Venus and Adonis

With Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare in 1593 launches his career as a poet. The poem is a minor epic, a genre chosen by a large number of poets in the 1590s for their first efforts, each attempt at the genre self-consciously imitating the others. The genre is a marginal one, its characters usually drawn from the periphery of mythology or legendary history. Its interest is not in the matters of state that inform major epics but in eroticism, sophistication, and verbal wit. Among these poems, Venus and Adonis was such a notable success that it was, during his lifetime, Shakespeare’s most popular published work, going through ten editions by 1616 and quoted in numerous journals, letters, and plays of the period. In 1598 a critic wrote that “the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis.”