Shakespeare

Venus and Adonis was immensely popular. Only one copy of the 1593 edition survives; the first print-run had been read literally to disintegration. There were no fewer than eleven editions over the next twenty-five years, and there may have been other reprints that have simply vanished. It was in his lifetime far more popular than any of his plays, and did more to secure his literary reputation than any drama. His instinct to compose such a narrative poem, especially at a time of theatrical dearth, was undoubtedly the right one.

It is in essence a dramatic narrative that, like Shakespeare’s plays, hovers between comic and serious matter. Half the lines are conceived as dialogue or dramatic oratory. The confrontation between the lascivious Venus and the frigid Adonis becomes the subject of quintessential English pantomime:

She sincketh downe, still hanging by his necke,

He on her belly fall’s, she on her backe.

But the farce is succeeded by the solemn obsequies on the dead boy. Shakespeare cannot stay with one mood for very long. It repays reading aloud, and in Chaucerian fashion it may have been performed by Shakespeare as a private entertainment. It moves rapidly and energetically; Shakespeare is both adept and nimble, attentive and consoling. It was remarkable for what was known as its wantonness. Although it was not half as pornographic as some of the poems then being circulated in manuscript, it earned a rebuke from John Davies as “bawdy Geare.”⁷ Thomas Middleton included it in a list of “wanton pamphlets” and a contemporary versifier suggested that

Who list read lust there’s Venus and Adonis

True model of a most lascivious leatcher.⁸

Venus and Adonis is a poem concerning overpowering lust for a young male, considerably more passionate even than Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and it seems obvious to the reader that Shakespeare took great delight and pleasure in writing it. Erotic literature is perhaps the one genre in which the author’s personal tastes and preoccupations are vital to its success and effectiveness. But at the same time it would be unwise to attribute such feelings of personal passion to Shakespeare. He is eloquent, of course, but he is also detached. Passion is an element within his repertory of effects. The reader is given the curious impression that the author is there and yet not there. To feel so much, and yet be able to mock that feeling – that is the mark of a sublime intellect. It is perhaps also why the poem has often been considered as an extension of Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination. There has never been a more fluent, or more artful, English writer.

Venus and Adonis became particularly popular among the students of the universities and of the Inns, who read it individually or perhaps even in groups. In 1601 Gabriel Harvey could still write that “the younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis”. He was by no means the anonymous or unremarked writer he is often assumed as being. Venus and Adonis itself became almost a byword for poetry itself. In Peek’s Merry Conceited Jests the tapster of the inn at Pie Corner was “much given to poetry, for he had ingrossed the Knight of the Sunne, Venus and Adonis, and other pamphlets.” It was called “the best book in the world,”⁹ and a play of 1608, The Dumb Knight, has the following dialogue. “I pray you, sir, what book do you read?” “A book that never an orator’s clerk in this kingdom but is beholden unto; it is called, Maid’s Philosophy, or Venus and Adonis”. We may say, with some certainty, that Shakespeare now was one of the most famous poets in the country. He was not the faceless man in the crowd, or the unnoticed stranger in a corner of the inn.

CHAPTER 36 The Hath a Mint of Phrases in His Braine

Shakespeare and Southampton could have met in, or through, the playhouse. Southampton became a regular attender of plays. Indeed it seems to have been his principal London recreation. There were other connections. In the year after the publication of Venus and Adonis Southampton’s mother, the Countess of Southampton, married Sir Thomas Heneage; Heneage was Treasurer of the Queen’s Chamber, and therefore responsible for arranging payment for the players at court. It is a tenuous connection, perhaps, but in the small and overcrowded world of the English court an interesting one.