(This essay was first published as a Gadfly Literary Supplement in 1984.)
I.
After re-reading Venus and Adonis recently, with great pleasure, for the first time in many years, I turned back to see what F. T. Prince, the Arden editor, has to say about the poem. He begins by quoting this from Biographia Literaria:
In Shakespeare's poems, the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength seems to threaten the extinction of the other. At length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought each with its shield before the breast of the other.
I reviewed my fresh experience of the poem, but try as I might to locate this conflict of "creative power" and "intellectual energy" in the words I had read, I could not. But then, what do these imposing phrases mean? Coleridge does not define them. To me they look like synonyms – for what "creates", in this instance, but the mind, and what is "power" but released energy? But there is a more obvious objection to Coleridge's words: he understands Shakespeare's poems as apprentice-work, verse written before he embarked upon his career as a playwright. Why then does Professor Prince, who believes that Venus was written in 1592 or 1593 during a period when plague compelled the closure of the London theatres (by which time its author had eight plays under his belt), quote Coleridge at all? The answer comes soon enough: Coleridge
was wise to make his criticism serve the larger purpose of illuminating Shakespeare the dramatist. Nothing else was likely then, or is likely even now, to win an attentive reading of these poems.
That is: unless one insists that Venus (and by extension Lucrece) are addenda to "a body of dramatic work which is immensely superior" to them, one is not going to get people to read them. This is curious reasoning. Surely the converse is true: if critics insist that Shakespeare's poems are immensely inferior to his plays, then nobody is going to give them a glance. It is only by seeing them as poems, as things in their own right which belong to a different literary kind, that one may see them clearly. Certainly Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis, but it needs no special pleading. It is a splendid and completely successful poem: as good a poem (let us say, though it is superfluous to draw such comparisons) as A Midsummer Night's Dream is a good play.
But Venus is, for Professor Prince, a real problem child: its "eroticism is hardly more acceptable than it was in Coleridge's day; few English or American readers nowadays will respond to such happily wanton fancies…" It would be interesting to know how Professor Prince came to be able to make this pronouncement with such confidence. Perhaps he commissioned a mid-Atlantic opinion poll or sociological survey; perhaps he is disappointed after a lifetime of thrusting the poem upon unresponsive students; perhaps he is flexing his professorial intuition; or perhaps he is generalising from a personal discomfort when confronted by the erotic. At any rate, since I (born a full generation later than the good Professor) find the poem's eroticism an attraction rather than an obstacle, it seems that I must regard myself as an abnormal reader – in the Professor's eyes, at least.
It is surprising, then, to find him, a little later in his Introduction, girding up his loins "to argue that Venus is a complete artistic success". Ultimately he just about convinced me that he really believed this, but he had to work hard to overcome his sense of the poem's detractors: his approach to writing about Venus is a fine example of how scholarship hems in rather than releases a critic, for what heavy weather he makes of things:
The style of Venus and Adonis is something that can only be appreciated by a certain application, a deliberate savouring of its texture and verbal music. But it must be realised, before the poetry can be read aright, that here we have the spirit of comedy – of a romantic, that is to say, a Shakespearean, comedy.
!!! One might have thought that any poem worth its salt demands a certain level of attention, "a deliberate savouring". And anyone who needs to be told that Venus and Adonis is a comedy, nay a Shakespearean, comedy, is never going to be capable of reading it (or any other) poem.
But if Professor Prince fumbles Venus and Adonis, he follows a line of distinguished maladepts. Coleridge we have already found among them, in spite of his generous and ready appreciation of many of the poem's qualities. C. S. Lewis is there too, and it is to his total inability to make anything of the poem that I now turn.
Lewis, captivated by Marlowe's Hero and Leander, thought that Venus, as another Ovidian poem, "an epyllion among epyllions", ought to display certain characteristics whilst excluding others. This led him to the perverse belief that Shakespeare failed with it because he has "powers quite beyond the range" that this sort of poem requires, as opposed to possessing the more limited powers that alone could have guaranteed success! (See his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century.) As if a Shakespeare would or could be content merely to tread in the footsteps of another poet – even one as good as Marlowe! It is of course true that Venus and Adonis seems at a number of points to spark off Hero and Leander, but to me this looks, not as if Shakespeare is saying: "Look, I can do Marlowe as well as Marlowe can"; but Shakespeare saying: "Look, this is me, Shakespeare, doing something as fully Shakespearean as Hero and Leander is fully Marlovian; now, whose poem has more to offer?" Shakespeare is challenging Marlowe for the crown, and, in my opinion, wins it hands down.
How, wonders Lewis, ought we to take Venus and Adonis? "Is it a poem by a young moralist, a poem against lust? Plainly it, and particularly Shakespeare's sweaty Venus, arouses Lewis's disgust ("Certain horrible interviews with voluminous female relatives in one's early childhood inevitably recur to the mind"!), and he takes his disgust for Shakespeare's. But whilst there is something of disgust in Adonis, there is none, I think, in Shakespeare. We have fetched up against the difficulty felt by Professor Prince – which is no other than the inadequacy of the puritan sensibility before poetry whose sensuality naturally demands expression in a realistic language of the body. Lewis is prepared to tolerate his heroine so long as she doesn't sweat (Swift, you may recall, went further than objecting to sweat): so much the worse for Lewis. He prefers Marlowe's artifice because it excludes the real life of the flesh: but that is exactly what Shakespeare is getting to grips with, and he will be true to himself in spite of generations yet unborn of delicate and tender-hefted critics. His Venus is not "the golden Aphrodite" of Lewis's hieratic imagination, she is a flesh-and-blood woman impelled by desire. It is not surprising finally to find Lewis falling back on a Coleridgean explanation of what he sees as a failed poem: "Shakespeare may well have failed because he was embarrassed by powers, essential for drama, which he could not suspend while writing an epyllion."
