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- 28 VENUS AND ADONIS
Shakespeare of her railing indictment of Death seems to grow out of the goddess’ gentle cry in the Italian of Tarchagnota, when Death claims her lover:—
Io ti perdonerei ciò che fatto hai.
Venus is represented, too, by Shakespeare as excusing the boar’s murderous assault on Adonis on the ground that the fatal thrust was an amorous embrace, to which the brute was provoked by the boy’s beauty. Venus exclaims in Shakespeare’s poem:—
He thought to kiss him, and hath killed him so.
’Tis true, ’tis true; thus was Adonis slain:
He ran upon the boar with his sharp spear,
Who did not whet his teeth at him again,
But by a kiss thought to persuade him there;
And nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine
Sheath’d unaware the tusk in his soft groin.
(Venus and Adonis, ll. 1110–16.)
The boar’s appeal to Venus after Adonis’ death in Tarchagnota’s poem is to like curious effect:—
Ti giuro, che il voler mio non fu mai
Di offender questo tuo sì caro amante:
Ben è egli il ver, che tosto, ch’ io mirai
Nel corpo ignudo sue bellezze tante,
Di tanta fiamma acceso mi trovai,
Che cieco a forza mi sospinsi avante,
Per baciar la beltà, che il cor m’ apria,
Et ismorzar l’ardor, che in me sentia.
(L’Adone, Stanza lxv.)
¹ This episode is of Greek classical origin. It is the topic of the last poem in the ordinary collections of Theocritus’ idylls, although the author was some late imitator of Theocritus, and not the poet himself. Antonius Sebastianus Minturnus’ Latin epigram called De Adone ab Apro Interempto deals with the same theme (cf. Shakespeare, Variorum edition, 1821, xx. p. 784). The Theocritean idyll was rendered into crude English verse in a volume entitled Six Idillia . . . chosen out of the right famous Sicilian poet Theocritus, Oxford, 1588,
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