“Those lips that love’s own hand did make”

Many critics are of the opinion that Shakespeare’s marriage was an unhappy one. Germaine Greer in Shakespeare’s Wife, while doing a valiant job of rescuing Anne Hathaway’s reputation, cannot even be sure that the couple shared any closeness or intimacy when Anne nurses her husband in his last illness, which, Greer argues, is probably syphilis. Stephen Greenblatt in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare entitles his chapter on Shakespeare’s marriage “Wooing, Wedding, and Repenting,” Beatrice’s words from a quotation from Much Ado About Nothing, and builds up a barrage of evidence based almost solely upon lines plucked from the plays, that William could not stand the sight of Anne. The bond, dated 28 November 1582, of the princely sum of forty pounds, to enable the marriage of one William Shagspere and one Anne Hathwey of Stratford, a record found in the Bishop of Worcester’s registry, brought together an eighteen-year-old boy and his pregnant sweetheart, who was older by no less than eight years (Pogue 59; Greenblatt 120).^[1] Since Anne was pregnant, the couple could not wait to call the banns in church on three consecutive Sundays: the period of Advent was to begin on 2 December, and in that period no marriages could take place (Pogue 59). If Anne had an illegitimate child, not only would she be a social outcast; her own right to get child support and her child’s right to inherit would be jeopardized (Pogue 59). It was unusual for a boy, not yet an adult, for that would come only when he turned twenty-one in the laws of the time, to marry a woman so many years his senior. Shakespeare’s father’s monetary condition was not good (friends Fulk Sandells and John Richardson had to step in to pay the bond of forty pounds), and it could not have helped to face the prospect of feeding an additional person. William, because of his young years and lack of proper employment, would not be seen as a good match. Anne, being an orphan, had, in fact, a small legacy left to her by her father and was independent (Greenblatt 119). It was unusual for pregnant women to be married at the altar—only twenty percent of women at that time had that distinction (Pogue 65). While all these circumstances have usually been interpreted to argue that Anne forced William to marry her, could it not be argued that it was William, no less than Anne, who was determined to overcome all these hurdles—parental opposition, marriage between a minor boy and an adult woman, monetary difficulties, lack of gainful employment—so that his pregnant sweetheart would not be dishonored?

After the marriage, relations may have changed between William and Anne. The newlywed couple moved into John Shakespeare’s already crowded abode on Henley Street, which housed, along with Shakespeare’s wife and children, Shakespeare’s parents, three younger brothers (the youngest, Edmund, being only a few years old), and an unmarried sister, Joan. As Greer points out, the abode would not have been either a romantic or a cozy one. John Shakespeare was a glover, and it was quite possible that the house was strewn with the objects of his trade, which included odoriferous, drying skins (Greer 104). William and Anne’s first child, a daughter, Susanna, was born some months later. On 26 May 1583, the records show that Susanna was baptized at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. The young couple would have had little or no privacy, and, two years later, the twins Hamnet and Judith were born. Henley Street became very crowded indeed and not a place in which a budding playwright could compose anything of worth. So it was that, having chosen the uncommon profession of actor, playwright, and, later, producer, the Stratford boy left his wife and his three children and set off for the glamorous location of London to pursue his ambitions. It was not usual for young couples with small children to live apart; neither was it common for those engaged in the theatrical trade to live in London without their families. Kate Emery Pogue points out that Winifred and Richard Burbage lived in London with their eight children, as did Henry and Elizabeth Condell with their nine offspring and John and Rebecca Heminge with their fourteen children. Pogue argues that Anne, a farmer’s daughter, used to the ways of Shottery, may not have been as accustomed to London life as Elizabeth Condell, an heiress who owned twelve houses in the city, or the Burbage family that lived on Shoreditch Road, an area full of theatrical families. Nevertheless, it was true that Shakespeare’s youngest brother, Edmund, lived in London along with his illegitimate son, while William, the successful playwright, kept his family in Stratford and moved from one hired lodging to the next (Pogue 61-62). It was also not common to have so few children as did William and Anne. As already mentioned, the Condells, the Heminges, and the Burbages had many more. So even though Shakespeare did travel from London back home to Stratford to visit his family and though his wife was not past childbearing age, they had no more children.

