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- 16 VENUS AND ADONIS
he had learned something of them is a proposition that is hard to refute. In any case it is desirable to indicate briefly the distribution of the story in the literature of the European Renaissance, not merely because the attempt does not seem to have been made before, but because only thus is Shakespeare's work, whatever its precise measure of indebtedness, set in its rightful place in the broad current of contemporary thought and aspiration. Shakespeare's achievements are commonly treated in isolation—as work detached from the great movements of his epoch. In many instances the supreme quality and individuality of his genius may largely justify the critic in ignoring the links that bind the poet to his era. But in the case of *Venus and Adonis*, no such transcendent merits are in question. He writes on a lofty level. But the plane along which he moves is that in which many others of the century had their being, and his literary no less than his historic position is misrepresented, when the similar work of those who wrote a generation or two before him, or at the same time as he, is passed by in silence.
The story of Venus and Adonis, which had its source in Phoenician or Assyrian mythology, was absorbed at an early period by the religion of Greece. The earliest poems in honour of Adonis, the beloved of Venus, who was prematurely slain in a boar-hunt, were elegiac hymns written to be sung at an annual religious festival commemorative of the youth's sad death.¹ Sappho and Praxilla wrote such lyrics
¹ The compilers of the Vulgate version of the Old Testament introduced a reference to the familiar Adonaic festival. Cf. ² Et introduxit me per ostium portae domus Domini, quod respiciebat ad Aquilonem: et ecce ibi mulieres sedebant plangentes Adonidem (Ezek. viii. 14). The Hebrew text reads Thammuz, the god of light. According to the story as it was ultimately incorporated into the religion of Greece and of all the lands by the shore of the Eastern Mediterranean, Adonis, after his wooing by Aphrodite (Venus) and his physical death in the boar-hunt, was suffered, at the earnest entreaty of the
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