Stepping Out of Narrative Line: A Bit of Word, and Horse, Play in Venus and Adonis

Summary

Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds,

And now his woven girths he breaks asunder;

The bearing earth with his hard hoof he wounds,

Whose hollow womb resounds like heaven’s thunder;

The iron bit he crusheth ’tween his teeth,

Controlling what he was controllèd with.

Picked out in bold type here is a piece or ‘bit’ of word-play in Shakespeare’s erotic narrative poem Venus and Adonis, which has not been noticed, or at least not recorded, and which has ramifications far and beyond its immediate context which I shall explore in what follows. Briefly, it consists in a verbal mimesis of the violence done by the horse to its ‘iron bit’, an image which thus acquires an emblematic metatextual significance as well as inter- and extra- textual significances. More precisely, the formation of ‘tween’ from between – a formation exemplary of poetic linguistic licence, as I shall indicate – is reactivated by a virtual homophone of the elided syllable or ‘bit’ before the verbal phrase ‘he crusheth. Releasing the polyvalency of the word bit this evokes at the same time its relation to the word bite, from which it is formed (again by elision), together with the relation of both to the body’s organs of articulation (‘tween his teeth’). Evoking these relations this bit of word-play makes them new, illustrating a poetics of recreative licence, a stepping out from narrative and syntactic linearity in a discursive equivalent to the intemperance of holiday, which, breaking with common or ordinary discourse, liberates and regenerates desire in a pleasurable re-creation of relations, especially of the word to the body.