Where, then, does Shakespeare stand with regard to his two lovers? Here are two early stanzas:
With this she seizeth on his sweating palm,
The precedent of pith and livelihood,
And trembling in his passion, calls it balm,
Earth's sovereign salve to do a goddess good:
Being so enrag'd, desire doth lend her force
Courageously to pluck him from his horse.
Over one arm the lusty courser's rein,
Under her other was the tender boy,
Who blush'd and pouted in a dull disdain,
With leaden appetite, unapt to toy:
She red and hot as coals of glowing fire,
He red for shame, but frosty in desire. (lines 25-36)
The comedy here, and continually in the poem, arises from the incompatibility of the two: yet their feelings, so ill attuned, maintain an equilibrium, for the strength and obstinacy of Venus's desire is fully matched by the strength and obstinacy of Adonis's frigidity. Shakespeare's power characteristically declares itself in the voltage discharged by his verbs: Venus's "seizeth", "enrag'd" and "pluck", which convey, along with the physical force of her desire, its extremeness, its absurdity (which we also feel when she hauls him off his horse), are matched by Adonis's "blush'd and pouted". So that the couplet (35-36) can only finish up by enacting, through its almost Augustan balance – the first line as thrustingly energetic as the second is coolly poised – the comic disharmony of their tempers.
In these narrative verses, Shakespeare gives us his lovers' feelings with some force and yet stands off from them, an ironic observer. Elsewhere, when Venus finally gets to kiss Adonis, Shakespeare presses the hyperbole till it throws up a judgement:
And having felt the sweetness of the spoil,
With blindfold fury she begins to forage;
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. (553-558)
What Shakespeare sees as unreasoning is Venus's persistence in trying to seduce a boy who finds her not in the least attractive. It is not her desire that is comic, but her desiring, in face of the plain fact of his lack of interest, this particular male. The poem would be lopsided, of course, if this was all that Shakespeare saw. For he gives us, with no less force, with no less a sense of its absurdity, Adonis's stunning immunity to Venus's charms: how can any male with any fire in his veins resist for a moment the advances of so magnificently sensual a creature? So that it is unreasonable for Venus to persist in her siege of Adonis, and unnatural for Adonis to persist in refusing her. For Venus, nature is reason enough; for Adonis, nature must defer to reason.
The obvious difference between Venus and Adonis and a Shakespearean play is that whilst a play consists wholly of acted speech, the poem contains narrative. The primary business of narrative is to sustain and forward a story, but it must also hold the balance between the speaking characters. What Shakespeare set himself to do in Venus was both difficult and sophisticated: to maintain a narrative climate in which he could make fun of his characters whilst never going so far as to push them beyond the reach of our sympathies, to alienate us from the pulse of their lives. While he may withdraw from them in the narrative parts of the poem, he can and must, with the maturing genius of the dramatist, think himself into them, as is the way with the chameleon poet, when he comes to imagine what they say. Here he is thinking Adonis through:
"I know not love," quoth he, "nor will not know it,
Unless it be a boar, and then I chase it.
'Tis much to borrow, and I will not owe it:
My love to love is love but to disgrace it,
For I have heard, it is a life in death,
That laughs and weeps, and all but with a breath.
"Who wears a garment shapeless and unfinish'd?
Who plucks a bud before one leaf put forth?
If springing things be any jot diminish'd,
They wither in their prime, prove nothing worth;
The colt that's back'd and burden'd being young,
Loseth his pride, and never waxeth strong.
"You hurt my hand with wringing, let us part,
And leave this idle theme, this bootless chat;
Remove your siege from my unyielding heart,
To love's alarms it will not ope the gate.
Dismiss your vows, your feigned tears, your flatt'ry,
For where a heart is hard they make no batt'ry." (409-426)
Adonis, we see, can reject love with an unquestioning complacency and absoluteness quite simply because he has not the least idea what it is. He is the child who refuses an apple because he has heard bad things about the colour green. His knowledge, and his arguments, are wholly mental, wholly of the head. He cannot see any difference between love of the hunt and love of a woman, between love that fixes itself on an object or activity that has a defined and limited shape, and love for a person, love that involves a committal of oneself to the unknown, the unknowable, to a relationship that involves giving as well as taking, surrender as well as conquest. What Shakespeare imagines in imagining Adonis from within is indeed a boy – a self-possessed boy certainly, but an unfinish'd garment, a bud: Adonis is, in his callowness, a little puritanical, a little petulant, a little bored, and his facile metaphors spring from an untouched imagination. His sexuality is unawakened.
Such a nature, a surface unscratched by experience, does not of course offer a poet much scope. Venus has much the better arguments and calls forth more of our sympathy because she has a fullness of life and a fullness of feeling in her which Adonis cannot even begin to grasp. If she also has much the larger quantity of arguments, that is because, in the way of nature, it is on her side that they lie:
"The tender spring upon thy tempting lip
Shows thee unripe; yet mayst thou well be tasted.
Make use of time, let not advantage slip;
Beauty within itself should not be wasted.
Fair flowers that are not gather'd in their prime
Rot, and consume themselves in little time.
