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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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12 VENUS AND ADONIS
information under the author’s hand as to the chronological place which the work fills in the long list of his achievements. Shakespeare, in his letter to the Earl of Southampton, declares his *Venus and Adonis* to be ‘the first heir of my invention’.
The frank tone of the address to the Earl combines with evidence from the poem’s internal characteristics almost to compel the critic to interpret those words—‘the first heir of my invention’—in their obvious sense. A difficulty inevitably suggests itself. By the year 1593, when the poem was first published, Shakespeare had written at least four original plays, and had revised as many more by other hands.¹ None of these eight plays had yet gone to press, but such work must have been composed subsequently to ‘the first heir’ of the author’s ‘invention’, if that phrase is to be taken quite literally. The needs of the situation are, however, easily satisfied by the assumption that *Venus and Adonis* was written, or at any rate sketched out, several years before it was published. The theory, which there is abundant internal and external testimony to justify, that this tale in verse was in all essentials the earliest of Shakespeare’s experiments in poetry, does not exclude the likelihood that it was freshly elaborated before it was printed. There is indeed ground for the suggestion that the work lay in manuscript in the author’s desk through four or five summers, during which it underwent occasional change and amplification.
The tone of the poem.
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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