I was going to use our every-day-is-Sunday plague-time to revisit the Sonnets, but my detour into the early poems is proving fruitful for me. I'm using the Oxford edition of the complete poems, and its editor, Colin Burrow, is a passionate advocate for the view that "the poems are foundational to his oeuvre."
Shakespeare's early long poems are now considered peripheral to his canon. That style of writing has long since gone out of fashion while the theatrical community continues to infuse new life and ideas into the performances of the plays, keeping them fresh for contemporary audiences. (There have been some relatively recent productions of staging the poem in Canada, Germany, the States, and Australia and, in 2004, the Royal Shakespeare Company produced a Venus and Adonis with marionettes, a production that continued its run for several years after Stratford.)
Venus and Adonis was likely left out of the first Folio because of its popularity, because it was still in print and making money under rights held by a rival publisher. It was written and published in 1593, while the theaters were closed because of the plague, and the poem made Shakespeare famous. It was reprinted sixteen times before 1640 (Hamlet was reprinted five times in that period). And yet by the early 1700s it had been marginalized and was largely ignored by the literary community, a situation that continues to this day.
Lengthy story poems like Venus and Adonis will never again hold an important place in Shakespeare's canon; but I will argue the case that its reputation – especially among Shakespeare enthusiasts – deserves to be considerably better than it is. (I'll point out that among the thousands of posts on PlayShakespeare.com, there is exactly one on Venus and Adonis so far. It's short, but a good one, by a young woman who clearly understood the poem and its relevance to contemporary life.)
The poem is a relatively easy read, which I'm sure was one of the reasons for its initial popularity. It is essentially one scene, with Venus hitting on Adonis and Adonis telling her he would rather go hunting. Late in the poem he rides off, and (offstage) is gored to death by a boar. The language is beautiful, the only surprise there being that none of the phrases from the poem are in common circulation.
Long story-poems based on Ovid were a popular genre in the last part of the 16th Century, and Venus and Adonis was one of a number, along with Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Lodge's Scylla's Metamorphosis, Heywood's Oenone and Paris and others. They each emphasized different aspects of stories from Ovid, and changed and embellished them.
The contemporary purchasers of Venus and Adonis would most likely have called it a "pamphlet" (rather than an epic or Ovidian poem), or would have referred to the "honey-tongued Shakespeare."
The backstory to Venus and Adonis is among the most bizarre in Roman mythology. You all recall the story of Pygmalion, who fell in love with a statue he created. It was the goddess Venus who granted Pygmalion's wish and brought the statue to life, so Venus is involved right from the beginning. Pygmalion and the statue (the name Galatea is a later addition to the story, not from Ovid,) had a boy named Paphus. Paphus has a son named Cinyras whose daughter, Myrrha, developed an incestuous passion for her father. Myrrha tricks her father into sleeping with her, and pays for it by being transformed into a tree. Her child is Adonis. As Burrow writes, "From that incestuous union between the grandchild and great-grandchild of a statue, Adonis is born, and he enters the world by ripping through the bark of the tree into which his mother has been transformed. Venus, the goddess of love whose metamorphosis of Pygmalion's statue began the whole dynasty, then falls in love with Adonis, and, in Ovid's version, wins him."
Venus does most of the talking in the poem, and in doing so reveals the kind of complexity of character we admire in the great heroines of the plays. She is the mighty goddess who conquered Mars, the goddess of physical love, of verbal love, of maternal love, and more. Quoting Burrow, "Venus finally cannot separate her subjective experience of love from the physical being of her lover, and readers who try to do so for her, and to read her as either predatory or maternally loving, are willfully detaching themselves from the multiplicity of perspectives on which the poem insists. . . . Multiple perspectives and self-deception are as early as 1593 central to Shakespeare's poems, and the poems are foundational to his oeuvre."
The main theme of Venus wooing and Adonis rejecting is broken up with several episodes, none of which wander far from the center. Early on, there is a lengthy and quite wonderful diversion with horses – as Adonis is about to mount and ride away from Venus, his stallion gets distracted by an attractive filly and rides off on his own.
The physical description of Adonis' horse is taken from an earlier English book on horses, which itself was taken from an earlier Italian book's description of a perfect breeding stallion:
"Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong,
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:
Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back."
Adonis blames Venus for the (temporary) loss of his horse, Venus tells him to learn from his horse, to come to her love.
A later diversion emerges when Venus urges Adonis to hunt harmless, furry animals, not dangerous boars.
Some of Venus' appeals to Adonis are essentially the same as the pleas to marry and multiply in the early sonnets:
'Upon the earth's increase why shouldst thou feed,
Unless the earth with thy increase be fed?
