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which he refers to and quotes from
many times in his plays. He even
brings a copy of the poems on
stage in his early tragedy Titus
Andronicus and in his late romance
Cymbeline. Shakespeare seems to
have referred both to the original
and to an English translation by
Arthur Golding. But while Ovid
tells the tale in only 75 lines,
Shakespeare expands it to 1,194
lines of verse. He modifies both the
characterization and the events of
the original tale. In Ovid’s version,
the youthful Adonis returns Venus’s
love, but Shakespeare turns him
into a bashful adolescent who shies
away from the goddess’s lustful
advances. He also expands the
story; the most substantial addition
is the episode (ll.259–324) in which
Adonis’s horse lusts after a mare
and gallops after her into the forest,
frustrating Adonis’s attempts to
escape from Venus’s clutches.
Style and reception
The poem is written in six-line
stanzas. Each line is an iambic
pentameter, meaning that it has ten
syllables and every other syllable is
stressed: for example “She looks
upon his lips, and they are pale”
(l.1123). The lines are rhymed in this
order: a b a b c c, resembling the
last six lines of a Shakespearean
sonnet. The style is witty, narrating
events with knowing detachment
while also achieving lyrical beauty
in the descriptive passages.
The poem was to be more
frequently reprinted than any other
of Shakespeare’s works during his
lifetime: nine times by 1610. It was
especially popular with adolescents.
In about 1600, Cambridge scholar
Gabriel Harvey wrote that, “the
younger sort take much pleasure in
Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,
but his Lucrece, and his tragedy of
Hamlet Prince of Denmark, have it
in them to please the wiser sort.”
Venus a nd Adon is acquired a
reputation as soft porn due to lines
such as these in which Venus tries
to tempt Adonis with the delights of
her body: “I’ll be a park, and thou
shalt be my deer. / Feed where
thou wilt, on mountain or in dale; /
Graze on my lips, and if those hills
be dry, / Stray lower, where the
pleasant fountains lie” (ll.231–234).
In a play performed by Cambridge
students early in the 17th century,
a character boasts of how he woos
his mistress with speeches larded
with quotations from Romeo andJuliet and Venus and Adonis, and
declares that he will “worship
sweet master Shakespeare.”
The poem’s artificial style and
digressive story line caused it to fall
out of fashion until romantic poet
and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
Biographia Literaria (1817) helped
to restore its critical reputation. ■THE FREELANCE WRITER
In 2007, the Royal Shakespeare
Company, in association with the
Little Angel Theatre of Islington,
London, gave a performance in which
the poem was recited aloud while the
story was acted out with puppets.