Venus and Adonis

Professor Katherine Duncan Jones, Senior Research Fellow, Somerville College, gives a talk on Shakespeare's poem, Venus and Adonis. In 1592-93, with London playhouses closed because of plague, Shakespeare wrote his most technically perfect work. Venus and Adonis (1593) is a highly original 'take' on the ancient Greek myth of the doomed Adonis - presented here as a pubertal boy incapable of responding to the goddess's amorous advances. It was a tearaway success with Elizabethan readers.