SOURCE: Bate, Jonathan. “Sexual Perversity in Venus and Adonis.” Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993): 80-92.

In the following essay, Bate examines Venus and Adonis as an example of “Elizabethan Ovidianism,” in that its treatment of the myth is not intended as a moralization, but as a study of the psychological exploration of love and desire.

Late in 1589, Thomas Lodge published his poem Scillaes Metamorphosis: Enterlaced with the unfortunate love of Glaucus. In so doing, he established a new poetic genre, the witty love-poem dressed in the manner of Ovid. Following in Lodge's wake, Marlowe wrote Hero and Leander and Shakespeare Venus and Adonis—to judge by frequency of allusions to the former and reprintings of the latter, two of the most popular poems of the age.

An earlier tradition, extending back through the middle ages, had moralized Ovid's tales: in the prose dedication to the first edition of his...