Venus and Adonis: Shakespeare’s Blueprint for Tragedy
Venus and Adonis: Shakespeare’s Blueprint for Tragedy

Author(s): Patricia Keeney
Subject(s): Theatre, Dance, Performing Arts, Cultural history, Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Studies of Literature, Philology, Theory of Literature, British Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Ted Hughes; Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being; Shakespeare; Venus and Adonis; mythology
Summary/Abstract: Poet and theatre critic Patricia Keeney explores Ted Hughes’ monumental study, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (1992) from its genesis in Shakespeare’s long poem, Venus and Adonis. In his study, Hughes explores a mythic structure that binds the entire Shakespearian corpus into one vast, ever-evolving work. Hughes connects the myth of ‘the hero who rejects the love of the goddess and is killed in revenge by a wild boar’ with ‘the living myth’ of the English Reformation. Keeney discusses the way in which Hughes’ reading of Shakespeare in the light of goddess mythology also becomes part of a salvage operation attempting to resurrect the women from the myth of the dying god from their religious and political limbos as virgins, mothers and whores, to restore them as not only real women but, in many cases, power figures of history. Throughout this paper, Keeney references the strong role played by the goddess figure in her own creative works of poetry and fiction and from a similar perspective to the one Hughes takes.

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