ABSTRACT
Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed that William Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis is designed as a series of sharply etched scenes stitched by a "never broken chain of imagery, always vivid and, because unbroken, often minute". This chapter argues that Venus and Adonis's structural design creates an interpretative frustration in readers that mirrors the sexual frustration with which Venus struggles throughout most of the poem. A few somewhat disparate modes of inquiry are engaged to test the narratological implications underlying this position. It employs theoretical concepts drawn from narrative analysts such as Peter Brooks and Kenneth Burke to consider whether the interpretive paradoxes so prevalent in twentieth-century readings of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis can be partially reconciled through study of the psychology of form and structural design. The chapter integrates a transactional analysis that considers how Shakespeare's Elizabethan readers might have responded to his poem based upon understanding of literary conventions associated with English erotic epyllions.
