Venus, in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, is given subtle understanding of the Neoplatonic doctrine that Beauty is an absolute quality which is conferred from on high on other qualities like pleasingness of colour and proportion, from which it is distinct. But she combines this with a simple misunderstanding by identifying absolute Beauty with her beloved. When Adonis lived, she says,

While without him

In Sonnet 53, Shakespeare picks up Venus' statement and, speaking as himself the lover of the Beautiful, transforms it into a paradoxical,but much more serious play with Platonic logic. He addresses the beloved young man as the reality behind not only Adonis, the paradigm of male beauty, but Helen, the paradigm of female beauty;not only as a pattern for human beauty, but for that of the spring and autumn; not only as a pattern for ‘beauty’ but also for ‘bounty’. The third of these pairs recalls the sentence in which Hoby, rendering Castiglione's Courtier and indirectly Plato's Symposium, speaks of the Beautiful as ‘the beawtye unseperable from the high bountye’. The young man is addressed not only as if he were the Beautiful itself, but as the Good, which is in fact what Plato implies by to kalon, although it is inadequately translated as ‘the Beautiful’. Furthermore, the relation between the young man and every instance of good is underlined by the conflation for which there seems to be no parallel,of all Plato's models for the relation between forms and particular things.