SOURCE: Doebler, John. “The Reluctant Adonis: Titian and Shakespeare.” Shakespeare Quarterly 33, no. 4 (winter 1982): 480-90.

In the following essay, Doebler compares Renaissance pictorial representations of Adonis and Venus with Shakespeare's rendering of these mythological figures in his poem Venus and Adonis.

Dost thou love pictures? We will fetch thee straight Adonis painted by a running brook, And Cytherea all in sedges hid. 

These words describe one of the “wanton” pictures the drunken tinker from The Taming of the Shrew (1593-94) can expect to enjoy as a lord (Induction, ii. 49-51). The subject of this article is Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593), where the paragon of male beauty betrays no more interest in the goddess of love than he does in the picture offered Christopher Sly. Although Cytherea is hidden from view in the painting, she is anything but unrevealed when she turns up as Venus in the narrative poem. The...