It’s 1593. Theatres are closed, players out of work, houses bolted, people terrified by the touch of another’s skin, the breath of another’s air.  Shakespeare, syphilitic and dangerously bored, publishes a scandalous response to the pestilence—an epic work about the very things lost to us, like intimacy, identity, and the erotic freedom of touch.His searing poem, Venus and Adonis, rips and tears at the founding myth of why human beings are cursed to love each other, in every form—him and her, her-as-him, him-as-her, love as equal and unequal, obscenely arousing and utterly destructive.