This week we read Venus and Adonis. This is a well documented and probably flawless (in terms of copy) work.
It also marks our first poem break and the 1/4 mark for this project.
I love the poetry of Shakespeare but usually that makes me think of sonnets.
This one is far longer than a sonnet, and the production that I listened had readers/performers who were a little too arching and a little too conscious of their diction for my taste, but it was a clean delivery and very quick, at an hour.
A summery of this poem.
Venus sees Adonis and wants him. She pounces on him and plucks him off his horse with lusty enthusiasm. Adonis could not care less and wants to go hunting. She tries to seduce him and he’s very much “No thank you, I’m very busy.”. He wants to go hunting.
His horse gets the hots for a mare and runs off. Adonis tries to ditch Venus and pays the toll of a kiss, to get her off him.
She asks if they can meet up the next day and he says no he’s going out, hunting boar. She says a boar will kill you if you do that. He’s all, ‘talk to the hand’.
The next day she goes to find him killed by a boar. She is bitter and curses both death and love.
Shakespeare says this all very prettily.
This is probably Shakespeare’s first publication (1593) and it seems comes from his clean copy. It was super popular when it came out and did a good bit to establish his reputation.
Half of me wants to say that this is Shakespeare understanding that women can be lusty hornballs too (but of course this unbalances the natural order, so Venus is left frustrated, unsatisfied, and tedious) and the other half of me falls very comfortably into the queer interpretations which often imagines Adonis as an object of homosexual or bisexual desire. There’s lots of good analysis on this poem and it’s worth checking out to see how clever Shakespeare is being here, or at the very least how open to interpretation.
The Bard is showing off here. There is classical Ovid, there is camp comedy and touching sorrow, its lusty (lust vs love beautifully debated mid stream) and philosophical. He is maybe also doing that thing that popular writers do, and expressing the contemporary zeitgeist, the discomfort of a kingdom of men ruled by a woman.
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