Summary: Plot Of The Most Successful Shakespeare’s Poem: Venus and Adonis

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Although conceivably less well known today than his sonnets, Shakespeare’s most successful poem in his lifetime was Venus and Adonis. Shakespeare attunes in the poem the ancient tale of the young and mortal huntsman Adonis as he tries to escape the lusty pleas of Venus. He adds several unique elements to the tale that had become conventional in his time. One of them is the use of digressions, which are the act or an instance of leaving the main subject in an extended written or verbal expression of thought.

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“Digressions were a primary component in the Elizabethan erotic poems, which continually invite their readers to wonder about the relationship between the post and ornament, centre and periphery”. Shakespeare uses them in this poem to serve as a parallel reference to the work as a whole. He uses them to present ironic contrast to the unrequited love in the main story. He also employs them to give credibility to the immense power of Venus’s sexual desire and to dramatise the supremacy of natural instinct.

He asserts the force of nature as a norm; consequently, he overturns an inflicted mediocre standard of morals by portraying the invincibility of nature and by indicating that it is the lead agent of scale in the poem's structure of values.

Shakespeare's digression contains a rich emotional meaning, in being included almost as a set-piece, it misses the naturalness of being easily integrated into the poem. One feels an imaginative commitment to the sexual tension portrayed here that much of the rest of the poem lacks.

The poem has two major digression episodes: the horses and the hare hunting. The main characters of these digressions are simply animals but their characteristics are surprisingly humans. Venus experiences intense, animal-like perceptiveness that allow her to commune with Adoni’s horse and to imagine herself as the secular and hunted hare. The two digressions serve as stress to adonis’s adolescences and tying both characters to morality.A context for the horses episode is important for an understanding of its literary articulacy. Venus is “Being so enraged, desire doth lend her force/ Courageously to pluck him from his horse”; she is aggressive and filled with desire. As for Adonis, “[w]ho blushed and pouted in a dull disdain”, becomes “red for shame, but frosty in desire”. These description of Venus and Adonis mirrors the actions of the courses and the jennet. Shakespeare describes the courser as one that “excel a common one” which can suggest that Shakespeare wants to link Venus to the courses in their aggressive quest for desire.

Venus is like the courser and Adonis is like the jennet, but Venus is frustrated by this and wants the situation to be reversed. She wants Adonis to “learn of him”. Taking the episode on its own and removing it from the poem, can be seen as an imitation of romantic courtship popular in the renaissance era. They replicate the sophisticated manners and body-language of human heterosexual courting and mating in the 1590s. The language in which the episode is described is artificial and romantic which is something expected when talking about love and desire, but Shakespeare dose not fail to keep reminding that the characters of this romantic story are marly horses.

Shakespeare gives a very vivid, verbal detailed description of the horses and their behaviour. Their part in the context can be seen as a separate story with a beginning, middle and an end; it is artistically organised with relation to each other. The digression “shows a highly conscious and consistent presentation of its material in a humorously ironic manner”. The two horses show different physical description behaviour, and they can be seen as parallels to Venus and Adonis. The courser resemble Venus. He is aggressive and he is the one that approaches the jennet.The courser is described as controlling: “The iron bit he crushes ’tween his teeth, /Controlling what he was controlled with”; the word controlling suggests dominance which evokes the idea that male figures should have the sexual dominance.The jennet “from forth a copse that neighbors by” and probably the appearing of the jennet and the courser being “lustful” is staged by Venus herself in order to make the horses run away and thus it becomes difficult for Adonis to leave.

The courser shows off his strength and beauty by “Imperiously he leaps, he neighs, he bounds”. It is clear that the courser is trying to seduce the jennet to submit to him sexually. Shakespeare ironically describes the way Venus demonstrates her aggressive muscling power in a way similar to the courser. Venus holds in “one arm the lusty courser's rein/ Under the other her tender boy”. Venus is attempting to use force to get Adonis, the way the courser uses his. Ironically, the way in which Venus is acting should be the role of a man. The actions of the jennet in the digression can be compared to the actions of Adonis. The jennet, when advanced by the courser, “She puts on outward strangeness, seems unkind”. Shakespeare uses similar images to describe Adonis’s feelings towards Venus. Adonis resistance to Venus escalates her desire just as the jennet do the same to increases the courser’s. The courser after being spurned by the jennet, “stamps and bites the poor flies in his fume”. After Venus clutches Adonis, his gets angry and that increases his beauty: “Pure shame and awed resistance made him fret/ Which bred more beauty in his angry eye”.

