Venus and Adonis, the erotic and lengthy poem by William Shakespeare, is comprised almost entirely of scenes of violence. However, in great literature, no scene of violence exists for its own sake. The scenes of violence in this poem do not only exist in the story; they are the story. Venus and Adonis is essentially one part soft-core erotica, and one part gruesome predation. There is very little in the ways of plot that does not fit into one of these categories of violence. Through the violence is simply the way the story is told, and without it, the poem, with its passion, and ferocity, could not exist.

The first and most obvious type of violence in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis is the sexual violence. For the first six-hundred or so lines of the poem, the goddess of love...