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In the early modern period, poets William Shakespeare and Richard Barnfield utilized erotic and homoerotic language to subvert English Petrarchan conventions and explore the transformative effects of love and desire on the mind and body. Coppelia Kahn confirms as such by suggesting that by means of echoing Ovid’s tales of Metamorphoses, Shakespeare’s poetry captures the “overwhelming psychological changes wrought by desire, as well as its often-grotesque physical mutations.” Less drastically, Bruce Smith proposes Barnfield’s poetry as focusing on the internal transformations of the individual caused by love and desire, moving from expressed desire towards self-control within Elizabethan social boundaries: “Barnfield makes sure we experience things in chronological order: first desire, then constraint.” Thus, I would concur with both Kahn and Smith and extend upon their arguments by suggesting that through language devices such as imagery and metaphor, Shakespeare and Barnfield’s authorship reflects the propensity of early modern poetry to illustrate the transformative effects of love and desire on the individual in the sixteenth century. In his Epyllion Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare destabilizes English Petrarchan rhetoric by placing Venus in the role of masculine suitor, and Adonis, as her object of desire. Using hypersexualized metaphors and animalistic imagery, Shakespeare focuses on the erotic, queer nature of Venus’s love to highlight the all-consuming role of desire in changing both her and Adonis’s bodies and minds. Likewise, in his lyrical verse The Affectionate Shepherd, Barnfield undermines traditional Petrarchan convention by exploring the homoerotic relationship between Daphnis and Ganymede, wherein Daphnis pursues the resistant Ganymede. Barnfield utilizes queer rhetoric and youthful imagery to articulate the role of desire in driving Daphnis’s sexual fantasies and also, in limiting him to the confines of Elizabethan tradition. By doing so, Barnfield allegorically captures the internal transformations individuals undergo to confirm. Ultimately, through symbolic language, both texts depict the overt, often forceful transformations, love, and desire can cause.
Shakespeare and Barnfield’s explorations of the transformative effects of love and desire are inextricably linked to the social context of the Elizabethan era. Jonathan Bate suggests that throughout the early modern period, “Elizabethan Ovidanism often seems to be that however you behave, whether you rein in your passion or not, love will make you suffer.” As such, poetic rhetoric in the era was often recognized by audiences as capturing the “transformative action,” of love and desire because of the pain and sorrow it caused. Bate writes: “Lessons may be learned from this world of desire and metamorphosis, but they are lessons about the games and anguish of love.” For Shakespeare, whom Kahn argues appropriates and draws inspiration from Ovid’s explorations of tortured love; Elizabethan ideas of love and desire and marriage are considered incongruent. Mary Beth Rose articulates this sentiment by proposing that marriage, throughout the sixteenth century, was positioned as an ideal that worked towards upholding “the basis of an ordered society.” Rather, than a union that reflected erotic feelings or desire. By focusing on love and desire outside of marriage in Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare investigates the amalgamation of love and desire onto the mind and body, “and the changes it wreaks on human beings, driving them to the heights and depths of human feeling and conduct.” Similarly, Barnfield’s engagement with homoerotic themes and attitudes outside of Elizabethan social order and expectations in The Affectionate Shepherd also explores relationships driven by love and desire beyond marriage. Rebecca Yearling suggests that in the Renaissance period, “[homosexuality] was considered as a more general symptom of moral decay and degeneration.” Thus, Barnfield echoes Shakespeare by illustrating the painful realization and transformation love and desire have on the individual. Therefore, I would posit the role of Shakespeare and Barnfield in exploring the impact of love and desire outside of traditional institutions to further emphasize its transformative effects.
In Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare utilizes sexualized imagery and innuendo to position the transformative effects of love and desire as both irresistible and destructive, and capable of evoking extreme changes to the mind and body. This notion is explored in Shakespeare’s characterization of Venus and the masculine qualities he prescribes to her:
‘like a bold-faced suit ‘gins to woo him.’
By establishing her role as the pursuer, and Adonis as the object of desire, Shakespeare engages with English Petrarchan rhetoric through gender reversal and works towards inaugurating the male attributes which shape Venus’s desire throughout the poem. Employing strong, emotive language, Shakespeare presents Venus’s masculine desire as both overpowering and maddening,
‘And, trembling in her passion, calls it balm –
Earth’s sovereign salve does a goddess good.
