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- # Introduction
## Overview
This document is the introduction to the chapter "Venus and Adonis" by William Shakespeare. It was extracted from a text file on January 30, 2026.
## Context
This introduction is part of the chapter "[VENUS AND ADONIS](arke:01KG6S4BKQ65P7DTQM82TXFB34)" and was extracted from the file "[pdf-01KG6Q7Q25RHMFT3SJXPV18VFF.txt](arke:01KG6S2X2EBB305ENM00G16GWA)". The chapter itself is part of the collection "[PDF Workflow Main Test 2026-01-30T00:26:53](arke:01KG6NWQ2H2K4PGG7H4ZHYCZ3Y)".
## Contents
The introduction discusses Shakespeare's poem "Venus and Adonis," noting its opening in the dawn of a summer's day and its Italianate atmosphere. It explores potential influences on Shakespeare's work, particularly from Italian poets like Tarchagnota, whose poem "L'Adone" is cited as a possible source for Venus's lamentations and her explanation of Adonis's death. The text highlights specific passages from Shakespeare's poem and compares them to similar sentiments and narrative elements found in Tarchagnota's work, suggesting that Shakespeare may have adapted or been inspired by these earlier treatments of the myth. The introduction also briefly touches upon the classical origins of the episode, referencing Bion's "Lament" and Theocritus.
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- Introduction
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- VENUS AND ADONIS 27
The sun’s rising or falling rays constantly illumine Shakespeare’s story, which opens in the dawn of a summer’s day.¹ The sunlit atmosphere, no less than the flower-strewn grove, seems redolent of an Italian origin.
There are indeed other and more definite accretions to the classical legend, both in Shakespeare and the Italian poets, which seem to indicate loans levied by the English poet on his foreign predecessors. The impressive execration of death which Shakespeare puts into Venus’ mouth has the true ring of poetic fervour, and bears the stamp of the Shakespearean mint (ll. 931–54, 991–1002). But Shakespeare appears there to work up an episode in the Italian poem of Tarchagnota, who set on Venus’ lips an impassioned complaint, in a like number of lines, of the blind cruelty of the hard-favoured Tyrant (Stanzas liv-lix). ‘Tu morte crudel,’ ‘o cosa mostruosa e strana,’ cries the Venus of the Italian poet at the thought of Adonis’ loss; Death, she sorrowfully reflects, destroys the pleasure of mortal life as suddenly as it devours the beauty of the flowers of the field. The sentiment is clothed by the Venus of Shakespeare in richer language, yet it is doubtful if it would have had its precise place in the English poem’s machinery, but for the Italian suggestion.² Again, Venus’ final retractation in
¹ Cf. Even as the sun with purple-colour’d face
Had ta’en his last leave of the weeping morn. (ll. 1–2.)
A summer’s day will seem an hour but short. (l. 23.)
And Titan, tired in the midday heat,
With burning eye did hotly overlook them. (ll. 177–8.)
The sun ariseth in his majesty:
Who doth the world so gloriously behold
That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish’d gold. (ll. 856–8.)
² In introducing Venus’ apostrophe to Death, the Italian poets themselves developed a very slight and bare hint in Bion’s Lament, where Venus is made to describe Adonis as ‘journeying to Acheron, that hateful king and cruel’ (στογνὸν βασιλήα καὶ ἄγριον).
D 2
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28 VENUS AND ADONIS
Shakespeare of her railing indictment of Death seems to grow out of the goddess’ gentle cry in the Italian of Tarchagnota, when Death claims her lover:—
Io ti perdonerei ciò che fatto hai.
Venus is represented, too, by Shakespeare as excusing the boar’s murderous assault on Adonis on the ground that the fatal thrust was an amorous embrace, to which the brute was provoked by the boy’s beauty. Venus exclaims in Shakespeare’s poem:—
He thought to kiss him, and hath killed him so.
’Tis true, ’tis true; thus was Adonis slain:
He ran upon the boar with his sharp spear,
Who did not whet his teeth at him again,
But by a kiss thought to persuade him there;
And nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine
Sheath’d unaware the tusk in his soft groin.
(Venus and Adonis, ll. 1110–16.)
The boar’s appeal to Venus after Adonis’ death in Tarchagnota’s poem is to like curious effect:—
Ti giuro, che il voler mio non fu mai
Di offender questo tuo sì caro amante:
Ben è egli il ver, che tosto, ch’ io mirai
Nel corpo ignudo sue bellezze tante,
Di tanta fiamma acceso mi trovai,
Che cieco a forza mi sospinsi avante,
Per baciar la beltà, che il cor m’ apria,
Et ismorzar l’ardor, che in me sentia.
(L’Adone, Stanza lxv.)
¹ This episode is of Greek classical origin. It is the topic of the last poem in the ordinary collections of Theocritus’ idylls, although the author was some late imitator of Theocritus, and not the poet himself. Antonius Sebastianus Minturnus’ Latin epigram called De Adone ab Apro Interempto deals with the same theme (cf. Shakespeare, Variorum edition, 1821, xx. p. 784). The Theocritean idyll was rendered into crude English verse in a volume entitled Six Idillia . . . chosen out of the right famous Sicilian poet Theocritus, Oxford, 1588,
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VENUS AND ADONIS 29
- title
- Introduction