Elizabethan narrative poems, even William Shakespeare’s, seldom attract the attention of medical journals. Nevertheless, a 1994 issue of Biological Psychiatry opened with an editorial entitled “Venus and Adonis: An Early Account of Sexual Harassment.”1 This elicited a further editorial on the opposite page, assuring the readership that “Although the example of Venus and Adonis has literary merit, it hardly typifies the problem as it exists today.”2 Though the incident was brief and largely forgettable, it nevertheless shows that Venus and Adonis retains its power to disturb, depicting as it does a relationship combining sex and power. In this rare instance, the medical research community followed the lead of literary critics, who have for some time read the poem as a description of sexual harassment. Clearly working under the influence of psychological criticism, Alan Baer Rothenberg declared in 1979 that “Shakespeare has pictured Adonis as Venus’s over-fondled, abused infant.”3 Gordon Williams in 1983 summarized Venus’s argument as “Lolita in reverse.”4 A. D. Cousins, writing in 2000 but repeating his earlier views on the subject, described Adonis as “a helpless, feminized victim of sexual violence” and Venus as “a sexual predator.”5 A number of critics in the past decades would concur with one of my upperyear students who described the poem as “kind of rapey.”
Writing in an earlier and more innocent age, C. S. Lewis noted that in reading about Venus’s embrace, “Certain horrible interviews with voluminous female relatives in one’s early childhood inevitably recur to the mind.”6 Lewis judged the poem in withering terms, as he did many texts over his long, distinguished, and sometimes sarcastic career. In its own time, however, Venus and Adonis enjoyed unparalleled popularity, compared either to Shakespeare’s other works or to contemporary poems by other writers.7 Lewis’s humorous disgust can be reconciled with the Elizabethans’ apparent delight if both derive from a reading of the poem as a whole, and the figure of Venus in particular, as funny. J. W. Lever borrows the words of the poet Frances Cornford to describe Venus as “thoroughly absurd, a fat, white woman whom nobody loved.”8 John Doebler describes Venus carrying Adonis under her arm as “Among Shakespeare’s most comic effects.”9 Cousins takes the gender reversal to be farcical and Venus’s action to be nearly reducible to an exhibition of the mechanics of wooing. She “recalls,” he argues, “the Venus Mechanitis of the ancient world, the Venus practised in love’s verbal and other artifices.”10 Barry Pegg observes that “Venus is a fool” and that the “narrator of the poem describes her as ‘ridiculous’.”11 Even Coppélia Kahn, a feminist critic, notes that both Venus’s loquaciousness and her aggressiveness become funny.12 To Rufus Putney, Venus’s excessiveness overwhelms even the pathos of her mourning.13 Critics may view Venus as a rapist, but they also dismiss as clownish whatever threat she poses. As a failed rapist, Venus compounds her attack on Adonis with a humiliation of herself.
I argue that Venus must fail in her effort to elicit love with violence. From the materials he finds in Ovid, Shakespeare builds a meditation on the self-frustrating nature of desire. The poem achieves its simultaneous comedy and tragedy through its depictions of quasi-human figures reduced or partially reduced to things. The poem’s peculiar mixture of comedy and tragedy suggests Emmanuel Levinas’s observation that all representation offers the possibility of tragedy as well as comedy. Before proceeding to my central argument, that Shakespeare’s poem illustrates Levinas’s conception of desire, I shall show how Shakespeare renders Venus both more disquieting in her desire and less powerful in its realization than she is depicted in the poem’s Ovidian source. Ultimately, Levinas’s description of desire shows why Venus’s confusion of Adonis—an Other, a beloved—with something that can be possessed or controlled dooms the realization of her desire as effectively as the boar’s tusks doom its object. Venus fails in fact and she ought to fail, but more importantly to my argument, she must fail, insofar as she attempts to win love by force. The very violence of her attempt to realize her desire simultaneously frustrates it, and the poem therefore illustrates Levinas’s claims regarding the fundamental incompatibility of desire and power.
