ABSTRACT
One of the most startling traits of Shakespeare’s retelling of the romance of Venus and Adonis, compared to the source material in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is the absence of the very romance that originally defines it. The mutually satisfying tryst between the goddess of love and the fair youth – one of the many interspecies relationships Ovid describes – is transformed into a distasteful, wrong-headed pursuit of Adonis by Venus. In this farce, which preserves little but the bare-bones plot – they meet, he hunts, he dies, she cries – the two central characters are translated so drastically that the only characteristics that link them to their Ovidian predecessors are their names and their general identificatory categories: fair human youth and goddess of love.
