Shakespeare And Sex - Shakespeare's Sonnets and Narrative Poems - Review

Shakespeare's Sonnets and Narrative Poems. A. D. Cousins. Longman. [pound]60.00. 227 pages. ISBN 0-582-21513-7.

Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece are discourses, sequent and complementary, on sex. Venus and Adonis is elegant pornography. As Gabriel Harvey noted, "The younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis'. But, he added, Lucrece and Hamlet 'have it in them to please the wiser sort'. I suspect that A. D. Cousins goes along with this view; but he gives fair scope to both poems.

He reads them in terms of gender and role. Venus (the predator) is seen as 'masculinized'. Adonis is 'feminized'. Furthermore, Shakespeare's narrator devalues the sexual attractiveness of Venus but, himself seemingly appreciative of Adonis as an object of desire, sets up the feminized Adonis for the gaze of the implied male reader'. The description of Venus's body ('sweet bottom-grass and high delightful plain', etc., is by a woman, inverting the usual pornographic form. This comedy of gender-reversal and Venus's approach to Adonis is what we would term sexual harassment. Mr Cousins sees in this the disorderly, self-defeating aspects of both sexual desire and chastity.

The key insight into Lucrece is her externalized sense of self. She is a victim, but she still feels guilty. How to read this? William Empson thought 'Thus she took an involuntary pleasure in the rape, though she would have resisted it in any way possible; that is why she felt guilty ...' (Essays on Shakespeare) A. D. Cousins point to her sense of role: 'she thinks of herself as being primarily a chaste Roman matron and as having received that role from without'. She has been an exemplar of chastity and has lost her sense of exemplarity.

The psychic relations with the rapist are intriguing. Tarquin's role model is his father, whose pride, violence, and treachery signal his will to power. But the rape of Lucrece is 'also a self-violation because violation of the aristocratic Roman code of conduct by which he...thinks his existence primarily defined'. These, if you like, are the contradictions of patriarchy. My criticism of Mr Cousins' learned and delicate discussion is that he avoids all contact with Titus Andronicus. I do not see how Lucrece can be adequately treated, detached from the parallel theatrical analysis of patriarchy which must have been written at much the same time. The obvious 'affinities' between Titus Andronicus and Lucrece are left unexplored.

The more's the pity, since Mr Cousins is alert to 'the reciprocal formation of consciousness and of role among Tarquin, Lucrece and Collatine...' This is the basis of characterisation in Shakespearian drama. Indeed Lucrece's fate is the marker for much in the dramatic canon to come. Suicide is a defining act: 'Suicide will re-establish her status in the cultural system'. After that she becomes absorbed into Brutus's political programme, just as Cleopatra is absorbed into Octavius's triumph.

The section on the Sonnets is more rarefied. Mr Cousins will have no truck with biographical speculation, and analyses the Sonnets purely in terms of classical and literary antecedents. The most important is the myth of Narcissus, seen as the symbol of the youth's self-absorption. Roles, hence a fundamental playfulness, remain the key concept. 'If Shakespeare's speaker fictionalized the young man, so too he fictionalizes himself'. We need to imagine what the young man looked like, and Mr Cousins does well to suggest (of Sonnet 94) a Bronzino portrait. Overall, 'The Sonnets do not so much decry or invert Petrarchism as appropriate it'.

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