Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: Practising with Theory
- 2 Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Lacan with Augustine and Montaigne
- 3 Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis
- 4 Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece
- 5 Antinomies of Desire and the Sonnets
- 6 Peter Quince's Ballad: Memory, Psychoanalysis, History and A Midsummer Night's Dream
- 7 The Illusion of Empire: Elizabethan Expansionism and Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy
- 8 Making Histories Then and Now: Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V
- 9 The Case of Hamlet's Conscience
- 10 Iago the Essayist
- Notes
- Index
3 - Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: Practising with Theory
- 2 Psychoanalysis and Early Modern Culture: Lacan with Augustine and Montaigne
- 3 Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis
- 4 Tarquin Dispossessed: Expropriation and Consent in The Rape of Lucrece
- 5 Antinomies of Desire and the Sonnets
- 6 Peter Quince's Ballad: Memory, Psychoanalysis, History and A Midsummer Night's Dream
- 7 The Illusion of Empire: Elizabethan Expansionism and Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy
- 8 Making Histories Then and Now: Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V
- 9 The Case of Hamlet's Conscience
- 10 Iago the Essayist
- Notes
- Index
Summary
The painter Zeuxis excelled in the art of trompe-l'oeil, a mode of painting that is capable of deceiving the eye by its simulation of nature. Zeuxis portrayed grapes with such success that birds flew towards his picture. His younger rival, Parrhasius, however, challenged Zeuxis to a competition to decide which painter's work was more true to life. Parrhasius won – by depicting a curtain so convincing that Zeuxis begged him to draw it and reveal the picture behind. In his seminar ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a’ Jacques Lacan makes a distinction between the two pictures: only the curtain that Parrhasius painted is a true trompe-l'oeil, because its effect depends on what is missing, the possibility of a secret concealed behind the veil. For Lacan it is not deception alone that defines the trompe-l'oeil: on the contrary, its determining characteristic is the promise of a presence that it also withholds. Trompe-l'oeil tantalises.
At a critical moment in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, when the goddess has succeeded in manoeuvring her reluctant suitor into a likely physical position, but without the consequence she seeks, the text compares Adonis to the painting by Zeuxis:
Even so poor birds deceiv'd with painted grapes
Do surfeit by the eye and pine the maw:
Even so she languisheth in her mishaps,
As those poor birds that helpless berries saw.
The warm effects which she in him finds missing
She seeks to kindle with continual kissing.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare in Theory and Practice , pp. 34 - 53Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008