ABSTRACT
The poem is not merely or mainly a praise of sexual love; it is a pictorial and psychological study of the physical and emotional attitudes of wooing and revulsion, lust and coyness, pursued with a voluptuous delight (not found in Ovid or his English translator) which is extended after Adonis's death to the goddess's anguish-portrayed in 45 or more stanzas of postures sweet and sad. That Venus and Adonis is full of rhetoric has often been shown. It is the rhetoric ofthe Renaissance treatises father than of Ovid himself, but undoubtedly the prince of Roman oratorical poets inspired Shakespeare to new flights of patterned speech infused with a colour and warmth greater than his source. The Ovidian influence, coming as the Sonnets suggest at a time of emotional disturbance, urged Shakespeare to fresh verbal flights and was one cause of the freedom, wit, allusiveness and elegance which accompany the emotional enrichment of the next plays. At the end of Venus and Adonis the goddess puts a curse on love, saying that it shall be full of paradoxes:
It shall be waited on with jealousy Find sweet beginning, but unsavoury end .•. It shall be sparing, and too full of riot, Teaching decrepit age to tread the measures, ...
