SOURCE: "The Birth of the Bard: 'venus and Adonis' and Poetic Apotheosis," in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 26, No. 2, Spring, 1990, pp. 191-211.

In the following essay, Baumlin evaluates Shakespeare's transformation of his Ovidian source material in Venus and Adonis.

Many readers, modern and Elizabethan alike, have delighted in the sensuous sophistication and humor of Venus and Adonis, but critics have been by no means univocal in their evaluations of the genre and effect of the entire poem. Some have questioned its genre, one critic calling Venus and Adonis an allegory on the Neoplatonic ascent, others describing it as a serious debate on the relative concepts of lust and chastity, either siding against Venus as a Goddess of lust who assails Adonis's maidenly virtue or attacking Adonis's so-called "villainous" rejection of the life-giving principle of the Venus Genetrix.¹ Hallett Smith places the poem in the genre of Ovidian...