ABSTRACT
In both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare tests and creatively adapts the knowledge of earlier mythical narratives which may figure Venus's success, Adonis's virility or the Roman Republic being founded. The teasing and beguiling pleasures that are released in such encounters can only be amplified when the poems in question appeal to the memory in a recessive vision of unbiddable desire and vain resistance.The Rape of Lucrece emphatically denies us the satisfaction of dismissing Tarquin as a mindless agent of monstrous violence. In direct comparison with Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Francis Beaumont's Salmacis and Hermaphroditus remained eager to roll back the centuries to the erotically charged environment of which 'sweet-lipp'd Ovid long ago did tell'. The teasing and beguiling pleasures that are released in such encounters can only be further amplified when the poems in question appeal to the memory in a recessive vision of unbiddable desire and vain resistance.
