SOURCE: "Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis: A Lacanian Tragicomedy of Desire," in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, edited by Philip C. Kolin, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997, pp. 359-76.

In the following essay, Schiffer offers a psychoanalytic reading of Venus and Adonis that considers the poem's representation of phallic desire.

I

Why? She's neither fish nor flesh. A man
 knows not where to have her.

(Henry IV, Part I, 3.3.128-29)¹

The subject of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis is desire, its comedy and anguish, desire in all its multifaceted, paradoxical forms: "high desire" (1. 277), "sweet desire" (1. 386), "deep desire" (1. 389), "quick desire" (1. 547), but perhaps most of all "hot desire" (1. 1074), that "coal that must be cooled" (1. 387). Of the twelve uses of the word "desire" in the poem, seven come at the end of lines; of these seven, six rhyme with "fire." Venus' burning passion for Adonis powers the action. The lusty, "sick-thoughted" goddess "pants" and "sweats...