SOURCE: "Towards a Reconsideration of Shakespeare's Adonis: Rhetoric, Narcissus, and the Male Gaze," in Studia Neophilologica, Vol. 68, No. 2, 1996, pp. 195-204.

In the following essay, Cousins examines Shakespeare's use of rhetoric in characterizing Adonis, seeing him as an anti-Narcissus figure who is the object of a voyeuristic male sexual desire.

Shakespeare's Adonis, like his Venus, has been primarily studied either in terms of Renaissance thinking about myth and symbol or as if a character in a play. Study in the first mode has connected Adonis with, for example, the idea of beauty's transience, a connection that has been interestingly explored.¹ Study in the second mode has closely traced his responses to Venus' sexual aggression, examining his evasions, his defiances, and so on.² In what follows (and so in parallel to my discussion of Venus), both familiar critical approaches are used but new arguments about Adonis' characterization are put forward...