The Sonnets and Other Poems by William Shakespeare Read Free Book Online Page A

with horse, hare, and boar, and with an actor adopting the wry voice of the narrator. There was a precedent for this adaptation in Ben Jonson’s 1614 comedy
Bartholomew Fair
, in which Christopher Marlowe’s poem “Hero and Leander,” a work closely related to
Venus and Adonis
, underwent transformation at the hands of a puppet master.
    The Elizabethan reader’s pleasure in Shakespeare’s poem lay in its cunning rhetoric, the inventive conceit of its language. The resourceful Venus has many an example:
    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.
    The double entendre whereby landscape and body parts become as one is typical of the poem: Shakespeare is trying out that language of indefatigable innuendo that will characterize so many of his subsequent plays. He is also experimenting with the idea that sexual attraction is sparked by contrariness and apparent disdain. The dynamic between a pair of erotically charged horses anticipates not only the relationship of Venus and Adonis, but also those of the speaker of the sonnets and his beloved, not to mention Berowne and Rosaline in
Love’s Labour’s Lost
and Beatrice and Benedick in
Much Ado about Nothing
:
    He looks upon his love and neighs unto her,
She answers him as if she knew his mind:
Being proud, as females are, to see him woo her,
She puts on outward strangeness, seems unkind,
  Spurns at his love and scorns the heat he feels,
  Beating his kind embracements with her heels.
    The poem ends with the death of Adonis, described as a pattern that will recur perpetually. This sense of inevitable future repetition is what gives the story its mythic, archetypal quality. In one tradition of interpretation, the tale was read as a vegetation myth: Abraham Fraunce, in a mythography published the year before Shakespeare’s poem, interpreted Adonis as the sun, Venus as the upper hemisphere of the earth, and the boar as winter. Shakespeare, though, did not go in this direction: he was more interested in the nature of human sexual desire, making the anemone-like Adonis flower symbolize the transience of beauty and the vulnerability that is created by erotic longing.
Venus and Adonis
moves toward an etiology of love’s anguish: “Since thou art dead, lo, here I prophesy / Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend.” And yet the tone throughout remains gossamer-light, as the reader is invited to delight in the reversal of conventions (woman as seducer, man effeminate and passive) and the excursions into a vibrant surrounding countryside of hunted hares and randy horses.
    Venus doesn’t metamorphose herself into the boar in the manner of Ovid’s Jupiter becoming an animal in order to rape a mortal girl. The story is about frustration rather than violation because a woman cannot easily rape a man. The tone is set not by the spilling of blood toward the end, but by the earlier sequences in which the violence is playful and nobody really gets hurt: “Backward she pushed him, as she would be thrust.”
THE RAPE OF LUCRECE
AND “A LOVER’S COMPLAINT”
    While for most of
Venus and Adonis
, sexual desire is a source of comedy, Shakespeare’s second narrative poem is unquestionably tragic because Tarquin does rape Lucrece. The story of sexual pursuit is replayed in a darker key. Having made a comic spectacle of the rapacious goddess, Shakespeare makes a tragic spectacle of the raped emblem of chastity. The two poems are opposite sides of the same coin, as may be seen from their structural resemblance: in each, an ardent suitor attempts to gain the reluctant object of her/his sexual desire by means of rhetorical persuasion, fails, and indirectly or directly precipitates the death of the object of desire. The difference between the two works is that Adonis dies with his chastity intact—he is only metaphorically raped by the boar—whereas