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- 16 VENUS AND ADONIS
he had learned something of them is a proposition that is
hard to refute. In any case it is desirable to indicate briefly
the distribution of the story in the literature of the European
Renaissance, not merely because the attempt does not seem to
have been made before, but because only thus is Shakespeare's
work, whatever its precise measure of indebtedness, set in its
rightful place in the broad current of contemporary thought
and aspiration. Shakespeare's achievements are commonly
treated in isolation — as work detached from the great
movements of his epoch. In many instances the supreme
quality and individuality of his genius may largely justify
the critic in ignoring the links that bind the poet to his era.
But in the case of Venus and Adonis^ no such transcendent
merits are in question. He writes on a lofty level. But
the plane along which he moves is that in which many
others of the century had their being, and his literary no
less than his historic position is misrepresented, when the
similar work of those who wrote a generation or two before
him, or at the same time as he, is passed by in silence.
The Greek xhc story of Vcuus and Adonis, which had its source in
Adonis. Phoenician or Assyrian mythology, was absorbed at an early
period by the religion of Greece. The earliest poems in
honour of Adonis, the beloved of Venus, who was pre-
maturely slain in a boar-hunt, were elegiac hymns written to
be sung at an annual religious festival commemorative of the
youth's sad death.* Sappho and Praxilla wrote such lyrics
' The compilers of the Vulgate version of the Old Testament intro-
duced areference to the familiar Adonaic festival. Cf. * Et introduxit me per
ostium portae domus Domini, quod respiciebat ad Aquilonem : et ecce ihi mulieres
sedeBa7it plangent es Adonidem ' (Ezek. viii. 14.). The Hebrew text reads
Thammuz, the god of light. According to the story as it was ultimately
incorporated into the religion of Greece and of all the lands by the shore of the
Eastern Mediterranean, Adonis, after his wooing by Aphrodite (Venus) and his
physical death in the boar-hunt, was suffered, at the earnest entreaty of the
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