Venus and Adonis (dramatic reading)

Shakespeare wrote his most popular work in verse form, and it's not a play. Venus and Adonis is a narrative poem in shimmering couplets about the goddess of love falling desperately for a beautiful mortal who would rather hunt than kiss. Venus pursues Adonis across a pastoral landscape, pleading and protesting, her desire growing increasingly comic and increasingly desperate. He rebuffs her again and again, until tragedy intervenes: a wild boar kills him, and the goddess is left to mourn what she could never possess. The poem operates on multiple levels - it's witty and sensual, a kind of erotic game that turns suddenly dark, exploring how desire can curdle into grief. Written in the 1590s and beloved by Shakespeare's contemporaries, it remains a dazzling display of verbal invention, a love poem that knows that love and death are never far apart.