"Were I hard-favour'd, foul, or wrinkled old,
Ill-nurtur'd, crooked, churlish, harsh in voice,
O'erworn, despised, rheumatic and cold,
Thick-sighted, barren, lean, and lacking juice,
Then mightst thou pause, for then I were not for thee;
But having no defects, why dost abhor me?
"Thou canst not see one wrinkle in my brow,
Mine eyes are grey and bright and quick in turning,
My beauty as the spring doth yearly grow,
My flesh is soft and plump, my marrow burning,
My smooth moist hand, were it with thy hand felt,
Would in thy palm dissolve, or seem to melt.
"Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear,
Or like a fairy trip upon the green,
Or like a nymph, with long dishevell'd hair,
Dance on the sands, and yet no footing seen.
Love is a spirit all compact of fire,
Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire." (127-150)
It is surprising that so discerning a reader as Coleridge thought the author of this poem immature. Venus's arguments are familiar from the sonnets, and possess the same persuasiveness: can we doubt that, in the act of imagination which produced these stanzas, Shakespeare was inward with his Venus, carried forward on the self-fuelling thrust of her desire? He enables us to feel something of what it is like to be her, to inhabit flesh "soft and plump" whose marrow burns, and we are drawn, willy-nilly, into taking her hand and feeling it. (This is Keats's Shakespeare, plainly.) The last-quoted stanza looks forward not only to the fairy world of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but to Prospero's magical island; and the assonating vowels of "light" and "aspire", escaping the downward tug of "gross to sink", seem to lift the verse upwards in an effortless assertion of free spirit.
Which brings me to the passage that gives puritan critics particular bother and even made Coleridge pause:
"Fondling," she saith, "since I have hemm'd thee here,
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer:
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale;
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
"Within this limit is relief enough,
Sweet bottom grass and high delightful plain,
Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,
To shelter thee from tempest and from rain:
Then be my deer, since I am such a park,
No dog shall rouse thee, though a thousand bark." (229-240)
Professor Prince comments in a footnote: "It was this sort of witticism which made Venus and Adonis so popular with the genteel readers of its day" and the comment connects with his statement in his Introduction which pushes the poem's "wantonness and wit" away from the foreground of Shakespeare's creative activity: "The finer interest of the poem lies in its demonstration that for Shakespeare these [qualities] are only manifestations of an intenser activity: they become the adjuncts of an almost intoxicating poetic vision." Now it seems to me that unless we recognise the deer-park stanzas as the thing itself, not "manifestations" of some "intenser activity" (whatever that is) or "adjuncts" to some "almost [?] intoxicating poetic vision" (and whatever that), we shall never get anywhere. For plainly, these stanzas are intense and self-delighting poetry, are the vision of a great comic poet. Their "wantonness and wit" (whatever shade of meaning the first of these terms is meant to carry) are not detachable qualities, but exist where the poetry is. Venus's words delight us (if we are not lost puritans) because Shakespeare's imagination was delighted by what it contemplated in the act of writing them. Coleridge says of the poem, no doubt with these lines prominent in his mind, "Though the very subject cannot but detract from the pleasure of a delicate mind, yet never was poem less dangerous on a moral account." His second claim is surely right, so that the "delicate mind" which is offended by such poetry had better not only steer clear of poetry but of the real world of human experience. (I am reminded of Keats, who, advised by his friend Woodhouse that a certain stanza in The Eve of St Agnes would render the poem unfit for the perusal of ladies, replied that he did not want ladies to read it.) The Venus that Shakespeare here imagines from within is wholly unselfconscious, quite lacking in prurience, embarrassment, or the debased and wretched modern sense of sexuality as dirty or smutty. What she offers Adonis is her complete self, her body, her passion, her commitment – her generosity is absolute and alive with good humour. There is also in her here more than a touch of maternal protectiveness towards the boy: she offers herself to him both as mistress and as mother, offers herself with the indulgent and unconditional helpfulness of the mature woman to the embarrassed and awkward novice, but is at the same time Venus Genetrix, the Mater Gea.
It may well have been that Shakespeare's "genteel readers" enjoyed this passage: it is certain that countrymen of his time would have had no difficulty with his metaphors, for he shows himself to be in close touch with the rural ballad of the period. The imaging of women's bodies as landscapes is common in folksong, and the language of the hunt was an established means of celebrating sexual love. One of the finest songs of this kind is "The Furze Field", which includes the following verse:
I have got a park, my own dearest jewel,
Where all my fine deers I do keep,
And if you goes a-hunting when hunting's in season
I'll tell you, love, how to proceed.
You bring your dog with you, your nag in your hand,
All saddled and bridled and at your command:
When the deers they will prowl and the dogs they will bawl,
It's 'Gee up then Dobbin', and back they will fall.
Here the "deers" are the physical delights which the park affords a hunter, whereas Venus sees Adonis as a deer to whom her park guarantees safety from the huntsman's dogs. "The Furze Field" takes the form of a woman's invitation to the male, and, though its words cannot properly be appreciated apart from the lilting, good-tempered melody, the ballad in its less sophisticated English conveys a lively unselfconsciousness – a quality present also in Venus's invitation.
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II.
Shakespeare, I have suggested, is inward in Venus and Adonis when he wishes to be, projecting himself wholly and inevitably into the minds and bodies of his characters, detached and ironic when he withdraws from this absorption to view them from outside. The failure to see that this is how a poet with Shakespeare's special gifts will proceed when composing narrative verse leads, by different routes, to the difficulties of Coleridge and Lewis. Here is Coleridge again on the poem:
It is throughout as if a superior spirit, more intuitive, more intimately conscious even than the characters themselves, not only of every outward look and act but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions, and actuated only by that pleasurable excitement which had resulted from the energetic fervour of his own spirit, in so vividly exhibiting what it had so accurately and profoundly contemplated.
