Alison Powell

‘Where herself herself beheld’: Reflection and Re(conception) in ‘Venus and Adonis’

Shakespeare’s epyllion ‘Venus and Adonis’ was published in 1593, when theaters were closed because of the plague’s wrath on London, and a thorough reading of this poem must allow for the possibility that sexuality in the poem is tied to issues of mortality. Adonis’s body is mortal, pubescent, singular; Venus is, by contrast, an immortal goddess who exercises control over mortals in all things relating to desire. Various critics have been preoccupied enough with Venus’s dizzying, sometimes embarrassing entreaties to persuade Adonis to have sex with her that they may have (ironically) neglected an in-depth consideration of the role bodies play in the text. In fact, Venus’s revolving and excessive rhetoric throughout functions as a screen which subtly obscures what her body actually does to Adonis’s body, what her speech tells us about embodiment, and what the poem indicates about Shakespeare’s early treatments of death. For it is impossible to argue that this poem, written during such a dramatic time– when death was publicly gruesome, uncontrollable and inexplicable– would have entirely escaped engaging on some level, at least, issues of mortality and degeneration.

In addition to incorporating the ominous historical scrim of the plague, I consider the epyllion through Ovidian genealogy. Because Adonis is born of an incestuous relationship between his mother, Myrrha, and her father / his grandfather, and is subsequently birthed from a tree (Myrrha is turned into a tree as punishment for her unnatural lust), transgressive sexuality is integral to the work. I argue that what is important to Venus in persuading Adonis to stay is not sex, but rather the prevention of his disastrous, violent death; additionally, I contend that Venus’s various descriptions of Adonis’s body turning in or to itself reminds us of his incestuous origin. The illicit desire between Venus and Adonis is further complicated if we understand Venus as a type of second mother; there are potentially redemptive aspects to such an interpretation. Two forms of projection frame my analysis of the text: first, sexuality is projected onto mortality, and thus layers and obscures the treatment of death; second, Venus is herself a projection of Adonis’s mother, who similarly layers and obscures his incestuous origin.

Alison Powell is a PhD student at CUNY specializing in the early modern period and the Metaphysical poets. She has an MFA from Indiana University in Poetry; her own poetry has appeared in journals including AGNI, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, New Orleans Review, Caketrain, and others, and in the anthology Best New Poets 2006. She has received writing awards from institutions including the Vermont Studio Center, Writers at Work, Millay Colony for the Arts, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Indiana University and University of Missouri-Columbia.