Cousin’s observation that Shakespeare’s character recalls Venus Mechanitis touches on the source of both the humor and the horror of the poem. Venus brings the single-minded energy of an incarnate idea to her seduction of Adonis. At times, her actions seem to consist in little more than relentless propositioning. In his classic study of the comic, Henri Bergson argues that “The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life.”14 The allegorical seems, in the poem, to have the role which Bergson reserves for “pure mechanism.” The reading of Venus as allegorical is well-established; the poem itself draws upon the paradox that “She’s Love, she loves, and yet she is not loved” (VA 610).15 As an allegorical figure, Venus not only loves but must, as if driven by automatism. Generations of critics may have proven themselves sexist in their characterization of Venus—to say nothing of proving themselves callous in their indifference to the molestation of boys—but they have nevertheless been correct in finding something comic in Venus. This is not to say that she is entirely reduced to a thing. Huntington Brown over a half century ago argued that “certain strokes of the portraiture … bring the character alive as an individual.”16 She does, as John Klause notes, eventually let Adonis go and therefore shows herself possessed of an “elementary concern for the ‘other’.”17 Indeed, if “To love is to fear for another, to come to the assistance of his frailty” as Levinas argues (TI 256) then Venus’s efforts to keep Adonis from his fatal hunting expedition should be counted among acts of love. In any case, mere lust incarnate would be unlikely to inspire laughter, but Venus occupies an allegorical role that threatens to but never quite transforms her into a “pure mechanism.”
Where Venus can be treated as humorously half-human, satisfying Bergson’s description of le risible by her repetitive gestures, her treatment of Adonis satisfies at least part of Stanley Cavell’s understanding of tragedy as an unwillingness to acknowledge the humanity of the other person. Tragic figures, he argues, try to treat the Other as a thing available to knowledge, rather than as a person requiring acknowledgement. Writing about Othello, Cavell summarizes the difference between a person and a thing in epistemological terms: “A statue, a stone, is something whose existence is fundamentally open to the ocular proof. A human being is not.”18 Venus repeatedly treats Adonis as an object, either literally carrying him around or desperately comparing him to objects she could know and at least intellectually grasp. Where Venus illustrates the humor of transformation when she declines from person to allegorical principle, Adonis illustrates the horror of transformation as he is transformed into a flower. Catherine Belsey notes that critics of the poem in earlier generations took the question of genre to be central: “Was it primarily comic, or mainly tragic, or possibly satirical?”19 The poem produces both comedy and tragedy, and in both cases by the proximity of a character to a thing.
Levinas relates both the tragic and comic aspects of art to the reduction of persons to their own images in his 1948 essay, “Reality and Its Shadow.” Here he argues that everything bears, in its own image, a double, the “shadow” of his title. Still very much a phenomenologist at this point in his career, Levinas gives examples of things represented by artworks that show their images. “The most elementary procedure of art,” he writes, “consists in substituting for the object its image” (LR 132). Indeed, every being, whether represented in art or not, “resembles itself, is its own image” (LR 135). He develops this distinction between a being and its image into a general critique of representation, opposing “the hypertrophy of art in our times” by which, Levinas claims, “it is identified with the spiritual life” (LR 142). It is easy to exaggerate Levinas’s antipathy to art, which should be understood specifically as an attack on Martin Heidegger’s romanticism. Levinas’s views on art nevertheless helpfully anticipate his later work on the extraordinary phenomenon of the face, by which the Other presents herself.
Levinas’s distinction between a being and its image becomes more relevant both for his later thought and my argument here when he moves to the more specific distinction between a person and his or her image: “Thus a person bears on his face, alongside of its being with which he coincides, its own caricature, its picturesqueness” (LR 135). Levinas enthusiastically acknowledged his youthful admiration for Bergson,20 and the Bergsonian influence is evident here. For Bergson as for Levinas, representation, expressed as images or as imitation, allows comedy. Bergson notes that the comic element of character is “that which causes us to imitate ourselves. And it is also, for that very reason, that which enables others to imitate us.”21 Levinas extends Bergson’s ideas, moreover, to claim that the doubling of reality by its shadow produces tragedy as well:
Every image is already a caricature. But this caricature turns into something tragic. The same man is indeed a comic poet and a tragic poet, an ambiguity which constitutes the particular magic of poets like Gogol, Dickens, Tchekov—and Molière, Cervantes, and above all, Shakespeare. (LR 138; emphasis in original)
Addressing himself to the question of temporality in art, Levinas draws upon the Ovidian example of “Niobe’s punishment” (LR 140), transformed into stone in book VI of the Metamorphoses. In an Ovidian transformation, as of Niobe into stone or Adonis into a flower, the human being becomes a thing. Anthony Mortimer, author of the only monograph on the poem, relates its events to Ovidian metamorphosis, the transformation by which Ovid’s characters experience “the gradual loss of human faculties and … the horror of imprisonment in a non-human shape.”22 This can produce comic effects, in keeping with Bergson’s philosophy, or tragic horror, in keeping with Cavell’s. Levinas’s critique of representation unites both possibilities.
In Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare converts into an independent minor epic one of a series of interlocked narratives of sexual perversion and transformation in the tenth book of the Metamorphoses. Indeed, an early seventeenth-century Dutch translation of the first eight hundred and ten lines “was printed under the banner of Ovid without any mention of the names of Shakespeare and his translator.”23 In some ways, Shakespeare manages to out-Ovid Ovid, making Adonis younger and therefore the story more disturbing, while also extending the seduction and thereby making his own version more erotic. Mortimer argues that, while breaking with his source, Shakespeare makes Venus more aggressive and therefore more Ovidian.24 However, Shakespeare’s innovations reduce Venus’s power, including her defining power to command love. Most importantly, Shakespeare portrays Adonis as the reluctant object of Venus’s sexual aggression. At one level, the reason for Shakespeare’s change is obvious: Ovid depicts no seduction to speak of and as a result the author of the Amores creates surprisingly little erotic verse in his version of the Adonis myth. In Golding’s translation of Ovid, “To him shee clinged ay, and bare him companye,”25 but without any indication that her company is unwanted. In Shakespeare’s poem, on the other hand, Adonis tries to break away at his first opportunity and Venus “governed him in strength, though not in lust” (42). Ovid does acknowledge that Adonis, “did revenge the outrage of his mothers villanye,”26 but Adonis takes revenge not by resisting Venus but only by dying. In any case, the reference to Myrrha re-emphasizes the power of Venus to inflict such outrages as the incestuous lust in which Adonis is conceived. Ovid’s Venus might love “Adonis more / Than heaven” but she leaves him before his hunt, and he finds himself hunting the boar by an unhappy accident: “By chaunce his hounds in following of the tracke, a Boare did see, / And rowsed him.”27 Shakespeare’s Adonis, on the other hand, “Leaves love upon her back deeply distressed” (814) in order to hunt. Erwin Panofsky suggests that Shakespeare may have derived the idea of a reluctant Adonis from Titian’s painting of Venus and Adonis now in Madrid’s Museo del Prado, in which Adonis is seen pulling away from Venus, who struggles to restrain him.28 Williams, on the other hand, declares that “Panofsky’s arguments for a Shakespearian debt to Titian are thin.”29 For one thing, Titian’s Adonis appears more mature than Shakespeare’s, who may not even have achieved sexual potency. Venus describes him as “more lovely than a man” (9). Ovid’s Adonis, on the other hand, has clearly become “by and by a man.”30 By making Adonis younger and more reluctant, Shakespeare achieves the remarkable feat of surpassing even Ovid in his depiction of a disturbing sexual seduction. Doebler notes that no Ovidian heroine quite matches “the rapacity” of Shakespeare’s Venus, “a frenzied older woman driven by comic lust for a very young man barely emerging from boyhood.”31 By introducing a reluctant Adonis, Shakespeare provides himself an occasion to depict an extended seduction, erotically charged with all the resources of Renaissance rhetorical debate.32 The change, moreover, makes Shakespeare’s Venus appear simultaneously aggressive and weak. Her weakness and aggression relate reciprocally: her failure leads her to greater aggression, and the failure of her aggression further illustrates her weakness.
In another of his large changes, Shakespeare removes the enframed tale of Atalanta and Hippomenes. In Ovid’s account, Venus not only relates their tale, but also makes it clear that they are twice her victims. First, both fall in love, so that Hippomenes risks death by racing against Atalanta and for her hand, while Atalanta surrenders herself by allowing him to win. Venus is moved by Hippomenes’s prayer to aid him, despite her reluctance to help anyone: “His prayer movd mee” she tells Adonis, adding parenthetically “I confesse.”33 At least in the Golding translation, Venus describes her mercy as exceptional and out of character. Certainly, she expects repayment in worship:
Thinkst thou I was not woorthy thanks,
Adonis, thinkest thow
I earned not that he to mee should
frankincence allow?
But he forgetfull neyther thanks nor
frankincence did give.
By meanes whereof to sooden wrath he
justly did me drive.34
Jonathan Bate considers this “the key moment” at which Ovid’s Venus turns from narrative to threat. “She tells the story to demonstrate her power.”35 As Hippomenes passes a temple, Venus inspires him, “That needes he would to Venerie though out of season go.”36 Having defiled the temple, both Hippomenes and Atalanta are punished by transformation into lions. Venus’s overt reason for telling the tale is to warn Adonis to “Shonne / Theis beastes,”37 but in the telling she also warns him of her own power.
