William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593) and Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1958) are seminal poems of the epyllion genre (Carter 136). According to Robert A. Logan, the epyllion—or little epic (Keach xvii)—“can be loosely defined as an Ovidian narrative poem about mythological and human figures in situations of frustrated love, usually unrequited or unfulfilled” (58). Though they were often perceived as “trite” and titillating entertainment, written “with undisguised artifice, prolixity, and ostentation” (58), the epyllia also “legitimated an erotic discourse by presenting erotic material in a framework of humanist education and literary skill” (Carter 136). Essentially, these poems functioned in Renaissance society as provocative,
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Immediately, the goddess is characterised as “Sick-thoughted” (Venus and Adonis 5) and “like a bold-faced suitor” (6), “Courageous[]” (30) and full of “force” (29), in comparison to Adonis who is “Rose-cheeked” (3) and hyperbolically “fairer than [Venus]” (7). In this way, the poem seems to dramatize a gender reversal (Carter 153) with Venus figured as the masculine ‘pursuer’, and Adonis as the feminine ‘pursued’. However, as Logan points out, Shakespeare’s other major alteration to Ovid’s myth was to make Adonis considerably younger (64), and the effects of this decision on the power dynamic between the two characters within the narrative is just as noteworthy and interesting as the gender dynamic. As the character himself states, it is principally the matter of Adonis’s youth that renders him unwilling and perhaps even incapable of giving into Venus’s …show more content…
Venus describes him as “more lovely than a man” (Venus and Adonis 9), but that does not mean that he is like a woman. As Alan Sinfield points out in Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism, “For the adult male, the female is not the only defining other: also there is the boy” (103). The relationship between the sexually aggressive, masculine, and ancient (despite her emphasis on her own youthful appearance (139-144)) divinity of Venus, and Adonis’s weaker or effeminate masculinity as a youth, is what produces the poem’s association with the myth of Ganymede. In Ovid’s version of the myth, “Jupiter becomes an eagle because he desires Ganymede sexually” (Carter 92), and he carries the Trojan prince away to Olympus to serve as his cupbearer, among other things. This scenario is paralleled in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, as Venus, after physically removing Adonis from his horse and carrying him away (29-36), kisses him and becomes an eagle, “Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste / Till either gorge be stuffed or prey be gone” (57-8). As many critics have argued, this imagery of predator and prey invokes the Ovidian
Immediately, the goddess is characterised as “Sick-thoughted” (Venus and Adonis 5) and “like a bold-faced suitor” (6), “Courageous[]” (30) and full of “force” (29), in comparison to Adonis who is “Rose-cheeked” (3) and hyperbolically “fairer than [Venus]” (7). In this way, the poem seems to dramatize a gender reversal (Carter 153) with Venus figured as the masculine ‘pursuer’, and Adonis as the feminine ‘pursued’. However, as Logan points out, Shakespeare’s other major alteration to Ovid’s myth was to make Adonis considerably younger (64), and the effects of this decision on the power dynamic between the two characters within the narrative is just as noteworthy and interesting as the gender dynamic. As the character himself states, it is principally the matter of Adonis’s youth that renders him unwilling and perhaps even incapable of giving into Venus’s …show more content…
Venus describes him as “more lovely than a man” (Venus and Adonis 9), but that does not mean that he is like a woman. As Alan Sinfield points out in Shakespeare, Authority, Sexuality: Unfinished Business in Cultural Materialism, “For the adult male, the female is not the only defining other: also there is the boy” (103). The relationship between the sexually aggressive, masculine, and ancient (despite her emphasis on her own youthful appearance (139-144)) divinity of Venus, and Adonis’s weaker or effeminate masculinity as a youth, is what produces the poem’s association with the myth of Ganymede. In Ovid’s version of the myth, “Jupiter becomes an eagle because he desires Ganymede sexually” (Carter 92), and he carries the Trojan prince away to Olympus to serve as his cupbearer, among other things. This scenario is paralleled in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, as Venus, after physically removing Adonis from his horse and carrying him away (29-36), kisses him and becomes an eagle, “Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste / Till either gorge be stuffed or prey be gone” (57-8). As many critics have argued, this imagery of predator and prey invokes the Ovidian