Venus and Adonis, all Shook up

In making an attempt to identify some mythological aspects within Shakespeare, I'm coming to understand just how essential it is to be familiar with those myths before reading. Someone, Jamie maybe? brought up the excellent point that too often Shakespeare is taught without any prior instruction in mythology. No wonder so many students develop a distaste, even a fear of such fantastic works of literature. Even if the language was made perfectly clear, the "meta-meanings" are invisible without prior knowledge of their origins. And not just that irksome word "exposure", I mean, with Shakespeare you have to have a pretty solid handle on all that Greek business. His take on Venus and Adonis, for example, turns the whole situation upside down by rendering Adonis into a goddess-rejector rather than having him heed her lustful advances. Of course, the nod to Ovid's version is unmistakable here, with a few changes to the plot which certainly don't render the story unrecognizable. But this bait and switch move is typical of Shakespeare, and I think that it takes a certain level of confidence to be able to point  with a shaky finger to the mythological roots in some of his works. Some of his characters adopt recognizable names, Hymen, for example, but that doesn't necessarily define their roles in the play, the reference is there, it gives color to the idea, but it is only that, a background idea, not a definitive trait. This fits nicely with Hughe's assertion of Shakespeare's Cabbalist roots, where each aspect of his ideas can be contained within a single mental image. The mention of a name, or a place, can encourage the construction of a hundred answers to the Shakespeare riddle, and our espousal of any one of those points to our inheritance of a tangled mythological history.