Venus and Adonis: Stanzas 2-4
Having managed to set the scene and characters in just 6 lines, Shakespeare lets Venus take over for three stanzas of flattery and promises of pleasurable sport. This too sets the tone of the poem; a good portion of the remaining 195 stanzas is comprised of Venus making increasingly inventive, explicit and desperate pleas for Adonis to tarry a while and forget that nasty boar.
In these three stanzas Shakespeare establishes three themes that he will explore throughout the poem. The first is Venus’ use of rhetoric in her efforts to seduce Adonis (and the reversal of traditional gender roles in making her the sexual aggressor). The second is the poem’s complex numerical structure, particularly related to the marking of time. The third is alchemical allegory symbolically centered in the interplay of the colors red and white. I will consider the first two in subsequent posts but want to begin with the role of alchemy and color symbolism in the poem.
We already encountered the red-white theme three times in the first stanza, although modern readers may not recognize all three. The sun with purple-colored face is glossed in modern annotations with a note that renaissance purple was more red and vivid than our modern conception of the color and offers crimson as a synonym. I am not sure that is altogether right, but purple-faced is probably intended to evoke red-faced, the flushed condition of someone whose skin is reddened with bloodflow as the result of exertion, excitement or embarrassment. The blood connection to purple is the same either way. Next, Adonis is rose-cheeked establishing the correspondence with the sun and most closely embodying the red-in-white color symbolism we will find repeated throughout the poem. Finally, Venus is “like a bold-faced suitor.” Bold-faced is etymologically complex. If you google the term you will find a host of sites discussing whether the it is properly bald-faced or bold-faced (in the context of lying). Here Shakespeare trades on the ambiguity of early modern spelling and pronunciation. Bold indicates that Venus is shameless in her pursuit of Adonis. Bald in early usage does not mean hairless but rather white (hence the American Bald eagle, perhaps significantly Hereford cows were described as bald-faced).
In Venus’ speech in stanza 2 she declares Adonis, “More white, and red, then doves, or roses are.” In stanza 4 she describes how her short kisses will make Adonis’ lips red with blood and then pale as the blood is forced out in one long kiss.
On the surface then we can see red represents blood and white the bloodless body. This takes us immediately to the medieval/renaissance theory of the galenic humours, their role in health and psychology and their correspondence with the elements (air, water, earth and fire) which were believed to compose physical reality. In Galen’s theory, both physical and mental health depend on balancing the moisture and heat in the body. These properties in turn were carried by four bodily fluids: blood (hot and wet, the sanguine humor, red), phlegm (cold and wet, phlegmatic, white), black bile (cold and dry, melancholia, black) and yellow bile (hot and dry, choleric, yellow).
In humorous terms the Sun in line 1 is sanguine, Dawn is phlegmatic, Adonis is all wet (both red and white) as is Venus until Adonis dies when she becomes melancholic.
Another way to read red and white is as symbols for beauty and virtue. In the earliest version of the Venus and Adonis myth there is no boar. Mars gets wind of Venus’ new crush and in a fit of jealousy goes to smash the presumptuous youth. When Venus realizes what is about to happen she races to stop the slaughter. Racing through the woods her skin is torn by the thorns of roses along the way, her blood stains the flowers red. In the Platonic sources for Venus and Adonis that informed Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy, love or passion is a vital force which can lead to destruction if not restrained by reason or virtue. In this reading Adonis represents rational control and Venus passion. The problem is that Adonis’ rejection of Love leads only to his death so it is hard to see how the story was intended to be read in this interpretation.
The most elaborate reading of the poem and its red and white symbolism is as an alchemical allegory. While most modern readers associate alchemy only with the futile and possibly fraudulent effort to transmute base materials into gold, in Shakespeare’s time alchemy encompassed both a wide variety of sophisticated chemical manipulations (exoteric alchemy – what happened in a flask in a laboratory) and a theological and psychological system for individual enlightenment (esoteric or spiritual alchemy). In this theory the fallen state of man could be redeemed by a path of learning and personal sacrifice that led to enlightenment. Renaissance alchemy was a mixture of classical and eastern esoteric practice, early experimental chemistry, Platonic philosophy and Christian theology, which came together in the work of Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino in the mid fifteenth century and was developed and elaborated upon by many up to and including Isaac Newton.
In alchemy the colors red and white signify the male and female principles (sort of more basic elements that make up reality). Red represents Philosophical Sulfer (not to be confused with the ordinary smelly kind) and White, Philosophical Mercury. In theory these principles could be recovered from ordinary dross matter in the laboratory through a long process of dissolving, distilling and purifying in the alchemical alembic. Similarly a virtuous and studious individual could cleanse his soul of impurities carefully separating his material body and higher consciousness and purifying each until finally reuniting body, soul and spirit into a higher, enlightened being able to perceive and act upon the divine forms. This process of spiritual and intellectual integration was allegorized as a marriage of the various levels of consciousness which reconciled the polarities inherent in ordinary mortal beings.
We see three of these “Chemical Weddings” in Venus and Adonis, the first the truncated and disappointing bodily union of male and female consummated between Venus and Adonis at the end of the first day. The second an even less satisfactory conjunction of the very material boar and Adonis at the end of the night, and finally the integration of white and red in the flower which emerges in place of Adonis’ body at the end.
The blackness of the boar is the third primary color in alchemy. The “great work” is accomplished in three stages – the Nigredo, in which the grossness and impurity of the physical body is burned away in a dark night of the soul, a kind of ritual, spiritual, or symbolic death from which the pure spirit and soul and emerge. The Albedo (or whitening) is the process of cleansing the soul, or the stone the physical vessel for the reunified being. Finally the Rubedo reunites the levels of consciousness – the red and white as the red male principle penetrates and stains the white purified body to produce the Philosophers stone.
Continue reading: Venus and Adonis: The Equinoctial Boar and the Easter Flower