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Shakespeare’s poem of *Venus and Adonis* has a peculiar fascination alike for the poet’s biographer, critic, and bibliographer. It is sufficient to mention three points of interest. Firstly, the volume, alone in the great roll of Shakespeare’s works, includes a precise personal statement from the dramatist’s own pen respecting its composition. Secondly, it supplies a singularly illuminating clue to the relations subsisting between Shakespeare’s early work and the poetic efforts alike of his contemporary fellow countrymen and of the poets of the Italian Renaissance. Thirdly, it was the earliest of his writings to find its way to the printing press, and, although the early editions were extraordinarily numerous, exceptionally few early copies survive. Neither the intrinsic nor the extrinsic character of the volume is to be exactly matched in variety of interest in the whole range of Shakespearean literature.
No more valuable fragment of autobiography exists than the dedicatory letter bearing the poet’s signature, which is prefixed to the original edition of *Venus and Adonis*. It is addressed to ‘The Right Honourable Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield’. Only one other of Shakespeare’s works, *The Rape of Lucrece*, was similarly distinguished by a prefatory epistle from the poet’s pen, and that was addressed to the same patron. But the inscription before the *Venus and Adonis*, which is somewhat fuller and yet at the same time somewhat simpler in expression than its successor, differs from it, too, in supplying
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