Shakespeare found the story of Venus and Adonis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a poem in fifteen books that retells more than two hundred pagan myths of transformation. Velasco describes in her study, the fascination and popularity of mythology in the Elizabethan period. “Elizabethans were fascinated by stories about gods who loved, but could not pursue the loveliest object of their desire, without experiencing terrible transformations in doing so. These stories represented the natural way of expressing the processes of human feelings, especially the anguish of love.” In Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare shapes his poem so that it might in some respects communicate more closely to a Petrarchan norm. When Ovid’s Venus is dazzled by Adonis she resolves to appeal him by feigning an interest in his favorite sport. By donning hunting gear and resolutely chasing rabbits, she successfully captures the gorgeous huntsman. Shakespeare’s Venus, in a much more forthright fashion, is desperately attracted to the young Adonis who, unlike Ovid’s, being more interested in the art of hunting, remains unresponsive to Venus’ charms. Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis was Ovidian in technique, however Shakespeare’s originality is in the way he retold and reworks the main source. Shakespeare’s concentration was psycological; he appeared to be more interested in exploring the lover’s mental state under the stress of emotion and desire which entail produced an extraordinary drawing-out of action. Ovid spends about eighty-five lines on Adonis, beginning with a brisk description of his birth and ending with an equally succinct account of his metamorphoses into an anemone flower. Shakespeare manages to devote almost twelve hundred lines to the last twenty-four hours of Adonis’s life. (Greenblatt, Cohen, Howard and Maus 630) Shakespeare’s revisions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses exaggerate the effects of this transposition. He attributes some traditionally masculine traits to his heroin and feminine traits to…
