You are William Shakespeare, 28 years of age, in London in 1592.

Having left your wife and children behind to start a theatrical career, you find yourself involuntarily idle when all the theaters are closed due to the plague (which was the disease that COVID 19 wishes it could be).

You’ve written Henry VI, and possibly Richard III, but with no prospect of a paying audience, there’s no point in writing more plays. What do you do until your life on stage can continue?

Answer: you write a nice long epic poem, and dedicate it to a nice rich patron who can introduce you to all the right people.

At least, that’s what one particular William Shakespeare did when he wrote Venus and Adonis, dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton. (Incidentally, Southampton is the chief suspect for the identity of the “Fair Youth” for whom so many of Shakespeare’s sonnets were written.) The poem was a huge success, going through multiple printings and making Shakespeare’s name a household word in London literary circles. Shakespeare never bothered to publish his plays during his own lifetime; stage plays were thought of as merely popular entertainment in his day, much how we look down upon television shows today. Epic poetry, however, was another matter, and the intelligentsia of the 1590s ate it up.

As with many other poets of the time writing in that genre, he chose the plot and characters for his epic from the myths of Classical Rome. His source, it should be no surprise, was the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which was also the basis for Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and the Pyramus and Thisbe scene from Midsummer (which indirectly, of course, also inspired Romeo and Juliet!)

In Ovid’s retelling of the myth, the handsome hunter Adonis is the willing lover of Venus. Shakespeare’s Adonis refuses the affections Venus offers—a significant twist for those of us accustomed to seeing the man’s protestations of love rejected by the beautiful woman.

It is written in stanzas of six lines, or sestets, with a consistent rhyming pattern of ABABCC. As one would expect from our Bard, the lines are in iambic pentameter. Other great poets of the day who published such poems were Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge. Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, published a few years later, was also based on a story from Ovid, and was an even greater success.

           Synopsis

Venus openly flirts with Adonis, but he only wants to go hunting. She pulls him off his horse, and speak to him of love. She craves a kiss, but he wants to leave and go hunting.

In a bit of parallelism, his horse spies a female horse, and the two animals gallop off together, which keeps Adonis from going hunting. Venus continues to speak to him of love. He scorns her once too often, which causes her to faint. (Medical question: Immortal gods are incapable of dying, but can they lose consciousness?) This provokes the first sign of concern from Adonis, and he kneels beside her to revive her. Venus once again requests a kiss, and this time he relents.

Venus warns him that if he goes hunting as he planned, he will be killed by a boar. She flings herself on him, pulling him down to the ground. He frees himself, and leaves; she cries. The next morning Venus searches for Adonis in the woods. She finds injured hunting dogs, and then Adonis, killed by a wild boar. Venus is devastated, but uses his blood to color a flower as a tribute to his beauty.