And then there was Shakespeare’s will. Shakespeare left all his property, or at least what remained after the payment of debts, legacies, and funeral costs, all scrupulously mentioned in the will, all his “goodes chattel leases plate jewels & household stuffe” (quoted by Gray 269), to his son-in-law John Hall and his elder daughter Susanna. The will mentions arrangements for a settlement, which included a “broad silver gilt bole” (quoted by Gray 269) for his other daughter, Judith, who was about to make an unwise match with Thomas Quiney, son of Shakespeare’s friend Richard Quiney. The match was unwise because Thomas Quiney was accused of fathering a child with another woman. For his wife of thirty-four years, Shakespeare left only “Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture” (quoted by Gray 269).

Against all this damning evidence, I should like to offer a poem, the “first heir” of Shakespeare’s “invention”: Venus and Adonis. This poem, published in 1593, about the attraction an older woman has for a youth, is, I argue, Shakespeare’s tribute to the time when Anne and he made love in the fields and woods around Stratford, and it perfectly encompasses both his attraction towards and nervousness about a powerful and single-minded older woman who resolutely wants her way with him. The Warwickshire countryside is omnipresent in this poem, and the abundance of natural images are Shakespeare’s tribute not just to the green and verdant lanes of his birthplace but also to those days and months of courting and lovemaking in an entirely natural environment. The portrait of Venus, with its acute sensitivity to natural surroundings, is a fond tribute to the farmer’s daughter whose life probably revolved around wholesome farmyard activities. It was a life in tune with nature’s rhythms. To make love and to procreate seemed to be lessons nature herself taught. Shakespeare may have had misgivings later; he may have outgrown his attraction for “[t]hose lips that love’s own hand did make” (Sonnet 145); but the urgency and sweetness of those initial meetings are perfectly captured in Venus’s ardent wooing of Adonis. Shakespeare’s ambivalent attitude towards Anne may be glimpsed, I argue, in the many-layered portrait of Venus. She embodies a candid, outspoken, no-holds-barred desire; but she also metamorphoses into a mater dolorosa who cradles her dead lover in her arms and acts with surprising dignity in the face of her sudden bereavement.

Let us look more closely at the poem. Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare’s epyllion or mini epic, the “first heir of [his] invention,” appeared in 1593 and immediately went into nine editions, so popular was it. It is one of the most frequently quoted of Shakespeare’s poems by his contemporaries. Harebrain, a character in Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (performed in 1605 and printed three years later), calls the poem and Hero and Leander “two luscious marrow-bone pies for a young married wife” (1.2.44-46) (quoted by Greer 190).

The source most commonly cited for Shakespeare’s poem is Ovid’s Metamorphoses X. Arthur Golding’s translation, which appeared in 1567 and was published by the same printer, Richard Field, who printed Venus and Adonis, says that this book is “reproving most prodigious lusts.” However, while the adventures of Jove, Neptune, and other gods in Book X are all about seducing young girls, this tale is very different. As Cupid’s arrow accidently grazes Venus’s skin, she sets eyes on the much younger Adonis and immediately falls in love with him: “The goddess of Cythera, captivated by the beauty of a mortal, cared no more for her sea shores, ceased to visit seagirt Paphos, Cnidus rich in fishes, or Amathis with its valuable ores. She even stayed away from heaven, preferring Adonis to the sky” (Metamorphoses 239). Initially, Venus is content to go about dressed like the chaste Diana and to hunt because that is Adonis’s favorite pursuit. During a pause in the hunt, resting her head on his chest and interspersing her tale with kisses, she tells him the story of Atlanta’s and Hippomenes’ transformations into wild boars in order to caution him against hunting. However, despite her warning, after she leaves, Adonis follows a trail, gets bored in the groin by a wild boar, and dies. Venus hears his cries from afar, beats her breasts, and tears her hair, but to no avail. She prophesies that Adonis’s death will be reenacted many a time in ages to come. From his purple blood, sprinkled on the ground by Venus, springs the short-lived flower, the anemone. Adonis’s end is as violent and unnatural as his beginning—he was born of the incestuous union of Myrrha and Myrrha’s father. Geoffrey Bullough cites two other passages in the Metamorphoses as possible sources for Shakespeare’s poem, the story of Narcissus and the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (Metamorphoses III 427-542 and 635-42). In Shakespeare’s poem, Adonis is compared to Narcissus, who prefers admiring himself in the water to reciprocating Echo’s passion, and in the story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (Metamorphoses IV 285-388) are the details of the aggressive female lover who takes the sexual initiative and the blushing, reluctant boy who continually refuses the woman’s kisses and amorous embraces (Bullough 1:161-76).