Shakespeare’s Venus, on the other hand, wanders hopelessly offtopic while describing a rabbit hunt. “Unlike myself thou hear’st me moralize,” she remarks (712). Apparently she lacks all skill at her unpracticed task, since she loses her place in the improvised narrative and Adonis leaves to hunt anyway, ignoring her advice. Her tale seems less of a threat than an effort to keep Adonis with her by not providing a break in the conversation, or rather monologue. Lauren Shohet remarks on how Venus “gushes forth stanza after stanza of erotic desire, hampering intrusions by her interlocutor or even, it seems, the narrator.” On the other hand, events drive “briskly forward precisely whenever Venus stops talking.”38 “Lie quietly and hear a little more,” she urges him (709), and then produces a string of allegories regarding Adonis’s origins and beauty, making a familiar argument in favor of sex as reproduction. Perhaps Adonis sympathizes with the argument when he calls it “overhandled” (770). In any case, Venus has already summarized it in the form of a couplet: “By law of nature thou art bound to breed, / That thine may live when thou thyself art dead” (171-72). Venus produces the same argument as Shakespeare’s early sonnets, but more importantly, she recites an argument that the speaker of the sonnets abandons. Moreover, she comes to resemble Shylock in drawing upon the example of how “gold that’s put to use more gold begets” (768).39 Adonis’s rejection of Venus’s argument is predictable: “Your treatise,” he declares, “makes me like you worse and worse” (774). Though he describes himself as too inexperienced to compose a proper counter-argument, Adonis needs no great sophistication to offer the standard rebuttal to a well-known theme: “The text is old, the orator too green” (806). Where Ovid’s Venus implicitly threatens Adonis, and has no difficulty convincing him both to love her and to avoid dangerous animals, Shakespeare’s spouts platitudinous arguments in vain.
The relative helplessness of Venus extends to Adonis’s death and transformation. Ovid’s Venus cites Persephone to claim a divine prerogative to metamorphose, then changes Adonis into a flower by her own act, sprinkling “Nectar on the blood.”40 Shakespeare’s Venus shows considerably less agency, merely witnessing Adonis’s disappearance and discovering the flower:
By this the boy that by her side lay killed
Was melted like a vapor from her sight,
And in his blood that on the ground lay spilled
A purple flower sprung up, checkered with white.
(1165-1168)
Insofar as Venus acts, she appropriates the flower or merely describes it, rather than transforming Adonis into it: “She crops the stalk, and in the breach appears / Green-dropping sap, which she compares to tears” (1175-1176). In Ovid, Adonis is clearly transformed into an anemone, but the flower Shakespeare describes as springing from Adonis’s blood appears quite different, purple rather than red, and spotted. It appears, in fact, to be the only individual of its species and is destined “To wither in [Venus’] breast” (1182). According to Ovid’s Venus, the flower “From yeere to yeere shall growe / A thing that of my heavinesse and of thy death shall showe.”41 Shakespeare’s Adonis gains no immortality through a flower doomed to immediate extinction. Venus can neither convince him to seize immortality by reproducing, nor grant him immortality by an Ovidian metamorphosis.
Throughout the poem, Venus is a victim of her own law, a paradox to which the poet draws attention: “Poor queen of love, in thine own law forlorn, / To love a cheek that smiles at thee in scorn” (251-252). This renders suspect Venus’s etiology of love in the conclusion: “Sith in his prime death doth my love destroy, / They that love best their loves shall not enjoy” (1163-64). Love is already perverse before Venus curses it, so her curse might be yet another effort to claim credit for a situation she finds herself helpless to avoid. One might compare Edmund Spenser’s version of the Adonis myth in book three, canto six of The Faerie Queene, where Venus preserves Adonis forever as a playmate in the centre of a garden that gives form to all living things: “There now he liueth in eternall blis, / Ioying his goddesse, and of her enioyd.”42 Both poets draw on Ovid, but only Shakespeare renders Venus powerless.
More importantly, in Shakespeare’s poem, Venus’s failure illustrates the contradiction implicit in her desire. In Existence and Existents, one of the first statements of his independent philosophy, Levinas compares loving to eating. In eating, he claims, there is perfect good faith. In the relationship with food “there is a complete correspondence between desire and its satisfaction” (EE 43). In normal life, as opposed to the sort of forced labor that Levinas himself endured as a prisoner of war when working on the draft of this book, one eats because one is hungry; therefore, “an object concords fully with a desire” (EE 36). “The man who is eating,” Levinas goes so far as to claim, “is the most just of men” (EE 35). By contrast, “what characterizes love is an essential and insatiable hunger” (EE 35; cf. TO 89). It has no true object, for its object is not an object as such, which could be grasped by the hand in the image favored by phenomenology, but the Other. “In the random agitation of caresses,” Levinas writes, “there is the admission that access is impossible, violence fails, possession is refused” (EE 35). Levinas repeats the idea later in his career, in Totality and Infinity, declaring that “Nothing is further from Eros than possession” (TI 265). To Levinas, erotic desire frustrates itself not only because it is a desire for what cannot be possessed in fact, nor merely because it is a desire for what morally ought not to be possessed. More importantly and fundamentally, erotic desire frustrates itself because it is a desire for what cannot be possessed in principle.
