27 pages • 54 minutes read
William ShakespeareVenus and Adonis
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1593A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Love Unrequited, and Love Versus Lust
On the evidence of the poem, the relationship between Venus and Adonis must be one of the most one-sided ever recorded. Venus is completely smitten by the young man she admires so much, but he cares not a whit for her. He is not interested in having a love affair with anyone, and certainly not with Venus. In spite of this, she is extremely persistent, and she fails to understand why she is putting him off when all she wants to do is reel him in. The fact that her love is unreturned brings her great sorrow. For his part, Adonis dismisses her claims to love him and makes it clear why: He thinks she is simply lusting after him, and lust, he believes, has no connection to true love. Indeed, love is the opposite of lust, in the view of this idealistic young man.
The lustful nature of Venus becomes apparent early in the poem, when “desire doth lend her force / Courageously to pluck him from his horse” (Lines 29-30). In medieval times, the word courage had the additional meaning of lust, and here “courageously” means “lustfully.” (The word is so used in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale, just to give one example.) In Line 35, this impression is confirmed in the description of Venus as “red and hot as coals of glowing fire.” For Venus, love, desire, and lust go hand in hand. Adonis straightaway calls her “immodest” (Line 53), and when Venus offers Adonis her body and describes it metaphorically as a park, inviting him to graze like a deer wherever he chooses (Lines 229-40), he reacts only with a disdainful smile. It is clear they are at cross-purposes, but Adonis has not yet made it crystal clear why he is holding back.
A little later, when Adonis complains that he has lost his horse and it is Venus’s fault, she tries to use the incident in which Adonis’s stallion pursued and took the mare (Lines 259-324) as a teaching moment. The horse was just following his desire, she says, and she equates that desire with love. Although the horse was tied to a tree, “when he saw his love, his youth’s fair fee” (Line 393), he broke away from his bonds and ran toward her. (“Fee” in this line means “rightful reward.”) Venus fails to make the distinction between animal desire and human love, but this distinction is not lost on Adonis.
Another indication of Venus’s lustful nature occurs in the narrator’s descriptions of the effect on her of the extreme erotic attachment she feels toward Adonis. After Adonis reluctantly agrees to give her just one kiss before he bids her goodnight, she seizes him and they fall to the ground together. The speaker says, “And glutton-like she feeds, yet never filleth” (Line 548). Feeding like a glutton is not a compliment, since gluttony is traditionally one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Venus’s lustful nature is made even more explicit in the stanza that follows: “Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood doth boil, / And careless lust stirs up a desperate courage” (Lines 555-56). She forgets all about qualities such as shame and honor (Line 558).
The theme of love versus lust is presented clearly nearly two-thirds through the poem, with Adonis’s speech beginning at Line 769. He says, “Call it not love, for Love to heaven is fled, / Since sweating lust on earth usurp’d his name” (Lines 793-94). (More than once in the poem, Venus is described as sweating; Line 175, for example.) Adonis then lays out the distinction between love and lust in a stanza that pairs them as opposite in their effects:
Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
But Lust’s effect is tempest after sun;
Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust’s winter comes ere summer half be done;
Love surfeits not, Lust like a glutton dies;
Love is all truth, Lust full of forged lies (Lines 799-804).
Innocent, Beautiful Young Male versus Cunning, Mature Female
Venus constantly emphasizes Adonis’s beauty. She even compares herself unfavorably to him. He is “Thrice fairer than myself” (Line 7); his lips are fairer (that is, more beautiful) than hers (Lines 115-16). When she places her “tender” hand on his cheek, his “tend’rer cheek” receives it (Lines 352-53). Adonis is more beautiful than the nymphs (Line 9), Venus says, and, as a youth, he is “more lovely than a man” (Line 9). Nature surpassed herself in creating him (Line 11). His face possesses a beauty “Whose full perfection all the world amazes” (Line 634). The mold from which Adonis came belonged to heaven rather than nature (Line 729-30). The narrator comments that Adonis’s beauty even increases when he is angry and fretful (Lines 69-70). After his death, Venus states that “true sweet beauty liv’d and died with him” (Line 1080).
