William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis
In 1592, Shakespeare’s career as a dramatist had barely got off ground when a severe outbreak of the plague forced London’s theatres to close. He turned his hand to poetry and the result was Venus and Adonis, an epic poem that became his first published work and the best seller of its day!
Its commercial success was due in no small part to its more erotic passages which describe how, over a period of 24 hours, the sexually experienced Venus tries to seduce a young, virginal boy.
Is Venus and Adonis a soft-focus centrefold in the playbook of Elizabethan erotica? Or is it a portrait of sexual power, love, lust and its catastrophic consequences?