Shakespeare the Man by Candido Joseph

Author:Candido, Joseph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson
Published: 2012-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

“Within this limit is relief enough,

Sweet bottom-grass, and high delightful plain,

Round rising hillocks, brakes obscure and rough,

To shelter thee from tempest and from rain.” (231ff)

She can identify with the “breeding jennet” that makes no bones of its overpowering sexual attraction towards Adonis’s courser. “Seeds spring from seeds, and beauty breedeth beauty: / Thou wast begot; to get it is thy duty” (167-68), she tells Adonis sternly.

To cut oneself off from breeding, as Adonis does, seems to be unnatural: “By law of nature thou art bound to breed” (171). His frosty, joyless stance is somehow against nature’s ways of generation: “Things growing to themselves are growth’s abuse” (166), Venus warns him. Venus opts for procreation and life as opposed to stillness and death. This is why she implores him to hunt for innocuous animals like the hare rather than the dangerous boar. She captures in a detailed description the terror of the hare continually zigzagging across the fields in an effort to elude the hounds’ keen sense of smell, evincing the sort of knowledge of woodland creatures that a farmer’s daughter like Anne Hathaway would share:

“And when thou hast on foot the purblind hare,

Mark the poor wretch, to evershoot his troubles,

How he outruns the wind, and with what care

He cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles.

The many musits through the which he goes

Are like a labyrinth to amaze his foes . . .

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