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- I VENUS AND ADONIS ii
>ut had Shakespeare gone to Ovid alone, his Fenus mid
Adonis would not have taken the shape which is familiar
to us. The scholars of the Renaissance rediscovered in the
sixteenth century the Greek pastoral poetry of Sicily, and
many poets of the Renaissance, while they continued to pay
much deference to Ovid, sought inspiration in Theocritus
and Bion as well. Not Ovid's Metamorphoses alone, but also
Bion's elegy was translated into all the vernacular tongues of
Western Europe, and it was sometimes under the Greek
influence, and sometimes under the Latin, and more often
under the two influences combined, that there came to
birth the massive corpus of poetry on the classical legend in
Italian, French, Spanish, and English.
Through the Renaissance literature of Italy the story in the
spread rapidly. At the end of the fifteenth and at the R^"^"^^"
...
.
poetry
of
beginning of the sixteenth century it was a frequent theme Italy.
in Italy of scholarly Latin verse ', and early in the sixteenth
century it found its way into the vernacular Italian poetry.
The vogue of the story was greatly extended by an Italian
rendering of Bion's elegy (wrongly assigned to Theocritus
under the title of Epitafio di Adone di Teocrito)^ which
appeared in a collection of l^me Toscane in isiS-^ Avery
' Numerous Latin poems on Venus and Adonis by Italian scholars,
including Alciati, Sannazaro, and Minturno, are found in Gruter's Delitiae
Italorum Poetarum^ vol. i, pp. 32, c)0, 1311 ; vol. ii, pp. 713, 5)14, i^^z. In
Fontani Opera^ 1505, an epigram De Adonide et Venere^ p. 10, gives a vivid de-
scription ofnature's grief on Adonis' death ; see also De conversione Adonidts
In citrtum^ p. 13^. Slight reference is made to Adonis by Ariosto in his
Orlando Furioso. He is mentioned under Ovidian influence as a type of
ardent lover. Canto vi. Stanza 57, and as the child of an incestuous union
in Canto xxv, Stanza 7,6.
^ This was first published in Paris in i^r^y and reissued in Venice in
15:38 and i')^'j. The author's name is given on the title-page as Amomo ;
nothing else seems known of him. Cf. F. Flamini's Studi di istoria litteraria
ttaliana e stran'tera^ -^^Jj PP- i^^J^ sq.
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