Much Ado About Adonis

The passion that drove Shakespeares lusty Venus made Elizabethans blush. Germaine Greer charts the poetic rendering of a red-hot goddess, while Robin Usher explores a modern take on the Bards bawdiest offering.

Shakespeare, we are told, was already a "successful playwright" when he sat down to write Venus and Adonis. No play by Shakespeare had yet been printed but Thomas Greene had been sufficiently envious to have sneered at him in a pamphlet of 1592 as a "Shakescene", a mere player who dared to fill out the work of his educated betters. In August 1592, the city authorities closed down the London theatres in an effort to control the spread of a particularly virulent visitation of the plague, and they were to remain closed for the whole of 1593. Shakespeare and his fellows may have found a way of waiting out the time as entertainers in the train of the brilliant young Earl of Southampton.

It may have been the earl or one of his cronies who dared Shakespeare to compose a poem on the theme of one of the stunning Titian paintings that Philip II of Spain had brought to England with him when he came to marry Mary Tudor.

The Titians had gone back to Spain with Philip in 1559, but Titians version of the Venus and Adonis episode from Ovids Metamorphoses was known to cognoscenti through at least two engravings. Titians painting was called a "poesia" and we can imagine young wits animadverting on the maxim "ut pictura poesis", "as in painting so in poetry" or vice versa. Shakespeare might have been hardy enough to suggest that poetry will always outdo painting, and set out to show just how.

Titians painting shows us the instant when a big burly Adonis departs for the hunt, a spear in his right hand, and the lead of an eager bull mastiff in the left. Adonis strides towards us, while we see naked Venus from the back, almost overbalancing as she clutches him round the chest. The momentum of his stride will soon have "him on his belly, she on her back". In the background an exhausted Cupid is asleep, his bow and quiver hanging in a tree. In the foreground, an empty ewer lies on its side. The signficance is obvious. Adonis has had his fill of lovemaking, and is off to pursue more manly pursuits. In the composition his dogs are as important as his lover. This is an exact rendition of the 70 lines or so in Ovids account, where there is no suggestion that Adonis is a beardless boy or "unapt to toy". In the moralised versions of the Metamorphoses as read by schoolboys the episode was interpreted as another illustration of the theme of duty before pleasure.

Shakespeares version would be a sexy poem in which there is no sex; it would display his brilliance as a writer of dialogue, as the two actors in his scene explain themselves, but it would also range over an entire landscape, swooping to investigate the lives of dab-chicks and snails, and pulling out and up to aerial perspectives beyond human vision. To create a succession of sequences, each one with its own internal dynamic, Shakespeare needed stanzas, self-contained units that built to their own climaxes, whether pathetic, bathetic or astonishing. He chose the six-line stanza that was used by Thomas Lodge in cillaes Metamorphosis, published in 1589, the first erotic narrative poem in the kind that 19th-century schoolmen would call "epyllion", or mini-epic, apparently by analogy with presumed works by Theocritus. If English critics had read the Italian comic epic they would have been confronted by the same mangle-mingling of subjects, tones and viewpoints, the same shifts from pathos to absurdity. Variety is the name of the epyllions game, but critics such as

C. S. Lewis who damned Venus and Adonis because "it succeeds neither at titillating nor at arousing disgust" dont get it. "For an orgy of the senses it is too unreal, for a decorative pseudo-classic picture it has too much homely realism," lamented literary critic Douglas Bush. Their limited options are not the poets options; for Shakespeare the sky was the limit. The more disparate elements he could bring into his poem, the more he kept the imagination focusing and re-focusing, the better.

In understanding how Venus and Adonis works, the 21st century has the advantage of familiarity with the cinema and with the comic strip. In both media the viewpoint constantly shifts; scale and pace are deliberately varied.

The most important skill of a film editor is to know when a sequence should begin and end; likewise the poet working in stanzas has to know how to wind up and how to let go, if he is to score his point.

With this she seizeth on his sweating palm, The precedent of pith and livelihood, And trembling in her passion, calls it balm, Earths sovereign salve to do a goddess good: Being so enragd, desire does lend her force Courageously to pluck him from his horse.

Until this, the fifth stanza of the poem, we didnt know that Adonis was on a horse. The couplet is meant to be surprising, just as the stanza is meant to show what can be imagined, which is more than can be seen. The opening of the stanza has Adonis hand gripped in Venus involving an imperceptible interchange of bodily fluids. The stanza holds its breath in parallel phrases in apposition and then blooey! Venus plucks Adonis, doesnt drag him, plucks him like the flower he is to become, off his horse. Venus now seems bigger than a man mounted upon a horse. Such switches of lens are the stock in trade of the comic epic. They are meant to be preposterous. In the 31st stanza, Venus will tell us that "two strengthless doves draw her through the sky" and that primroses are as trees under her feet. For the nonce she is seen in monumental terms:

Over one arm the lusty coursers rein, Under her other was the tender boy, Who blushed 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.

