Why does twain call Venus and Adonis sorely embarrassing?

Answer 1

Because Mark Twain was a Baconian, and therefore employed the usual specious anti-Stratfordian arguments. His argument goes like this: 1. Shakespeare in the preface to Venus and Adonis called it "the first heir of my invention", therefore 2. He must have written it years before it was published in 1593, because by then he had written several plays (Twain assumes five for some reason), and therefore wrote it in 1586, seven years earlier because . . . who knows, but at that time he was still in Stratford with the baby twins and everyone knows that everyone in Stratford was an ignoramus with an IQ lower than their shoe size. Therefore, said Twain, Venus and Adonis is an "embarrassment" to Stratfordians, people who believe that William Shakespeare the author of the poem and William Shakespeare the guy buried in Stratford Church were the same poem because, by Twain's reckoning, the guy from Stratford couldn't have possibly written it.

The possibility that "the first heir of my invention" meant that it was the first writing which Shakespeare had published seems not to have occurred to Twain.