Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare poem)

• 1. Introduction

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  Shakespeare called Venus and Adonis 'the first heir of my invention.' Published in 1593, it was almost certainly his first work to appear in print. The poem spans 199 stanzas and covers territory that is, in turns, pastoral, erotic, comic, and tragic. It was reprinted fifteen times before 1640. Yet remarkably few of the original printed copies have survived. The title of the haunted-mansion theme song played at Disneyland, Walt Disney World, and Tokyo Disneyland traces back to a line in this poem. What drew Shakespeare to a long erotic narrative rather than a play? How did a work so popular leave so little physical trace? And what does it take for a 1593 poem to leave its mark on a Disney attraction?

• 2. Plague, Press, and Patronage

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  Richard Field printed Venus and Adonis at his London shop. Field shared one notable detail with Shakespeare: both men came from Stratford-upon-Avon. The poem was almost certainly set from Shakespeare's own fair copy. It was issued as a carefully produced quarto pamphlet. Shakespeare wrote the poem during a period when London's theatres had been closed due to plague. The finished work bore a dedication to Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton. Venus and Adonis reached print before any of Shakespeare's plays did, though some of those plays had already been performed on stage. About five years later, Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander was published posthumously. That poem was also a narrative love poem drawn from Ovid. The story Shakespeare chose to open his published career came from a poet who had died more than fifteen centuries earlier.

• 3. Ovid Transformed

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  Ovid, the Latin poet who lived from 43 BC to around AD 17 or 18, is the direct source for Venus and Adonis. Shakespeare drew on the Metamorphoses, and specifically on the tale as it appears in book ten. The two versions share a basic plot and almost nothing else. In Ovid's telling, Venus goes hunting with Adonis to please him. She wears tucked-up robes, worries about her complexion, and particularly hates dangerous wild animals. Shakespeare's Venus is a different figure. She apparently goes naked, shows no interest in hunting, and offers her body to Adonis in graphically explicit terms. Where Ovid's goddess adapts herself to the hunter's world, Shakespeare's refuses entirely.

  In Shakespeare's telling, Venus insists the boar killed Adonis by accident. The animal, struck by Adonis's beauty, tried to kiss him and gored him in the attempt. The explanation recasts a fatal attack as an act of misdirected admiration.

  A stallion's feelings as he pursues a mare receive close attention in the poem. So do a hare's feelings as hounds run it down. These passages reflect what the poem itself implies: Shakespeare's own feelings of empathy toward animals.

  Three other stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses also feed into the poem, though at a lesser degree. These are the tales of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, of Narcissus, and of Pygmalion. The story Shakespeare built from all these sources runs from comedy to violence, and its ending falls not on Adonis but on love itself.

• 4. Love Against Its Will

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  Venus, goddess of love, comes down to earth when she sees Adonis setting out on a hunt. She wants him to dismount and speak to her; when he refuses, she forces him. She lies beside him, gazes at him, and talks of love at length. He craves only the hunt; she craves only him. When he manages to slip away, he goes to find his horse, but his horse has become enamoured of another horse. The two animals gallop off together, stranding Adonis and giving Venus another opening. The poem treats this as comedy: the goddess of love cannot obtain a kiss without a horse providing the delay.

  Adonis listens for a time, then turns away scornfully. This pains Venus, and she faints. Alarmed, Adonis kneels beside her, strokes and kisses her. She recovers and asks for one final kiss. He gives it reluctantly.

  When Adonis announces he is going to hunt the wild boar, Venus has a vision of his death. She throws himself on him and warns him not to go. He pries himself loose. Before leaving, he lectures her on the difference between lust and love. She cries.

  The next morning, Venus roams the woods searching for him. She hears dogs and hunters in the distance. Fearing her vision is coming true, she hurries toward the sounds. She comes across injured hunting dogs. Then she finds Adonis, dead. In her grief, she decrees that love will henceforth be mixed with suspicion, fear, and sadness. In her own words, it will be 'fickle, false and full of fraud.'

  Adonis's blood gives colour to the plants around him. A flower grows from the soil beneath him, white and purple, like blood on his flesh. Venus, bereft, takes the flower and retreats to Paphos, on Cyprus, where she was worshipped. The 1,194 lines of the poem are arranged in a verse form with its own distinct history among English poets.

• 5. A Stanza Keeps Its Name

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  Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge had each written in a six-line stanza of iambic pentameter before Shakespeare built Venus and Adonis around it. The rhyme scheme runs ABABCC: four lines of alternating rhyme, then a closing couplet. Although the form predates Shakespeare's use of it, it is now commonly known as the Venus and Adonis stanza. The name belongs to this poem, not to its earlier practitioners. Venus and Adonis also shares certain qualities with three Shakespeare plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Love's Labour's Lost. All three belong to roughly the same period in Shakespeare's writing life. Artists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries found the poem rich enough to sustain operas, theatrical stagings, and recordings of many different kinds.

• 6. Stage, Score, and Screen

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  Ted Hughes, then Britain's poet laureate, published Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being in 1992. The book was released by Faber and Faber in the UK and Farrar Straus in the US. Hughes offered a 'shamanic' interpretation of Venus and Adonis as a 'key' to Shakespeare's tragic dramas.

  In 1996, the Theatreworks Company in Dublin staged an acclaimed production directed by Michael Caven, now known as Barker-Caven. The Royal Shakespeare Company brought Venus and Adonis to the stage in 2004 with marionettes, directed by Gregory Doran.

  During the 2010-2011 season, the Boston Metro Opera staged a chamber opera version running approximately 40 minutes. The libretto uses Shakespeare's own poem, edited by Gretchen Snedeker. Snedeker was an American French horn player and adjunct professor of music at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. She died in 2008, before the production opened. The music was composed by Zachary Wadsworth, an American composer born in 1983.

  In 2001, a cyberpunk and techno adaptation directed by James Kerwin played for several weeks in Hollywood, California. The production starred Megan Henning and Travis Schuldt. In 2006, Zombie Joe's Underground Theatre Group in North Hollywood staged another version, with an original score and songs by Christopher Reiner.

  Richard Burton recorded Venus and Adonis as a spoken word album for Caedmon Records. A Naxos audiobook features readings by David Burke, Eve Best, and Benjamin Soames; the recording also includes The Rape of Lucrece.

  In 2020, Rodrigo Ruiz composed a song cycle set entirely to Shakespeare's texts. It became the first song cycle known to have been written by a Mexican composer. The work was recorded for Signum Records and released on the 27th of September 2024. The title Grim Grinning Ghosts, the theme for the Haunted Mansion attractions, was drawn from a line in Venus and Adonis. Rodrigo Ruiz's release stands as the most recent recording to carry the poem's words into new form.