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- 38 VENUS AND ADONIS
the theme gives small warrant for the degrading classification. Shakespeare himself urged a juster view when he introduced a charming reference to the airy aesthetic significance of the fable in the Induction to *The Taming of The Shrew* (Induction, Sc. 2, ll. 51–5):—
Dost thou love pictures? we will fetch thee straight
Adonis painted by a running brook,
And Cytherea all in sedges hid,
Which seem to move and wanton with her breath,
Even as the waving sedges play with wind.
One effect of Shakespeare’s poems was to increase the popularity of the topic among contemporary writers. The four sonnets on Venus and Adonis by B. Griffin and other anonymous hands which figure in *The Passionate Pilgrim* of 1599 (the poetic miscellany unwarrantably assigned by the publisher to Shakespeare), and *The Shepheard’s Song* by H[enry] C[onstable], which first appeared in *England’s Helicon* (1600), are paraphrases of Shakespeare’s verse, and they bring to no unworthy close the roll of poetic adaptations of the classic story in the literature of the English Renaissance.¹
of light subjects’, which ladies ought to avoid: ‘Venus and Adonis are unfitting Consorts for a Ladies bosome’ (p. 139).
¹ Two poems of the sixteenth century, which dealt with the story of Adonis’ incestuous birth as related in Ovid’s *Metamorphoses*, Book x, should doubtless be reckoned among the Shakespearean progeny. Mirrha, after an incestuous union with her father Cinyras, was, according to the myth, changed into a tree, which gave Adonis miraculous birth. The earlier poem on the subject, *Mirrha, the mother of Adonis*, or *Lustes Prodigies*, was by the actor William Barksted (1607); the other, entitled *The Scourge of Venus*, or *The Wanton Lady, with the rare birth of Adonis*, was written by H. A. in the metre of Shakespeare’s *Venus and Adonis*, and published in 1613. Barksted’s poem ends with an eulogy on Shakespeare’s effort:—
But stay, my Muse, in thine owne confines keepe,
And wage not warre with so deere lov’d a neighbor,
But, having sung thy day song, rest and sleepe
Preserve thy small fame and his greater favor:
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