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VENUS AND ADONIS
The story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus.
Marlowe’s genius exercised a powerful fascination over Shakespeare’s youth, and in all probability under such influence Adonis’ disdain of the goddess of beauty became the central motive of his first poem.
There was much material at Shakespeare’s hand which may well have encouraged him to develop Marlowe’s hint. Another popular tale which was wholly concerned with a youth’s disdain of a beautiful woman’s embraces was accessible to him, and it was easy to graft its main features on the legend of Venus and Adonis. Ovid before he approached the tale of Venus and Adonis in his *Metamorphoses* had elaborated the less conventional topic in the tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. That story of Ovid had attracted attention in Elizabethan England. It had been rendered independently into loose pedestrian English rhyme by one Thomas Peend. His *Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis... With a morall in English verse* was published in a small octavo in 1565.¹ But there was little in Peend’s doggerel to serve Shakespeare’s purpose. There was far more in Golding’s literary rendering of Ovid’s tale. But Shakespeare clearly supplemented that source by another.
It is of great importance to bear in mind that some four years before the publication of Venus and Adonis, an Elizabethan poet, Thomas Lodge, presented with much exuberant and original detail a different hero’s disdain of a different heroine’s advances. In 1589 appeared Lodge’s narrative
¹ A freer version followed at a later date, and has been very doubtfully assigned to Francis Beaumont, the dramatist. This was first published anonymously under the title of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in 1602. It is in heroic verse and is of much literary interest. The rare copy in the Bodleian Library was reprinted in the *Shakespeare Society Papers* (1847), vol. iii. pp. 94–126. In Cranley’s *Amanda* (1635), Shakespeare’s *Venus and Adonis* is mentioned with Salmacis and her Hermaphrodite’ among a number of songs of love and sonnets exquisite’.
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