The Polyphonic Onyx: A Study of the Multi-layering of Plurisignification in William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

Abstract

Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, unlike the Ovidian original, sets the conventional “man-wooing-woman” context on its head, with the madly lovelorn Venus crazily serenading a very unwilling Adonis, who happens to be a person much younger than her in age as well. My article takes up this seemingly innocuous issue of man turning away from woman in order to probe into a multidimensional discourse of psychoanalysis as well as Queer Theory to try and understand the situation to find out the psychosis that might have been working at the back of Adonis’s mind while turning his back petulantly on the importunate Venus. A qualitative analytical approach finds that psychoanalysis would analyze Adonis with the sixth stage of Eriksonian developmental adaptation in humans, while a Lacanian perspective at the issue would rake up suggestions of the “Objet petit a” as the matheme of desire. Again, Queer theorists would stray into fields of discourse on alternate sexuality while hermeneutics would see Adonis’s refusal of the normal, natural order of heterosexual love as a subversion of the macrocosmic rubric of the procreative Scala Naturae.