The East as Poetic Commodity in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis

Abstract

Although a great deal of current scholarship explores the impact of England’s trade with the Ottoman Empire and the East on early modern drama and travel narratives, very little has turned to poetry, and even less to Shakespeare’s poetry. I suggest that this is because we have been asking the wrong questions of early modern poetry. Instead of searching for representations of Oriental identity in poetry, we should look for evidence of the interplay of Eastern aesthetics and commodities in English verse, in order to interpret the intellectual and artistic effects of the mercantile and political exchange between East and West. This essay attempts to uncover an Eastern aesthetic in Shakespeare’s first narrative poem, Venus and Adonis. I contend that Adonis’s horse and the flower into which he transforms function as imported Eastern aesthetic commodities in the poem on many levels. First, the prized Arabian stallion’s Eastern heritage both exoticizes and naturalizes desire. Second, as valuable aesthetic objects capable of being bred (the horse) and propagated (the bulb) to generate economic success, both horse and flower perform the poetic and rhetorical roles of furthering the poem’s goal of out‐stripping Ovid and classical poetry and making a name for Shakespeare in the literary marketplace. Though Venus is unsuccessful in her courtship, Adonis’s horse and the flower into which he transforms are not. Their display in the poem attempts to breed fame and fortune for the poem’s new author in the same way an expensive imported animal or botanical specimen might for a nobleman, counteracting the poem’s narrative outcome.