Venus the huge is controlling the stallion with one hand and carrying the lad under her other arm. All he can do about it is to blush and pout. The picture in this frame is a peculiar perversion of the madonna and child theme; indeed we might be reminded of an angry mother grabbing her disobedient child off his bike, kid in one hand, bike in the other. (In stanza 93, Adonis is likened to an infant.) This stanza is all red, red-hot and red-cold. Though it is only the sixth stanza we have already been through extraordinary blushings and palings.

The sun was purple, Adonis cheeks were rose, setting a fairly hectic palette in the first stanza, which is overturned by the second for Venus, like a copy-writer, insists on whiter than white and redder than red, calling Adonis.

Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man, More white and red than doves or roses are.

Her kisses, she promises, will produce a veritable light show of red and white, making his lips, "red and pale with fresh variety". The reader is expected to be surprised and delighted; it is the critics inadequacy that gives him only the options of being aroused or revolted. The ebb and flow of pleasurable tension, emblematised in the ebb and flow of red and white, of shame and innocence, produces the dynamic instability that we should have come to recognise as an attribute of baroque art. Think Rubens, not Burne-Jones.

English academics may have been immune to the playful eroticism of Venus and Adonis but Shakespeares public went for it in a big way, and kept on buying it through edition after edition. Reprinted in 1593, again in 1594, again in 1595, again in 1596, and twice in 1599, Venus and Adonis was Shakespeares principal claim to fame among his contemporaries, few of whom could boast a work that went through a total of at least 16 editions in less than 50 years.

Only a few copies of any edition now survive. The rest were read to pieces. The schoolmen were disgusted that erotic poetry, which had been accessible only to those who could read Latin, was now to be read by hoi polloi, including women. In The Return from Parnassus, written by Cambridge students in 1599 or so, it is the nincompoop Giulio who sleeps with Venus and Adonis under his pillow.

Seven years later Middleton brought the poem into his city comedy, A Mad World My Masters: Master Harebrain tells us that he has confiscated his wifes "wanton pamphlets, as Hero and Leander, (by Marlowe and Chapman) Venus and Adonis; oh, two luscious marrow-bone pies for a young married wife!" After Shakespeares death, when his plays gradually disappeared from the repertoire, he was occasionally dismissed as a bawdy poet; of all his works, it was only Venus and Adonis that was still selling.

Venus and Adonis was published originally by Shakespeares childhood friend, Richard Field. It may have been written at his suggestion, indeed, rather than as a jeu desprit for the Southampton circle. In 1589 Field had published the second edition of Goldings translation of Ovids Metamorphoses; in 1591 he published Sir John Haringtons translation of Ariostos poema cavelleresco, Orlando Furioso and he was the first publisher of The Faerie Queene, in which Edmund Spenser adapts his own stanza to display a similar range of imaginary extravagance and metric virtuosity. Field would have known, none better, that the public was clamouring for more of the same. Christopher Marlowe was at work on Hero and Leander. It may have been Shakespeares decision to conflate elements from another episode from the Metamorphoses to create a new story of the all-powerful goddess of love resisted by a petulant boy as Salamacis is by Hermaphroditus. Shakespeare probably supplied Field with a fair copy of his poem; it is equally probable that he saw the poem through the press, because we have evidence of meticulous in-press corrections. Once Field had paid a lump sum for it, Venus and Adonis was his property to do with as he chose. (In the event he chose to sell his rights to another printer.) Though the poem made Shakespeare famous, it could not make him rich.

Venus and Adonis is then the first known performance by Shakespeare as a self-conscious literary artist, exercising control over his text and soliciting a new, discriminating market for his work, a readership as distinct from an audience. His second attempt at a sophisticated narrative poem was The Rape of Lucrece. Unless we count A Lovers Complaint there was no third. After such success it is not easy to decide what might have been Shakespeares reasons for abandoning this kind of literary activity. It may be that he realised that there was no living to earn by doing that kind of thing. Spenser, acknowledged by contemporaries as their "principall poet" and in 1593 at the height of his career, was alleged by William Camden, Ben Jonson and John Fletcher to be living in poverty, despite a royal pension of �50 a year. Shakespeare may have felt incapable of fulfilling the role he would have been expected to play as a writer in the pay of a nobleman, living as a menial in his household, remembering Samuel Daniel, tutor to William Herbert, who published nothing between 1595 and 1599. Or it may simply have been that at the end of 1593, when the theatres re-opened, he was glad to return to the theatre, where his medium was, rather than the imagination of a more or less sophisticated single reader, the collective imagination of the people, high and low, rich and poor, good and bad. The literate had amusements aplenty; perhaps Shakespeare made a deliberate choice to turn his back on the life of a noblemans dependant, and enrich instead the lives of the people who had least to look forward to. Perhaps their tears and laughter meant more to him than the two guineas Southamptons steward would have tossed him in return for each fulsome dedication.

The Malthouse production of Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare, directed by Marion Potts, runs from April 11 to May 4 at the Beckett Theatre. Bookings: Malthouse box office 9685 5111 or

www.malthousetheatre.com.au

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?