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- 36 VENUS AND ADONIS
rhapsody under the joint title of *The Pilgrimage to Paradise*, ioyned with the Countess of Penbrookes loue. The skilful management of the metre by Spenser, Lodge, and Breton—the pleasant alternation of the alternately riming quatrains with the riming couplet—left Shakespeare small opportunity of improvement, and although his mastery is for the most part complete he did not travel far beyond the bounds that his predecessors had assigned the stanza.¹ Of the attraction that the metre had for him in early life, he has left an interesting testimony outside the poem. In what is probably his earliest play, *Love's Labour's Lost*, he attempted to turn sixains to dramatic uses, and one of the hero Biron's speeches, Act i, Sc. 1, ll. 151–62, is in regular six-lined stanzas. But the awkward experiment was not repeated on the stage, and its main interest lies in the evidence it offers of Shakespeare's predilection for the metre at a very early stage of his career.
Reception of Shakespeare's poem.
The reception accorded Shakespeare's work was extraordinarily warm. Reprints were numerous during the remaining twenty-three years of Shakespeare's life. References to it are frequent in contemporary literature, and are couched for the most part in highly commendatory terms. So signal a success is adequately explained by the vigorous freshness of the poem. Subsidiary causes are to be found in the voluptuous treatment of the story, and in a natural affinity,
¹ Of the many long poems written in sixains subsequent to *Venus and Adonis*, it will be sufficient to mention Southwell's *St. Peter's Complaint* (1595), Barnfield's *Affectionate Shepheard* (1594), his *Cassandra* (1595), his *Lady Pecunia* and *Complaint of Poetrie* (1598), J. C.'s *Alcilia* (1595) and Marston's *The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image* (1598). The metre was so common before *Venus and Adonis* came out that it would be unsafe to assume that its vogue was substantially extended by the success of Shakespeare's work. But Barnfield's plagiarisms of Shakespeare's *Venus* are so constant and unblushing that his choice of metre may safely be assigned to the influence of Shakespeare's poem.
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