Venus and Adonis

By 1592, William Shakespeare, aged 28, was already established as both an actor and a dramatist. In that year, the plague broke out which caused up to 15,000 victims. Theatres were kept closed, and no regular playacting in London could take place until June 1594. Shakespeare needed a patron and dedicated Venus and Adonis (as well as The Rape of Lucrece) to the glamorous Henry Wriothesley, the 3^rd Earl of Southampton, a ward of William Cecil, Lord High Treasurer. In 1591, an author, John Clapham, who was working as clerk for Cecil, had dedicated a Latin poem, Narcissus, to him, which may have prompted Shakespeare to do the same (see Martindale and Burrow 1992). Venus and Adonis was an enormous success. Forty-three editions were published within 15 years and the book was literally read ‘to pieces’. It appeared in more printed editions than any other work of vernacular poetry in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and was published twice as many times as his most successful play, Henry IV Part 1. It was also the first work by Shakespeare to be translated into another language: the first 810 lines were translated into Dutch in 1621.

  The epigraph, taken from Ovid’s Amores, has been interpreted as an act of renunciation of the ‘low’ act of playwriting but can also be seen as Shakespeare’s way of representing himself as an Ovidian poet. Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) are “probably the only printed works whose publication Shakespeare authorized himself” (Shakespeare 2007, 471). Venus and Adonis is a prime example of the so-called Elizabethan minor epic or epyllion, erotic narrative poems drawing from episodes in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that “feature debates about desire, pairing stories of sexuality or sexual maturation with stories of rhetoric” (Ellis 2018, 239). It is written in six-line stanzas in iambic pentameter consisting of a quatrain and a final couplet (rhyme scheme: ababcc).

The main source of Venus and Adonis is the myth found in Book Ten of Ovid’s Metamorphoses which was widely known in Elizabethan England. Shakespeare read Ovid both in Latin and in Arthur Golding’s translation. The myth had been allegorised already in antiquity, and a contemporary author with whom Shakespeare may have been familiar, Abraham Fraunce, interpreted it as follows:

by Adonis is meant the sun, by Venus, the upper hemisphere of the earth (as by Proserpina the lower) by the boar, winter: by the death of Adonis, the absence of the sun for the six wintry months; all which time, the earth lamenteth: Adonis is wounded in those parts, which are the instruments of propagation: for, in winter the sun seemeth impotent, and the earth barren: neither that being able to get, nor this to bear either fruit or flowers: and therefore Venus sits, lamentably hanging down her head, leaning on her left hand, her garments all over her face . . .  Adonis was turned to a fading flower; beauty decayeth . . .  Adonis was killed by a boar, that is, he was spent and weakened by old age: Venus lamenteth, lust decayeth. (1592, 45v)

There have been many attempts to find a hidden allegory in Shakespeare’s poem, from a Neoplatonic or Christian point of view, but with scant results. Shakespeare decided not to include any reference to the fate of Adonis’ mother, Myrrah (who had him as a result of an incestuous relationship with her own father) or to his being contended between Venus and Proserpina (as relates, among other, Pseudo-Apollodorus). Instead, he focused on Venus’ obsession with Adonis and Adonis’ attempts to reject her advances. Ovid simply stated: “iam placet et Veneri matrisque ulciscitur ignes” (Met. 10.524), he wins the love of Venus and takes revenge of his mother’s passion. Shakespeare represents Adonis as much younger than his sources and lets Venus try to persuade him to lie with her for hundreds of lines in a rhetorical bravura display. Interestingly, she keeps characterizing Adonis as an androgynous figure and there have been many studies trying to make sense of Adonis’ disinterest (is he immature? is he homosexual? Is he asexual? ...). Venus is humanised in her vehement desire for the boy and Shakespeare “satirizes Ovidian desire even as he reveals its power” (Vaughan 2019, 83). The boar’s wound is characterised as a kiss, in keeping with a tradition which can be found in continental texts, while the flower into which Adonis turns at the end (“A purple flower sprung up, checkered with white”, 1168) has been identified with either an anemone or a fritillary (Shakespeare 2002, 235).    

Works Cited

Ellis, Jim. 2018. “The Epyllion”. In A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, edited by Catherine Bates, 239-49. Hoboken, NJ:  Wiley Blackwell.