Some of this is finely said, and it is difficult to feel that a poet who can be described in such terms can be writing at anything less than his best; where I differ from Coleridge is in feeling that Shakespeare does "participate" in Venus's passions in the act of imagining how she would herself speak of them. Shakespeare "becomes" her no less than he becomes Othello, Iago, Desdemona. If we place Hero and Leander beside Venus and Adonis we see that Coleridge's description is more appropriate to Marlowe's order of poetic imagination than to Shakespeare's. Marlowe's is a mind which contemplates vividly and energetically, whilst standing outside and remaining aloof from what it contemplates, but Shakespeare has the capacity utterly to absorb himself in his creations. Marlowe is a first-rate poet, but he is not a genius. And indeed Coleridge, seemingly forgetting what he has said earlier in the same chapter of Biographia Literaria, gives Shakespeare his full and proper due in a splendid passage in which he compares him with Milton:
While the former darts himself forth, and passes into all the forms of human character and passion, the one Proteus of the fire and the flood, the other attracts all forces and things to himself, into the unity of his own ideal.
Biographia Literaria appeared in July 1817; in October of the following year Keats, in a letter to Woodhouse, restated Coleridge's distinction as one between the "camelion poet" (pre-eminently Shakespeare, but also himself) and the poet of the "egotistical sublime" (Wordsworth – but we may name Milton with him). In November 1817 Keats had written to Reynolds from Burford Bridge, where he had gone to finish Endymion, that Shakespeare's poems was one of three books he had with him there. He comments that the sonnets "seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally – in the intensity of working out conceits" and gives as an example (correcting himself at the last moment that this is from Venus, not a sonnet) this stanza:
Or as the snail, whose tender horns being hit,
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,
And there all smother'd up in shade doth sit,
Long after fearing to creep forth again:
So at his bloody view her eyes are fled
Into the deep dark cabins of her head. (1031-1036)
It is characteristic of him that Keats, commenting in what looks like amused ruefulness that Shakespeare "has left nothing to say about nothing or any thing; for look at snails," should pick on this stanza. The snail is there for the purpose of the conceit, which springs out of Venus closing her eyes (or rather, the eyes closing themselves in reflex reaction) when they light upon Adonis's mutilated body. Shakespeare has already likened Venus's closing eyes to "stars asham'd of day", yet his imagination will not rest content with this simile. If I ask myself why this is so, I can only come up with the suggestion that his imagination demands something that will give us the pathos of Venus's response at this moment. Rather than Venus herself, he gives us an analogue, a snail hurt and scared. The most active word in the first line here is "tender", the only disyllable, which concentrates on the feel of the snail as its horns are "hit" – the brisk verb at which the line fetches abruptly up. The vowel of "hit" is immediately caught up in "Shrinks", and the second line springs away from the first, recoiling onomatopoeically in one rapid fluid movement. "Smother'd up" dominates the third line, giving the pent-up, suffocating misery of the creature. How different, then, is the brusque couplet from the sympathetic inwardness, the "snailhorn perception" (Keats's phrase in another letter) of the quatrain! Shakespeare in the couplet is witty and hyperbolic, the couplet has comedy in mind: whilst the quatrain represents a poet who cannot but feel for Venus – even when he must feel for her at one remove, feel through an analogue. The hurt snail is indeed a fine thing said in the intensity of working out a conceit, but I do not believe it is said unintentionally: the sympathetic imagination has its own wilfulness, and poetic "intention", that very slippery customer, is something that in the making of a poem is in a continuous state of flux and self-discovery.
Shakespeare's dealings with animals and with Venus and Adonis are of a piece in that both call forth the inwardness of the chameleon poet. As the snail gives us the tenderness of Venus's flesh, the dive-dapper gives us Adonis – here reluctantly preparing to receive the payment of a kiss:
Upon this promise did he raise his chin,
Like a dive-dapper peering through a wave,
Who being look'd on, ducks as quickly in:
So offers he to give what she did crave,
But when his lips were ready for his pay,
He winks, and turns his lips another way. (85-90)
Here Shakespeare works out the conceit in advance of completing his bit of business with the kiss, so that the quick pertness of "ducks" anticipates Adonis's coy avoidance of her lips in "winks", which carries a portmanteauish double meaning of "blinks" and "winces". It seems to me that Shakespeare here – as so often – both has his cake and eats it: making fun of Adonis, but in so good-humoured a manner that our sympathies for the boy are touched and engaged rather than jeopardized. This is the essence of the poem's comedy.
