This article unfolds a broadly Lacanian reading of Shakespeare's poem, Venus and Adonis . In this mythological tale of a mortal youth whose relation with a goddess is fatally severed when a boar gores him in the thigh, it finds an allegory of oedipalization: the experience of “castration” which impels the subject into absence, difference, language, adult sexuality, and desire. In its compensatory and redemptive capacity, language offers to fill the gap with words, giving us the whole order of art, all that can be imagined, narrated, and believed (the Imaginary). But insofar as it is based on loss and lack, language testifies to an insatiable desire for meaning it is unable to fulfill (the Symbolic). Here we find Shakespeare, still at an early stage in his writing career, weighing up these two radically different linguistic registers—comic and tragic, respectively—as he contemplated the different modes and potentialities for his craft.