A number of critics note the excess of Venus’s desire, but rather than concluding that what she desires is the Other, they conclude that her desire itself is in some sense alterior. Cousins, for instance, declares that for Venus, “the experience of loving Adonis both in vain and obsessively is a new, alien experience: ultimately, the experience of love as otherness.” Her desire is for “infinite physical enjoyment” which a finite lover cannot provide.43 Mortimer argues that Venus’s desire is infinite because solipsistic: “She sees Adonis not so much as a type who excites a specific kind of sexual appetite, but as an empty space, a blank page on which all forms of desire can be inscribed.”44 James Schiffer quotes Lacan to the effect that “impossible desire” is for an alienated part of the self.45 Schiffer was soon followed by Catherine Belsey, who rises to an O altitudo in her Lacanian description of desire:
Passion is not subject to reason or entreaty, regulation or Law. On the contrary, desire is anarchic, and its cause is not, in the end, the persuasive powers of another person, not even a goddess, but the missing objet a, the presence that the ordering mechanisms of the symbolic both promise and withhold. Irrational, irregular, incited by prohibition, and thus quite unable to take “no” for an answer, desire is in every sense of the term an outlaw.46
This seems to justify the violence of Venus’s desire as a function of its anarchic power. Belsey appears to argue that the desire of Venus lies beyond satisfaction for precisely the same reason that it is rapine, as a violation of social and moral norms. Indeed, if the violation of social norms is taken to be liberating, then the intensity of her assault ought to be applauded.
The conflation between relations of violence and possession and relationships of love is not merely forbidden—moralistically, socially, or legally—and therefore, perhaps, to be embraced in a spirit of rebellion. Nor is it, for that matter, merely pragmatically unproductive. Obviously, violent efforts at possession are likely to repel the beloved, but this is not the reason the poem gives for Venus’s failure. In fact, the narrator declares that “Foul words and frowns must not repel a lover” (573), apparently endorsing stalkers. Instead of making a moral or pragmatic argument against the conflation of violence and sexual desire, Shakespeare, unlike Ovid and several recent critics, opposes love and violence categorically, or rather at a level even more basic than the categorical, associated as the categorical is with the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant.
Venus is helpless in Shakespeare’s poem because, as Levinas writes in Time and the Other, “If one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be other. Possessing, knowing and grasping are synonyms of power” (TO 90). The alterity of the Other, therefore, is not a matter of power: “The Other is not a being we encounter that menaces us or wants to lay hold of us. The feat of being refractory to our power is not a power greater than ours” (TO 87). Shortly before this point, Levinas associates the other with feminine mystery, citing “the great themes of Goethe or Dante” (TO 86). His use of woman as a figure for the Other proved so controversial that he was forced to abandon it, though even in introducing the metaphor he is careful to specify that “I do not want to ignore the legitimate claims of the feminism that presupposes all the acquired attainments of civilization” (TO 86). Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s poem has particular interest, since it reverses the genders of the lover and the beloved. A reading of Venus and Adonis justifies Levinas in using the example of the beloved as Other but also, it would seem, in abandoning his more specifically gender-based example of woman as the Other, since the mysteriousness and alterity of the Other is not inherent to one gender in particular. More to the point, Shakespeare seems to share the same general understanding of love, since he constructs a poem in which erotic possession defeats itself.
Venus repeatedly describes, and therefore attempts to grasp, Adonis as an object. Indeed, near the beginning of the poem, she grasps Adonis physically. She first “seizeth on his sweating palm,” before “desire doth lend her force / Courageously to pluck him from his horse” (25, 29-30) and carry him off under her arm. She spends most of the beginning of the poem on top of him, like a wrestler, though she later pulls him down on top of her by the absurdly passive-aggressive tactic of first grabbing him and then fainting (591-594). Most of her violence takes metaphorical form, however, as Venus tries to grasp Adonis with her thought, describing him as an object. Begging him not to hunt, Venus imagines him fabricated in “molds from heaven that were divine” (730). Such a fabricated object would presumably complement beauty with silence, and Venus indeed attempts to silence Adonis: “‘What canst thou talk?’ quoth she, ‘hast thou a tongue? / O, would thou hadst not, or I had no hearing!’” (427-428). Earlier, “she murders with a kiss” the objections of Adonis, in anticipation of both Much Ado about Nothing (MA 2.1.7-9) and (much more grimly) Titus Andronicus (TAN 2.3.185).47 If Adonis were to become the dumb statue she appears to want, however, this would only reinforce Venus’s frustration. “Fie,” she cries in answer to the parrying of her initial aggression, “lifeless picture, cold and senseless stone, / Well painted idol, image dull and dead, / Statue contenting but the eye alone” (211-213). As a statue, Adonis could be grasped and known by Venus, but as a statue, he ceases to offer her any kind of amatory satisfaction.
