The subject

matter.

impressions of the country-side,-impressions which lost something of their concrete distinctness and filled a narrower space in his thought in adult years, amid the multifarious distractions of the town.

The subject, too, savours of the conditions of youth,— of what Shakespeare called in his Sonnets (LXX. 9) 'the ambush of young days'. Shakespeare chose to occupy his budding fancy with a somewhat voluptuous story—an unsubstantial dream of passion-which was first revealed to him in one of his classical school-books, and had already exercised the energies of famous versifiers of his own epoch in England and on the continent of Europe. As in the case of most youthful essays in poetry, the choice of so wellworn a topic as Venus and Adonis shows Shakespeare to have embarked at the outset of his poetic career in a consciously imitative effort, even if the potency of his individuality stamped the finished product with its own hallmark. Ovid in his Metamorphoses had emulated the example of Theocritus and Bion, the pastoral poets of Greece, in narrating the Greek fable of Venus and Adonis. Ovid's poem filled a generous space in the curriculum of every Elizabethan school, and at all periods of his career Shakespeare gave signs of affectionate familiarity with its contents.

But Ovid was only one of the literary companions of Shakespeare's youth, and the Latin poet dealt with this tale of Venus and Adonis in bare outline. In spite of his deep obligation to the great Roman, Shakespeare did not confine his early poetic studies to him. There are ample signs that he filled out Ovid's brief and somewhat colourless narrative on lines suggested by elder English contemporaries, Spenser and Marlowe, Lodge and Greene. In finally manipulating the theme there cannot be much doubt, too, that Shakespeare

worked up some vitalizing conceptions which were derived from the Italian poets. Long before he wrote, foreign writers had elaborated the simple classic myth in narrative verse which closely anticipated his own in shape and sentiment.

Most of the varied influences which moulded Shakespeare's poetic genius, indeed, find a first reflection in Venus and Adonis. In it, recent impressions of the country life of Warwickshire seem to be fused, not merely with schoolboy devotion to Ovid and youthful enthusiasm for the new birth of English poetry, but with genuine appreciation of the taste and feeling which the Renaissance had generated in all cultivated minds of Western Europe. On foundations offered by the novels of Italy and France-some of the most characteristic fruit of Renaissance literatureShakespeare at the height of his powers reared many of his best-known plays. The same elements of literary sustenance, the same force of literary sympathy, which fed the stream of Shakespeare's genius in its maturity, seem, in the eye of the careful student, to course in embryo through Venus ana Adonis, the first heir' of his invention.

II

of the story.

CRITICS of Venus and Adonis hardly seem conscious of the Distribution fact that the story of Venus and Adonis engaged the attention of poets in Italy, France, and Spain, as well as of England, both before and after Shakespeare approached the theme.' The extent to which Shakespeare was acquainted with the preceding foreign efforts may be difficult to appraise, but that

J. P. Collier strangely wrote of Venus and Adonis sixty years ago: 'It was quite new in its class, being founded on no model either ancient or modern; nothing like it had been attempted before, and nothing comparable to it was produced afterwards.'

The Greek festival of Adonis.

he had learned something of them is a proposition that is
hard to refute. In any case it is desirable to indicate briefly
the distribution of the story in the literature of the European
Renaissance, not merely because the attempt does not seem to
have been made before, but because only thus is Shakespeare's
work, whatever its precise measure of indebtedness, set in its
rightful place in the broad current of contemporary thought
and aspiration. Shakespeare's achievements are commonly
treated in isolation-as work detached from the great
movements of his epoch. In
In many instances the supreme
quality and individuality of his genius may largely justify
the critic in ignoring the links that bind the poet to his era.
But in the case of Venus and Adonis, no such transcendent
merits are in question. He writes on a lofty level. But
the plane along which he moves is that in which many
others of the century had their being, and his literary no
less than his historic position is misrepresented, when the
similar work of those who wrote a generation or two before
him, or at the same time as he, is passed by in silence.

