SOURCE: Streitberger, W. R. “Ideal Conduct in Venus and Adonis.” Shakespeare Quarterly 26, no. 3 (summer 1975): 285-91.

In the following essay, Streitberger stresses the moral themes of Venus and Adonis, and views Adonis as the embodiment of the young nobleman faced with a dilemma between duty and the temptation to neglect responsibility.

Although the sonnets in The Passionate Pilgrim (IV, VI, IX, XI) represent, as T. W. Baldwin observed, “a kind of first handling of the Venus and Adonis story, out of which the poem of Venus and Adonis grew,”¹ Don Cameron Allen has pointed out that the narrative poem takes an entirely different position. The substitution of the courser and jennet episode for the legend of Atalanta and Hippomenes indicates that Shakespeare's plan is as different from Ovid's “as his Venus—a forty-year-old countess with a taste for Chapel Royal altos—is. …” Professor Allen notes that the imagery associated...