Animal Rites: A Reading of Venus and Adonis

Abstract

From its first publication, Venus and Adonis has elicited unusually disparate readings. Philip Kolin's 1997 collection of the critical history establishes this work as seemingly inexhaustible. Many readers have noted the unusual number of animals inhabiting the poem. Hereward T. Price comments on the "finely articulated and often interlacing images from nature, especially from wild animals", appropriate to a pagan naturalist myth. Don Cameron Allen's article eon the unifying metaphor of the hunt has been influential. He traces the literary history of the hunt from classical times to the opening of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, finding that Adonis rejects the soft hunt of love, the hunt for the hare, Venus's secret self, and by seeking the boar embraces his death. Despite this, he sees the poem as a moral lesson against yielding to passion, part of a tradition of Christian humanism.

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