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- VENUS AND ADONIS 15
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 literature—Shakespeare 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 and Adonis*, ‘the first heir’ of his invention.
## II
Critics of *Venus and Adonis* hardly seem conscious of the 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.¹ The extent to which Shakespeare was acquainted with the preceding foreign efforts may be difficult to appraise, but that
¹ 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.’
Distribution of the story.
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