SOURCE: "'CLo, in This Hollow Cradle Take Thy Rest': Sexual Conflict and Resolution in 'venus and Adonis,'" in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, edited by Philip C. Kolin, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997, pp. 341-357.

In the following essay, Merrix explores the conflict between domestic sexuality and the desire for what is exotic and unknown in Venus and Adonis.

I

Recent scholarly articles on Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis more and more focus on the complexity of the poem, a complexity that exposes earlier allegorical interpretations as naive or reductive. The simple allegorical interpretations have given way to more profound iconographic or mythographic analyses of the poem.¹ When allegory yields to myth or symbolism, ambivalence inevitably results. The simple one-dimensional relationship between the human attribute and its allegorical vehicle is replaced with what one scholar calls "a mystery, a complexity, even a self-contradiction."² Norman Rabkin also speaks of the poem...