Venus
Venus is the Roman goddess of love, correlating with the Greek goddess Aphrodite. In Roman mythology, she represents love, desire, fertility, beauty, and prosperity. She is also the mother of Aeneas, the founder of Rome, as well as Cupid, the god of erotic love and attraction. In the poem, Venus is portrayed in a manner that digresses from her traditional representation in myth and literature; she is frenzied by her desire for Adonis and powerless to convince him to love her back. The poem showcases the limits of Venus's power by making her the erotic aggressor who cannot overtake the young man's disinterest in love or desire.
Venus becomes enraptured by Adonis when she sees him. She believes she is experiencing love at first sight and for this reason she comes down to earth so that she can meet him. When Venus finally finds Adonis, her expectations are diminished when the young man does not return her affections. For the first time in her life, Venus experiences unrequited love. She wants nothing more than for Adonis to feel the same way for her as she does for him, but he appears entirely apathetic toward love and romance. Venus resorts to force – holding Adonis in her arms – as well as a series of arguments about why Adonis has a duty to return her desire.
Venus's arguments fail; it is only when she faints and Adonis is worried he killed her that he hesitantly bestows a kiss on her lips. This kiss gives Venus hope that Adonis has finally developed affections for her, but he ultimately accuses her of experiencing lust rather than love and begs her to let him return to his hunt. Venus has a premonition that Adonis will be killed by the boar he is hunting. When this premonition comes to fruition, Venus is beside herself, raising the question of whether she actually was in love with Adonis after all. The end of the poem functions as a type of origin story for the Petrarchan tradition of expressing the pains of unrequited or persistent love: Venus declares that, because she has been so hurt, love itself will be laden with falsehood and difficulty from that point on.
Adonis
Adonis, in Roman mythology, is a youth of unparalleled beauty. Depictions of his age in literature range from boyhood to adolescence to young adulthood, but Shakespeare's Adonis focuses quite fervently on his own youth and immaturity throughout the poem. In Roman mythology and in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Adonis was a willing mortal lover of Venus. In Shakespeare's poem, however, Adonis is not only uninterested in Venus, but in the concept of love and desire altogether.
What Adonis does express interest in is hunting. From the very beginning of his encounter with Venus, he attempts to escape her grasp and manipulative arguments so that he can continue his hunt. Adonis is also a self-aware character, reminding Venus of how young he is and how he cannot engage in love or desire until he develops a stronger sense of self. This clever assertion belies Adonis's concurrent arguments that he is too young and immature to be Venus's lover, once again calling into question his precise age. His dialogue with Venus highlights two different perceptions of sex: while Venus argues that Adonis has a duty to reproduce, Adonis conversely argues that he will not be able to reproduce successfully until he has lived longer.
Adonis's death is both tragic and ironic, as he dies shortly after declaring that he must experience more of life before he can have sex. The poem therefore remains ambiguous about whether Venus or Adonis espoused the correct notions about desire and reproduction. In the Roman myth, the death of Adonis and the flower that springs from his blood signifies the seasonal cycle of winter giving way to spring. In Shakespeare's poem, Adonis's death signifies the beginning of love as a complicated and often painful experience, notions expressed most famously in the Petrarchan poetic tradition in which Shakespeare himself participated.
