SOURCE: Greenfield, Sayre N. “Allegory to the Rescue: Saving Venus and Adonis from Themselves.” In The Ends of Allegory, pp. 86-110. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998.

In the following excerpt, Greenfield explores the reasons why Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Spenser's treatment of the Venus and Adonis myth in The Faerie Queen have been read allegorically, observing that the allegorization of such texts stems from a desire to moralize a text or to demonstrate the text's coherence.

This chapter sketches out how allegorical readings arise as reactions against the sort of metonymic fractures described in the previous chapter. To do this, it traces one particular history of interpretation, that of the Venus and Adonis myth in the poems of Shakespeare and Spenser. Allegory substitutes a metaphoric structure for failed metonymy, but it is only one of a variety of defenses against such cognitive disturbances. Some of these reactions...