The Importance of Venus and Adonis in the Shakespeare Canon

Shakespeare steps onto the literary stage

This year, our annual conference is focused on Shakespeare’s first two publications, the long poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. This seems like a good time to talk about Venus and Adonis and its place in the Shakespeare canon.

Venus and Adonis was the very first work published under the name “William Shakespeare.” The poem (a short epic form called an epyllion) runs to 1,194 lines of iambic pentameter in 199 six-line stanzas, each of them rhyming ababcc.

The first edition of Venus and Adonis is considered to be the rarest book in the world; only one copy remains. Yet it is also considered the most popular work in Shakespeare’s lifetime, running to ten editions.