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- VENUS AND ADONIS 25.
who in the course of his diplomatic occupations visited both Italy and England during the first half of the sixteenth century, produced in 1553 a Spanish poem called *Fábula de Adonis*, in eight-lined stanzas, which enjoyed wide popularity in the peninsula. Don Diego narrated the legend after the manner of Dolce. Other Spanish poets subsequently repeated Mendoza’s experiment. In the miscellaneous collection of poetry, the *Cancionero general* of Amberes, which appeared in 1557, there figured an attractive poem on the subject in short metre. A writer of repute, Juan de la Cueva (1550–1609), penned in eighteen ‘ottavas reales’ the *Llanto de Venus en la muerte de Adonis*¹, and there is a stilted sonnet by Lope de Vega’s friend Juan de Arguijo (d. 1629), entitled *Venus en la muerte de Adonis*. Finally, in the last decade of the century, the theme was elaborately recast by a more distinguished pen. Lope de Vega’s tragedy entitled *Adonis y Venus*, which greatly developed the ancient legend, is the most notable adaptation of the story in the literature of Spain.²
Thus a cursory survey of the literature of the European Renaissance shows not merely that the story of Venus and Adonis had already travelled far and wide before it engaged Shakespeare’s attention, but that it was still enjoying active life abroad while he was working upon it. The strong family resemblance which exists among the component parts of this many-languaged Adonic literature is mainly due to the common sources in classical poetry. Only where there recur in two or more poems details or reflections or
¹ *Obras poéticas*, Seville, 1982.
² Cf. Observaciones preliminares, ix–xxv, before Lope’s tragedy *Adonis y Venus* in *Obras de Lope de Vega publicadas por la Real Academia Española*, Tomo vi, Madrid, 1896. Several narrative poems on the same subject appeared in Spain during the seventeenth century. Cf. Alonso de Batres’ *Fábula de Adonis y Venus*, and Juan de Moncayo y Gurrea’s *Venus y Adonis* (Zaragoza, 1652).
Don Diego
Hurtado de Mendoza.
Juan de la Cueva.
Lope de Vega.
Family likeness among the Renaissance poems.
D
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