A Reference to the Song of Songs in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (229-240)

MUCH has been written on the sources of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Besides Ovid’s Metamorphoses—with particular but not exclusive reference to the episodes of Venus and Adonis and Salamacis and Hermaphroditus—many works, both classical and Renaissance, have been suggested as pos- sible sources of inspiration for the poem as a whole or for single passages of it. Only one critic, however, has noticed the influence that the biblical Song of Songs, a book that played an important role in shaping the Renaissance language of love and whose poetic potential was far from ignored by the poets of the period, exercised over Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. In his study The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature, Noam Flinker dedicates one chapter to the analysis of the ‘Canticles as erased conventions in Venus and Adonis’