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- VENUS AND ADONIS 21
But had Shakespeare gone to Ovid alone, his *Venus and Adonis* would not have taken the shape which is familiar to us. The scholars of the Renaissance rediscovered in the sixteenth century the Greek pastoral poetry of Sicily, and many poets of the Renaissance, while they continued to pay much deference to Ovid, sought inspiration in Theocritus and Bion as well. Not Ovid’s *Metamorphoses* alone, but also Bion’s elegy was translated into all the vernacular tongues of Western Europe, and it was sometimes under the Greek influence, and sometimes under the Latin, and more often under the two influences combined, that there came to birth the massive corpus of poetry on the classical legend in Italian, French, Spanish, and English.
Through the Renaissance literature of Italy the story spread rapidly. At the end of the fifteenth and at the beginning of the sixteenth century it was a frequent theme in Italy of scholarly Latin verse¹, and early in the sixteenth century it found its way into the vernacular Italian poetry. The vogue of the story was greatly extended by an Italian rendering of Bion’s elegy (wrongly assigned to Theocritus under the title of *Epitafio di Adone di Teocrito*), which appeared in a collection of *Rime Toscane* in 1535.² A very
¹ Numerous Latin poems on Venus and Adonis by Italian scholars, including Alciati, Sannazaro, and Minturno, are found in Gruter’s *Delitiae Balorum Poetarum*, vol. i, pp. 32, 90, 1311; vol. ii, pp. 723, 924, 1452. In *Pentani Opera*, 1503, an epigram *De Adonide et Venere*, p. 10, gives a vivid description of nature’s grief on Adonis’ death; see also *De conversione Adonidis in citrium*, p. 139. Slight reference is made to Adonis by Ariosto in his *Orlando Foriese*. He is mentioned under Ovidian influence as a type of ardent lover, Canto vi, Stanza 57, and as the child of an incestuous union in Canto xxv, Stanza 36.
² This was first published in Paris in 1535 and reissued in Venice in 1538 and 1547. The author’s name is given on the title-page as Amomo; nothing else seems known of him. Cf. F. Flamini’s *Studi di istoria litteraria italiana e straniera*, 1895, pp. 256 sq.
In the Renaissance poetry of Italy.
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