Fraunce, Abraham. 1592. The Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch Entituled, Amintas Dale. London: Thomas Woodcocke.

Martindale, Charles, and Colin Burrow. 1992. “Clapham’s Narcissus: a Pre-Text for Venus and Adonis?”. English Literary Renaissance 22: 147-76.

Shakespeare, William. 2007. Shakespeare’s Poems. Edited by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H.R. Woudhuysen. London: Bloomsbury.

— Shakespeare, William. 2002.The Complete Sonnets and Poems. Edited by Colin Burrow. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Vaughan, Virginia Mason. 2019. Shakespeare and the Gods. London: Bloomsbury.

Bate, Jonathan. 1993. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Belsey, Catherine. 1995. “Love as Trompe-l’oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis”. Shakespeare Quarterly 46: 257-76.

Bush, Douglas. 1963. Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry. New York: Norton.

Duncan-Jones, Katherine. 1993. “Much Ado with Red and White: the Earliest Readers of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593).” Review of English Studies 44: 479-501.

Enterline, Lynn, ed. 2019. Elizabethan Narrative Poems: the State of Play. London: Bloomsbury.  

— 2015. “Elizabethan Minor Epic”. In The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: Volume 2, edited by, Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie, 253-72. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fletcher, Loraine. 2005. “Animal Rites: a Reading of Venus and Adonis”. Critical Survey 17: 1-14.

Kolin, Philip C., ed. 1997. Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays. New York and London: Garland.

Martindale, Charles, and Colin Burrow. 1992. “Clapham’s Narcissus: a Pre-Text for Venus and Adonis?”. English Literary Renaissance 22: 147-76.

Mortimer, Anthony. 2000. Variable Passions: a Reading of Venus and Adonis. New York: AMS Press.

Roberts, Sasha. 2003. Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tregear, Ted. 2023. Anthologizing Shakespeare, 1593-1603. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Weaver, William P. 2012. Untutored Lines: the Making of the English Epyllion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Richard Field, who came from Stratford-upon-Avon like Shakespeare, entered Venus and Adonis into the Stationers’ Register on the 18^th April. There is only one extant copy of the 1593 first quarto (Q1): it is preserved at the Bodleian Library (Arch. G e.31) and has been digitized here, https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1475-1640_venus-and-adonis-_shakespeare-william_1593/page/n1/mode/2up. The copy, as can be understood from the handwritten note she left on the titlepage, belonged to Frances Wolfrestone (1607-1677). This has served as the copytext of this edition. The first quarto displays Field’s device on its titlepage (“Anchora Spei”, anchor of hope) and seems to have been very carefully edited. The misprints are few and the unique witness we possess features two alterations by hand at line 193 (“shines” > “shineth”) and 198, where “this” is made to precede “earthly sun”. The book consists of 56 pages (signatures: A2 B-G4 H2). Field reprinted the quarto in 1594 (Q2) with mostly slight spelling alterations which were adopted in the following editions. The third edition (Q3) of 1595 survive only in a fragmented state (see https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/venus-and-adonis-third-edition), but like the  fourth edition (Q4) of 1596 and the fifth of 1599 and the following ones, is imposed as an octavo rather than as a quarto. Q4 was the last to be printed by Richard Field and this time the bookseller was mentioned, John Harrison. Q5 and Q6 were printed by William Leake in the same year, 1599. He had acquired the rights for Venus and Adonis from John Harrison on June 25, 1596. Leake also printed Q7 (1600) and purportedly Q8, but the latter was in fact illegally printed in 1607 by Robert Raworth. The title page of Q9 states that it was printed for Leake in 1602, but it was actually printed in 1608 by Humphrey Lownes. All these illegal copies attest to the enormous popularity of Shakespeare’s poem. The tenth edition, which survives in only fragmentary copies, also states that it was printed in 1602 but was probably not printed for Leake until 1610. The year after Shakespeare’s death, 1617, saw the publication of Q11 by William Barrett to whom Leake had transferred the rights. But Q12, published in 1620, saw again a change in the printer: John Parker. Q8 served as the basis for the first edition printed outside England: Q13 was published in Edinburgh by John Wreittoun in 1627, and here we stop the current survey because to go on is beyond the scope of the current project.