自20世纪以来，莎士比亚对奥维德的借鉴引起了学界的广泛关注。该领域的大量研究证明了奥维德对莎士比亚作品的影响之深。基于前人研究，本文探讨莎士比亚首部叙事诗《维纳斯和阿多尼斯》对奥维德《变形记》中的维纳斯-阿多尼斯神话的改写。通过结合历史文化语境对文本进行细读，本研究认为，莎士比亚的人物改写不仅体现出初登诗坛的莎士比亚的雄心和抱负；同时，该作将由神主导的神话改写成凡人主导的爱情故事，反映了莎士比亚的人文主义之思。

论文主体部分分为三章。第一章考察了《变形记》和莎士比亚诗歌中呈现出的维纳斯形象。本章首先指出奥维德在其嵌套叙事中展现了自恋的维纳斯形象。莎士比亚通过视觉描述也在诗中呈现了同一特征。莎士比亚对于维纳斯这一自恋特征的提取和呈现正是其对奥维德的自觉回应。同时，莎士比亚通过展现维纳斯的修辞无效和神力消逝，将强权的女神改写为恋爱中的女人，从而最大程度地削弱了作为神的维纳斯对凡人的霸权。

第二章考察阿多尼斯的人物形象。阿多尼斯在《变形记》中是一个顺从的男人，而在莎诗中成为反抗的少年。本文认为，与以往批评家所描述的阿多尼斯不同，莎士比亚的阿多尼斯既不纯真，也非拒绝爱情，而是表现出在步入成年之际树立起来的男性气概。尽管阿多尼斯因不愿服从权力而付出了生命的代价，但是他对权威的反抗颠覆了神对人的霸权。莎士比亚刻画阿多尼斯的意志对及其对维纳斯的影响突出了人的作用。莎士比亚的改写扭转了人神之间的话语失衡，进一步凸显了人的自主性。

第三章结合莎士比亚所处时代的文学及历史语境审视年轻诗人莎士比亚。考虑到英国十六世纪以降的诗歌辩护及赞助活动，本章提出《维纳斯与阿多尼斯》既是一次社会实践，又是作者宣言。年轻无名的莎士比亚凭借此诗成功进入知识圈；而诗歌末尾的激进改写和献词的呼应则宣告了莎士比亚如何以其个性与特有的文学想象改变了维纳斯-阿多尼斯这一神话背后的文学传统。

本文结论指出，《维纳斯与阿多尼斯》体现了青年莎士比亚的诗人抱负以及他的人文主义主张。正如此诗向我们所展示的，奥维德对莎士比亚的影响并非是单向的。莎士比亚将自己对奥维德神话的阐释编织到了自己的叙事中，并引导读者去发现文本中的潜藏含义，进而改变了阅读奥维德文本的方法。

Shakespeare’s indebtedness to Ovid has seized critical attention since the 20^th century. Numerous researches into this field have attested to the intensity of Ovid’s influence on Shakespeare’s works. Based on the previous studies, this thesis explores Shakespeare’s rewriting of the Venus-Adonis myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in his first published narrative poem Venus and Adonis. It argues that Shakespeare’s rewriting is not only his early ambitious response to Ovid as a young poet; his transformation of the god-driven myth into a mortal-guided story also demonstrates his humanist concern.

The body of this thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter one examines the characterization of Venus in the Metamorphoses and Shakespeare’s poem respectively. While Ovid presents a narcissistic image of Venus in his mise-en-abyme narrative, Shakespeare also provides a narcissistic Venus implied by the visual descriptions in his poem. The extraction and presentation of this feature in Venus may be read as Shakespeare's self-conscious response to Ovid. Furthermore, by rendering Venus’s rhetoric a failure and eliminating the divine power of a goddess, Shakespeare reduces a powerful goddess in privilege into a powerless woman in love, successfully minimizing the Ovidian Venus’s supremacy over human.

Chapter two concentrates on the characterization of Adonis. Adonis is transformed by Shakespeare from a submissive man into a resistant youth. It argues that Adonis is neither innocent nor against love as critics describe, but prefers building up masculine identity when he enters into adulthood. Though Adonis is consequently punished for his unwillingness to acquiesce to the power, the display of the curt challenges to the authority of divinity, ironically overthrows Olympian’s supremacy over human being. Shakespeare’s rendering of Adonis’s strong will and the ensuing transformation of Venus may be the finest touch to emphasize the impact exerted on a goddess by a mortal. And by shifting the balance of the speeches in Adonis’s favor, Shakespeare further highlights the autonomy of human.

Chapter three reads the rewriting in Venus and Adonis in its literary and historical milieu. Given the conditions of defenses of poetry and the patronage in the sixteenth century, it holds that Venus and Adonis is both a social practice and an authorial declaration, by which Shakespeare succeeds in joining the intellectual community. Moreover, the radical rewriting of the ending and its interaction with the dedication reveal how Shakespeare uproots the poetic tradition over the Venus-Adonis myth with his individuality and distinctive literary imagination as a young poet.

The thesis concludes that the poem demonstrates Shakespeare’s ambition as a young poet as well as his proposition as a humanist. As Shakespeare’s first published poem shows to us, Ovid does not exert merely a unidirectional influence on Shakespeare. Shakespeare, in return, by weaving his interpretation of Ovid’s myth into his own narrative and guiding readers to find what remains unspoken, changes the way Ovid is read.