Being so enraged, desire doth lend force
Courageously to pluck him from his horse.’
Through stimulating imagery such as ‘trembling in her passion,’ and ‘being so enraged, desire doth lend force,’ Shakespeare reflects the internal transformation love and desire inflicts on the mind and body, wherein it evokes inflamed, uninhibited emotions. Thus, establishing the lack of control Venus possesses over such change. By extension, the sexual connotations associated with ‘trembling’ allude to the bestial instinct which is attempting to escape and transform Venus’s body as she is overcome with lust. In this vein, Coppelia Kahn suggests that “Venus embodies desire in the Ovidian sense as a blind impersonal force that overwhelms man or woman, god or human, obliterating normal consciousness, and in mind if not body-transforming the [individual].” The transformative impact of love and desire is further depicted in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis through his metaphorical, hypersexualized portrayal of Venus’s body as a park.
‘I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer:
Feed where thou wilt, on the mountain or in dale,
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.’
In this stanza, Shakespeare symbolically highlights desire as changing the body into an object used purely for erotic fantasy and sexual indulgence. By outlining the structure of the female body, and alluding to the use of sexual acts to persuade and seduce, Valerie Billing argues that Shakespeare’s “description of Venus’s body plays into a common Renaissance poetic trope of describing the female body as an erotic landscape that encourages male conquest and colonization.”
‘The strong-necked steed being tied unto a tree,
Breaketh his rein, and to her straight goes he.
Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds,
And now his woven girths he breaks asunder.’
By employing animalistic imagery, Shakespeare utilizes the love and desire between two horses, reflective of Venus’s hopes for herself and Adonis, to further reveal the unrestrained state humans can enter when in pursuit of their object of desire. In doing so, he solidifies the role of love and desire in morphing and transforming the individual into an animal, embodying their inhuman instincts, and moving the individual – almost painfully – beyond ‘human feeling and conduct.’
Shakespeare’s treatment of the effects of love and desire in Venus and Adonis is also explored through the literal and symbolic transformation of Adonis. Whereby, through Venus’s all-consuming, animalistic desire, and her attempts to control him, he emblematically transforms into her submissive through death.
‘He now obeys, and now no more resisteth,
While she takes all she can, and not at all listeth.”
In these lines, Shakespeare’s conclusive, authoritative tone alludes to Venus’s pleasure at being able to overcome Adonis’s resistance towards her, forcing him to kiss her against his will, ‘her lips are conquerors,’ and ‘his lips obey.’ Recognizing the Petrarchan qualities shaping the inverted relationship of Elizabethan tradition between Venus and Adonis, Richard Rambuss suggests that “the fervor of the lover’s desire for the beloved is matched only by the icy disdain for her rebuff. Shakespeare, […] represents both the wooer and her wooed as enflamed.” In this sense, Venus is the raging, masculine ‘wooer’ and Adonis is the impervious, feminine ‘wooed’. This uneasy dynamic between Venus and Adonis reaches its climax in the symbolic depiction of the boar murdering Adonis. Wherein, Kahn proposes that the boar is representative of “the destructive aspects of [Venus’s] desire,” and Billing, argues that the boar is “an explicit figure of […] penetration.”
‘And, nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine
Sheathed unaware of the tusk of his soft groin.’
Utilizing extremely vivid imagery, Shakespeare simultaneously illustrates the sexual innuendo associated with the penetration and murder of Adonis, and Venus’s desire as transforming him into the reciprocal, obedient lover she has always wished him to be. Demonstrating the pain and suffering associated with such transformation, Adonis’s metamorphosis is captured through Shakespeare’s use of blood spurring the growth of a metaphorical flower: ‘A purple flower sprung up, chequered with white, Resembling well his pale cheeks.’ Which, serves to represent the rebirth of Adonis’s non-existent figure as having become an extension of Venus’s love and desire – he has become a part of her and is at the center of her universe. Kahn writes: “[Venus] possesses him totally. […] Withering in her bosom, he seems to have surrendered to her all-embracing love…He has been consumed and achieved as the Petrarchan object of desire.”
‘My throbbing heart shall rock thee day and night.
There shall not be one minute in an hour
Wherein I will not kiss my sweet love’s flower.’
