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- VENUS AND ADONIS 29
### III
But it was not only the Ovidian outline and Italian adaptations that Shakespeare assimilated. None had chosen the legend for independent treatment in England before Shakespeare. But many Elizabethan poets of earlier date had made incidental reference to the tale, and had laid special stress on features of it which Shakespeare seems to have elaborated in emulation of them.
The story in England.
Spenser in his Elegy on Sir Philip Sidney adapts the details of the fable to his special purpose. Spenser figuratively credited his hero with Adonis’ precise manner of death. ‘Astrophel’ is slain in the chase by ‘a cruel beast’, who inflicts a wound in his thigh, and his corpse is metamorphosed into a flower. Spenser, too, sets on the lips of Sidney’s lady-love Stella the pathetic lamentation which poetic tradition assigned to Venus on the discovery of Adonis’ dead body. Spenser’s description of the flow of blood from the boar’s fatal thrust, and the transformation of the fair white corpse into a flower ‘both red and blue’, anticipate Shakespeare’s account of how
Spenser’s treatment of it (1586).
in his blood that on the ground lay spill’d,
A purple flower sprung up.
The curious identity of tone, as well as of topic, can only be appreciated by a close study of the two poems side by side. The metre of Spenser’s *Astrophel*, moreover, was that adopted by Shakespeare in his poem of *Venus and Adonis*. Many a critic might be forgiven if he mistook such a stanza as the following
of which only one copy—in the Bodleian Library—is known (cf. reprint in *Some Longer Elizabethan Poems*, ed. A. H. Bullen, Constable’s edition of Arber’s *English Garner*, 1903, pp. 123, 146). But the Italian version of Tarchagnota has far closer affinity to Shakespeare’s treatment of the incident, than the English translation of the Theocritean idyll or Minturnus’ epigram.
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