SOURCE: "Venus and Adonis," in Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries, Rutgers University Press, 1977, pp. 52-84.

In the following essay, Keach analyzes the ironic imagery and erotic motivations of character in Venus and Adonis, examining the poem's "insight into the turbulence and frustration of sexual love."

Shakespeare's first published work as a poet was an epyllion. With the London theatres closed in 1592-1593 by the plague, Shakespeare was temporarily prevented from writing for "Pennie-knaves delight" (to borrow Lodge's phrase from Glaucus and Scilla), so he took the opportunity to write and publish Venus and Adonis and thus to put himself before the public as a "serious" author.¹ This "first heir of my invention," as he calls Venus and Adonis, is dedicated to the Earl of Southampton, whose sybaritic taste it was presumably meant to flatter.² Shakespeare's strategy for...