ABSTRACT
Venus and Adonis 322), which may owe a little to Virgil's Georgie III (75-94), excites Venus more and lends force to her argument that physical love is natural and inevitable (385-408). Similarly her description of the boar introduces a plea that the best way of countering mortality is procreation (721-68), which Adonis answers by accusing her of lust, and differentiating between heavenly and earthly love (76g-8xo). Adonis however is not an allegory of 'Beauty or true love refusing to be won by Venus's love to propagation' (Baldwin). The poem is anything but a Platonic piece; the poet's sympathy is primarily with Venus and the coupling animals, though he also states a point of view which the Spenserians would accept. Venus and Adonis is indeed closely related to the first seventeen Sonnets in which Shakespeare urges his friend to marry and have children and uses Venus's arguments among others. These sonnets were probably written about the same time as the narrative poem, and if Southampton were the friend in the Sonnets the Dedication of Venus and Adonis to him would have special point.
