Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare poem)

It has certain qualities in common with A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Love's Labour's Lost.

Ovid's much briefer version of the tale occurs in book ten of his Metamorphoses.

She wears "tucked up" robes, worries about her complexion, and particularly hates dangerous wild animals.

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.

In the end, she insists that the boar's killing of Adonis happened accidentally as the animal, impressed by the young hunter's beauty, gored him while trying to kiss him.

Venus's behavior seems to reflect Shakespeare's own feelings of empathy about animals: his poem devotes many stanzas to descriptions of a stallion's feelings as he pursues a sexually attractive mare and to a hare's feelings as hounds run it down, which is inconsistent with Venus's request that he hunt only harmless animals like hares.

Other stories in Ovid's work are, to a lesser degree, considered sources: the tales of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, Narcissus, and Pygmalion.

Venus and Adonis was extremely popular as soon as it was published, and it was reprinted fifteen times before 1640.

When she sees Adonis, she falls in love with him, and comes down to earth, where she encounters him setting out on a hunt.

Venus wants to see him again; Adonis tells her that he cannot tomorrow, because he is going to hunt the wild boar.

Thinking of her vision that he will be killed by the boar, she is afraid, and hurries to catch up with the hunt.

[4] "Hard-favour'd tyrant, ugly, meagre, lean, Hateful divorce of love," thus chides she Death, Grim-grinning ghost, earth's worm, what dost thou mean To stifle beauty and to steal his breath, Who when he liv'd, his breath and beauty set Gloss on the rose, smell to the violet?