The accuracy of the expression "sympathetic imagination" for the temper of Shakespeare's engagement in Venus and Adonis is most literally borne out in the passage in which Venus, discovering Adonis's intention to go boar-hunting, gives vent to her fears for his safety. Jealousy, she says,
"presenteth to mine eye
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;
Whose blood upon the fresh flowers being shed,
Doth make them droop with grief, and hang the head." (661-666)
Love, fear, protectiveness, a complex of emotions spur Venus to seize the future in the instant. The future is vividly imaged, and that the images are unmistakably Shakespearean we know by their finely measured excess: Shakespeare (or Venus – it is all one) does not stop at the vision of Adonis's body "stain'd with gore", but pushes effortlessly beyond that to the pathetic image of the flowers which, spattered with his blood, "droop with grief" – drawn inevitably into the humanizing pale of influence of Venus's sympathy. What Venus "sees" she sees by virtue of imagination. We may characterise the difference between Venus and Adonis by saying that she possesses a profound faculty of imaginative sympathy whilst he has none. Shakespeare, that is, endows Venus with his own supreme gift while necessarily denying it to Adonis. It is not, I think, fortuitous that the female possesses imagination, the male lacks it. The rational, self-contained, stubborn selfhood of Adonis is a masculinity unadulterated and unpenetrated by the feminine. It looks forward in a modest way to those notably and unsympathetically male sensibilities of the Roman plays, to Octavius Caesar and Coriolanus. It is sexually and politically absolute (its sexuality a politics of the person), and offers no chink through which the feminine may enter. (In Mark Antony, conversely, we have an experienced male sensibility penetrated to the point of self-perplexity by the feminine, and quite unable to regain the singleness and simpleness of being necessary for political survival in the frigid empire that Rome has created.) Glancing back to Keats, we may say that the chameleon poet, the poet of Negative Capability, is the poet of the feminine, the poet who escapes the confines of his own ego in order to enter into his creations, while the opposing kind of poet, a Wordsworth or a Milton, typically impresses his own stamp upon what he creates. It is not surprising that Keats was unable to finish his Miltonic Hyperion: glitter with a hard sheen the poetry might, but the latinate masculinity of Milton's style was not in the long run conducive to the release of Keats's particular genius.
When Adonis, then, refuses to heed Venus's warning and persists in his intention of hunting the boar, it is the feminine, imagination, upon which he turns his back. But he is, it turns out, no better fitted for the masculine sphere of war that the hunt mimics than for the seductions of the goddess of love. We deny the intuitions of imagination at our peril.
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III.
The whole action of Venus and Adonis is implied in its opening stanza:
Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase;
Hunting he lov'd, but love he laugh'd to scorn.
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-fac'd suitor 'gins to woo him. (1-6)
The primary meaning of the opening lines is of course that Adonis sets off to the hunt as the sun lifts himself above the horizon. But there is a secondary meaning: "Even as" suggests a simile in whose terms "Rose-cheek'd Adonis" is compared to the sun with his "purple-colour'd face". The analogy is incomplete, for Adonis is not said to take leave of anyone, but it seems natural to link "the weeping morn" with "Sick-thoughted Venus". "Sick-thoughted" carries the main sense of "sick with thoughts of love", but the stanza anticipates Adonis's departure for the hunt on the second day, his death, and a sick-thoughted Venus weeping over his bloody corpse. "Purple" is Shakespeare's colour for blood in a number of plays, and when Venus can finally bring herself to look at Adonis's mangled body, we read that her eyes
being open'd threw unwilling light
Upon the wide wound that the boar had trench'd
In his soft flank, whose wonted lily-white
With purple tears that his wound wept, was drench'd.
No flower was nigh, no grass, herb, leaf or weed,
But stole his blood and seem'd with him to bleed. (1051-1056)
"Purple tears" catches up both the brilliance of the sun and the weeping of the morning from the poem's opening. In this elaborate conceit, cause and effect wittily conspire in the blood weeping for its own shedding. The couplet catches up and fulfils the stanza I have already quoted in which Venus's intense imagination presents her not only with the vision of Adonis stained with gore but of the flowers that seem to grieve for him. If we wish to be persuaded of the fusion of intellect and creative power in this poem, we need look no further than the conceit of lines 1055-1056, in which Shakespeare's imagination goes one better than in the comparable couplet at 671-672: the flesh of the plants appears to bleed in sympathy with the flesh of Adonis. When later his body is magically transformed into a flower, the sympathies of nature are fulfilled. Goddess, boy, animals and plants have been connected throughout the poem in similes and conceits. Nature may have its destructive boars, but Venus herself is a kind of huntress who can see the boar in a conceit as a lover of Adonis, and can admit that, had she been toothed like the boar, "With kissing him I should have kill'd him first" (1118); elsewhere Venus is given the qualities both of eagle and vulture, so that the destructive and the creative in nature exist not in absolute enmity but in an intimacy born of interdependence. This is the consolation of comedy. Whereas Shakespeare's tragedies highlight the circumstantial horrors and defeats that time, destiny and man's own imperfect nature inflict upon him, horrors and defeats that nothing can compensate or alleviate, the comedy of Venus and Adonis conceives of a world in which all creatures and events are bound together by the logic of nature, and the world seems capable of infinite metamorphosis and renewal in spite of Venus's assertion that Adonis was unique and irreplaceable.
Here is the moment of metamorphosis:
By this the boy that by her side lay kill'd
Was melted like a vapour from her sight,
And in his blood that on the ground lay spill'd,
A purple flower sprung up, checker'd with white,
Resembling well his pale cheeks and the blood
Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood. (1165-1170)
These lines pick up not only the earlier images of ensanguined flowers but the second verse of the poem, where Venus addresses Adonis as
The field's chief flower, sweet above compare:
Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man,
More white and red than doves of roses are...
The white and red of Adonis the flower fulfil other lines too: 76-78, in which he is
Twixt crimson shame and anger ashy pale
and 346-348, where the red and white drive one another alternately not from Adonis's cheeks but Venus's.
