This week in my Shakespeare in a year reading program brought me to the end of “The Taming of the Shrew” and got me a bit further through “Venus and Adonis,” together with a few more of the early Sonnets (4, 5, 6).
The themes in the poems continue to be those of love unrequited and love egoistically self-directed. I was interested to see that to make these images sharper, the language of law appears on occasion. Here are a few examples taken from “Venus and Adonis,” lines 355-360 and 379-384.
As a reminder, Venus is just determined to conquer the young Adonis, but he’s quite resistant, and rather young for all of this romance stuff. The expression of her love is compared to the the way in which a lawyer argues on behalf of a client–as are the baleful effects of suppression of speech and love alike when they cannot give vent to the heart’s true feeling.
An Oven that is stopt, or river stayd,
Burneth more hotly, swelleth more with rage:
So of concealed sorow may be sayd,
Free vent of words loves fier doth asswage,
But when the hearts atturney once is mute,
The client breakes, as desperat in his sute.
When the heart has no lawyer to speak on its behalf, then the client’s (the heart’s) inability to express itself becomes all the more desperate, breaking in its incapacity to say what it feels.
The same legal metaphor reappears just a few lines later, as the poet describes the entreaties of Venus’s eyes to Adonis’s eyes, using the language of law suits and petitioners. The imagery is again of looks taking the place of speech–mute expressions through the exchanges of the eyes.
Oh what a war of lookes was then betweene them,
Her eyes petitioners to his eyes suing,
His eyes saw her eyes, as they had not seene them,
Her eyes wooed still, his eyes disdaind the wooing:
And all this dumbe play had his acts made plain,
With tears which Chorus-like her eyes did rain.
