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- VENUS AND ADONIS 23
fifty-four eight-lined stanzas — La Favola d^Adone, He worked
on the simple lines of Tarchagnota, and strictly confined
himself to depicting Venus' passion and Adonis' death.*
The warmth of feeling which is inherent in the legend Marino.
was reflected by Dolce, Tarchagnota, and Parabosco, in the
comparatively sober colours which were characteristic of the
Greek poets. The like restraint is observable in the briefer
Italian poems on the subject which figure in the * Rime '
of Luigi Groto, called Cieco d* Hadrla (Venice, is 7 7)-) and
in L? Adcne^ idillio di Ettore Martinegro (Venice, 1^14).
But ultimately a more famous poet of the Italian Renaissance,
Giovanni Battista Marino, gave freer play to a lascivious
imagination, and wove round the story a voluptuous epic
in twenty cantos, which was again entitled UAdone. Marino,
as an extant letter proves, designed near the outset of his
career a poem of Adonis on the restricted plan which Para-
bosco and Tarchagnota adopted. He also translated anew
Bion's Lament. But the work grew under his hand, and
finally emerged in the prolix and affected collection of mytho-
logical improprieties, which has given him claim to rank
with the chief literary masters of lubricity. Marino's poetry
was well known to Shakespeare's contemporaries % but his epic
^ This was first published at Venice as an appendix to the third book of
Parabosco's I quatro Ubr't delle lettere amorose^ Venice, 15:^1. The literary
work of Parabosco, who died in 1557, ^"^^ o^ Dolce, was not unfamiliar to the
Elizabethans. Watson notes that two of his ' passions ' (Nos. Ixv and c) in
his Hecatompathia (1581) were based on 'the invention of M. GiroJamo
Parabosco', and Drummond of Hawthornden records that in 16^11 he read
Parabosco's Lettere amorose — the volume which includes the poem UAdone.
George Gascoigne's tragedy of Jocasta is a translation of Dolce's version of
Euripides' Vhoenissae^ and Lodge acknowledged that several poems in his
Margarite were written ' in imitation of Dolce, the Italian poet '. I can find no
reference in Elizabethan literature to Tarchagnota.
" As early as 15"^! the poet Daniel issued by way of appendix to the
collection of sonnets, which he entitled Delia, a translation of one of Marino's
poems, which he called The Description of Beauty,
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