‘Thrice fairer than myself’

Abstract

This chapter draws attention to the hyper-whiteness of Adonis in Venus and Adonis, arguing that Shakespeare’s epyllion cannot produce a future for racial whiteness because sexual desire is darkened and linked to non-White people. Adonis’s hyper-whiteness points towards asexuality as absence of sexual desire, which, ironically, only makes Adonis more desirable to Venus. His whiteness is repeatedly threatened by Venus, whose body is less white than Adonis’s and darkened by sexual passion. Yet, in Adonis’s disinterestedness in Venus and sexual reproduction, his hyper-whiteness dies with himself. Although his whiteness has no future in the poem, it does in the desires of young, elite, White male readers. This chapter then suggests that the racial futures of whiteness can be traced through the history of reading, in how White readers read, quote, and use Shakespeare’s works.