Aphrodite, or rather Venus, appears in quite a few sources from medieval literature beyond the context of Ancient Greece. She appears in the story of Perceforest (the oldest version of Sleeping Beauty) where she leads the Scottish prince Troylus to the sleeping bedchamber of the cursed princess Zelladine of Zeeland (Netherlands) and tells him to get down with her. (kinda gross, but in this version Zelladine and Troylus have like... met each other and Troylus is away proving himself a worthy suitor when she’s put to sleep, so it's a lot less problematic than the more triggering versions of Sleeping Beauty) so in this story, Venus is serving the role of the Lilac Fairy in Tchaikovsky’s ballet or Merryweather from the Disney film. Venus helps the prince break Zelladine’s sleeping curse and saves the day. This story also includes Arthurian Grail stories, so not only is Sleeping Beauty canonically linked to Arthurian Legend, but Venus has a place in it as well, beyond being Arthur’s many centuries removed godly ancestor. In Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, the hero Palamon is one of two men fighting over the amazon princess Emilye, the other being his cousin Arcite. Palamon prays to Venus, and Arcite prays to Mars. So this is also one of the very few times when Venus and Mars are in opposition to one another. Palamon and Arcite challenge each other to combat for Emilye's hand. As the goddess of love, Venus wants to give Palamon the girl, but as the god of combat, Mars cannot simply allow Arcite to lose the battle. So, after Venus and Mars bicker back and forth, Uranus yells at them to shut up, and cuts the proverbial baby in half. Arcite wins the battle, but his horse falls on him, killing him. Mars gets the victory, but Palamon gets the girl. Venus and Mars are both content, Arcite dies, and Emilye gets royally screwed over because she asked Diana to help keep her chaste and the goddess pretty much told her to fuck off. Also, Theseus and Hippolyta are in this story, with Hippolyta being Emilye’s sister. They both appear together again in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and both stories take place in Greece. Keep an eye on that, we’ll come back to it later. In another story, Venus is the ruler of Venusberg, a gigantic kingdom that exists below Germany, and a saintly knight called Tannhäuser ventures below the ground to her kingdom. This myth of Venus ruling over Venusberg and mortal men going into her realm is closely associated with tales of mortals wandering into fairyland and the court of the fairy queen. It also bears mythological similarities to the Tuatha de Danann of Irish mythology and their relationship to the Aos Si, or the People of the Mounds. The Tuatha de Danann were godlike figures rewritten as being fairies by Christian missionaries who wanted to erase the pagan elements from Irish mythology. Just like the Tuatha de Danann were recontextualized as faeries, the involvement of Venus and Themis in Perceforest was altered to being fairies in later adaptations of the Sleeping Beauty story. When the Tuatha de Danann lost the war with the human Milesians, they were banished to live below the hills. This is where they intersect with the Aos Si, the faeries who live below the hills of Ireland in an underground kingdom. Wouldn’t you know it, but the fairies are almost always ruled by a queen. Oberon is the only king to ever be named, but there's many named fairy queens including Mab and Titania, but also Caelia, Gloriana, and Nicnevin. Now, these could just be coincidental mirror stories of underground magical kingdoms ruled by a beautiful woman of great power, and the fairy queen has also been associated with Diana instead of Venus, but the Celts did originate from Germania and Gaul, so it's not entirely out of the question that Venus ruling over the underground kingdom of Venusberg flowed into the idea of Titania and her court of fairies living below the hills of Ireland. And as I said, we’re coming back to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. So in The Knight’s Tale, Venus absolutely exists, as the gods directly interfere with the plot, and Venus even speaks to Palamon. A Midsummer Night’s Dream doesn’t include Venus per se, but does include two characters from The Knight’s Tale, meaning that Venus would logically exist in that story too. Shakespeare also directly retells the story of the Knight’s Tale in his play The Two Noble Kinsmen. While this play distinctly lacks any pagan gods as characters, the fact that the story exists within Shakespeare’s pantheon of plays that had such prominent paganism in the original source would still suggest that Venus still exists in this play, but simply does not appear on stage. Regardless of whether Venus and Titania are merged figures in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the blatant removal of Venus from The Two Noble Kinsmen, if one subscribes to a Shakespeare-verse where all of his plays take place in a shared world or timeline, that would mean that Venus exists in all of Shakespeare’s works, and is a canon divine force in all of his plays. By extension, this would include the entire Roman pantheon of pagan deities, and if going by Chaucer’s version, Uranus would stand as the King of the Gods in Shakespeare’s plays.
