus and Adonis’, in Narrative Poems, ed. Jonathan Crewe (New York: Penguin, 1999), 46.

³⁷ Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, 14.