Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, though rarely studied, were Shakespeare's bestsellers: reprinted fourteen times during his lifetime, they generated considerable commentary providing rare accounts both of men and women as readers of Shakespeare and of Shakespeare's reputation among his contemporaries. This thesis examines issues of gender and sexuality in venus and Adonis and Lucrece by turning both to contemporary accounts of reading the poems and to the actual reading environment of Shakespeare's elite readers. The Elizabethan and Jacobean elite home was extraordinarily rich in visual images. Elite men and women read Shakespeare's Ovidian poetry in an environment itself furnished with Ovidian imagery. But connections between textual representation and the immediate context of reading -- by which I mean the actual rooms in which men and women read - - have rarely been examined. Despite claims for greater interdisciplinarity in Renaissance literary criticism, we still know very little about the habitats of early modem readers. However, questions of gender and sexuality currently examined in Renaissance literary criticism can be powerfully interrogated in the furnishings of rooms in which men and women read. Though little known to literary critics, the striking images that appeared upon the walls, chairs, chests and beds of Shakespeare's elite readers represent a rich source for studying early modern oeconomy -- 'or what appertains to the house'. In this thesis, I seek to show both how Shakespeare's bestselling works explore the making of oeconomy, and how his readers could have interpreted them in the making of their own oeconomies. In so doing, I explore the implications of reading Shakespeare in the early modem elite home.

William Shakespeare is arguably the most famous and influential author in modern history. His plays make up a literary canon that has been translated into every language, is constantly being reproduced on the stage and on film and has persisted in popularity for centuries. Yet, Shakespeare’s first and most popular text is not a play, but the narrative poem, Venus and Adonis. The text that launched Shakespeare into popularity and gave rise to this cultural icon was a poem, rather than a play. But despite its initial success, Venus and Adonis is not a central feature of the modern literary canon and Shakespeare’s original role as a poet has been overshadowed by his achievements in theatre. This paper sets out to explore what happened to Shakespeare’s legacy in poetry by examining the commercial history and aesthetic form of two of Shakespeare’s poems: Venus and Adonis and the sonnets. I will address how the dramatic literary canon was created and why it revolves around Shakespeare as solely a playwright.