I wish to add another source not unearthed by Bullough for Shakespeare’s 1200-line reworking of the slight Ovidian tale of 85 lines: Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene Books I-III, which appeared in 1590, three years before Shakespeare’s poem. Greer points out that Richard Field, a Stratford man, whose father, the tanner Henry Field, was known to John Shakespeare, was the publisher of Venus and Adonis and of Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Field also published The Faerie Queene. Greer observes that, in many cases, the literary works published by Field were used as sources by Shakespeare: Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso for Much Ado About Nothing, Sidney’s Arcadia for the sub-plot of King Lear, and Robert Greene’s Pandosto for The Winter’s Tale (Greer 187-89). Greer does not, however, make a connection between The Faerie Queene and Venus and Adonis. She merely states that Spenser “influenced Shakespeare in many ways” (189). In the depiction of a tapestry in Malecasta’s Castle Joyous (The Faerie Queene III 1), a cloth of Arras and of Toure, which some critics conjecture could have been inspired by the erotic paintings and tapestries depicting mythological scenes in the Earl of Leicester’s residence, the love of Venus and of Adonis is described. As in Ovid and Shakespeare, Spenser’s Venus is older, more experienced, and somewhat predatory in her pursuit of the unsuspecting and inexperienced Adonis: “With what sleights and sweet allurements she / Entyst the Boy, as well that art she knew, / And wooed him her Paramour to be . . . So did she steale his heedlesse hart away” (The Faerie Queene III 1 35-37). Spenser’s Adonis is not, ultimately, unwilling to bed Venus. And he most certainly doesn’t make a hue and cry about the inappropriateness of their liaison. He is quite content to be crowned with flowers, to be spied on while bathing, and to be drawn away from his “Beauperes.” In fact, it is the added detail of Adonis’s cronies, a detail that does not appear in Ovid but does appear in both Spenser and Shakespeare, that suggests that this Spenserian bit of ecphrasis may have been in the back of Shakespeare’s mind when he composed his epyllion.

Shakespeare’s poem, however, is quite different from both Ovid and Spenser. As is the case with many Renaissance adaptations of classical sources, the Ovidian tale is combined with medieval erotic poetry. With a reversal of gender roles, the distant, unattainable mistress of Petrarchan poetry becomes the unwilling young boy, Adonis, and the hotly pursuing lover none other than the goddess of love herself. Shakespeare’s Venus uses the stock Petrarchan image of the deer to represent the ardently pursued beloved: “I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer,” she tells Adonis (231), but she is obviously more than the soft green grass he’ll graze on: if he is the deer, then she is the hunter. Katharine Eisaman Maus observes in her introduction to Venus and Adonis in The Norton Shakespeare that, while using Petrarchan motifs and techniques, the gender-specific roles of Petrarchan poetry are overturned by Venus. Rather than wait for Adonis to utter the catalogue or blazon of the mistress’s charms, another common Petrarchan convention, Venus does her own cataloguing and blazoning:

As is evident from this declaration, it is Shakespeare’s Venus who is the real eye-opener. She encompasses everything and, true to her mythical nature, is a bundle of contradictions. She is so light that, as she tells Adonis, “[t]hese forceless flowers like sturdy trees support me” (151-52); she is so strong that she thinks nothing of tucking Adonis under her arm before moving swiftly to a better location for dalliance: “Over one arm, the lusty courser’s rein; / Under her other was the tender boy” (31-32). And if Adonis struggles to be free of her iron grip, petulantly complaining, “You hurt my hand with wringing” (421), Venus “locks her lily fingers one in one” (227-28).

