ABSTRACT

Venus and Adonis is a stylish and sophisticated poem that captures the ambiance of the young aristocratic males for whom it was apparently written. This ambiance is modishly literary, and much of the delight of the poem springs from the paradoxes and perversities of Ovidian themes, many of which depend upon the traditional identification of love with hunting. But the ambiance is also modishly social, deeply implicated in the values and customs of the hunt within which young aristocratic males were so deeply immersed. Adonis's love of the heroic hunt of the boar, Venus's seductive attempts to deflect that love into the soft hunting of deer in parks or hare in the open field, the ritual of Venus's "blooding" with which the poem concludes-such episodes achieve their witty resonance in large part because they draw upon the traditions, practices, debates, and values embedded in the Elizabethan world of the hunt.

Key words : Venus and Adonis , the hunt , the ritual of “blooding”