Beasts and Gods: Greene’s Groats-worth of Witte and the Social Purpose of Venus and Adonis

Summary

The Player's Challenge

Precisely because it is of a different kind, there has been very little attempt to see Venus and Adonis as the work of one whose nature was already subdued, like the dyer’s hand, to the popular stage-writings of his day. In this, Shakespeare has succeeded in what was surely his initial intention, to make a second reputation for himself. To appear in print was to make a dignified bid for Fame; the author at once achieved recognition and respectful notice, even among those who despised, or affected to despise, the work of the common stages. In a few years, the students of St John’s College, Cambridge, in the person of Judicio would commend William Shakespeare the poet—‘Who loues not Adons loue or Lucrece rape?’—while they gave a pulverizing defence of William Shakespeare the playwright to Kempe:

Few of the vniversity pen plaies well, they smell too much of that writer Ouid, and that writer Metamorphoses, and talke too much of Proserpina & Iuppiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare put them all downe, I and Ben Ionson too.