`History’s Original Cougar,’ exposed and expounded at Shakespeare Symposium
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If you want to brush up on your Shakespeare, Cal State Fullerton’s 18th annual Shakespeare Symposium will hit the boards Friday and Saturday in the campus’ student union building.
The presentation that grabbed Culture Monster’s eye is called ‘Gathering Fair Flowers in Their Prime: Venus as History’s Original Cougar.’
The presenter is senior English major Lindy Madrid, and she promises ‘all the spicy stuff’ about the Bard’s 1,194-line poem ‘Venus and Adonis,’ in which the goddess of love pursues an adorable but strait-laced huntsman, to her frustration.
If you can’t catch Madrid’s talk, the climactic scene has Adonis shrugging off Venus thusly: ‘I hate not love, but your device in love/That lends embracements unto every stranger.’
It ends badly for both of them.
-- Mike Boehm