As I have written elsewhere, Shakespeare puts his classical learning to good use in the portrait of Venus (Panja, et al. 22-32).^[3] Contradiction is Venus’s middle name. In an effort to explain this, Pausanius in Plato’s Symposium refers to not one Venus but two:

“Popular” Venus, Venus Naturalis or Venus Genetrix, the Venus related to nature and procreation, is the Venus that Shakespeare initially portrays. He describes her in a series of images drawn from the flora and fauna that he would have been familiar with from his courting days in Stratford when a wholesome farmer’s daughter matched him caress for caress in the woodland shades and where their lustful young appetites would have been a reflection of the natural rhythms of procreation and generation all around. Venus’s appetite is as rapacious as that of a fasting eagle:

She describes her own body in terms of the contors of the landscape and the sudden, hidden delights it holds:

She can identify with the “breeding jennet” that makes no bones of its overpowering sexual attraction towards Adonis’s courser. “Seeds spring from seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty: / Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty” (167-68), she tells Adonis sternly.

To cut oneself off from breeding, as Adonis does, seems to be unnatural: “By law of nature thou art bound to breed” (171). His frosty, joyless stance is somehow against nature’s ways of generation: “Things growing to themselves are growth’s abuse” (166), Venus warns him. Venus opts for procreation and life as opposed to stillness and death. This is why she implores him to hunt for innocuous animals like the hare rather than the dangerous boar. She captures in a detailed description the terror of the hare continually zigzagging across the fields in an effort to elude the hounds’ keen sense of smell, evincing the sort of knowledge of woodland creatures that a farmer’s daughter like Anne Hathaway would share:

Much later in the poem, when she fears for Adonis’s safety, Venus is both falcon in her eagerness to find him and snail in her horrified recoil at the glimpse of his bloody, bruised body:

In fact, Venus is even able to identify with the wild boar that kills Adonis (even though some myths said that it was another of Venus’s lovers, Mars, the God of War, who took on the shape of the boar to kill his rival in love). If she had tusks, the intensity of her kisses would have killed Adonis. The boar’s penetration of Adonis was no more than a savage and clumsily fatal act of love: “And, nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine / Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin” (1115-16). Venus sighs and ruefully admits, “Had I been toothed like him, I must confess / With kissing him I should have killed him first” (1117-18).

However, despite the strident physicality of Venus’s energetic courting of Adonis, we do see a change come over her once she is separated from him. There is a pathos in the long, drawn-out suspense of her search for Adonis, when she does not know that death has already claimed him. She insults Death and pleads with him in turn, anxiously scours the landscape, and feels temporarily reassured when she sees the hounds with their “scratched” and bleeding ears, but she is ultimately confronted with the numbing shock of her beloved’s battered body. The loud and boisterous older woman hotly and sweatily pursuing a frosty young boy turns into a figure of quiet dignity as she says, “Wonder of time . . . this is my spite / That, thou being dead, the day should yet be light” (1134).

As Venus frenziedly catalogues the paradoxes love will henceforth encompass (“It shall be fickle, false, and full of fraud . . . / It shall be sparing and too full of riot . . . / It shall be raging-mad and silly-mild; / Make the young old, the old becomes a child” [1141ff]), we realize that she has already incorporated all these in her own person. She has turned from Amazonian lover to frail, discarded nymph, from a yearning romantic to a mater dolorosa as she cradles the anemone, colored with Adonis’s blood, to her breast:

If we return to Pausanius’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, we will remember that he had spoken of two Venuses:

Sometimes Venus is related to nature, and the body, Venus Naturalis, and sometimes to the spirit and the sky, Venus Coelistis, of the sky. The Italian Neoplatonist Pietro Bembo, in his peroration of love at the end of Castiglione’s The Courtier, says, “Let us ascend the ladder whose lowest rung bears the image of sensual beauty to the sublime mansion where dwells the celestial . . . and true beauty” (Castiglione 341). John Donne in his poem “The Exstasie” says something similar, but his emphasis is on those lower rungs of the ladder and how they ought to be valued:

The body is the ladder by which the souls ascend and descend. In other words, Venus can be, at the same time, celestial and erotic. In Botticelli’s Primavera (c. 1482), Venus is fully clothed, her head tilted, and her hand raised in benediction in a Madonna-like manner; but she presides over a scene that includes violent corporeality—Chloris about to be raped by Zephyr, then metamorphose into Flora—“Chloris eram, quae Flora vocor: corrupta Latino/nominis est nostri littera Graeca sono.” “I who now am called Flora was formerly Chloris: a Greek letter of my name is corrupted in the Latin speech” (Ovid’s Fasti v. 183-209, 274, 275. Fasti, a poem on the Roman calendar, is probably one of the sources for the Primavera). E. H. Gombrich in his illuminating essay “Botticelli’s Mythologies: A Study in the Neoplatonic Symbolism of His Circle,” cites letters written by Marsilio Ficino, the Renaissance Florentine Neoplatonist philosopher of enormous repute. Ficino was the intellectual mentor of the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old Lorenzo de Pierfrancesco, whom he affectionately addressed as Laurentius minor to distinguish him from his famous relative, Lorenzo il Magnifico. It was in his castle in Castello that Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. 1485) and his Primavera were apparently displayed. The letter from Ficino to Lorenzo de Pierfrancesco quoted by Gombrich was probably written 1477-78 when Pierfrancesco was a teenager. The letter is part astrological prediction, part humanist exhortation. Ficino writes to his pupil to “fix . . . eyes on Venus, that is on Humanitas”

Charity, dignity, modesty, temperance, honesty—are these truly attributes of Venus, one wonders? What is also surprising is the detailed praise of Venus’s body in this letter. The details that are omitted are as crucial as those included. Hands, feet, and eyes come in for their share of praise, but not the usual attributes of Venus’s voluptuous, sensuous appeal.

When Adonis, “[h]ot, faint and weary with her hard embracing” (559), finally gets a chance to state his case, his words sound remarkably like those of Pausanius in Plato’s Symposium or Ficino’s in his letter to Pierfrancesco. Adonis is not convinced, he tells Venus, that her feelings for him are love: “‘Call it not love, for love to heaven is fled / Since sweating lust on earth usurped his name . . . / Love comforteth, like sunshine after rain . . . Love surfeits not; lust like a glutton dies’ . . . ‘Love is all truth, lust full of forged lies’” (793-804). And then he says something strange: “More I could tell, but more I dare not say; / The text is old, the orator too green.” (805-6).

The text is old indeed. Pausanius in The Symposium in discriminating between “popular” love and heavenly love says

This secret is the “more” Adonis would fain say, but dares not. There is another kind of love, he tries to argue, but that love does not have a heterosexual matrix and its end is not the generation of the species. The reason for his hitherto puzzling revulsion when faced with Venus’s energetic advances now becomes clear. He would much rather hunt with his male friends than bed Venus: “‘I am . . . expected of my friends,’” he tells her, as he tries to wriggle out of her embrace. This is not just the classic choice between the life of love and the martial life. This is a choice between heterosexuality and homosexuality (Rambuss 240-259).

Perhaps there was a similar progression in Shakespeare’s own life from the love of an older woman to the love of a young man. The dedication to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, a handsome nineteen-year-old aristocrat, in Venus and Adonis reads:

The dedication is fairly long and formal and somewhat timid in tone. However, the dedication to The Rape of Lucrece, published a year later, which delivers the promise of a “graver labour” made in the previous dedication and is, once again, dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, is very different: “The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end, whereof this pamphlet without beginning is but a superfluous moiety. . . . What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours.” The tone is much warmer, more intimate, and relaxed—in fact, even ardent. The dedication is shorter and more to the point. It is as if Shakespeare has no need to establish the existence of the relationship between Southampton and himself: that it exists is an accepted fact.