The story of Venus and Adonis, which had its source in Phoenician or Assyrian mythology, was absorbed at an early period by the religion of Greece. The earliest poems in honour of Adonis, the beloved of Venus, who was prematurely slain in a boar-hunt, were elegiac hymns written to be sung at an annual religious festival commemorative of the youth's sad death.' Sappho and Praxilla wrote such lyrics

The compilers of the Vulgate version of the Old Testament introduced a reference to the familiar Adonaic festival. Cf. Et introduxit me per ostium portae domus Domini, quod respiciebat ad Aquilonem: et ecce ibi mulieres sedebant plangentes Adonidem (Ezek. viii. 14). The Hebrew text reads Thammuz, the god of light. According to the story as it was ultimately incorporated into the religion of Greece and of all the lands by the shore of the Eastern Mediterranean, Adonis, after his wooing by Aphrodite (Venus) and his physical death in the boar-hunt, was suffered, at the earnest entreaty of the

of lamentation for ritual observances in the sixth century B.C. But it was three centuries later, in the closing epoch of classical Greek literature, when the worship of Adonis flourished in its chief glory, that the theme was developed to best effect by Theocritus and Bion, the Greek pastoral poets of Sicily. The fifteenth of Theocritus' Idylls describes Idylls of the celebration of the festival of Adonis, and includes and Bion. a beautiful psalm sung in the hero's honour. The finest of all Greek poems on the theme is Bion's pathetic Lament for Adonis, which enjoyed the admiration of the poets of the Renaissance, and ultimately suggested to Shelley his Adonais, the great elegy on Keats.

goddess of love, to spend in spirit half the year in Hades with Persephone (Proserpina) and half the year on earth with Aphrodite. The myth seems an anthropomorphic interpretation of the annual birth and decay of vegetation, Adonis being identified with the spirit that brings the flowers and fruits year by year to life, and then deserting them leaves them to decay. This interpretation is confirmed by the name of Gardens of Adonis' (kîπoɩ 'Adúvidos), which was conferred throughout Greece in classical times on earthen vessels, in which plants were brought to fruition with exceptional rapidity and then usually faded as quickly. Many classical authors mention these flower-pots under the name of Gardens of Adonis' (cf. Plato, Phaedrus 276). In 1 Henry VI, i. 6. 6-7 Joan of Arc's 'promises' are likened to

Adonis' gardens

That one day bloom'd and fruitful were the nextsure evidence of ripe classical knowledge in the author of this scene. Spenser in his Faerie Queene (Bk. iii, Canto vi, Stanzas xxix-liii) gives an elaborate description of The Garden of Adonis', which he represents allegorically as the great treasury of Nature's seeds—

The first seminary

Of all things that are born to live and die
According to their kinds.

Developing his theme somewhat irregularly, Spenser finally makes the garden
the eternal home of the immortalized hero Adonis, where he is visited by his
lover Venus (Stanzas xlvi-xlix). Milton, doubtless imitating Spenser, wrote of
Spot more delicious than those gardens feign'd

Or of reviv'd Adonis, or renown'd

Alcinous, host of old Laertes' son.

C

(Paradise Lost, ix. 439–41.)

Theocritus

Ovid's narrative.

From Greek literature the story spread to Roman. Ovid's narrative of the fable in his Metamorphoses (x. 520738) is a mere skeleton, and is awkwardly obscured by the interpolation of the independent story of Hippomenes' footrace with Atalanta (ll. 560-707). But Ovid caught something of the temper of Theocritus and Bion, and added a few mythological details. It was through the Latin that the tale in the first instance reached the poets of Western Europe. Dante's slight allusion to Venus' infatuation (Purgatorio, xxviii. 64–6) and Chaucer's apostrophe to Venus in The Knight's Tale (2227-8)—

For thilke loue thou haddest to Adon,
Have pitee on my bitter teres smart,

are Ovidian reminiscences.

Shakespeare, too, gained his first knowledge of the myth from Ovid. He had opportunities of reading the Ovidian tale in both Latin and English from his school-days. Golding's English verse translation of the Metamorphoses, of which the publication was completed in 1567, was constantly reprinted during Shakespeare's lifetime, and the dramatist adapted many passages from it in plays of all periods of his career.

Ovid's account of Venus' infatuation for Adonis, of her warnings against the ferocity of the boar, of his love of the chase, of his death in the boar-hunt, of the goddess' grief, and of her lover's transformation into a purple flower, are the broad bases of Shakespeare's poem. Apart from verbal coincidences, some of its leading characteristics-the free employment of pictorial imagery, and the frank appeal to the senses-indicate that Ovid, whether in the Latin original or in the English translation, was a primary source of inspiration. Shakespeare's indebtedness to Ovid passed indeed beyond the bounds of the Latin poet's brief version of the