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- VENUS AND ADONIS 37
which the legend’s previous popularity attested, between the tale and the spirit of the times. A very early critic, the Jesuit Robert Southwell, deplored, from the Christian point of view, the pagan frankness of ‘the first heir’ of Shakespeare’s ‘invention’.
Still finest wits are ‘stilling Venus’ rose,
In Paynim toyes the sweetest vaines are spent.
But the general tone of ingenuous approval may be gauged by Francis Meres’ insistence in 1598 that this and other of the dramatist’s poems proved that ‘the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare’. Next year John Weever, in his enthusiastic sonnet in praise of ‘our honey-tongued Shakespeare’, declared that
Rose-cheek’d Adonis with his amber tresses,
Fair fire-hot Venus charming him to love her
were, with the other issue of his brain, children of Apollo by some heaven-born goddess. The university wit who penned about 1600 the academic plays of *The Pilgrimage to Parnassus* and *The Return from Parnassus* voiced popular opinion when he wrote, ‘Let this duncified world esteem of Spenser and Chaucer; I’ll worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare and to honour him will lay his *Venus and Adonis* under my pillow.’
In the seventeenth century there was a popular tendency to rank *Venus and Adonis* with improper literature and to insist on its erotic tendency.¹ But the essential beauty of
¹ Cf. Middleton’s *A mad world my masters* (1608), where the jealous Harebrain, speaking of his newly-married wife, says, ‘I have conveyed away all her wanton pamphlets, as *Hero and Leander*, *Venus and Adonis*; O, two luscious marrow-bone pies for a young married wife.’ Richard Brathwaite, in *The English Gentlewoman* (1631), includes the poem in a list of ‘books treating
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