Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593) are based on a Greek legend, and it ministers to the taste for voluptuous pictures. It narrates the story of the love of Venus for the handsome Greek youth, Adonis, who is killed by a wild bore and is transformed into a stone. But Shakespeare’s poem retains no traces of mythology: his Venus is no goddess but a real woman of the world torn by love and passion. We get vivid pictures of female loveliness and her lascivious gestures. The poem is also remarkable for its richness of vocabulary and wealth of imagery. It is in stanzas and so has the effect of a series of pictures.