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- VENUS AND ADONIS 27
The sun’s rising or falling rays constantly illumine Shakespeare’s story, which opens in the dawn of a summer’s day.¹ The sunlit atmosphere, no less than the flower-strewn grove, seems redolent of an Italian origin.
There are indeed other and more definite accretions to the classical legend, both in Shakespeare and the Italian poets, which seem to indicate loans levied by the English poet on his foreign predecessors. The impressive execration of death which Shakespeare puts into Venus’ mouth has the true ring of poetic fervour, and bears the stamp of the Shakespearean mint (ll. 931–54, 991–1002). But Shakespeare appears there to work up an episode in the Italian poem of Tarchagnota, who set on Venus’ lips an impassioned complaint, in a like number of lines, of the blind cruelty of the hard-favoured Tyrant (Stanzas liv-lix). ‘Tu morte crudel,’ ‘o cosa mostruosa e strana,’ cries the Venus of the Italian poet at the thought of Adonis’ loss; Death, she sorrowfully reflects, destroys the pleasure of mortal life as suddenly as it devours the beauty of the flowers of the field. The sentiment is clothed by the Venus of Shakespeare in richer language, yet it is doubtful if it would have had its precise place in the English poem’s machinery, but for the Italian suggestion.² Again, Venus’ final retractation in
¹ Cf. Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face
Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn. (ll. 1–2.)
A summer’s day will seem an hour but short. (l. 23.)
And Titan, tired in the midday heat,
With burning eye did hotly overlook them. (ll. 177–8.)
The sun ariseth in his majesty:
Who doth the world so gloriously behold
That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish’d gold. (ll. 856–8.)
² In introducing Venus’ apostrophe to Death, the Italian poets themselves developed a very slight and bare hint in Bion’s Lament, where Venus is made to describe Adonis as ‘journeying to Acheron, that hateful king and cruel’ (στογνὸν βασιλήα καὶ ἄγριον).
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