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- VENUS AND ADONIS 27
The sun's rising or falling rays constantly illumine Shake-
speare's story, which opens in the dawn of a summer's day.*
The sunlit atmosphere, no less than the flower-strewn grove,
seems redolent of an Italian origin.
There are indeed other and more definite accretions to
the classical legend, both in Shakespeare and the Italian
poets, which seem to indicate loans levied by the English
poet on his foreign predecessors. The impressive execration
of death which Shakespeare puts into Venus' mouth has
the true ring of poetic fervour, and bears the stamp of the
Shakespearean mint (11. 931-5-4, 991-1002). But Shakespeare
appears there to work up an episode in the Italian poem
of Tarchagnota, who set on Venus' lips an impassioned
complaint, in a like number of lines, of the blind cruelty
of the hard-favoured Tyrant (Stanzas liv-lix). ' Tu morte
crudel,' ' o cosa mostruosa e strana,' cries the Venus of the
Italian poet at the thought of Adonis' loss; Death, she
sorrowfully reflects, destroys the pleasure of mortal life as
suddenly as it devours the beauty of the flowers of the
field. The sentiment is clothed by the Venus of Shakespeare
in richer language, yet it is doubtful if it would have had
its precise place in the English poem's machinery, but for
the Italian suggestion.^ Again, Venus' final retractation in
* Cf. Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face
Had
ta'en his
last
leave
of the
weeping
morn.
(II.
i-i.)
A
Summers's day
will
seem
an hour
but
short
(1.
23.)
And Titan, tired in the midday heat,
With burning eye did hotly overlook them. (II. 177-8.)
The sun ariseth in his majesty :
Who doth the world so gloriously behold
That cedar-tops and hills seem burnish'd gold. (11. Sffi'-S.)
' In introducing Venus' apostrophe to Death, the Italian poets themselves
developed a very slight and bare hint in Bion's Lament^ where Venus is made
to describe Adonis as ' journeying to Acheron, that hateful king and cruel '
{(TTvyvov Pa(ri.Xrja Kal aypiov). D 2
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