A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Shakespeare for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Shakespeare for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535842082

Book preview

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Venus and Adonis

William Shakespeare

1593

Introduction

Venus and Adonis is one of Shakespeare's two most substantial narrative poems, the other being Lucrece. Shakespeare is commonly believed to have written both of these poems early in his career while the London theaters were closed to prevent the spread of the plague. Also, both narrative poems were dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, a noted literary patron; critics have noted that, as courtly poetry, the works signaled a fair degree of ambition on Shakespeare's part. M. C. Bradbrook notes in Shakespeare: The Poet in His World that with the dissemination of Venus and Adonis, The author at once received recognition and respectful notice, even among those who despised, or affected to despise, the work of the common stages.

Venus and Adonis certainly merits comparison with Shakespeare's drama; at nearly twelve hundred lines, the poem is fully two-thirds the size of his shortest play, The Comedy of Errors. Given the poem's complex and nuanced treatment of its universally appreciated subject matter—love, lust, and desire—it has perhaps received more critical attention and praise. In his introduction to the play, Jonathan Crewe speaks of its rhetorical brilliance and showiness, its conventional yet extraordinarily sophisticated reflection on relations between nature and art, and its densely layered allusion to other texts and literary traditions. Venus and Adonis also received a great degree of immediate popular attention, as some sixteen editions were produced between its initial publication in 1593, and 1640.

Venus and Adonis is often referred to as an epyllion, which is a narrative poem in the style of an epic poem but shorter. It is largely based on the work of the ancient Latin poet Ovid, whose Metamorphoses contains not only a seminal version of the story of Venus's courtship of Adonis but also other myths that shaped Shakespeare's portrayal of the pair. Crewe also refers to the work as an etiological poem, in that it describes the origins of some axiomatic truth; specifically, at the poem's conclusion, Venus condemns the relationships of all future lovers to confusion and strife. The figurative heart of the poem is its depiction of the ambling discourse between the aggressive Venus and the withdrawn Adonis. That depiction has received a wide variety of interpretations—perhaps unsurprisingly, as where love is concerned, beauty as well as truth are in the eye and mind of the