In Shakespeare’s Sonnets, composed from about 1591 to 1604, as Walter Cohen in The Norton Shakespeare states, we see the same progression from friendship with a man to love, and there are many critics who believe that the WH, the “onelie begetter” of the Sonnets, is none other than the man to whom Venus and Adonis is dedicated: Henry Wriothesely, Earl of Southampton, whose initials are WH in reverse. Shakespeare begins by pleading with his young friend to marry, to propagate his own image, and thereby snatch for himself a slice of immortality, something that Venus had told Adonis it was his duty to do: “Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface / In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled. / Make sweet, some vial, treasure thou some place / With beauty’s treasure, ere it be self-killed” (Sonnet 6); “You had a father; let your son say so” (Sonnet 13). However, the vehicle of immortality abruptly becomes not marriage and breeding but Shakespeare’s poetry: “And all in war with time for love of you / As he takes from you, I engraft you new” (Sonnet 15); “Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade / When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st. / So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (Sonnet 18). Ultimately, of course, there is no need even for poetry. What remains is the love of the two men, without “impediments” (Sonnet 116). “[T]ake thou my oblation, poor but free, / Which is not mixed with seconds, knows no art / But mutual render, only me for thee,” declares the poet in Sonnet 125. The 1609 Quarto published by Thomas Thorpe may have been published without Shakespeare’s consent. The second edition of the Sonnets appeared posthumously as late as 1640. Perhaps Shakespeare did not want these very personal poems to be freely read by all. Perhaps he even had a thought of shielding his wife from reading them.

There is one sonnet in the collection that does not quite fit either into the group of 125 sonnets addressed to the young man or to the twenty-odd sonnets addressed to the Dark Lady. It is Sonnet 145, and it begins “Those lips that love’s own hand did make.” The lines of this poem are octosyllabic, shorter than those of the other sonnets. The argument does not develop from quatrain to quatrain as is common in the other sonnets. The images are elementary and the phrasing rough. Andrew Gurr argues that it could possibly be Shakespeare’s first extant poem, composed when he was courting Anne. The oft-quoted couplet with which the poem ends—“‘I hate’ from hate away she threw, / And saved my life, saying ‘not you’”—contains a rough pun on his sweetheart’s name: “hate away” “Hathaway.” As Gurr correctly opines, it is miraculous that a sonnet written by an eighteen-year-old would survive in the poet’s possession for twenty-five years before it was published along with the other sonnets in Thorpe’s 1609 Quarto—even more so because the sonnet does not belong to either the young man sonnet group or the Dark Lady group. “Perhaps Shakespeare kept it for sentimental reasons,” concludes Gurr (226). I think this is a corrective to Greenblatt’s satirical reference to the “sentimental nineteenth century picture” that showed Shakespeare reading his works aloud to his family, parents, children, and pet dog, watched “adoringly” by his wife (125). The picture is, no doubt, a falsification of Shakespeare’s domestic life. But excessive carping about the unhappiness of Shakespeare’s marriage and his loathing for Anne Hathaway, to the extent that his gravestone inscription—“Bleste be ye man yt spares thes stones, / And curst be he yt moves my bones”—would be precisely worded so as to avoid their bones being joined after her death (Greenblatt 147-48), also needs a corrective.