The digression of the hare can be seen on different layers. It can suggest that Venus wants to invent a story about a hare in order to prolong Adonis’s stay. Adonis is still lying on top of Venus “her champion mounted for the hot incounter”, which suggest that it might worked in seducing Adonis; for the speech about the hare takes forty lines, and Adonis has not moved. But failure to understand Adonis and his true love for hunt, leads him to once more running away from Venus. Towards the end, she loses focus and incite pity for the hare. As she describes the flight of the hare in its 'cranks and crosses with a thousand doubles', it becomes increasingly humanised and its plight increasingly desperate and moving. Even at the beginning of the description the hare is a 'poor wretch'. By the end, it has been given a name, 'poor Wat.”. She herself is perplexed by her conclusion: “To make thee hate the hunting of the boar/ Unlike myself thou hear'st me moralize”. Distracted by the effect of her own exhortation to hunt the hare, she ends by losing her train of thought altogether: “Where did I leave?”.

Through the story of Wat, the tone shifts; it shifts from ironic to tragic. To Venus, Wat the hare becomes a tragic hero, and the description of his flight is heroic. Shakespeare uses words such as “labyrinth”, “maze” which alludes to the myth of Theseus and thus presenting the hare as a hero. This also doubles the complexity of the hare hunt and presents it as difficult prey. To make Adonis want to hunt the hare rather than the boar, Venus needs to make him feel a dead hare would be just as big a triumph. Running fast and wiggling likely is not enough, so she present it “sometime he runnes among a flocke of sheepe/ To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell”.

The hunt of the hare suggests a foreshadowing Venus’s fate. Venus re-enact the run of the hare as she “[s]he treads the path that she untreads again” (908) in search for Adonis. This re-enacting gives the narrator power over Venus by foreshadowing her fate. Whereas Venus interpreted the narrator's story of the horse according to her own form, as a lesson in natural love; where as in her narration of the tragic hero Wat ,Venus becomes like Wat, runs in terror, snatched at by brambles as she searches for the wounded Adonis.

Another way of seeing this hunt is that Venus, through the hare episode, projects her erotic fantasies on the hare. She wants adonis to hunt her instead of the boar. The word hare can be seen as a symbol of sexuality and the name the Venus give to the hare “Wat” can suggest the female genitalia. Shakespeare dose not present the hare, who is a traditional attribute of Venus as a furry circle animal but he introduces it as a frightened wretched “poor Watt”, who must forever dodge, fiend, and flee from blaring horns and baying hounds. The traditional tender animal of Venus appears as the confused victim of furious pursuit, like frowning Adonis in the arms of lustful Venus.Venus's attempt to seduce Adonis through images of a hare in the fields lies a hierarchy of social values within the culture of the hunt itself. In the argument between love and hunting, she puts herself not merely on the side of love but on the side of the degraded kinds of hunting that transform a goddess into a despicable kind of amusement. Her desire blur the distinctions between hunting values and courtly eroticism, that threaten to turn hunting itself into love. And this is of course exactly what Venus hopes to accomplish. She herself is an agent of metamorphoses.

Venus does not want Adonis to go anywhere to hunt anything because that means he would have to remove himself from his current position. As she says in the beginning moments of her description of Wat the hare: “Be ruled by me”. Venus has no intention of sending her love off into the woods to chase after a rabbit. She wants Adonis to hunt her, but she is not offering food and water, but rather she is offering her own “dew-bedabbled' self. Just as she solicited Adonis to drink of her pleasant fountains, here she is asking him to hunt her own Wat.