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VENUS
AND
ADONIS
Marlowe's genius exercised a powerful fascination over Shake-
speare's youth, and in all probability under such influence
Adonis' disdain of the goddess of beauty became the central
motive of his first poem.
There was much material at Shakespeare's hand which
may well have encouraged him to develop Marlowe's hint.
Another popular tale which was wholly concerned with
a youth's disdain of a beautiful woman's embraces was
accessible to him, and it was easy to graft its main features on
the legend of Venus and Adonis. Ovid before he approached
the tale of Venus and Adonis in his Metamorphoses had
elaborated the less conventional topic in the tale of
The story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus. That story of Ovid had
Saimacisand attracted attention in Elizabethan England. It had been
dims. rendered independently into loose pedestrian English rhyme
by one Thomas Peend. His Pleasant Fable of Hermaphroditus
and Salmacis. . . . With a morall in English verse was published
in a small octavo in is<^f^ But there was little in Peend's
doggerel to serve Shakespeare's purpose. There was far more
in Golding's literary rendering of Ovid's tale. But Shakespeare
clearly supplemented that source by another.
It is of great importance to bear in mind that some four
years before the publication of Venus and Adonis^ an Eliza-
bethan poet, Thomas Lodge, presented with much exuberant
and original detail a different hero's disdain of a different
Lodge's heroine's advances. In 15-89 appeared Lodge's narrativeG Uncus and
Scilla, 1589. * A freer version followed at a later date, and has been very doubtfully
assigned to Francis Beaumont, the dramatist. This was first published anony-
mously under the title of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in idoz. It is in heroic
verse and is of much literary interest. The rare copy in the Bodleian Library
was reprinted in the Shakespeare Society Fapers (184.7), ^°^* ^^^* PP* 94--i^<^»
In Cranley's A7na7tda (1^55), Shakespeare's Venus and Adoiiis is mentioned
< with Salmacis and her Hermaphrodite ' among a number of * songs of love
and sonnets exquisite*.
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