The Sonnets and Other Poems by William Shakespeare

INTRODUCTION
VENUS AND ADONIS
    Shakespeare became famous as a poet before most people knew that he also wrote plays. To judge by the frequency of admiring allusions and demand for printed copies,
Venus and Adonis
was the most popular long poem of the Elizabethan age. The language of praise in a poem by Richard Barnfield, published in 1598, is typical:
    And Shakespeare, thou whose honey-flowing vein,
Pleasing the world, thy praise doth obtain,
Whose
Venus
and whose
Lucrece
(sweet and chaste)
Thy name in fame’s immortal book have placed.
  Live ever you, at least in fame live ever:
  Well may thy body die, but fame dies never.
    In that same year of 1598, Francis Meres, an Oxford graduate with his finger on the pulse of the literary world, sought to dignify contemporary literature by comparing English poets and playwrights to their classical forebears. He numbered Shakespeare among the best for both tragedy and comedy, but also contrived an astute comparison for his non-dramatic poetry: “As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his
Venus and Adonis
, his
Lucrece
, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends.”
    Shakespeare’s two long narrative poems, written during the period in 1593–94 when the theaters were closed due to plague, are based on the Roman poet Ovid. They are calling cards which announce his poetic sophistication, perhaps in response to the jibe in
Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit
(1592) about “Shake-scene,” the “upstart crow,” the vulgar jack-of-all-trades from the country.
Venus and Adonis
takes a one-hundred-line story from the third book of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
and expands it into more than a thousand lines of elegant artifice. Ovid provided the narrative framework: the comic idea of the lovely young Adonis’ resistance to love, the dark twist of his boar-speared death, and the final release of floral transformation. Shakespeare wove into this structure elaborate arguments for and against the “use” of beauty. These were opportunities for him to show off his rhetorical skill, while also engaging with an issue much debated in Elizabethan times, namely the relative value of courtly accomplishments and military ones. The successful courtier would have been equally adept in the arts of praise and chivalry. Shakespeare gives the chivalric skills to the hunter Adonis, then inverts the norm of man-praising-woman by having a woman—and not just any woman, but Venus, the Queen of Love, herself—praise a young man. For this, he pulled together different parts of Ovid: the witty persuasions to love are in the manner of the
Amores
and the
Ars Amatoria
, while the figure of the vain youth has something of Narcissus, and that of the “froward” woman more than a little of Salmacis, who, in book 4 of the
Metamorphoses
, seduces another gorgeous but self-absorbed boy, Hermaphroditus.
    Most distinctively, Shakespeare wrote his narrative poem as if it were a play. Great swathes of
Venus and Adonis
are composed in the form of dialogue, while the eye contact between male and female subjects is self-consciously theatricalized:
    O, what a war of looks was then between them,
Her eyes petitioners to his eyes suing,
His eyes saw her eyes, as they had not seen them,
Her eyes wooed still, his eyes disdained the wooing:
  And all this dumb play had his acts made plain
  With tears, which chorus-like her eyes did rain.
    In both their speech patterns and their accompanying actions, Venus and Adonis are turned into dramatic characters, their story into a theatrical encounter, albeit one that relies on a naturalistic rural setting peopled with animals and natural forces that could not have been represented onstage—though in the early twenty-first century, the Royal Shakespeare Company achieved a small theatrical triumph by turning the poem into a puppet show, influenced by Japanese bunraku, complete