Shakespeare's Narcissus: Omnipresent Love in Venus and Adonis

Summary

Love doth approach disguised, / Armèd in arguments

(Love's Labour's Lost, 5.2.83–4)

Imagine Narcissus had found his reflection in an object that was animate rather than inanimate. Imagine him with the same ‘fixed staring eyes’, the same ‘wretched rage’, the same vanity, destructiveness and self-pity, yet finding himself in the eyes of another person instead of a pool of water. Imagine him then not as a mortal man but an immortal goddess. Do so, and you have the basic idea of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, a minor Ovidian epic that tells one love-story not found even in Ovid – a story of love itself in love with love itself.

The story of Narcissus is without doubt an important source text for this poem. Venus compares Adonis to Narcissus more than once for failing to respond to her sexual advances. Many critics accept her judgement of the boy as narcissistic. Colin Burrow calls Adonis one of Shakespeare's ‘great’ narcissists. Coppélia Kahn calls the poem a ‘dramatization of narcissism’, in which the boy's attempt to ‘protect himself against the threat of love actually results in his self-destruction’. Jonathan Bate speaks of Adonis's ‘self-consuming absorption’, while Kenneth Muir finds in his death a kind of moral – that ‘beauty which refuses love is doomed to destruction and decay’. Other critics accept his narcissism with some qualification. Heather Dubrow, for example, sees Venus herself as ‘self-centered’ in a number of ways, yet for the most part agrees to the validity of the goddess’s charge, suspecting ‘subterranean motives’ of the boy for his resistance. Anthony Mortimer similarly thinks that Adonis will know no ‘other’, but appreciates certain reasons why he might not want to know Venus in particular.