The notion of a statue being incapable of love is instructive. Levinas uses the figure of the idol to explain the doubling of an object by its representation: “The insurmountable caricature in the most perfect image manifests itself in its stupidness as an idol” (LR 137). An idol may be considered a physical object taking the place of a true interlocutor. Fabricated and manipulable by human hands, the idol offers itself to possession. On the other hand, the fact that it offers itself to possession shows it to be a false god. Something similar could be said of Adonis, for whom the label is peculiarly appropriate. Richard Halpern points out that in the series of Ovidian myths, Adonis is the great-grandson of Galatea, the statue brought to life whom Pygmalion loved.48 Like a statue, Adonis frustrates Venus’s love but, as Pauline Kiernan notes, “it is Venus who has turned Adonis’s flesh and blood into a cold and senseless statue, she who has turned life into art.”49 He may be silent, but Venus silences him. Part of this effort involves aestheticizing his voice, disregarding what he says in favor of the “mermaid’s voice” in which he speaks (429). Objectified as a thing of beauty, he can be man-handled (or rather, goddess-carried), known and possessed. As an aesthetic object, however, Adonis ceases to be an Other.
In Existents and Existence, Levinas refers to the tendency to express erotic desire in terms of consumption: “It is as though one had made a mistake about the nature of one’s desire and had confused it with hunger which aims at something, but which one later found out was a hunger for nothing. The other is precisely this objectless dimension” (EE 35). Venus presents herself as a victim of this sort of confusion. “The tender spring upon thy tempting lip / Shows thee unripe,” she observes, “yet mayst thou well be tasted” (127-128). She attacks Adonis, “Even as an empty eagle, sharp by fast” (55), and offers her own body as a pasture to Adonis, whom she punningly calls “my deer” (231). Even such images, however, show the failure of the metaphor to food. When she finally achieves some sort of consummation, “gluttonlike she feeds, yet never fil-leth” (548). The image of birds frustrated by painted grapes follows whatever sort of consummation Venus achieves:
Even so poor birds, deceived with painted grapes,
Do surfeit by the eye and pine the maw;
Even so she languisheth in her mishaps
As those poor birds that helpless berries saw.
(601-604)
Venus is not frustrated by an inability to achieve some sort of conquest over Adonis, but rather despite achieving it. As the poet explains a few stanzas earlier, “she takes all she can, not all she listeth” (564). Venus presents love in the same terms which baffle her, as an infinite and self-deepening hunger. She offers to “smother thee with kisses; / And yet not cloy thy lips with loathed satiety, / But rather famish them amid their plenty” (18-20). Venus assumes herself to have a power like that of Cleopatra, who “makes hungry / Where most she satisfies” (AC 2.2.244-245). Levinas’s description of how Eros “feeds on countless hungers” seems a close parallel (TO 89). Unfortunately for Venus, however, it is Adonis who proves endlessly fascinating, and forever beyond her possession.
Long before he is actually transformed into a flower—in fact, with her first sentence to him—Venus makes Adonis a flower through metaphor, calling him “The field’s chief flower, sweet above compare” (8). Cousins correctly notes that this shows “the aesthetic element in Venus’s connoisseurship of the erotic and Adonis’s presentation in the rest of the poem as an aesthetic/sexual object.”50 Urging him to reproduce, she argues that “Fair flowers that are not gathered in their prime / Rot, and consume themselves in little time” (131-132). Accusing death, she again compares Adonis to a flower (946). His final transformation into the flower realizes Venus’s view of him all along. Adonis asks her rhetorically, “Who plucks the bud before one leaf put forth?” (416). Venus nevertheless plucks him twice: first, by whatever sort of sexual contact the flurry of metaphors about halfway through the poem simultaneously describes and obfuscates (539-576); again, by actually cropping the flower springing from his blood. In a comparison with a series of Italian poems on the same topic, James J. Yoch notes that Shakespeare’s is the only version in which the flower is plucked.51 Jonathan Hart argues that the flower is a substitute, allowing Venus to possess Adonis, at least symbolically.52 Both Cousins and Lever agree with him that the gesture allows Venus possession.53 Whatever sort of possession is achieved, however, proves completely unsatisfying. As Mortimer points out, Venus actually does what she accuses Death of doing: “thou pluckst a flower” (946).54 Possession of the flower still leaves Venus mourning, and abandoning the world in her sorrow. Venus no more wants Adonis as a flower than she does as a statue.
