Sexual Perversity in 'Venus and Adonis'

Abstract

Late in 1589, Thomas Lodge published his poem Scillaes Metamorphosis: Enterlaced with the unfortunate love of Glaucus. In so doing, he established a new poetic genre, the witty love-poem dressed in the manner of Ovid. Following in Lodge's wake, Marlowe wrote Hero and Leander and Shakespeare Venus and Adonis to judge by frequency of allusions to the former and reprintings of the latter, two of the most popular poems of the age. An earlier tradition, extending back through the middle ages, had moralized Ovid's tales: in the prose dedication to the first edition of his translation, Arthur Golding wrote that the myths of the Metamorphoses were 'outwardly moste pleasant tales and delectable histories', but that they were 'fraughted inwardlye with most piththie instructions and wholsome examples'.1 With not inconsiderable ingenuity, Golding peeled off the narrative skin and found hidden 'inner' moral meanings in the text; he thus contrived to make Ovid sound at least a little like the other major author whom he translated into English: John Calvin. Lodge's poem, by contrast, sets out to enjoy Ovid's poetry of passion, as the Roman poet did himself. Lessons may be learnt from this world of desire and metamorphosis, but they are lessons about the games and the anguish of love. The examples are not wholesome, the instruction is not moralistic. Lodge and his successors show how love is; they don't moralize about how behaviour should be. Golding's argument is that if you give in to passion, you will suffer, whereas the argument of late Elizabethan Ovidianism often seems to be that however you behave, whether you rein in your passion or not, love will make you suffer. Hero and Leander embrace love and end up dead. Adonis rejects love and ends up dead. In Lodge's poem, first Glaucus woos a reluctant Scilla, then Cupid fires an arrow that stops up his wound and cures him of his love; but Cupid also fires at Scilla, so she is in turn afflicted and tries to seduce a now reluctant Glaucus. Cupid, the blind, diminutive, and illegitimate child of Venus, is in every respect a contrary little bastard. But these poems cannot be described as tragedies of love. This is partly because, as in Ovid, metamorphosis lets the characters off the hook: they are arrested in the moment of intense emotion and released into a vital, vibrant, colourful world of anthropomorphic nature. And it is also, pre-eminently, because the poet is ultimately more interested in the beginnings than the