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- VENUS AND ADONIS 23
fifty-four eight-lined stanzas—*La Favola d’Adone*. He worked on the simple lines of Tarchagnota, and strictly confined himself to depicting Venus’ passion and Adonis’ death.¹
The warmth of feeling which is inherent in the legend Marino was reflected by Dolce, Tarchagnota, and Parabosco, in the comparatively sober colours which were characteristic of the Greek poets. The like restraint is observable in the briefer Italian poems on the subject which figure in the ‘Rime’ of Luigi Groto, called *Cieco d’Hadria* (Venice, 1577), and in *L’Adone, idillio di Ettore Martinegro* (Venice, 1614). But ultimately a more famous poet of the Italian Renaissance, Giovanni Battista Marino, gave freer play to a lascivious imagination, and wove round the story a voluptuous epic in twenty cantos, which was again entitled *L’Adone*. Marino, as an extant letter proves, designed near the outset of his career a poem of Adonis on the restricted plan which Parabosco and Tarchagnota adopted. He also translated anew Bion’s *Lament*. But the work grew under his hand, and finally emerged in the prolix and affected collection of mythological improprieties, which has given him claim to rank with the chief literary masters of lubricity. Marino’s poetry was well known to Shakespeare’s contemporaries², but his epic
¹ This was first published at Venice as an appendix to the third book of Parabosco’s *I quatro libri delle lettere amorose*, Venice, 1561. The literary work of Parabosco, who died in 1557, and of Dolce, was not unfamiliar to the Elizabethans. Watson notes that two of his ‘passions’ (Nos. lxv and c) in his *Hecatompatbia* (1582) were based on ‘the invention of M. Girolamo Parabosco’, and Drummond of Hawthornden records that in 1612 he read Parabosco’s *Lettere amorose*—the volume which includes the poem *L’Adone*. George Gascoigne’s tragedy of *focasta* is a translation of Dolce’s version of Euripides’ *Phoeniciae*, and Lodge acknowledged that several poems in his *Margarite* were written ‘in imitation of Dolce, the Italian poet’. I can find no reference in Elizabethan literature to Tarchagnota.
² As early as 1592 the poet Daniel issued by way of appendix to the collection of sonnets, which he entitled *Delia*, a translation of one of Marino’s poems, which he called *The Description of Beauty*.
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