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- 14 VENUS AND ADONIS
impressions of the country-side,—impressions which lost something of their concrete distinctness and filled a narrower space in his thought in adult years, amid the multifarious distractions of the town.
The subject-matter.
The subject, too, savours of the conditions of youth,—of what Shakespeare called in his *Sonnets* (LXX. 9) ‘the ambush of young days’. Shakespeare chose to occupy his budding fancy with a somewhat voluptuous story—an unsubstantial dream of passion—which was first revealed to him in one of his classical school-books, and had already exercised the energies of famous versifiers of his own epoch in England and on the continent of Europe. As in the case of most youthful essays in poetry, the choice of so well-worn a topic as Venus and Adonis shows Shakespeare to have embarked at the outset of his poetic career in a consciously imitative effort, even if the potency of his individuality stamped the finished product with its own hallmark. Ovid in his *Metamorphoses* had emulated the example of Theocritus and Bion, the pastoral poets of Greece, in narrating the Greek fable of Venus and Adonis. Ovid’s poem filled a generous space in the curriculum of every Elizabethan school, and at all periods of his career Shakespeare gave signs of affectionate familiarity with its contents.
But Ovid was only one of the literary companions of Shakespeare’s youth, and the Latin poet dealt with this tale of Venus and Adonis in bare outline. In spite of his deep obligation to the great Roman, Shakespeare did not confine his early poetic studies to him. There are ample signs that he filled out Ovid’s brief and somewhat colourless narrative on lines suggested by elder English contemporaries, Spenser and Marlowe, Lodge and Greene. In finally manipulating the theme there cannot be much doubt, too, that Shakespeare
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