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- Robert Greene.
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VENUS AND ADONIS 31
Shakespeare’s poem, which was introduced into the novel of *Perimedes the Blacke-Smith (1588)*, opens thus:—
In Cypres sat fayre Venus by a Fount
Wanton Adonis toying on her knee:
She kist the wag, her darling of accompt,
The Boie gan blush, which when his lover see,
She smild and told him loue might challenge debt
And he was young and might be wanton yet.
Greene’s second lyric on the theme which figured in his tract called *Never too late (1590)* is a pathetic appeal on the part of Venus to the disdainful boy:—
Sweet Adon, darest not glance thine eye?
N’oserez-vous, mon bel ami?
Upon thy Venus that must die?
Je vous en prie, pity me;
N’oserez-vous, mon bel, mon bel,
N’oserez-vous, mon bel ami?
It is more interesting to note that Marlowe, in his *Marlowe*, translation of the *Hero and Leander* of Musaeus, went out of his obvious path in order to bring Adonis’ coldness into signal relief. In that translation Marlowe mentions Adonis more than once. In one place he gives the youth the epithet ‘rose-cheek’d’, which is not warranted by the Greek text. That word is borrowed by Shakespeare when he first introduces Adonis to his reader in the third line of his own poem—a plain acknowledgement of obligation. In another place of *Hero and Leander* Marlowe interpolated three original lines, of which the Greek is quite innocent. These describe the grove where
Venus in her naked glory strove
To please the careless and disdainful eyes
Of proud Adonis, that before her lies.
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32
VENUS AND ADONIS
The story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus.
Marlowe’s genius exercised a powerful fascination over Shakespeare’s youth, and in all probability under such influence Adonis’ disdain of the goddess of beauty became the central motive of his first poem.
There was much material at Shakespeare’s hand which may well have encouraged him to develop Marlowe’s hint. Another popular tale which was wholly concerned with a youth’s disdain of a beautiful woman’s embraces was accessible to him, and it was easy to graft its main features on the legend of Venus and Adonis. Ovid before he approached the tale of Venus and Adonis in his *Metamorphoses* had elaborated the less conventional topic in the tale of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. That story of Ovid had attracted attention in Elizabethan England. It had been rendered independently into loose pedestrian English rhyme by one Thomas Peend. His *Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis... With a morall in English verse* was published in a small octavo in 1565.¹ But there was little in Peend’s doggerel to serve Shakespeare’s purpose. There was far more in Golding’s literary rendering of Ovid’s tale. But Shakespeare clearly supplemented that source by another.
It is of great importance to bear in mind that some four years before the publication of Venus and Adonis, an Elizabethan poet, Thomas Lodge, presented with much exuberant and original detail a different hero’s disdain of a different heroine’s advances. In 1589 appeared Lodge’s narrative
¹ A freer version followed at a later date, and has been very doubtfully assigned to Francis Beaumont, the dramatist. This was first published anonymously under the title of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in 1602. It is in heroic verse and is of much literary interest. The rare copy in the Bodleian Library was reprinted in the *Shakespeare Society Papers* (1847), vol. iii. pp. 94–126. In Cranley’s *Amanda* (1635), Shakespeare’s *Venus and Adonis* is mentioned with Salmacis and her Hermaphrodite’ among a number of songs of love and sonnets exquisite’.
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VENUS AND ADONIS 33
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