Both Venus and Adonis himself, as well as the speaker, emphasize his youth and innocence. He is a “tender boy” who blushes (Line 32); he is “bashful” (Line 49). He is a “wayward boy” (Line 344). Adonis tries to explain to Venus that he is too young to even think about love. He is not ready for it, and from what he has heard of love, he does not like it. Adonis is able to bond with his male friends who likely enjoy hunting as much as he does, but he is not prepared to extend either friendship or love to a woman—a goddess, even—especially one who pursues him with such relentless determination. Emphasizing his youth, he says to her plaintively, “Who plucks the bud before one leaf put forth?” (Line 416). Later, he tries to explain himself further along the same lines: “Measure my strangeness with my unripe years; / Before I know myself, seek not to know me” (Lines 524-25). (By “strangeness” here he means his coldness toward her.) He continues with an analogy drawn from nature: “The mellow plum doth fall, the green sticks fast, / Or being early pluck’d, is sour to taste” (Lines 527-28).
In contrast, Venus gives the impression of being much older than Adonis. She is certainly more experienced in love, as well as being a stronger personality who will use all her wiles and cunning to get what she wants. After all, she has been wooed, as she tells Adonis, by no less than Mars, the god of war, and she proved more than a match for him. He ended up begging for her favor like a slave, while she remained aloof. He even abandoned his warlike nature, putting his drum and flag aside and engaging in sport and dance, just to please her. She seems to regard her taming of Mars, as well she might, as a major accomplishment (Lines 97-114).
Venus is well aware that Adonis is “unripe” (that is, youthful, as he will later tell her) but she adds, “mayst thou well be tasted” (Line 128). She thus turns all her powers of persuasion on him, including amorous physical advances, psychological manipulation (as when she falls down and pretends to be dead), and intellectual argument (beauty must be used to beget progeny, for example).
In light of all that, and given the fact that even Mars could not handle Venus, what chance does the innocent young Adonis have? His only recourse, as he seems to know, is to say as little as possible, act in a surly manner, and get back home as soon as he can, where he can meet up with his hunting buddies, whose conversation is more likely to be about wild animals than women.
Self-Involvement and Relationship: The Narcissus Factor
The notion of the innocent young man up against a cunning and lustful woman/goddess is one view of the poem, but another interpretation is quite possible. Such a view would present Adonis as too self-involved and unable to take the next step in his growth toward self-knowledge and maturity. He is unwilling to step out of his familiar male world and learn what it is like to love a female. In that respect, his railing against lust might be seen as a smokescreen to deflect attention from his unwillingness to engage in the more complicated task of engaging with the opposite sex. Adonis may be young but he is not that young, and through no actions of his own he has won the love of a goddess. Perhaps it would be to his advantage to seize the opportunity, rather than hide behind his self-image of being chaste and pure with an elevated view of love that does not take account of the role that sexual desire plays in it. Such a view would see Venus in a more favorable light, not as a lustful, voracious woman intent on satiating her physical desire but as someone who can actually help Adonis ease himself into a new, more mature phase of his life. When this goal is thwarted, and Adonis dies, Venus experiences genuine grief and sorrow.
Venus offers a clue to this interpretation when she reproaches Adonis for resembling Narcissus. In Greek mythology, Narcissus, like Adonis, was an extremely beautiful youth, and also like Adonis, he refused to love any of his admirers, especially the nymph Echo. When Narcissus gazes into a pool, he falls in love with his own reflection. He is unable to tear himself away from the pool and the image, lying beside it until he dies, either of self-love or starvation. As Venus explains it to Adonis: “Narcissus so himself himself forsook, / And died to kiss his shadow in the brook” (Lines 161-62). Perhaps Adonis’s refusal to take the next step in life was in part responsible for his death. In rejecting Venus’s kisses, which might have allowed him to expand his understanding of life, he is forced to accept the violent “kiss” (Line 1114) of the boar (as Venus describes it). Like Narcissus, if he cannot break out of his inflexible self-involvement, he will die.
Related Titles
By William Shakespeare
