Venus And Adonis

With Venus And Adonis, William Shakespeare in 1593 launched his career as a poet. The poem is a minor epic, a genre chosen by a large number of poets in the 1590s for their first efforts, each attempt at the genre self-consciously imitating the others.

Venus And Adonis was such a notable success that it was, during his lifetime, Shakespeare's most popular published work, going through ten editions by 1616 and quoted in numerous journals, letters, and plays of the period. In 1598 a critic wrote that "the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus And Adonis".

Shakespeare found the story of the encounter between the Roman goddess of love and the boy hunter in book 10 of Ovid's Metamorphoses. 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. Shakespeare makes his Venus highly verbal, a seemingly endless source of arguments for making love.