Venus and Adonis Essay Questions

To what extent does Shakespeare's career as a playwright influence Venus and Adonis?

By the time Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis in the early 1590s, his plays had already been performed on stage and were met with popular acclaim. When the plague ravaged London and the theaters closed, Shakespeare turned to poetry. While Venus and Adonis is a minor epic poem, it is rife with dramatic elements one would encounter in a play. The most notable dramatic attribute of the poem is the fact that the third-person narrator contributes relatively little to the poem compared to the dialogue between Venus and Adonis. The two characters exchange lengthy arguments regarding love, desire, and procreation, and Shakespeare places these arguments – rather than plot – at the center of the narrative.

What major changes does Shakespeare make to his source material? Why do these changes matter?

Shakespeare used Ovid's Metamorphoses as the source material for his poem, and the story of Venus and Adonis in Ovid's text is comparatively brief. Shakespeare explodes the narrative to include the intricacies of Venus and Adonis's conversation, placing the focus less on the mythology of their union and more on commentary about love, lust, and procreation. These topics arise because Shakespeare's biggest change to his source material is that Adonis is not a willing lover of Venus, rejecting her over and over again throughout the poem. This rejection has been interpreted by most critics as a comedic inversion of the original, and the poem a creative musing over what would happen if the goddess of love were denied.

How does Shakespeare use poetic form to generate meaning in the poem?

Each stanza of Venus and Adonis subscribes to the form sesta rima, which is now also referred to as a Venus and Adonis stanza. This form features a quatrain followed by a couplet, with rhyme scheme ABABCC. Shakespeare does not depart from this form for the entirety of the poem, maintaining a rigid structure throughout. The rhyme scheme of sesta rima helps dramatize the poem's major conflict surrounding sexual desire: the ABAB rhyme mirrors the notion of two separate bodies existing near one another, while the rhyming couplet (CC) embodies their union into a single entity. While this paradigm may not have been Shakespeare's precise intent, it is worth noting that rhyme is frequently a signifier of coupling, and therefore a formal dramatization of sexual union.

How does Shakespeare connect elements of antiquity to conventions of early modern poetry?

Venus and Adonis is based off a myth from ancient Rome, in which the goddess of love becomes enamored with a young and beautiful man, who willingly submits to her advances. Shakespeare's version, however, contains numerous connections to early modern poetics and society, most notably in Venus's concluding premonition of Petrarchanism. Rather than use the original origin story associated with the myth – Adonis's death signifies the decay of winter, while the flower that blooms in his blood symbolizes the arrival of spring – Shakespeare's version of the poem concludes with Venus's decree that love will forever be insufferable. Her descriptions of love as fickle and untrue echoes the sentiments of most Petrarchan speakers, thereby predicting the poetic mode with which Shakespeare and his contemporaries frequently engaged.

What is significant about the symbolism of the flower in the poem?

After Adonis dies, a flower appears in a pool of his blood on the ground. The poem remains ambiguous as to whether the flower bloomed there or whether it was simply dyed by his blood. Shakespeare describes the flower as purple, but also as a mixture of red and white – the white petals stained by the red of Adonis's blood. That the narrator does not specify how the flower came to exist there aids in Venus's understanding that the flower was "born" of Adonis and is his next of kin. Furthermore, the red and white imagery mirrors the common early modern English poetic trope of describing a woman's complexion as a mixture of fair skin with blushing red tones. In this way, Shakespeare's treatment of the flower straddles both the original myth, in which it stood for spring's arrival, and the early modern social context of the poem.