In the final lines of the poem, Shakespeare captures resolutely, the capability of love and desire, whether it be one’s own or that of another, to transform and change the individual. For Adonis, his physical transformation is a demonstration of the impact of insatiable desire, one that Venus will dedicate her life to nurturing.
In The Affectionate Shepherd, Barnfield uses homoerotic language to capture the transformative, but simultaneously limiting, the effect of love and desire on the individual. Like Shakespeare’s masculine characterization of Venus, Barnfield echoes English Petrarchan tradition by positioning Daphnis’s admiration and desire for Ganymede as driving their interaction. For Daphnis, his desire to be with Ganymede lies outside of Elizabethan heterosexual social boundaries. Whilst his desire does not move him into an uninhibited, animal-like state, as it does for Venus, it guides him towards an appreciation and love for Ganymede’s youth and ‘virtue.’. This is established in the second stanza of the first eclogue through Barnfield’s use of descriptive language to illustrate Ganymede’s appearance:
‘If it is a sin to love a sweet-faced boy,
(Whose amber locks trust up in golden trammels
Dangle adown his lovely cheeks with joy,
When pearle and flower his faire haire enamels)
If it be sinne to love a lovely lad;
Oh then sinne I, for whom my soul is sad.’
Through soft, delicate language, Barnfield positions the relenting nature of Daphnis’s love and desire, it drives him towards a higher order of feeling – but, is weak in the face of Renaissance tradition. It does not consume, but values. By extension, Barnfield’s specific naming and gendering of Ganymede, a sweet-faced boy,’ directly engages with homoerotic language and themes. Which, Rebecca Yearling recognizes as ‘polarising’: “On the one hand was homosexuality (or rather, sodomy): a crime against nature, God and society. On the other hand, was homosociality: a healthy, natural way for men to strengthen social bonds and assert their masculinity.” In this vein, it is precisely Barnfield’s diverging exploration of the relationship between a boy and a man that champions the transformation of Daphnis, as isolated by a desire to be subdued by age and society. Initially, Daphnis’s desire for Ganymede is explicitly portrayed through a lovesick tone and sexual innuendo:
‘Oh would God he would but pitty mee,
That love him more than any mortal wight;’
and,
‘My lips were honey, and thy mouth a bee.
Then shouldst thou sucke my sweetie and my faire flower
That now is ripe, and full of honey-berries.’
Bruce Smith argues that Ganymede is fulfilling “a precisely imagined sexual fantasy.” In referring to his ‘sweet’ and ‘faire flower’, Barnfield invokes phallic imagery to position audiences within his pastoral landscape and force them to imagine the sexual acts which occur in homosexual relationships. However, upon realizing the brief and fleeting possibilities of his homoerotic desires in the early modern period, Daphnis predicts that ‘when age draws on, thy love will soon forsake.’ Thus, resigning himself to social tradition and time through vivid imagery,
‘Behold my gray head, full of silver haires,
My wrinkled skin, and deeper furrows on my face:
Cares bring old-age, old-age increaseth cares;
My time comes, and I have run my race.’
I would argue that Daphnis’s sense of his perceived unnatural desire forces him to transform into an individual whose demonstrations of love and desire are within the social boundaries of the Elizabethan era. Confirming as such, Smith writes: “[Daphnis] accommodates himself and his desires to the conventional structures of power in Elizabethan society.” By means of Barnfield’s purposeful word choice, emphasizing time and how it is lacking in Daphnis’s older age, he captures the capability of love and desire to transform mind and body, even if it is to restrict or encourage the individual to conform.
Ultimately, both texts chart the role of love and desire in transforming the individual’s mind or body through language devices such as imagery, metaphor, and innuendo. For Shakespeare, he chooses to utilize sexualized imagery and eroticized metaphors to focus on the role of love and desire in arousing the animal and basic instincts from within Venus, and metamorphosing Adonis into an obedient form, which can be unequivocally enjoyed and adored by Venus. For Barnfield, he employs homoerotic rhetoric and specific word choice to emphasize the role of love and desire in transforming the homosexual thoughts and feelings of Daphnis for Ganymede, into more traditional, reserved ways of thinking which align with the early modern era. Thus, capturing the transformative effects of love and desire through language in Renaissance poetry.
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