Variable Passions: A Reading of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (Ams Studies in the Renaissance)

"Venus and Adonis (1593) was the poem that made Shakespeare's reputation. In Variable Passions Anthony Mortimer's study illuminates the poem's starling shifts in tone, its subtle means of continuity and its willy inversion of gender roles. Variable Passions breaks new ground in seeing Venus and Adonis in relation not only to its Ovidian source but also to the whole continental tradition of Venus and Adonis poems. What emerges is a Shakespeare acutely conscious both of the relevance and irrelevance of myth and of the functions and dysfunctions of rhetoric."--BOOK JACKET.