In lines 1075 through 1105 of Venus and Adonis, William Shakespeare expresses the beauty of Adonis. The passage takes the form of a eulogy given by Venus in honor of Adonis’s beauty and laments the loss of this beauty with Adonis’s death. Throughout this passage, Shakespeare makes clever use of metonymy and his intended audience’s prior knowledge to craft an extended, implicit comparison between Adonis and Hyacinthus, the doomed the lover of Apollo.
According to Venus, “true sweet beauty lived and died with” Adonis. She declares that Adonis was so beautiful that when he went outside, the sun and wind “Lurked like to thieves to rob him of his fair.” The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines this use of “fair” to mean beauty, hence the sun and wind are shown to be desiring Adonis’s beauty for themselves. To get this beauty, “the gaudy sun would peep” under Adonis’s bonnet and “the wind would blow it off and…/play with his locks.” According to the OED, “locks” are strands of a person’s hair that naturally curl together, so in these lines Venus is expressing that the wind would take Adonis’s hat and play with his hair in a flirtatious manner. Venus further remarks that when this behavior upset Adonis, the sun and wind would compete to see “who first should dry his tears.”
Here, the sun and the wind are not mere natural forces, rather they are used as metonymical representations of the gods Apollo and Zephyrus who control the sun and the West wind respectively. The competitive interplay between Apollo and as the sun and Zephyrus as the wind over Adonis and his beauty is reminiscent of a variation of the story of Hyacinthus and Apollo, which many of Shakespeare’s readers would be familiar with, given the interest in ancient Mediterranean society at the time of Shakespeare’s writing. In the story Shakespeare is alluding to, Hyacinthus is a young man who attracts the attention of both Apollo and Zephyrus, but he ultimately begins a relationship with Apollo and rejects Zephyrus. Later, in a fit of a rage Zephyrus interferes with a game of discus between Apollo and Hyacinthus, causing the discus to go off course and fatally strike Hyacinthus. Like Adonis, Hyacinthus was then turned into a flower, the hyacinth.
With Adonis’s death, Venus says, all beauty has disappeared from the world. The sun and wind will no longer compete for the affections of anyone. As Venus puts it to the creatures of the world “Having no fair to lose, you need not fear; / The sun doth scorn you and the wind doth hiss you” which means that the sun will avoid other creatures and the wind will attempt to drive everyone away. by hissing (OED). Venus herself believes that Adonis was even more beautiful than Hyacinthus as she asks the world “what canst thou boast / of things long since or anything ensuing?
The comparison between Adonis and Hyacinthus asks readers to consider whether true beauty is really meant to last. Not only did both Adonis and Hyacinthus die young, they were both turned into flowers, and as Venus laments, “The flowers are sweet, their colors fresh and trim / But true sweet beauty lived and died with him.” Like the doomed young men, flowers eventually fade and the mortality of these beautiful people and plants suggests that beauty itself is fleeting.
Sources
"fair, adj. and n.1." OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/67704. Accessed 18 February 2022.
"hiss, v." OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/87264. Accessed 18 February 2022.
"lock, n.1." OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/109595. Accessed 18 February 2022.
Shakespeare, William. Venus and Adonis from The Folger Shakespeare. Ed. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library, February 18, 2022.