These passages deserve further comment, but it is not my purpose to provide it here: rather I wish to suggest the tip of an iceberg – the richness of idea, conceit, metaphor in this poem. It is the richness of mature Shakespeare, a far cry from the work of a poet testing his fledgling wings. The poem bursts at the seams with the natural, with glimpses and pictures of animals, birds, plants – and none of the longer episodes in which they feature are digressive: the treatment of Adonis's courser and the jennet exists not just for its own sake (which would have been sake enough, in truth) but to throw into ironic relief Adonis's rejection of Venus; whilst Venus's account of the hunting of Wat the hare is alive with the irrepressible vitality of her imaginative sympathy, that sympathy which will be shown at its most poignant when she comes upon the body of her beloved.
Critics have frequently remarked on the poem's rapidity of movement. The speed of the whole derives from the quickness of motion of its parts, and is partly due to the stanza that Shakespeare has chosen (a point I shall come back to), partly to the many instances of rapid action that he describes. These actions are often, when not those of Venus and Adonis themselves, actions of creatures to which the lovers are compared. Even when the lovers remain in one place for a number of stanzas, their physical stillness is surrounded and infiltrated by its opposite. Birds and beasts all move or desire to move, Adonis frets to be off hunting, and Venus at the last, as at the poem's beginning, is driven into vigorous pursuit. It is a young world that chafes at sitting still. Venus, of course, though she wishes to pin Adonis down (better still, to be pinned down by him), is not at odds with this world: the love-making that she seeks would be a mutual expense and fulfilment of the energies of desire; spiritually and passionately she is never still, her love is
a spirit all compact of fire,
Not gross to sink, but light, and will aspire. (149-150)
From an embarrassment of examples, an embarrass de richesse, I will take just two. Here are the two horses flying from Adonis:
His testy master goeth about to take him,
When lo the unback'd breeder, full of fear,
Jealous of catching, swiftly doth forsake him;
With her the horse, and left Adonis there:
As they were mad unto the wood they hie them,
Outstripping crows that strive to overfly them. (319-324)
Professor Prince comments in a footnote: These two lines show magnificently Shakespeare's concise evocation of landscape." Maybe so, but Shakespeare is much more interested in what the horses are doing and why they are doing it. How many words enact or imply movement: the verbs "goeth", "take", "catching", "forsake", "left", "hie", "Outstripping", "strive" and "overfly", the adverb "swiftly" – even the phrase "As they were mad" suggests the frenzy of their gallop. Their speed has less to do with escape than it is testimony to the energy that is in them, and it is energy born of desire: their flight is a flight towards the consummation of lusts which may not be denied. To respond in such a way, their action implies, is natural; Adonis, in rejecting Venus, imposes the artificial constraints of will and reason upon what ought not to be constrained. Venus and the horses exist in the liberated realm of unselfconscious energy which Blake advocated in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Adonis embodies the passive that is Heaven, Venus the active which is Hell. "Exuberance is Beauty" in Shakespeare's world, as in Blake's.
In the next passage, Venus is coasting in the direction of the sounds of the hunt:
And as she runs, the bushes in the way,
Some catch her by the neck, some kiss her face,
Some twine about her thigh to make her stay;
She wildly breaketh from their strict embrace,
Like a milch doe, whose swelling dugs do ache,
Hasting to feed her fawn, hid in some brake. (871-876)
This is remarkable writing, even by the high standards of the rest of the poem. The vital world through which the anxious, impelled Venus runs has developed its own desiring sexuality: the very bushes seek to detain and possess her: the phrase "twine about her thigh" is sinuously sensual. Everything in this realm – everything, that is, except Adonis – pays homage to the principle of love. But at this point Venus's own breathing sexuality has become submerged beneath a still more powerful instinct – the protective, ministering instinct of the mother. This, of course, has been implicit in her feelings all along. In the deer-park stanzas she invited him to pleasure himself at her breasts like a lover; the tone of those stanzas, a robust delight in offering her body to him touched by a protective solicitude of which she was well aware, has now given way before an irrepressible surge of maternal feeling. Typically, Shakespeare roots this feeling in the life of the body: her swelling, aching dugs keep nature's time, demand the relief of knowing that Adonis is alive to relieve them. She pursues him now not in the hope of satisfying her own desires but, unselfconsciously, to bring succour to him in what she perceives, intuitively, to be a time of threat.
The idea that connects the two last-quoted stanzas, and many others in the poem, is succinctly expressed in the parenthetic exclamation of line 38:
– O how quick is love! –
It is love that hies the horses to the wood, love that (in both senses of the word) quickens Venus as she pursues Adonis. We should not, of course, be surprised to find Shakespeare moving effortlessly from expressing Venus's physical desire for Adonis to expressing her maternal feelings for him. Both feelings are deeply sexual. The mother's love for her child (or for that matter the father's) must be a love of the child in the body. (I am not speaking of Freudian simplicities or paedophiliac desire.) For how otherwise can a parent properly love a child? How could parental love be love for an abstraction, the notion of a child? We may return to Venus's aching breasts: lovers know what it can mean literally to ache with desire for one another, and parents what it can mean literally to ache with love for children – a love that is instinct with concern for the child's well-being. This is not to minimise the profound differences between the love of lovers for one another and the love of parents for their children, the most obvious of which is that lovers fulfil their desire for one another through mutual acts of physical possession, whilst the love of parents for children properly exists beyond possession – for parents must relinquish, as children grow, those physical intimacies through which their love was, in part, naturally and necessarily expressed. (This last point goes some way towards explaining why it is impossible for most parents to feel for the children of others as they feel for their own: other people's children are simply not flesh of their flesh.) All this and much more Shakespeare knew well enough, for the great poet is educated as much in emotions as in words.
