Venus urges Adonis to hunt foxes or hares, anything that is not dangerous, rather than boars. Adonis, having paid his kiss, finds that he still cannot disengage himself from her wild grasp. It is night already and he is annoyed at this, for it will be hard to find his way. Venus turns this too into praise of Adonis' beauty.
—lines 724-28
The Titaness who served as goddess of the moon was Phoebe. However, Hyperion, the Titan god of the sun, had not only Helios as a son but Selene as a daughter. "Selene" is the Greek word for "moon" and that name was the most common mythological representation of the moon.
The later poets, however, transferred the duty of serving as goddess of the moon to Diana/Artemis, the sister of Apollo. She is also called Cynthia because she was supposed to have been born on a mountain called Cynthus on a small island in the Aegean Sea. Apollo is therefore, but much less frequently, called Cynthius.
Diana is, of all the Greek goddesses, the most insistently virgin. Venus therefore says that Adonis may lose his way or trip because the night is dark; and the night is dark because the moon hides herself, lest while shining on Adonis' beautiful face she be unable to resist kissing him, thus ruining her rigid chastity.
Venus' urgings are all in vain. The next day he hunts the boar and is slain. The horrified Venus finds him:
—lines 1167-70
The flower that arose out of the blood, according to the myth, was the anemone, and its appearance makes a second reason why the tale qualifies for inclusion in Ovid's Metamorphoses.
This is not the only flower that was supposed to have originated out of the blood of a mortal loved by a god.
There was the case, for instance, of a beautiful Spartan prince, Hya-cinthus, with whom Apollo fell in love. (The Greeks had a tolerant and even approving attitude toward male homosexuality, and the Greek gods indulged in it too.) The West Wind was also in love with Hyacinthus and when Apollo and Hyacinthus were exercising by throwing the discus, the West Wind, out of jealousy, blew the discus against the boy's head, killing him. From the blood of Hyacinthus sprang the hyacinth, which carries on its petals markings that look like the first two letters of the name of Hyacinthus (in Greek), two letters which, coincidentally, mean "woe."
Shakespeare's version of the story ends there, with the disastrous climax of Adonis' death. The last, and 199th, stanza, reads:
—lines 1189-94
The doves, for their amorous dispositions, their whiteness and gentleness, are fitting representations of romantic love and are therefore associated with Venus. Shakespeare makes a number of allusions to her doves in the course of his writings.
Paphos is a town on the western shore of the island of Cyprus, a town particularly dedicated to the worship of Venus. She is sometimes called the "Paphian goddess" as a result and sometimes "Cypris."
In the Greek myth, however, the tale of Adonis does not end with his death and Venus' mourning. In the proper fashion of death-and-resurrection, Venus goes to Jupiter and persuades him to make an arrangement whereby Proserpina, queen of the underworld, can have Adonis for half the year and she for the other half. And thus, Adonis, like the vegetation god he is, dies and is resurrected each year.
2. A Midsummer Night's Dream
The title of this play sets its tone. "Midsummer" refers to the summer solstice, when the noonday sun reaches the most elevated point in the heavens. By our present calendar, this is June 21. (To be sure this is only the beginning of summer by modern convention and by temperature considerations.)
The actual calendar day of the solstice has varied at different times because calendars themselves have. The Midsummer Day in English tradition is June 24, which is celebrated as the birthday of John the Baptist and which therefore has a Christian distinction as well as an earlier pagan one. The preceding night would be "Midsummer Night."
There is a folk belief that extreme heat is a cause of madness (hence the phrase "midsummer madness") and this is not entirely a fable. The higher the sun and the longer it beats down, the more likely one is to get sunstroke, and mild attacks of sunstroke could be conducive to all sorts of hallucinatory experiences. Midsummer, then, is the time when people are most apt to imagine fantastic experiences.
In calling the play A Midsummer Night's Dream, then, Shakespeare is deliberately describing it as a piece of utter fantasy. It does not imply, however, that the play actually takes place on Midsummer Night. Only one reference in the play seems to set a time and that makes it seem considerably earlier; see page I-45.
The play opens in a spirit of high festivity. A marriage is about to take place. The scene is set in the palace of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and it is he who speaks:
—Act I, scene i, lines 1-3
Theseus was the great hero of Athens, who (according to Greek legend) was the first to unify the peninsula of Attica under the rule of the city of Athens. He was supposed to have lived in the generation before the Trojan War and we may therefore put the time of the play as about 1230 b.c. (which makes this play the earliest from the standpoint of background chronology, so that I place it immediately after Venus and Adonis.)
As the centuries wore on, the imaginative Athenians invented more and more hero tales with which to adorn the life of their founder until, finally, he was second only to Hercules in the number of adventures he was given.