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- In the eighteenth century, the poem was less frequently issued than might be expected. Few of the great editors deemed the *Venus and Adonis* or any other of Shakespeare’s poems worthy of their notice. The first eighteenth-century reprint, *Venus and Adonis*, written by Mr. Shakespeare,² appeared in 1707 in *Poems on Affairs of State* (vol. iv, pp. 205-44). The text abounds in the corruptions of 1600 and the later issues, and was doubtless reprinted from the chap-book issue of 1675. Nicholas Rowe did not include Shakespeare’s poems in his first critical edition of the plays which Jacob Tonson published in six volumes in 1709. But two publishers independently supplied the omission without delay. The notorious Edmund Curll (with E. Sanger) brought out in 1710 a so-called ‘seventh volume’ of Rowe’s edition containing *Venus and Adonis, Lucrece*, with Shakespeare’s ‘miscellany Poems’, and an essay by Charles Gildon on the history of the stage. A more respectable publisher, Bernard Lintott, brought out, also in 1710, more than one impression of another complete collection of Shakespeare’s poems. This work, which was entitled ‘A Collection of Poems’, first appeared in a single volume, containing *Venus and Adonis, Lucrece*, and *The Passionate Pilgrim*. A second volume, which was published later, added the *Sonnets* and *A Lover’s Complaint*. In one impression of Lintott’s volumes the *Venus and Adonis* is preceded by a separate and subsidiary title-page bearing the date 1609. There was no known edition of the poem issued in that year, and the date may be a misprint for 1709, when Lintott sent the text to press, or it may be a confusion with 1609, the date of the first edition of the *Sonnets*. Other impressions of Lintott’s edition of 1710 give *Venus and Adonis* a title-page dated 1630, in which year an edition was undoubtedly published (see No. XVI). Lintott’s text was liberally corrected in the printing-office, but was apparently based on that of 1630. To Pope’s edition of Shakespeare’s plays, which Jacob Tonson issued without the poems in six volumes (1723-5), a syndicate of booksellers added in 1725 a ‘seventh volume’ giving the poems in Curll’s text under the incom-
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VENUS AND ADONIS 75
petent editorship of Dr. Sewell. Neither Theobald, Hanmer, Dr. Johnson, Warburton, Capell, nor Steevens noticed the poems in their editions of the plays. Capell annotated in manuscript a copy of the Lintott reprint, but the revision remains unpublished in the Capell collection in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1774 J. Bell, a London bookseller, first included the poems in a trade reprint of the plays.¹ In 1780 Malone included the poems in his *Supplement to Johnson and Steevens’ edition of Shakespeare’s Plays of 1778*, and there first attempted a critical recension of the text. They reappeared as a matter of course in Malone’s great edition of the works of Shakespeare, in 1790. It is due to Malone’s example that *Venus and Adonis* and the rest of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic works were finally admitted to the Shakespearean canon. They fill a place in all the nineteenth-century editions of Shakespeare’s works which enjoy a standard repute.
¹ Many so-called collections of Shakespeare’s poems, which were produced by publishers in the middle of the eighteenth century under such titles as *Poems written by Shakespeare*, or *Poems on several occasions by William Shakespeare*, were merely reprints of the 1640 edition of Shakespeare’s *Poems* which contained only the *Seenets* and *Passionate Pilgrim* and omitted Shakespeare’s narrative poems.
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