SOURCE: Kuchar, Gary. “Narrative and the Forms of Desire in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis.” Early Modern Literary Studies 5, no. 2 (September 1999): 4.1-24.

In the following essay, Kuchar examines the rhetorical and intertextual elements of Venus and Adonis and demonstrates “that the poem's frustrating effects are largely a product of its rhetorical design.”

Recent articles by Catherine Belsey, Richard Halpern, and James Schiffer have shifted the critical focus of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis from questions of what the poem means, to how it means, from its moral allegory to its erotic and literary effects. For Belsey, this transition arose from her sense that readers of Shakespeare's epyllion who seek a “moral center that would furnish the work with a final meaning, a conclusion, a definitive statement” (262) tend to be interpreted by the poem in the very effort made to interpret it. Venus and Adonis, Belsey contends, “prompts in the reader...