I must now take up the suggestion that the speed of Venus is in part due to Shakespeare's choice of stanza. The stanza is the sestet of a Shakespearean sonnet: its form implies the brief expansion of an idea (the quatrain) which is then clinched (the couplet). To take on a long poem in this stanza is to accept a very different challenge from that of writing one in couplets (Hero and Leander) or even in the seven-line stanza of Lucrece (which is like a busy traveller who continually has to declare excess baggage at each port of call). When a poem is composed in couplets that are encouraged to flow (as opposed to the managed, balanced couplets of Augustan verse) , the couplet loses its character as a sonnet-clincher; place a couplet after a quatrain, however, and you impose a verbal shape upon yourself which has implications built into its structure. The chief difficulty of the stanza lies in the fifth and sixth lines, for if their sense of clinching is too pronounced, too final, the poem will seem to start and stop, to start and stop again. The couplet must therefore possess, as well as the sense of clinching its quatrain, the sense of providing a springboard from which the next verse can take off. Let us look again at the poem's opening:
Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase;
Hunting he lov'd, but love he laugh'd to scorn.
Sick-thoughted Venus makes amain unto him,
And like a bold-fac'd suitor 'gins to woo him.
"Thrice fairer than myself," thus she began,
"The field's chief flower, sweet above compare,
Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man,
More white and red than doves and roses are:
Nature that made thee with herself at strife,
Saith that the world hath ending with thy life." (1-12)
Both stanzas recognise the suture between quatrain and couplet by pointing it strongly. The opening verse further presents us with a noticeable pause at the end of the third line – a pause marked not only by the semi-colon but also by the counterpointing of the first foot of line four. The effect is a little to isolate the fourth line, so that it acts as a kind of pivot between what goes before it and what comes after it. This opening stanza is very democratic: two lines for the sun, two for Adonis, two for Venus. Its couplet both clinches the stanza, introducing a lover for Adonis whom, in keeping with the assertion of line 4, he will reject, and provides a springboard for the following verse, which delivers the wooing promised in line 6. The second stanza is as different structurally as one could wish. The quatrain suspends before us a series of appositions which only come to syntactical completion in the couplet. The sense of clinching is particularly strong here: the idea is not only itself an absolute one – that the world will end if Adonis dies – but anticipates Adonis's death, Venus's grief for him, and the firm closure that the poem achieves when she departs in her dove-drawn chariot for Paphos.
I am tempted to liken the stanzas of Venus to the links of a chain – perhaps, borrowing from the poem one of its most memorable images, of a "red-rose chain": a connected and cumulative sequence of intensities which, though each may possess an air of individual completeness, gain their full resonance from the whole. Each verse pauses to take breath only to launch another forward, the energy that sustains the whole unflagging.
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IV.
Professor Prince observes that a far smaller proportion of modern Shakespeare criticism is devoted to the comedies than to any other section of his work. This, he says, represents the slowness of critics to appreciate the comic spirit. I think it has also to do with the tendency of British readers to value tragedy above comedy: they feel instinctively that tragedy must of its very nature explore regions of the human spirit more profound than comedy can, experiences that per se are more significant, certainly more relevant to the modern predicament. I say this self-consciously, for it is an attitude I find extremely difficult to reject. Yet reason suggests that the peaks and troughs of experience must, as contraries, be proportionate: that, for example, the agony of loss is no more intense an emotion than the joy of reconciliation: both extremities touch sublimity. So that I am inclined to think our valuation of tragedy above comedy is a matter of ingrained cultural inheritance; and if this is so, it is not something we can change at will.
Shakespeare himself, of course, did not stop at the great tragedies: we went on to the final comedies. George Barker ("William Shakespeare and the Horse with Wings" in Essays) has finely said of him: "He has written a cycle of dramas about illusion, disillusion and consolation. And the circle is complete." Shakespeare was not content to create Lear, Othello, Macbeth and leave it there. To do so would have meant leaving his transmutation of life incomplete. We are still labouring in his wake: we have still not grasped what he was about: we continue to undervalue these last plays. But it is not even as simple as that, for so many of Shakespeare's plays strain the labels of "tragedy" and "comedy" to such a degree that these terms become more of an obstacle than an aid to understanding. Measure for Measure seems for much of its length to be heading for a tragic outcome; when the dénouement comes, it is bitter, it is teasingly unsatisfying. King Lear includes in itself all varieties of the comic, from slapstick, to the cut and thrust of wit, to what twentieth-century writers have come to call the theatre of the absurd: yet it contains them and remains a tragedy. To think of these two plays, among others, is to see how mutually hospitable comedy and tragedy can be, how the one flows into the other (how, indeed, in Lear, heights of joy and depths of agony succeed one another in little space and time. In his Author's Note to his Collected Poems, Patrick Kavanagh, by way of explaining why he came to dislike his long poem The Great Hunger, says "The Great Hunger is tragedy and Tragedy is underdeveloped Comedy, not fully born." Measure for Measure gives us comedy straining to be tragedy, King Lear tragedy straining to be comedy. Kavanagh was wrong to be dissatisfied with The Great Hunger: it is a tragic piece: he ought to have been content to move on. His dissatisfaction is perhaps a reflection upon his inability to write convincing comedy, to produce a comic poem as good as his tragic one. When we press his comment in the light of what I have just said about Shakespeare, we see that, though it is enormously suggestive, it remains a half-truth. For if tragedy is comedy not fully born, comedy is tragedy not fully born. The profound satisfaction of reading Shakespeare from end to end has to do with the satisfaction of the cyclic – of emerging out of tragedy to find oneself once more in the realm of the comic. From Measure for Measure and King Lear we see that comedy and tragedy, rather than being opposites, are incestuous relations, that the difference between them lies not so much in the raw material of a play but in the treatment the playwright chooses to give that material.
