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- ¹ This piece was reprinted—for the third time in three years—in England’s Helicon, in 1600. Jaggard’s version was there followed, and it may have been transferred direct from The Passionate Pilgrim. It is succeeded in England’s Helicon, as in Jaggard’s miscellany, by ‘My flocks feed not’. But the editor of England’s Helicon bestowed on Biron’s verses the new heading ‘The Passionate Shepherds Song’, and subscribed them with the name ‘W. Shakespeare’.
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THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM 27
embody reminiscences of Shakespeare’s narrative poem, but none show any trace of his workmanship.
All treat of Venus’ infatuation for Adonis and of Adonis’ bashful rejection of her advances. The insistence on the boyish modesty of Adonis is largely Shakespeare’s original interpretation of the classical fable, and the emphasis newly laid upon the point in Jaggard’s sonnets seems to indicate the source of their inspiration. No. IX, ‘Faire was the morne, when the faire Queene of Love,’ develops Venus’ warning against the boar-hunt. No. XI, ‘Venus with Adonis sitting by her,’ works up ll. 97–114 in Shakespeare’s poem, where Venus describes how she had been wooed by ‘the stern and direful god of war’. In the two other sonnets (Nos. IV and VI) which open the series in Jaggard’s volume, hints have been sought outside Shakespeare’s poem, but the reference to Adonis in Shakespeare’s *Taming of the Shrew* appears to have given the sonneteer his leading cue. No. IV (‘Sweet Cytherea sitting by a Brooke’) and No. VI (‘Scarse had the Sunne dride vp the deawy morne’), in both of which the goddess is called Cytherea and is pictured by a brook, read like glosses on the passage in Shakespeare’s *Taming of the Shrew* (Ind. Sc. 2, ll. 52–3), which tells of
Adonis painted by a running brook
And Cytherea all in sedges hid.
The episode of Adonis bathing, with which the second of these two sonnets deals, is unnoticed in Shakespeare’s poem.
Of only two of these four poems is any trace found outside *The Passionate Pilgrim*. An early manuscript copy of No. IX was at one time in Halliwell[-Phillipps]’s possession. It gives a different and very tame version of ll. 2–4. The manuscript reading runs:—
D 2
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28
THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM
Faire was the morne when the faire Queen of Loue,
*Hoping to meet Adonis in that place,*
*Address her early to a certain groove,*
*Where he was wont ye savage Beast to chase.*
No. XI and B. Griffin’s *Fidessa*, 1596.
Of No. XI alone (‘Venus with Adonis sitting by her’) is the authorship determinable beyond doubt. With verbal differences, the sonnet was already included in an ample collection entitled ‘*Fidessa*. . . . by B. Griffin Gent.’, which had been published three years before, in 1596. It filled the third place in Griffin’s little array of sixty-two quatorzains. The textual variations again point to Jaggard’s dependence for his version on a private transcript. Apart from such differences as ‘the warlike god’, in *The Passionate Pilgrim*, for ‘the wanton god’ in *Fidessa*, or ‘she clasped Adonis’ for ‘she clipt Adonis’, the two texts entirely disagree in regard to ll. 7–12. Jaggard presents them thus:—
> Euen thus (quoth she) the warlike god unlac’t me,
> As if the boy should vse like louing charmes;
> Euen thus (quoth she) he seized on my lippes,
> And with her lips on his did act the seizure:
> And as she fetched breath, away he skips,
> And would not take her meaning nor her pleasure.
In Griffin’s printed volumes of 1596 the passage runs thus:—
> But he a wayward boy refusde her offer,
> And ran away, the beautious Queene neglecting:
> Showing both folly to abuse her proffer,
> And all his sex of cowardise detecting.
> Oh that I had my mistres at that bay,
> To kisse and clippe me till I ranne away.
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