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- 12 VENUS AND ADONIS
information under the author's hand as to the chronological
place which the work fills in the long list of his achieve-
ments. Shakespeare, in his letter to the Earl of Southampton,
declares his Venus and Adonis to be « the first heir of my
invention '.
The frank tone of the address to the Earl combines with
evidence from the poem's internal characteristics almost to
compel the critic to interpret those words — < the first heir of
my invention' — in their obvious sense. A difficulty inevit-
ably suggests itself. By the year 15-93, when the poem was
first published, Shakespeare had written at least four
original plays, and had revised as many more by other
hands.' None of these eight plays had yet gone to press,
but such work must have been composed subsequently to ' the
first heir' of the author's < invention', if that phrase is to
be taken quite literally. The needs of the situation are,
however, easily satisfied by the assumption that Venus and
Jdonts was written, or at any rate sketched out, several
years before it was published. The theory, which there is
abundant internal and external testimony to justify, that this
tale in verse was in all essentials the earliest of Shakespeare's
experiments in poetry, does not exclude the likelihood that
it was freshly elaborated before it was printed. There
is indeed ground for the suggestion that the work lay
in manuscript in the author's desk through four or five
summers, during which it underwent occasional change and
amplification.
The tone of Shakcspearc's assurance that the poem was the first-
fruits of his mighty faculty is amply confirmed by its tone
' The four original plays are in my view Love's 'Labour's Lost, Tivo
Gefit/emen of Verona, Comedy of Errors, and Romeo and Juliet ; the four revised
plays are in my view Titus Androntcus and the three parts of Henry VI.
the poem.
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