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- Love itself is deemed something "light," such that she herself can be supported by mere flowers and doves. She eventually wonders if he is simply infatuated with himself, like Narcissus, and thus incapable of love. She concludes that as a living creature he is obliged to reproduce, particularly so that his beauty can be passed to his offspring.
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In Ovid, the beautiful Adonis is the willing lover of Venus, and his death is an accident of the hunt. Shakespeare transforms the story by having his Adonis reject Venus’s advances in a way that, for his early readers, was clearly both ironic and comic.
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream | Folger Shakespeare Library
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare stages the...
- Venus and Adonis - Folger Shakespeare Library
What many consider to be the earliest known English opera...
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Shakespeare's Venus is a bit like a wild animal herself: she apparently goes naked, and is not interested in hunting, but only in making love to Adonis, offering her body to him in graphically explicit terms.
- Introduction
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Media Adaptations
- Themes
- Style
- Topics For Further Study
- Historical Context
- Compare & Contrast
- Critical Overview
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 lite...
Lines 1-96
In the opening stanza of Venus and Adonis, the narrator establishes the basis of the poem: the young Adonis has gone out hunting and is indifferent to romance, while the lovesick Venus has become infatuated with Adonis and has begun to boldly court him. They are understood to be meeting each other somewhere in the forest. Venus compares Adonis's beauty to that of a flower and asks him to dismount so that she can kiss him. Indeed, she takes his hand, "plucks" him from his horse, holds him unde...
Lines 97-174
Venus launches into an extensive plaint to Adonis. She mentions how Mars, the god of war, had once wooed her and had essentially become her slave, giving her the chance to teach him to be more light-hearted. Still, Adonis had somehow mastered her. She looks him in the eyes and asks once more for a kiss, saying that if he feels ashamed, he can always simply close his eyes. She says his youth and beauty should not be wasted in want of romance, and since she has no defects of person, physical or...
Lines 175-258
As the sun passes overhead, Adonis declares that he must give no more thought to love and remove himself from the heat. Venus assures him that with her immortal powers she can cool him, and regardless, the heat of the sun is no stronger than the passion that he inflames her with. She laments his hard-heartedness and again begs for kisses, eventually declaring that he must not be a man if he has no romantic inclinations. Venus then can speak no more, as she is overwhelmed by her tears. Venus i...
Adonis
Although he says far less than his counterpart in the tale, Adonis merits as much attention by virtue of his character's complexity. In fact, where Venus's speeches leave little doubt in the reader's mind as to her nature, Adonis's comparative silence has provoked many commentators to proffer elaborate explanations regarding his state of mind. In fact, comparatively few analyses revolve around the major speech he delivers from lines 769 to 810, in which he seems to relate that his reluctance...
• The Royal Shakespeare Company and the Little Angel Theatre collaborated to produce an hour-long marionette version of Venus and Adonisin 2004. The production was directed by Gregory Doran. A video was recorded by, and is held at, the Theater Museum of the United Kingdom's National Museum of the Performing Arts. Indeed, Adonis's evident narcissism...
Desire
The nature of desire is a major theme in Venus and Adonis, especially as represented by Venus and as absent in Adonis. Indeed, Shakespeare has portrayed the personification of love as simply overflowing with desire, and many commentators have thus seen Venus's characterization as largely negative and fairly comical. Catherine Belsey provides a survey of other critics who have used terms such as "sick excess," "unnatural and disorderly," and "perverse" to describe Venus's emotional state. Bels...
Mythology
In that the entire story of Venus and Adonis originates in Roman mythology, Shakespeare's poem is worth examining not only as an individual work but also alongside that myth and others from which the author drew. Shakespeare did not exclusively adhere to the facts of the primary myth, which he is understood to have learned from Ovid's Metamorphoses, written around 8 C.E. Most notably, Ovid depicts Venus as fairly reserved in terms of her sexuality. John Doebler notes of Ovid's Venus, "Dressed...
Birds are mentioned in a variety of contexts throughout Venus and Adonis. In an essay, discuss the nature of these references and their relevance to the poem as a whole.Some critics have suggested that Shakespeare portrayed Adonis as refusing Venus's advances because he had homosexual leanings. Research and write a report on the history of the gay rights movement...Discuss how modern American concepts regarding love, lust, and chastity are reflected in movies, on television, and on the Internet.In Ovid's version of the myth of Venus and Adonis, Venus relates the story of Atalanta and Hippomenes; Shakespeare may have excluded this digression because it did not fit with his interpretation o...The Elizabethan Concept of Love
The most prominent reason for examining Venus and Adonis in its historical context is that conceptions regarding love—and lust—in Elizabethan times were vastly different from those in modern times. As Russ McDonald notes in his Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, marriage frequently had little, if anything, to do with the degree of love shared by the partners in question. Especially among upper classfamilies, who possessed capital and estates that potential brides could give to their suitors as...
Queen Elizabeth
While the powerful and manipulative woman was not a common character in literature in Shakespeare's time, one would not have to search very hard to find a prime example of just such a personage: Queen Elizabeth herself. Commentators have noted that Shakespeare would certainly have been conscious of the possibility that comparisons would be drawn between his female lead and the nation's, especially because Elizabeth never married or produced an heir, such that her possible romantic relations w...
Sexuality
In that Adonis, a perfectly healthy young male, remains unstirred by Venus's advances, some scholars have speculated that Shakespeare intentionally depicted him in a way that left his sexuality in question. To begin with, Adonis is repeatedly described not merely as an attractive or powerful male but as a beautiful male. His blushing shyness, in turn, is more typically a feminine trait. In Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England, Bruce Smith notes that owing to "their androgyny," or combin...
1590s: England, a nation that is primarily patriarchal both legally and socially finds itself under the rule of a woman, Queen Elizabeth, for over forty years. Today: A nation whose laws generally...1590s: The words love and lust have yet to receive wholly distinct connotations, such that lust is often referred to positively. Today:Lust is widely recognized as one of the "seven deadly sins," i...1590s: As the word homosexual would not be coined for some three hundred years, people are not categorized according to their sexual desires. Today:For many, the question of "sexual identity" is cr...Critical opinions of Venus and Adonis have varied greatly over the years, especially because earlier critics invested less energy in what was long considered a minor Shakespearean work. Indeed, Heather Dubrow notes of both this poem and the subsequent Rape of Lucrece, Although some critics have found fault with a seeming lack of moral clarity to th...
Nov 23, 2021 · What many consider to be the earliest known English opera shares its mythological subject with Shakespeare’s most popular published work during his lifetime: the epic poem Venus and Adonis. Here we see great artists from different centuries using different art…
Just as it disappeared behind a cloud, rosy-cheeked Adonis went out hunting. He loved hunting, but he laughed in the face of love. Lovesick over him, Venus followed him as fast as she could. She started talking sweetly to him, and as boldly as a lover would.
Venus and Adonis is a narrative poem written in 199 six-line stanzas, telling the story of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 10, where Ovid tells of how Venus took the beautiful Adonis as her first mortal lover.
When Venus, the goddess of love, sees the beauty of young Adonis, she comes down to Earth because she is filled with love for him. Meeting him one morning in the fields as he rides out to the...