The confusion of caressing with eating proceeds from a wider confusion of sex with violence. In another image which seems to anticipate Anthony and Cleopatra, Venus boasts of having conquered Mars, the god of war: “Thus he that overruled I overswayed, / Leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain; / Strong-tempered steel his stronger strength obeyed, / Yet was he servile to my coy disdain” (109-112). As Cousins and before him Robert P. Miller point out, this reminiscence is abridged, omitting her humiliation before all the gods when caught with Mars, and therefore ironic.55 It is made more ironic, however, by the situation in which Venus finds herself, not master but slave to Adonis.56 When he prepares to leave after their first night, she addresses him as “love’s master” (585). By describing love as a matter of domination and power, Venus places herself in an abject position. The description of Venus’s domination of Mars is doubly ironic, but also contradicts its allegorical meaning. The story would seem to provide an allegory showing how love (represented by Venus) conquers war (incarnate in Mars). One thinks of Botticelli’s depiction of Mars: exposed, disarmed, and apparently rendered comatose by sex; not able to be awakened even by a conch shell blown in his ear. In Shakespeare’s particular rendition of the story, however, love’s victory leaves Venus perversely bellicose, boasting of having “foiled the god of fight” (114). It is little wonder that Venus physically dominates Adonis and attempts to force his love when she associates love so closely with domination. It is also unsurprising that she fails.
As a character, Venus is victimized by the very power of which she is the allegory, as the poem makes explicit. More fundamentally, however, the spectacle of love—in love but unloved—gives narrative form to Levinas’s claims about the erotic as a relationship with the Other, with a person and not merely a thing. Were Venus content with an aesthetic object, she would be content with a statue, a corpse, or for that matter, a flower. These things present themselves to the grasp and yield to violence. Venus’s desire is not only contradicted by the interdiction of rape in law and morality. But it is also contradicted by Adonis’s youthful incapacity, his indifference, and, finally, his alterity. Venus wishes to possess Adonis as Other, but as Other, Adonis can never be possessed.
In sum, Venus fails not because she lacks power—she demonstrates enough power to bodily manipulate Adonis and to conquer Mars—but because she embarks on a task for which power is useless. Levinas declares that the erotic relationship “is a relationship that is impossible to translate into powers and must not be so translated, if one does not want to distort the meaning of the situation” (TO 88). The power and violence which we often take to be ubiquitous, in literature as in the world, proves not only illegitimate but also impotent. In his first magnum opus, Totality and Infinity, Levinas opposes his philosophy to Heidegger’s: “In denouncing the sovereignty of the technological powers of man Heidegger exalts the pretechnological powers of possession” (TI 47). In the view of Levinas, a philosophy of possession is also a philosophy of power, of tyranny, and of war. “Does not lucidity, the mind’s openness upon the true,” Levinas asks rhetorically, “consist in catching sight of the permanent possibility of war?” (TI 21). Critics seem at times to believe this. In his classic essay on New Historicism, Edward Pechter defines the object of his criticism as a sort of Marxism, or rather all sorts of Marxism “to the extent that they all view history and contemporary political life as determined, wholly or in essence, by struggle, contestation, power relations, libido dominandi.”57 Of course, both Pechter’s critique and its object are now old. Nevertheless, we still tend to apply categories of power and struggle sweepingly to literary works and the world. The contribution of Levinas’s philosophy to Shakespeare criticism can be found in the reminder that power itself is not all-powerful. We blind ourselves to much of what is depicted by Shakespeare and, indeed, to much of our lives together in the world, if we act as though it were.
Notes
1 Joseph Wortis, “Venus and Adonis: An Early Account of Sexual Harassment,” Biological Psychiatry 35.5 (March 1994): 293.
2 Enoch Callaway, Regina Casper and Arnold Friedhoff, “Response to ‘Venus and Adonis: An Early Account of Sexual Harassment,’” Biological Psychiatry 35.5 (March 1994): 294.
3 Alan Baer Rothenberg, “The Oral Rape Fantasy and the Rejection of the Mother in the Imagery of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 40 (1971): 462.
4 Gordon Williams, “The Coming of Age of Shakespeare’s Adonis,” Modern Language Review 78.4 (October 1983): 771.
5 A. D. Cousins, Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Narrative Poems (New York: Longman, 2000), 35.
6 C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 498.
7 Anthony Mortimer, Variable Passions: A Reading of Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis” (New York: AMS Press, 2000), 3; and Jeanne Addison Roberts, “Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England,” Critical Survey 7 (1995): 299-300.
