- description
- # Girolamo Parabosco
## Overview
This entry discusses Girolamo Parabosco, an Italian writer and musician of the Renaissance. It is part of a larger work, likely a literary analysis or history, focusing on the theme of Venus and Adonis in literature.
## Context
Girolamo Parabosco (d. 1557) was a contemporary of Dolce and Tarchagnota, and his work on the Venus and Adonis theme is presented as part of a broader discussion of how this subject was treated in Italian literature. Parabosco is noted as a friend of Dolce and an organist at St. Mark's in Venice. His literary output, including novels and poems, was known to Elizabethan writers. His poem *La Favola d’Adone* is mentioned as an example of his engagement with the theme, adhering to a more restrained approach compared to later interpretations.
## Contents
Parabosco's contribution to the Venus and Adonis theme is a poem titled *La Favola d’Adone*. This work consists of fifty-four eight-line stanzas and is described as building upon the simpler lines of Tarchagnota, focusing strictly on Venus's passion and Adonis's death. The text notes that Parabosco's poem was appended to the first issue of his *I quatro libri delle lettere amorose* in 1561. The author also references that Parabosco's literary work, along with Dolce's, was familiar to Elizabethan readers, with specific mentions of Watson's *Hecatompathia* and Drummond of Hawthornden's reading of Parabosco's *Lettere amorose*.
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- Girolamo Parabosco
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- text
- Parabosco.
Within less than a decade a versatile friend of Dolce, Girolamo Parabosco, an organist at St. Mark’s, Venice, who made a reputation as writer of madrigals as well as of novels and poems, tried his hand on the theme in a poem of
¹ Dolce’s poem was appended to the first issue of his play called *Il Capitane*, which appeared at Venice, 1545. The British Museum has no earlier edition than that of 1547.
² Of the first edition, which is extremely rare, there is a copy in the Grenville Collection at the British Museum. The copy in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Rome was reprinted at Naples in 1898, edited by Angelo Borzelli. Tarchagnota, who died at Ancona in 1566, was a Greek and Latin scholar and an industrious compiler in prose, chiefly from Greek and Latin. His poem *L’Adone* seems his role surviving experiment in verse.
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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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24 VENUS AND ADONIS
of Adonis was not completed till 1623—long after Shakespeare’s poem was published. The history of his endeavour, however, affords salient proof that the topic persisted in Italian literature throughout Shakespeare’s career.
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- Parabosco.