ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the text 'prompts a desire for action that it fails to gratify' as Catherine Belsey as its main theoretical premises the idea that, in Shakespeare. Venus and Adonis certainly creates a frisson in its particular way of mixing the worlds of desire and fear. In shaping fantasies, the world of A Midsummer Night's Dream offers a fundamental difference with Venus and Adonis thanks to the logic of comedy which reverses the metamorphic process. Chastity and maidenhood, here associated with the 'fair vestal' and 'imperial votress' a probable allusion to Queen Elizabeth herself, are defined as 'fancy free'. As Leonard Barkan puts it, like many Renaissance Ovidians, William Shakespeare is more interested in transformation as a cause than in transformation as an effect. Contrary to Queen Pasiphae or to the Roman matron at the end of Apuleius' Golden Asse, animalized Bottom is not as such an object of feminine sexual fantasy.
