Venus and Adonis (Vol. 33) | Theodore L. Steinberg (essay date 1990)
Theodore L. Steinberg (essay date 1990)
SOURCE: "The Comedy of Love: The Medieval Venus and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis," in The Mythographic Art: Classic Fable and the Rise of the Vernacular in Early France and England, University of Florida Press, 1990, pp. 235-45.
[In the following essay, Steinberg argues that Shakespeare manipulated the original Ovidian story of Venus and Adonis in order to create a new and unique poem that deals in a comic way with the significance of Venus's role in human existence.]
Until recently, Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis has been treated as Shakespeare's stepchild, or as a funny thing that happened to him on his way to King Lear. Most early critics, for instance, were concerned with the poem's moral stance, not recognizing either that they were examining a beautiful and delicate poem dealing with themes that occupied Shakespeare else-where in his works, or that the questions of...
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