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- Shakespeare’s assurance that the poem was the first-fruits of his mighty faculty is amply confirmed by its tone
¹ The four original plays are in my view *Love’s Labour’s Last, Two Gentlemen of Verona*, *Comedy of Errors*, and *Romeo and Juliet*; the four revised plays are in my view *Titus Andronicus* and the three parts of *Henry VI*.
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VENUS AND ADONIS 13
and subject. Neither makes it easy to quarrel with the conclusion that it was originally drafted while the poet’s quick sympathetic intelligence was first growing conscious of its power. From the purely literary point of view the work often reaches heights of poetic excellence, which might have glorified the maturity of lesser men. But, viewed in relation to Shakespeare’s ultimate achievements, it shows the promise of greatness more plainly than the fruition. The signs of immaturity are not to be mistaken. The lascivious temper which plays about the leading incidents is more nearly allied to the ecstasies of adolescence than to the ripe passion of manhood. There are many irrelevant and digressive details which, though as a rule they bear witness to marvellous justness of observation and to exceptional command of the rich harmonies of language, defy all laws of artistic restraint. The metre, despite its melodious fluency, is not always so thoroughly under command as to avoid monotony and flatness. The luxuriance of the imagery is one of the poem’s most notable characteristics, and for the most part it serves with precision its illustrative purpose. But there are occasional signs of the juvenile tendency—of the vagrant impulse—to accumulate figurative ornament for its own sake. Nearly all the figures are, moreover, drawn from a somewhat narrow round of homely experience, from the sounds and sights of rural or domestic life. The ‘froward infant still’d with dandling’, the changing aspects of the sky, the timid snail creeping into its shell, the caterpillar devouring foliage, are among the objects which are employed by the poet to point his moral. All betray an alert familiarity with everyday incidents of rustic existence. The fresh tone and the pictorial clearness of the many rural similes in the *Venus and Adonis* seem, in fact, to embody the poet’s early
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14 VENUS AND ADONIS
impressions of the country-side,—impressions which lost something of their concrete distinctness and filled a narrower space in his thought in adult years, amid the multifarious distractions of the town.
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