Venus and Adonis: Shakespeare's Critique of Spenser

Abstract

IN writing Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare could not have ignored or been ignorant of Faerie Queene. When Shakespeare published Venus and Adonis in 1593, Shefheardes Calender (1581) had long since brought Spenser acclaim and renown; Sir Philip Sidney, for example, had singled it out for praise in Defense of Poetry. In 1590, the first part of Faerie Queene appeared and was enthusiastically received. Other writers—Nashe, Harrington, Daniel, Drayton, Lodge—heaped praise upon it: printer's preface to a volume of Spenser's complaints published in 1591 describes the favorable passage Faerie Queene won from the public.1 Recently, Donald Cheney has proposed that Shakespeare viewed The Faerie Queene as his principal challenge as a poem to emulate and surpass in Venus and Adonis.2 Because of the prominence of Spenser and his work, a version of the Venus and Adonis story published three years after Part I of the epic would not only admit Spenser's poem as a source, but also stand as a critical evaluation of the Garden of Adonis, the Garden's erotic philosophy, and Spenser's Ovidianism.