Abstract:
From 1592 to 1594 plague caused London’s playhouses to remain closed for almost two years. During this period William Shakespeare wrote two major narrative poems. In this essay I consider the first, Venus and Adonis. My approach is to situate Shakespeare’s poem within England’s social and literary milieu, and examine that milieu’s impact on what he wrote. I begin by examining the poem’s development in the context of a taste for erotically transgressive poetry that existed among a social and intellectual elite in the early 1590s, and the development of the epyllion, a narrative form influenced by Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I examine how Shakespeare utilised the Venus and Adonis myth supplied by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, how he radically reconceived traditional representations of Venus and Adonis, how he responded to poetic depictions of erotic transgression by exploiting then current notions of destabilised gender, and how he worked through the complexities of depicting sexual desire within a censorious social environment. Literary patronage was a prevalent practice in Elizabethan England. I appraise the impact of patronage on poets’ writing, then consider Shakespeare’s choice of the Earl of Southampton as patron. I go on to offer a psychological reading of the poem, in which I suggest how Shakespeare added elements into his poem that reflect the Earl’s personal life situation in 1593. I conclude with a brief consideration of how the poem impacted in the work of first two poets to respond to it, how a variety of readers interpreted it, and Shakespeare’s apparent attitude towards patronage at the end of the plague period.
