Venus as a Boy

Venus and Adonis derives much of its substance from The Metamorphoses, written by Ovid,¹ the great Greek-Roman mythomaniac who is responsible for bringing the (largely) concupiscent myths to the Early Modern inhabitants. At this time in history, a plague descends on the play-houses of Shakespeare's early career and so, while taking a break from plays, the Bard left us with with the ~1200 line poem dedicated to his sponsor, Henry Wriothesley. The main string of sexuality I would like to unweave comes from the tacit gender inversion threaded through out the poem, from the coy Adonis, out between the author and his reader (the Bard and Henry), and back to the masculine character of Venus — Venus as a boy.²

The trouble begins right from the start: here we are presented with a goddess of love and sexual desire — Venus — who not only has divine agency (she is a goddess, after all) but she also has sexual agency that becomes evident with her physicality: 

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

and her libidinous banter: 

"Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie."

Venus is a divine incarnate of sexual attraction, desire, love, etc.³ Although a woman, Venus is allowed to literally man-handle her beloved and attempt to "have her way with him" as made very clear by the poem. 

By now you must be thinking: What? A woman of sexual confidence and agency? You must be joking. I am not joking, but I would postulate that this "strong woman" is not just a strong woman outright, but that she is just a piece of a major gender inversion that Shakespeare has set into fluctuation.


The other character in the poem, Adonis, embodies the sexual potency of the verses. He is constantly censuring Venus for pursuing his when he is in his youth, his stage of sexual cocoon-ity.⁴ He is almost entirely passive; he tries to run away twice: the first time his horses run away so he lugubriously returns to the love goddess, but the second time he does get away to join the hunt. These attempts at escape and passive dismissal of love drive Venus into a sexually turgid cesspool of Petrarchan love — she tries to woo him with complimentary words, description of fecund nature; however, Adonis calls her on her trickery and does not fall for it, eventually costing him his own life. 

Well, wait. This does seem to be a Petrarchan romance, but doesn't it seem to be a little backwards? It does indeed. 

This gender inversion serves a plethora of purposes in the epic poem⁵  but modern readers are still left with questions of context: Shakespeare was writing this for a man; though it is only fantastic postulation to assume that the men were lovers (or whatever) of any kind, the gender inversion of the play puts the spotlight on love both romantic and homophilic, sometimes separating them (Adonis's speech about love and lust), but also, occasionally mixing them together. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis was meant to arouse, it is evident in its content and language; that the poem was dedicated to a man adds another layer to the gender inversion and brings more into question on the topic of "love." 

Being that sexual identities were nowhere near conceptualized in this era, perhaps Shakespeare simply wished to entertain his sponsor and audience with a complicating fantasy of impossible love (and lust) shown from an alternative paradigm, complete with queer sexualities (female agency, homophilia, onanism) galore. 

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1. Although in other contemporary retellings of the myth, Venus is not the suggested killer of her love Adonis (who it is suggested she only loves due to a mishap with Cupid's arrow). As classic Greek myths go, the original story is one of revenge, lust and confusion: some sources say a jealous Diana sent the boar to gore Adonis; other sources say the perpetrator was Apollo, avenging a love Venus had killed; some sources say it was Mars's boar. Regardless, the suggestion and transference of penetration in Shakespeare's rewrite is much appreciated.

2. I'm just going to leave this here: click. 

3. Her Greek name was Aphrodite, e.g. "aphrodisiac." Hint hint.   

4. Also of possible fervid masturbation. 

5. E.g., it sets up etymology of the Petrarchan romance ("Sith in his prime Death doth my love destroy, / They that love best their loves shall not enjoy."), lets Shakespeare play around with some determined, female heroines he's taken a liking to (think As You Like It or Twelfth Night), and, of course,  deeply and confusingly arouses us.