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The most prominent reason for examining Venus and Adonis in its historical context is that conceptions regarding love--and lust--in Elizabethan times were vastly different from those in modern times. As Russ McDonald notes in his Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, marriage frequently had little, if anything, to do with the degree of love shared by the partners in question. Especially among upper class families, who possessed capital and estates that potential brides could give to their suitors as dowries, the agreeability of the financial arrangement and the effect the union would have on the social status of each were frequently the most important matchmaking factors. While ''love'' certainly sprang from such arrangements over time, the unions often functioned more as partnerships than as marriages.

William E. Sheidley notes that the story's conclusion--Adonis meeting death after spurning Venus--can, and perhaps should, be read as his punishment for failing to give himself over to the goddess of love. Sheidley frames his discussion in part around the contrast between religious and secular points of view, which he differentiates as ''the mystical neoplatonic vision of love as the pathway to God, and the somewhat less exotic and more characteristically Shakespearean understanding of love, through its consummation in marriage and procreation, as the ordering principle and unifying bond of the cosmos.'' That is, without love--and sex--the human race would cease to exist. Taking note of the literary climate, he states, ''English poets of the era, like many members of the Christian humanist intellectual community in general, frequently express ambivalence or perplexity about the traditional poetic vision of love.'' Indeed, some Elizabethan writers came to adopt ''antilove'' standpoints, which better accorded with contemporary religious views touting the virtues of chastity. Shakespeare, to the contrary, perhaps recognized that humans, like all earthly mammals, could certainly enjoy physical love outside of the context of a spiritually pure romantic relationship. Sheidley asserts that in Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare ''conveys his realization that sexual love is not composed entirely of soft sweetness and warmth, but involves an untender element, an element even, as with human nature itself, of the bestial.'' He concludes, ''The properly ordered human being must acknowledge and integrate this lower nature.''

Catherine Belsey frames her discussion on the subject around the Elizabethan connotations of the words love and lust.Adonis, of course, draws a very fine distinction between the words, concluding several stanzas of comparisons with the twin declarations, ''Love is all truth, lust full of forge` d lies.'' Yet Belsey notes that this distinction is not played out in the rest of the text, with love and lust used interchangeably to describe Venus's emotional state. Belsey states, ''The emergence of a radical distinction between the two--a process inadvertently encouraged, as it turns out, by the voice of Adonis--marks a moment in the cultural history of desire which . . . has proved formative for our owncultural normsand values.'' That is, inmodern times, love and lust largely have precisely the connotations that Adonis assigns them. Belsey draws on a wide variety of sources to showthat at the time of the publication of Venus and Adonis, lust quite often had perfectly positive connotations, as associated and coupled with virtuous ''true love.'' The years afterward witnessed a gradual shift, such that ''by the mid-seventeenth century the term had acquired a primarily sexual and strongly pejorative meaning.''

Critical opinions of Venus and Adonis have varied greatly over the years, especially because earlier critics invested less energy in what was long considered a minor Shakespearean work. Indeed, Heather Dubrow notes of both this poem and the subsequent Rape of Lucrece,

The habits of not reading them sensitively and of not reading them at all both stem from the same preconception: these poems are amere 'gorgeous gallery of gallant inventions.' We are prone, in other words, to consider them literary samplers: we assume that their author is principally involved in displaying the tropes and other formal devices that he, like his contemporaries, had so thoroughly learned in grammar school. This assumption shapes what critics find--and, more to the point, fail to find--in the poems.

Although some critics have found fault with a seeming lack of moral clarity to the poem, others have interpreted that lack of clarity as utterly intentional and relevant in literary terms. William Sheidley cites, ''Kenneth Muir, for instance, taxes the poem with an 'ambivalence' which 'is caused partly by the poet's own acceptance of conflicting feelings about love.''' Similarly, Catherine Belsey describes early critics as having been ''tantalized by the poem's lack of closure,'' such that they ''sought to make something happen, at least at the thematic level, by locating a moral center that would furnish the work with a final meaning, a conclusion, a definitive statement.'' To the contrary, Sheidley himself declares, ''The poem's seeming contradictions result from the multiplicity of its viewpoints on its subject. Shakespeare generates a dialectic between ideals and possibilities, developing the recognition that, with love as with everything else, it is self-defeating to demand perfection in an imperfect world.'' Sheidley concludes that ''with a brilliant stroke,'' Shakespeare puts forth ''a compelling poetic argument with important moral, philosophical, and artistic implications.''

Coppelia Kahn likewise refers to Shakespeare's improvisation on several tales by Ovid as ''brilliantly'' done. Like Dubrow and Sheidley, Kahn gives the poem greater praise than she had seen given by her predecessors: ''Venus and Adonis has long been seen as a young man's poem for relatively superficial reasons: its erotic subject matter and sensuous playfulness. But Shakespeare deserves more credit than he has been given for his understanding of youth's deeper conflicts, of how eros shapes the growing masculine self.''

References:

Belsey, Catherine, ''Love as Trompe-l'oeil: Taxonomies of Desire in Venus and Adonis,'' in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3, Fall 1995, pp. 257-76.

Bradbrook, M. C., Shakespeare: The Poet in His World, Columbia University Press, 1978, pp. 72-5.

Crewe, Jonathan, ''Introduction,'' in The Narrative Poems, by William Shakespeare, Penguin Books, 1999, pp. xxix-lii.

Desmet, Christy, '''Who Is't Can Read a Woman?': Rhetoric and Gender in Venus and Adonis, Measure for Measure, and All's Well That Ends Well,'' in Reading Shakespeare's Characters: Rhetoric, Ethics, and Identity, University of Massachusetts Press, 1992, pp. 134-63.

Doebler, John, ''The Reluctant Adonis: Titian and Shakespeare,'' in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 4, Winter 1982, pp. 480-90.

Dubrow, Heather, '''Upon Misprision Growing': Venus and Adonis,'' in Captive Victors: Shakespeare's Narrative Poems and Sonnets, Cornell University Press, 1987, pp. 21-79.

Erickson, Peter, ''Refracted Images of Queen Elizabeth in Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece,'' in Rewriting Shakespeare, RewritingOurselves, University of California Press, 1991, pp. 31-56.

Hatto, A. T., ''Venus and Adonis--and the Boar,'' in Modern Language Review, Vol. 41, No. 4, October 1946, pp. 353-61.

Jahn, J. D., ''The Lamb of Lust: The Role of Adonis in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, in Shakespeare Survey, Vol. 6, 1970, pp. 11-25.

Kahn, Coppelia, ''Self and Eros in Venus and Adonis,'' in Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare, University of California Press, 1981, pp. 21-46.

Muir, Kenneth, ''Venus and Adonis: Comedy or Tragedy?,'' in Shakespearean Essays, edited by Alwin Thaler and Norman Sanders, Knoxville, 1964.

Shakespeare, William, Venus and Adonis, in The Narrative Poems, Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 2-48.

Sheidley, William E., '''Unless It Be a Boar': Love and Wisdom in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis,'' in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1, March 1974, pp. 3-15.

Smith, Bruce R., Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics, University of Chicago Press, 1991.

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