Variable Passions : A Reading of Shakespeare's ""Venus and Adonis

With its blend of pathos and erotic comedy, ""Venus and Adonis"" (1593) was the poem that made Shakespeare's reputation, but it has been strangely neglected by modern criticism. In ""Variable Passions"" it finally receives the kind of close sequential reading that has previously been reserved for the ""Sonnets"". Anthony Mortimer's stimulating and meticulous study illuminates the poem's startling shifts in tone, its subtle means of continuity and its witty inversion of gender roles. This work breaks new ground in seeing ""Venus and Adonis"" in relation not only to its Ovidian source but also to the whole continental tradition of Venus and Adonis poems. What emerges is a Shakespeare acutely conscious both of the relevance and irrelevance of myth and of the functions and dysfunctions of rhetoric.