Venus and Adonis was Shakespeare's first published work: an epyllion taken from a story in Ovid's Metamorphoses:, an erotic narrative mixing humor, beauty and cynicism with a feast of emotions intended to flatter the sybaritic taste of the young and flamboyant Earl of Southampton, to whom it is dedicated. The London theaters were closed in 1592-93 because of plague and Shakespeare used the opportunity to prove he was a "serious writer," a poet.

Accidentally stung with a dart by her son Cupid, the goddess of love falls in love with the beautiful boy Adonis. Forsaking cool demeanor and disdain, she becomes the huntress, the seductress and the wanton in earnest pursuit of her reluctant desire. "She's Love, she loves, and yet she is not loved, "the narrator says of Venus toward the middle of the poem, threading the obscure maze of ambiguities and paradoxes at its heart. Here three actresses share the divine prolixity of Venus, compounding the complexities of chameleon love in its godly array of games and strategies to portray a protean Venus whose aspect changes with each line and thought. This is God’s play. The human Adonis is coaxed and taunted, teased and hunted, flattered, seduced and outmaneuvered because of his too dear attachment to the human predicament: having a soul that is eternal in a body that will die, Adonis is unable to enter the theater of the gods, and unable to escape. In this, the story seeks to explain how love has become what it is in this flawed world.

Most problematic in Shakespeare's poem is the character of the narrator himself and his role in initiating the action and then pushing it to its fateful conclusion. 1n mythological and dramatic terms, he is like Mars, the arrogant and vengeful god of war, who had himself dallied with Venus in an earlier story. That time the two were caught by Venus’s husband Hephaestus, the divine artificer, and exposed to die ridicule of the voyeur Olympians. Here the narrator's pleasure at exposing Venus's love for a mortal seems to share Mars' s passion for retribution, mocking what he no longer can enjoy. The warrior boar, medieval emblem of overbearing masculinity in love and war, thwarts love, destroys beauty, and provokes a prophesy that is both curse and gift to complicate all future acts of love.

Venus and Adonis is an eternal story whose consequences remain with us. It is a banquet of the senses and a deeply human meditation on the wonders and dangers of love, presented to flatter your tastes and seduce your sensibilities with the creative potential of this all-too-human condition.

- Paul Walsh, Dramaturg