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- VENUS
AND
ADONIS
37
which the legend's previous popularity attested, between the
tale and the spirit of the times. A very early critic, the
Jesuit Robert Southwell, deplored, from the Christian point
of view, the pagan frankness of < the first heir ' of Shake-
speare's 'invention '.
Still finest wits are 'stilling Venus' rose,
In Paynim toyes the sweetest vaines are spent.
But the general tone of ingenuous approval may be gauged
by Francis Meres' insistence in 15-98 that this and other of
the dramatist's poems proved that ' the sweete wittie soule of
Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare '.
Next year John Weever, in his enthusiastic sonnet in praise
of < our honey-tongued Shakespeare ', declared that
Rose-cheek'd Adonis
with
his
amber
tresses,
Fair
fire-hot
Venus charming him
to love
her
,
were, with the other issue of his brain, children of Apollo
by some heaven-born goddess. The university wit who
penned about 1600 the academic plays of The Pilgrimage
to Parnassus and T/je l^eturn from Parnassus voiced popular
opinion when he wrote, 'Let this duncified world esteem
of Spenser and Chaucer ; I'll worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare
and to honour him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my
pillow.'In the seventeenth century there was a popular tendency
to rank Venus and Adonis with improper literature and to
insist on its erotic tendency.* But the essential beauty of
' Cf. Middleton's A mad 'world my masters (kjoS), where the jealous
Harebrain, speaking of his newly-married wife, says, ' 1 have conveyed away
all her wanton pamphlets, as Hero and Leander^ Venus and Adonis ; O, two
luscious marrow-bone pies for a young married wife.' Richard Brathwaite, in
The English Geyttlevjoman (163 1), includes the poem in a list of books treating
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