8 J. W. Lever, “Venus and the Second Chance,” Shakespeare Survey 15 (1962): 81.
9 John Doebler, “The Reluctant Adonis: Titian and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 33 (1982): 481.
10 Cousins, Narrative Poems, 18, 17.
11 Barry Pegg, “Generation and Corruption in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” Michigan Academician: Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 8 (1975): 105-115.
12 Coppélia Kahn, “Venus and Adonis,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 364.
13 Rufus Putney, “Venus and Adonis: Amour with Humor,” Philological Quarterly 20 (1941): 548.
14 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: Macmillan, 1921), 87. Stored in PDF format by The Internet Archive.
15 William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis, in Narrative Poems, ed. Jonathan Crewe (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 610. Future citations of this work will be indicated in parentheses. The capitalization of “Love” does not appear in the first quarto facsimile provided by Internet Shakespeare Editions, at http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/facsimile/bookplay/Mac_Q1_Ven/Ven.
16 Huntington Brown, “Venus and Adonis: The Action, the Narrator, and the Critics,” Michigan Academician: Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 2 (1969): 75.
17 John Klause, “Venus and Adonis: Can We Forgive Them?” Studies in Philology 85 (1988): 366.
18 Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 141.
19 Catherine Belsey, “Love as Trompe-l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995): 263.
20 Salomon Malka, Emmanuel Lévinas: His Life and Legacy, trans. Michael Kigel and Sonja M. Embree (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 25.
21 Bergson, Laughter, 148.
22 Mortimer, Variable Passions, 24.
23 J. C. Arens, “Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1-810): A Dutch Translation Printed in 1621,” Neophilologus 52 (1968): 422.
24 Mortimer, Variable Passions, 24.
25 Ovid, Shakespeare’s Ovid, being Arthur Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), X.615.
26 Ovid, Shakespeare’s Ovid, X.605.
27 Ibid., X.833-834.
28 Doebler, “Reluctant Adonis,” 486.
29 Williams, “Coming of Age,” 769.
30 Ovid, Shakespeare’s Ovid, X.602.
31 Doebler, “Reluctant Adonis,” 484.
32 Mortimer, Variable Passions, 15.
33 Ovid, Shakespeare’s Ovid, X.755.
34 Ibid., X.798-801.
35 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 57.
36 Ovid, Shakespeare’s Ovid, X.809.
37 Ibid., 826-827.
38 Lauren Shohet, “Shakespeare’s Eager Adonis,” Studies in English Literature 42 (2002): 87, 91.
39 See The Merchant of Venice, 1.3.93.
40 Ovid, Shakespeare’s Ovid, X.855.
41 Ibid., X.849-850.
42 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki (Harlowe, England: Pearson Education, 2001), 3.6.48. This edition numbers stanzas, not lines.
43 Cousins, Narrative Poems, 16, 17.
44 Mortimer, Variable Passions, 28.
45 James Schiffer, “Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis: A Lacanian Tragicomedy of Desire,” in “Venus and Adonis”: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Garland, 1997), 371.
46 Belsey, “Love as Trompe l’oeil,” 275.
47 See William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing, ed. Sheldon P. Zitner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 2.1.307-309; and William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, ed. Eugene Waith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 2.3.185.
48 Richard Halpern, “‘Pining their Maws’: Female Readers and the Erotic Ontology of the Text in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” in “Venus and Adonis”: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin (New York: Garland, 1997), 380.
49 Pauline Kiernan, “Death by Rhetorical Trope: Poetry Metamorphosed in Venus and Adonis and the Sonnets,” Review of English Studies, vol. 46, no. 184 (November 1995): 481.
50 Cousins, Narrative Poems, 19.
51 James J. Yoch, “The Eye of Venus: Shakespeare’s Erotic Landscape,” Studies in English Literature 20 (1980): 64.
52 Jonathan Hart, “‘Till Forging Nature be Condemned of Treason’: Representational Strife in Venus and Adonis,” Cahiers Elisabethains 36 (1989): 40.
53 Cousins, Narrative Poems, 28; and Lever, “Venus and the Second Chance,” 86.
54 Mortimer, Variable Passions, 336.
55 Cousins, Narrative Poems, 21; and Robert P. Miller, “The Myth of Mars’s Hot Minion in Venus and Adonis,” Journal of English Literary History 26 (1959): 470.
56 Belsey, “Love as Trompe l’oeil,” 258-259.
57 Edward Pechter, “The New Historicism and its Discontents,” PMLA 102 (1987): 292.