Anthony Mortimer, University of Fribourg
For much of Venus and Adonis Shakespeare seems careful to avoid direct confrontation with his source for the tale in the Metamorphoses, Book X. It is not simply that he omits all the antecedents that Ovid provides (the incestuous union of Cinyras and Myrrha, the miraculous birth of Adonis, the wounding of Venus with Cupid's arrow) and modifies the whole situation by making Adonis resist the advances of the goddess. The striking fact is that most of the frequent Ovidian echoes seem to derive from anywhere in the Metamorphoses except the passage which gave him the story in the first place. The sexually aggressive female and the reluctant youth recall Salmacis and Hermaphroditus (IV. 285-388) and, to a lesser extent, Echo and Narcissus (III. 339-510); the Lament of Venus owes little to Ovid's goddess, but a great deal to his long line of desperately eloquent human heroines (including those of the Heroides); the episode of Mars and Venus harks back to Book IV (171-89); even the description of the boar takes its details not from the boar of Book X, but from the Calydonian boar of Book VIII. Shakespeare, while happy to plunder the riches of the Metamorphoses, is not writing the kind of paraphrase, adaptation or expansion that keeps sending his readers back to the original.1
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