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- VENUS AND ADONIS 29
III
But it was not only the Ovidian outline and Italian The story in
adaptations that Shakespeare assimilated. None had chosen ^"S^^"^-
the legend for independent treatment in England before
Shakespeare. But many Elizabethan poets of earlier date
had made incidental reference to the tale, and had laid special
stress on features of it which Shakespeare seems to have
elaborated in emulation of them.
Spenser in his Elegy on Sir Philip Sidney adapts the details Spenser's
of the fable to his special purpose. Spenser figuratively ofTtTiTs^J)
credited his hero with Adonis' precise manner of death.
'AstropheP is slain in the chase by 'a cruel beast ', who inflicts
a wound in his thigh, and his corpse is metamorphosed into
a flower. Spenser, too, sets on the lips of Sidney's lady-
love Stella the pathetic lamentation which poetic tradition
assigned to Venus on the discovery of Adonis' dead body.
Spenser's description of the flow of blood from the boar's
fatal thrust, and the transformation of the fair white corpse
into a flower <•both red and blue ', anticipate Shakespeare's
account of how
in his blood that on the ground lay spill'd,
A purple flower sprung up.
The
curious identity of
tone,
as
well
as
of
topic, can
only be
appreciated by
a
close
study
of the
two
poems
side
by
side.
The
metre
of Spenser's Astrophel^
moreover,
was
that
adopted
by Shakespeare
in his
poem
o^ Venus and
Adonu. Many
a
critic
might
be forgiven
if
he
mistook
such
a
stanza
as
the
following
of which only one copy — in the Bodleian Library — is known (cf. reprint in
Some Longer 'Elizabethan Voems^ ed. A. H. Bullen, Constable's edition of Arber's
English Garner, 1903, pp. 125, i4()). But the Italian version of Tarchagnota
has far closer affinity to Shakespeare's treatment of the incident, than the
English translation of the Thcocritcan idyll or Minturnus' epigram.
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