SOURCE: "Thematics of Value in Venus and Adonis" in Criticism, Vol. XXXI, No. 1, Winter, 1989, pp. 21-32.

In the following essay, Fienberg studies the dynamically shifting marketplace of value operating in Venus and Adonis.

When Venus finds Adonis able to resist her love, she wonders of course what his nature is, "Art thou a woman's son and canst not feel/What 'tis to love" (201-02).¹ But her energies and the interest of the poem engage the question of her nature. We seem to know so much more about Venus than about Adonis. As Coppélia Kahn points out, however, what we know about Venus is severely limited, "We know Venus as a character only through the demands she makes on Adonis; the overwhelming impression we have of her is of a mouth, pressing insistently on or toward him."² Since Venus' representation in all its mutability and variety so dominates...