Even if he turned away from Anne to the young man or to other women, Shakespeare could not forget the ladder of the body freely given and freely enjoyed in those leafy Warwickshire lanes that first showed him the way from sensuous bliss to a deeper, more intimate love. It is a tribute paid to an amorous energy entirely in keeping with nature’s rhythms. Adonis shuts himself off from that music; Venus does not. And eloquence and persuasion belong to Venus in this poem, not to Adonis. She stresses the urgency of enjoying the present, of seizing the day, for Adonis’s body decays even as she speaks: “What is thy body but a swallowing grave, / Seeming to bury that posterity / Which, by the rights of time, thou needs must have/ If thou destroy them not in dark obscurity?” (757ff). Of the 1194 lines in the poem, Venus speaks almost half: approximately 561. Adonis speaks only ninety. Shakespeare gives him only one longish speech of about forty-two lines towards the end of the poem (769ff) when he lectures Venus on true love. Otherwise, he usually gets just a few words in while she launches into one impassioned monologue after another. The narrative progression of the poem, in fact, justifies Venus’s urgency: when Adonis’s life is cruelly cut short, all the sensual joys of the body left untasted, her prophecy about the fleeting nature of life’s joys comes true. The poem is ultimately a moving exposition of the carpe diem theme, and the graphic description of sensuous delights becomes poignant in the light of their fleetingness.

Even if Shakespeare looked back on his Warwickshire courting days and ruefully admitted that the attraction he had felt for Anne had been primarily lust, and nothing akin to what he now feels, deeply and with every fiber of his being, for the young man of the Sonnets, his tone in the depiction of Venus’s passion is very different from the self-righteous, judgmental tone of the raw and callow Adonis who lectures Venus about love and who seems to be full of theoretical knowledge but no real experience of love:

Even if Adonis’s preference for a different sort of love is shared by Shakespeare, he can identify with Venus’s urges. It is through the portrait of Venus’s energetic, ardent, urgent, out-of- breath pursuit of Adonis, and it is in the empathetic, non-judgmental portrayal of all the contradictions to which Venus is prey, that Shakespeare pays tribute to the anomalous woman who “saved” him by saying “I hate . . . not you.”

Acknowledgment

This essay was partially written while I had a fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library. I should like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of the Folger Shakespeare Library staff.

Works Cited

Bullough, Geoffrey. Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957.

Castiglione, Baldassare. The Book of the Courtier. Trans. George Bull. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.

Gombrich, E. H. “Botticelli’s Mythologies: A Study in the Neoplatonic Symbolism of His Circle.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 8 (1945): 7-60.

Gray, Joseph William. Shakespeare’s Marriage and Departure from Stratford and Other Incidents in his Life. London: Chapman and Hall, 1905.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 2004.

———, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds. The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

Gurr, Andrew. “Shakespeare’s First Poem: Sonnet 145.” Essays in Criticism 21 (1971): 221-26.

Ovid. Ovid in Six Volumes. Fasti. Vol. 5. With an English Translation by Sir James George Frazer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931, 1989.

Panja, Shormishtha. “Titian’s Poesie and Shakespeare’s Pictures.” In Word, Image, Text: Studies in Literary and Visual Culture. Ed. Shormishtha Panja, Shirshendu Chakrabarti, and Christel R. Devadawson. Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2009. 22-32.

Plato. Plato, with an English translation. Vol. 5. Lysis, Symposium, Georgias. Trans. W. R. M. Lamb. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925, 1946.

Rambuss, Richard. “‘What it feels like for a boy’: Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.” A Companion to Shakespeare's Works vol. IV: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, eds. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard. London: Blackwell, 2003. 240-259.

Smith, J. C. and E. de Selincourt, eds. Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. New York: Oxford University Press, 1948.

Spenser, Edmund. Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser. Ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1948.

Notes

See Gray for a detailed discussion of the technical details, the marriage license bond, the Shaxpere-Whateley entry, the “R. K.” Seal, etc. of Shakespeare’s marriage. For the theory of the two Annes—Anne Hathwey and Anna Whateley of Temple Grafton (the latter, Burgess romantically claims, was Shakespeare’s true love, but he was prevented from marrying her by Anne Hathaway and her family)—see Gray 21-29, Pogue 59-60, and Greenblatt 124-25.

Quotations from Shakespeare follow Greenblatt, et al.

In this article, I discuss Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, along with Titian’s paintings on the same subjects.

Marcilio Ficino, Opera Omnia. 2 vols. (Basel: Heinrich Petri, 1576). Gombrich mentions that Ficino’s letters to Pierfrancesco appear on pp. 805, 812, 834, 845, 905, and 908.