Venus and Adonis: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Venus and Adonis, credited to William Shakespeare, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare. Read in English by Thomas A. Copeland Both Ovid and Spenser also treat this ancient myth, but Spenser alters the ending, converting the tale into an archetype of fulfilled love, whereas Ovid, like Shakespeare, combines humor with pathos as a buffer against sentimentality. Ovid’s Venus behaves absurdly out of character, becoming a huntress to keep her lover company in the woods. Shakespeare, however, preserves decorum; his Venus remains at all times the queen of love. The humor arises rather from the fact that the would-be paramour isn’t interested. This endows the goddess’s wooing with nearly slapstick over-exertion, and yet her sincerity makes her appealing, while Adonis’s immaturity forces us to respect his chastity. The pathos comes, of course, from the unhappy ending—more unhappy because we do not expect a comedy to end sadly, especially not when we sympathize with the characters. The poetic form or genre, the epyllion, is an erotic narrative based on mythology, like Marlowe's Hero and Leander and, later, Phineus Fletcher's Venus and Anchises, also found in the Librivox catalogue. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both narrative poems, are the only works that Shakespeare ever carefully saw through the press. - Summary by T. A. Copeland

Recording facts

• Recording title: Venus and Adonis
• Author credits: William Shakespeare
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 1
• Listed recording duration: 1:07:05

Catalogue topics

• death
• love
• tragicomedy
• mythology
• epyllion
• iambic pentameter

Track guide

1. Venus and Adonis — 1:07:05

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.