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- Reception of Shakespeare's poem.
The reception accorded Shakespeare's work was extraordinarily warm. Reprints were numerous during the remaining twenty-three years of Shakespeare's life. References to it are frequent in contemporary literature, and are couched for the most part in highly commendatory terms. So signal a success is adequately explained by the vigorous freshness of the poem. Subsidiary causes are to be found in the voluptuous treatment of the story, and in a natural affinity,
¹ Of the many long poems written in sixains subsequent to *Venus and Adonis*, it will be sufficient to mention Southwell's *St. Peter's Complaint* (1595), Barnfield's *Affectionate Shepheard* (1594), his *Cassandra* (1595), his *Lady Pecunia* and *Complaint of Poetrie* (1598), J. C.'s *Alcilia* (1595) and Marston's *The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image* (1598). The metre was so common before *Venus and Adonis* came out that it would be unsafe to assume that its vogue was substantially extended by the success of Shakespeare's work. But Barnfield's plagiarisms of Shakespeare's *Venus* are so constant and unblushing that his choice of metre may safely be assigned to the influence of Shakespeare's poem.
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VENUS AND ADONIS 37
which the legend’s previous popularity attested, between the tale and the spirit of the times. A very early critic, the Jesuit Robert Southwell, deplored, from the Christian point of view, the pagan frankness of ‘the first heir’ of Shakespeare’s ‘invention’.
Still finest wits are ‘stilling Venus’ rose,
In Paynim toyes the sweetest vaines are spent.
But the general tone of ingenuous approval may be gauged by Francis Meres’ insistence in 1598 that this and other of the dramatist’s poems proved that ‘the sweete wittie soule of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare’. Next year John Weever, in his enthusiastic sonnet in praise of ‘our honey-tongued Shakespeare’, declared that
Rose-cheek’d Adonis with his amber tresses,
Fair fire-hot Venus charming him to love her
were, with the other issue of his brain, children of Apollo by some heaven-born goddess. The university wit who penned about 1600 the academic plays of *The Pilgrimage to Parnassus* and *The Return from Parnassus* voiced popular opinion when he wrote, ‘Let this duncified world esteem of Spenser and Chaucer; I’ll worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare and to honour him will lay his *Venus and Adonis* under my pillow.’
In the seventeenth century there was a popular tendency to rank *Venus and Adonis* with improper literature and to insist on its erotic tendency.¹ But the essential beauty of
¹ Cf. Middleton’s *A mad world my masters* (1608), where the jealous Harebrain, speaking of his newly-married wife, says, ‘I have conveyed away all her wanton pamphlets, as *Hero and Leander*, *Venus and Adonis*; O, two luscious marrow-bone pies for a young married wife.’ Richard Brathwaite, in *The English Gentlewoman* (1631), includes the poem in a list of ‘books treating
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38 VENUS AND ADONIS
the theme gives small warrant for the degrading classification. Shakespeare himself urged a juster view when he introduced a charming reference to the airy aesthetic significance of the fable in the Induction to *The Taming of The Shrew* (Induction, Sc. 2, ll. 51–5):—
Dost thou love pictures? we will fetch thee straight
Adonis painted by a running brook,
And Cytherea all in sedges hid,
Which seem to move and wanton with her breath,
Even as the waving sedges play with wind.
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