In Venus and Adonis Shakespeare takes a potentially tragic theme and makes of it a comedy. Although there is never any possibility of tragedy triumphing in the poem, we may nevertheless sense in it the force of the suggestion that comedy is tragedy not fully born. Which is not to criticise Venus, but simply to indicate the position the poem occupies on the circumference of our circle.
Answers to the question, Why is Venus not a tragedy? are not far to seek. Professor Prince is a useful guide on this trail, but it is not to my purpose to quote him here. What I want to emphasise may be approached by stating the obvious: it is in the poem's last movement (that is, from line 853 to the end) that stanzas of narrative take control of the poem. On the poem's first day, when Venus and Adonis are together, Venus has a sufficiently large number of stanzas of direct speech to make hers the poem's dominant voice. Now, on the poem's second day, although at all times we are with Venus, observing her, seeing through her eyes, sometimes carried forward with the wave of her feelings, Shakespeare's narrative voice dominates and controls our relationship with his heroine. This voice may, as I allowed in part I of this essay, be coolly detached:
A thousand spleens bear her a thousand ways,
She treads the path that she untreads again;
Her more than haste is mated with delays
Like the proceedings of a drunken brain,
Full of respects, yet naught at all respecting,
In hand with all things, naught at all effecting. (907-912)
Here the simile of the drunken brain in particular thrusts her away from us, forcing us to become clinical observers of a creative driven forward by anguish, irrational in her motions. Her wild bewilderment is that of a mortal rather than an immortal being: fearing the worst, she chides Death for his ruthlessness; then, recovering hope, takes back her words and flatters him. Earlier in the poem, the narrative voice ironized both her excessive fondness and Adonis's excessive coldness: now it holds up to the critical gaze Venus's emotional inconsistency:
Thy weal and woe are both of them extremes;
Despair and hope makes thee ridiculous... (987-988)
When she weeps, Shakespeare transmutes her tears into jewels; whenever he gets the chance, he lays on the hyperbole, spins conceit on top of conceit so that the brilliance of the poetry draws attention as much to itself as to the experiences it describes. When Venus can bring herself to look upon Adonis's body, she stares so hard that she gives herself double vision, and again we are in the land of comedy where nothing is allowed to be literally and uncompromisingly itself.
At length, however, Shakespeare must let her speak, and she gets two substantial speeches, one of fifty-two lines and one of thirty-two, and a shorter speech of twelve: ninety-six of the poem's last one hundred and twenty-six lines. None of this speech invokes the spirit of tragedy – darkly though her prophecy of the attendance of sorrow on future love may read. One reason for this is the picture of Adonis that she draws for us, a picture in which it is impossible to recognize the rationalistic, prudish, rash boy of the poem: the Adonis of her tribute is idealized by her characteristic generosity. Another reason is that the conceited wit that sauced her attempts to seduce Adonis earlier in the poem continues to colour her poetry: softened and put to poignant uses, certainly, yet still playful and gay:
"And therefore would he put his bonnet on,
Under whose brim the gaudy sun would peep:
The wind would blow it off, and being gone,
Play with his locks; then would Adonis weep,
And straight, in pity of his tender years,
They both would strive who first should dry his tears." (1087-1092)
At her most touching, she creates images of innocence that are full of pathos:
"When he beheld his shadow in the brook,
The fishes spread on it their golden gills;
When he was by, the birds such pleasure took
That some would sing, some other in their bills
Would bring him mulberries and ripe read cherries;
He fed them with his sight, they him with berries." (1099-1104)
"Pathos" and "pathetic" are words which, perhaps on account of their comparative temperateness, are under suspicion, under pressure in our time: yet both life and literature would be losers if we became unable to call upon them to evoke a certain range of sympathetic feeling. Venus in these stanzas is not only expressing her personal sympathy, but the sympathy that informs the transactions of the nature she describes – the sympathy of sun and wind with young Adonis, the reciprocal satisfactions of Adonis and the birds. So that, even in these lines of tender recollection, we may perceive the consolations of comedy: the poetry celebrates Adonis even as it registers his loss.
The poem finally refuses the uncompromising realism that tragedy demands in order to establish its world (it is the most readily identified means Shakespeare has, as Professor Prince points out, of sustaining the spirit of comedy) with the metamorphosis of Adonis into a flower – a flower that Venus then tucks between her breasts. It is not, alas, the Adonis to whom she so lustily offered those same breasts on the previous day, yet when we read –
Lo in this hollow cradle take thy rest;
My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night: (1185-1186)
– we may without straining discover something of that maternal protectiveness which has coloured Venus's love-lust for Adonis at earlier points in the poem. It is a cherishing love that asserts its durability, its survival in the future. It is wholly in keeping with this positivity, the positivity of the comic realm, that the poem ends with a taking-off, a lifting of spirit, as Venus mounts in her "light chariot" through the empty skies: the poem refuses to be downcast, it concludes with an effortless rising cadence. Here again one sees Shakespeare, whether consciously or instinctively, doing the right thing. Venus and Adonis is a glowing, assured and mature masterpiece which special pleading can only insult: to observe which, one need do no more than read it.
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