By law of nature thou art bound to breed,
That thine may live when thou thyself art dead;
And so, in spite of death, thou dost survive,
In that thy likeness still is left alive.'
Here's one of the more striking seductive passages from the Goddess of Love:
' . . . 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.'
Adonis pleads that he is not ready, and forcing him into love before his time would hurt him:
'The colt that's back'd and burden'd being young
Loseth his pride and never waxeth strong. . .'
' . . . Before I know myself, seek not to know me.'
The narrator, criticizing Venus' endless tales of love:
"Their copious stories, oftentime begun,
End without audience, and are never done."
The final sixth of the 'pamphlet' begins with Venus hearings the dogs baying in a way she knew they were facing a serious beast, not a soft furry one, and then she sees the boar, 'Whose frothy mouth bepainted all with red." Venus rails at Death, "Hard favored tyrant, ugly, meagre, lean;/ Hateful divorce of love, . . . / Grim grinning ghost, Earth's worm . . ./ The destinies will curse thee for this stroke:/ They bid thee crop a weed; thou pluck'st a flower."
Then, hearing the hunters' horns, her hope is revived, she thinks she hears Adonis, alive: "Despair and hope makes thee ridiculous./ The one doth flatter thee in thoughts unlikely,/ In likely thoughts the other kills thee quickly."
Venus apologizes to Death for accusing him of killing Adonis, who can't be dead because his death would be the end of beauty, and the whole world:
'O Jove,' quoth she, 'how much a fool was I
To be of such a weak and silly mind
To wail his death who lives and must not die
Till mutual overthrow of mortal kind!
For he being dead, with him is beauty slain,
And, beauty dead, black chaos comes again.'
But, as Venus travels through the forest she:
" . . . unfortunately spies
The foul boar's conquest on her fair delight;
Which seen, her eyes, as murder'd with the view,
Like stars ashamed of day, themselves withdrew;
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."
Eventually she comes to terms with his death:
"The flowers are sweet, their colours fresh and trim,
But true sweet beauty lived and died with him."
"'Wonder of time,'" quoth she, "'This is my spite,
That thou being dead, the day should yet be light.'"
Too many beautiful lines to be as badly ignored as it is!
Looks like 15 for our Zoom reading of M4M next Wednesday!
Steve
Yma Sumac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-hGsBBDnKI
Shakespeare's early long poems are now considered peripheral to his canon. That style of writing has long since gone out of fashion while the theatrical community continues to infuse new life and ideas into the performances of the plays, keeping them fresh for contemporary audiences. (There have been some relatively recent productions of staging the poem in Canada, Germany, the States, and Australia and, in 2004, the Royal Shakespeare Company produced a Venus and Adonis with marionettes, a production that continued its run for several years after Stratford.)
Venus and Adonis was likely left out of the first Folio because of its popularity, because it was still in print and making money under rights held by a rival publisher. It was written and published in 1593, while the theaters were closed because of the plague, and the poem made Shakespeare famous. It was reprinted sixteen times before 1640 (Hamlet was reprinted five times in that period). And yet by the early 1700s it had been marginalized and was largely ignored by the literary community, a situation that continues to this day.
Lengthy story poems like Venus and Adonis will never again hold an important place in Shakespeare's canon; but I will argue the case that its reputation – especially among Shakespeare enthusiasts – deserves to be considerably better than it is. (I'll point out that among the thousands of posts on PlayShakespeare.com, there is exactly one on Venus and Adonis so far. It's short, but a good one, by a young woman who clearly understood the poem and its relevance to contemporary life.)
The poem is a relatively easy read, which I'm sure was one of the reasons for its initial popularity. It is essentially one scene, with Venus hitting on Adonis and Adonis telling her he would rather go hunting. Late in the poem he rides off, and (offstage) is gored to death by a boar. The language is beautiful, the only surprise there being that none of the phrases from the poem are in common circulation.
Long story-poems based on Ovid were a popular genre in the last part of the 16th Century, and Venus and Adonis was one of a number, along with Marlowe's Hero and Leander, Lodge's Scylla's Metamorphosis, Heywood's Oenone and Paris and others. They each emphasized different aspects of stories from Ovid, and changed and embellished them.
The contemporary purchasers of Venus and Adonis would most likely have called it a "pamphlet" (rather than an epic or Ovidian poem), or would have referred to the "honey-tongued Shakespeare."
