Love
The central theme of Venus and Adonis is love. In the poem, love is synonymous with Venus herself, and thus the poem explores how her status as the goddess of love and desire defines her being. The poem features representations of a number of different kinds of love. The first is love at first sight; Venus catches sight of Adonis and is so captivated by his beauty that she comes down to earth specifically to be with him. Then comes unrequited love – Venus loves Adonis but he does not reciprocate her feelings. Love appears also as sexual desire, which Adonis argues is not love at all but instead lust masquerading as love. Even the horses in the poem fall into a type of love and play out the same power dynamic that Venus imposes on Adonis. Finally, Venus expresses love for Adonis through her grief when she discovers he has been killed by the boar. Ultimately, the poem presents love in many different iterations in order to showcase how amorphous and uncertain it truly is.
Unrequited Love
Unrequited love is perhaps one of the most popular motifs of early modern literature, specifically poetry written under the reign of Elizabeth I. These poets often subscribed to the conventions of the Petrarchan tradition, in which a sad lover praised a lady for her beauty but lamented the fact that she did not return his affections. Venus and Adonis represents a gendered inversion of this Petrarchan trope, as it is Adonis who will not return Venus's favor despite her many arguments and encouragements. When Adonis dies and Venus grieves him by condemning love for eternity, the poem suggests that unrequited love is likely the most powerful form of love one can experience.
Erotic Power Dynamics
Petrarchan and courtly love poetry in the English Renaissance often relied on the paradigm of a male aggressor pursuing a lady whose affections he could not ultimately attain. Beginning as early as the reign of King Henry VIII, courtier Sir Thomas Wyatt often wrote poems in which a male speaker attempts to catch an unattainable female deer, whom many believe to be a symbol for the king's wife, Anne Boleyn. This dynamic persisted through the poetry of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Petrarchan conventions enjoyed immense popularity. Venus and Adonis departs from this tradition in that the aggressor is Venus, the female goddess of love. Many have interpreted the poem, then, to be a comedic reimagining of the Roman myth, acknowledging Shakespeare's penchant for bawdy humor in his plays. However, by inverting the power dynamic that governed the majority of courtly love poetry, Shakespeare establishes himself as a poet outside the norm, ultimately commenting not just on the nature of romance in the poem but on the trends of popular poetry itself.
Political Commentary
Shakespeare wrote and published Venus and Adonis under the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. He would go on to become one of her favorite playwrights, as well as a favorite under King James I when he succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603. Because Elizabeth I cultivated the image of herself as the "Virgin Queen" – she never married, and credited her virginity as a sign of constancy and unwavering dedication to England – much of the poetry written during her reign figures her as the unattainable beloved the speaker ardently pursues. In this way, "love poetry" written during the Elizabethan era is almost always also political poetry, as courtiers attempted to gain the favor of the queen. Venus and Adonis challenges this tradition by making Venus the pursuer and Adonis the pursued. While it is unclear whether the poem is a direct challenge to Elizabeth I's power (unlikely, given her later enjoyment of Shakespeare's plays), this inversion could indicate an ironic judgment on the conventions of courtly poetry where flattery was celebrated above all else.
Youth
One aspect of the poem that contemporary readers might find troubling is the extent to which Adonis reminds them of his youth and boyhood. Representations of Adonis in literature have ranged from a boy to a young man. It is difficult to discern where Shakespeare's Adonis falls on this spectrum, but the character is determined to portray himself as a boy to avoid Venus's advances and continue his hunt. Adonis declares that he has no interest in love or desire. This statement, however, is ironic because of Adonis's love of hunting – a sport that, for many early modern poets, was used as a model of love itself. The narrative therefore suggests that Adonis knows more about love than he himself acknowledges, ultimately connecting the ways that boys' youth prepares them for procreation.
Reproduction
One of Venus's persistent arguments throughout the narrative is that Adonis must concede to her because he has a responsibility to procreate. This notion was a common theme of early modern English poetry, and indeed is one of the salient motifs in Shakespeare's own sonnet sequence. In the sonnets written to a fair young man, the speaker maintains again and again that he must reproduce in order to preserve his beauty for eternity, becoming immortal through the existence of his children. Venus takes up this same argument in Venus and Adonis, telling Adonis that procreation is what will truly render him a man.
Origins of Petrarchanism
The conclusion of Venus and Adonis features an origin story for the Petrarchan mode that Francesco Petrarca would create in the fourteenth century, and which early modern English poets would adopt under Elizabeth I. At the end of the poem, Venus declares that, because of her tragic loss of Adonis, lovers for the rest of eternity will be plagued by love that is fickle, unpredictable, and painful. This perception of love aligns precisely with the Petrarchan paradigm of a pained lover lamenting the torturous experience of being in love. Thus, Shakespeare reminds readers that the story of Venus and Adonis predates Petrarchan poetry, subtly acknowledging his own poetic career as one that, like Petrarch, would continue to endure and inspire other writers.
