Shakespeare’s Choicest Flowers

Abstract Returning to Thomas Deane, the reader of Shakespeare introduced in the Introduction, this chapter uses Englands Parnassus and Bel-vedére to read Venus and Adonis. By returning to the floral metaphors of the anthology, it outlines the relations between style, schooling, and gender in early modern England, to reveal a persistent association in humanist writings between rhetorical flowers and a rhetorically suspect femininity. It reads Ovid, and the epyllia by Lodge and Marlowe that imitated his writing, as picking up on this danger, using the rhetorical techniques of the schoolroom—above all commonplacing—to unsettle its social and political ends. Venus and Adonis, it argues, is a study in the hazardous potential of poetry’s flowers, and their transformations of rhetoric into poetry: from the salacious lessons Venus teaches, to the pert couplets the poem produces, to the short-lived metamorphosis of Adonis into a flower, no sooner transformed than plucked.