The backstory to Venus and Adonis is among the most bizarre in Roman mythology. You all recall the story of Pygmalion, who fell in love with a statue he created. It was the goddess Venus who granted Pygmalion's wish and brought the statue to life, so Venus is involved right from the beginning. Pygmalion and the statue (the name Galatea is a later addition to the story, not from Ovid,) had a boy named Paphus. Paphus has a son named Cinyras whose daughter, Myrrha, developed an incestuous passion for her father. Myrrha tricks her father into sleeping with her, and pays for it by being transformed into a tree. Her child is Adonis. As Burrow writes, "From that incestuous union between the grandchild and great-grandchild of a statue, Adonis is born, and he enters the world by ripping through the bark of the tree into which his mother has been transformed. Venus, the goddess of love whose metamorphosis of Pygmalion's statue began the whole dynasty, then falls in love with Adonis, and, in Ovid's version, wins him."
Venus does most of the talking in the poem, and in doing so reveals the kind of complexity of character we admire in the great heroines of the plays. She is the mighty goddess who conquered Mars, the goddess of physical love, of verbal love, of maternal love, and more. Quoting Burrow, "Venus finally cannot separate her subjective experience of love from the physical being of her lover, and readers who try to do so for her, and to read her as either predatory or maternally loving, are willfully detaching themselves from the multiplicity of perspectives on which the poem insists. . . . Multiple perspectives and self-deception are as early as 1593 central to Shakespeare's poems, and the poems are foundational to his oeuvre."
The main theme of Venus wooing and Adonis rejecting is broken up with several episodes, none of which wander far from the center. Early on, there is a lengthy and quite wonderful diversion with horses – as Adonis is about to mount and ride away from Venus, his stallion gets distracted by an attractive filly and rides off on his own.
The physical description of Adonis' horse is taken from an earlier English book on horses, which itself was taken from an earlier Italian book's description of a perfect breeding stallion:
"Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong,
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:
Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,
Save a proud rider on so proud a back."
Adonis blames Venus for the (temporary) loss of his horse, Venus tells him to learn from his horse, to come to her love.
A later diversion emerges when Venus urges Adonis to hunt harmless, furry animals, not dangerous boars.
Some of Venus' appeals to Adonis are essentially the same as the pleas to marry and multiply in the early sonnets:
'Upon the earth's increase why shouldst thou feed,
Unless the earth with thy increase be fed?
By law of nature thou art bound to breed,
That thine may live when thou thyself art dead;
And so, in spite of death, thou dost survive,
In that thy likeness still is left alive.'
Here's one of the more striking seductive passages from the Goddess of Love:
' . . . 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.'
Adonis pleads that he is not ready, and forcing him into love before his time would hurt him:
'The colt that's back'd and burden'd being young
Loseth his pride and never waxeth strong. . .'
' . . . Before I know myself, seek not to know me.'
The narrator, criticizing Venus' endless tales of love:
"Their copious stories, oftentime begun,
End without audience, and are never done."
The final sixth of the 'pamphlet' begins with Venus hearings the dogs baying in a way she knew they were facing a serious beast, not a soft furry one, and then she sees the boar, 'Whose frothy mouth bepainted all with red." Venus rails at Death, "Hard favored tyrant, ugly, meagre, lean;/ Hateful divorce of love, . . . / Grim grinning ghost, Earth's worm . . ./ The destinies will curse thee for this stroke:/ They bid thee crop a weed; thou pluck'st a flower."
Then, hearing the hunters' horns, her hope is revived, she thinks she hears Adonis, alive: "Despair and hope makes thee ridiculous./ The one doth flatter thee in thoughts unlikely,/ In likely thoughts the other kills thee quickly."
Venus apologizes to Death for accusing him of killing Adonis, who can't be dead because his death would be the end of beauty, and the whole world:
'O Jove,' quoth she, 'how much a fool was I
To be of such a weak and silly mind
To wail his death who lives and must not die
Till mutual overthrow of mortal kind!
For he being dead, with him is beauty slain,
And, beauty dead, black chaos comes again.'
But, as Venus travels through the forest she:
" . . . unfortunately spies
The foul boar's conquest on her fair delight;
Which seen, her eyes, as murder'd with the view,
Like stars ashamed of day, themselves withdrew;
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."
Eventually she comes to terms with his death:
"The flowers are sweet, their colours fresh and trim,
But true sweet beauty lived and died with him."
"'Wonder of time,'" quoth she, "'This is my spite,
That thou being dead, the day should yet be light.'"
Too many beautiful lines to be as badly ignored as it is!
Looks like 15 for our Zoom reading of M4M next Wednesday!
Steve
Yma Sumac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-hGsBBDnKI
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