Графични страници
PDF файл
ePub

INTRODUCTION

VENUS AND ADONIS was first published in Quarto, in 1593, with the following title-page :

VENUS AND ADONIS | Vilia miretur vulgus: mihi flauus Apollo | Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua. LONDON Imprinted by Richard Field, and are to be sold at the signe of the white Greyhound in Paules Churchyard. 1593.

A second edition followed in 1594; others rapidly succeeded, in 1596, 1599, 1600, 1602. By 1636 there were at least thirteen. Shakespeare dedicated it to the Earl of Southampton, in words that have become famous, as the 'first heir of his invention'; meaning probably that it was the first of his lyrical or narrative Poems, not that it had preceded all his plays. Its production falls without doubt within the three years preceding its appearance. These years were the golden prime of the Tale in Verse. In 1590 the first instalment of the Faerie Queene had set a magnificent and unique example. In the same year Thomas Lodge, a past master of prose romance, told the classic tale of Glaucus and Silla in verse full of Ovidian finesse, and echoing not unskilfully Ovid's fluid melody. A little later, but before 1593, Marlowe was at work upon the fragmentary paraphrase of the tale of Hero and Leander, completed after his death by Chapman, which stands alone in Eliza

bethan narrative verse by its fiery intensity of passion and nervous energy of style. It is hardly doubtful that Shakespeare knew all three. But it was the

second alone which palpably attracted and influenced him. Lodge had used the same six-line stanza, with that pleasant alternation of the quatrain and the couplet which Shakespeare seems to have preferred both to more complex and to more simple arrangements of rhyme; and the little episode on the story of Adonis over which Lodge lingers a while by the way is an essay in the same scheme of colour and in the same effects of verbal melody over which Shakespeare shows so secure a mastery in the poem before us.1

The poet of the Venus and Adonis had clearly drunk deep of the 'honey-tongued' Ovid with whom a few years later Francis Meres compared him. His manner, his melody, are full of Ovidian artifices and expedients. To Ovid's tale of Adonis, however (Metam. bk. x.), he owed very little,-hardly more than the transformation of his slain body into a flower (x. 735). The elementary situation which he found in Ovid he decorates with a profusion of beautiful inventions. His attitude towards the myth he handles is very like Ovid's own-the attitude of the artist not of the thinker; and in his utmost divergences from Ovid he dreams as little as he of that dawn-world of Eastern myth, so effectually obscured by the metallic glitter

1 Here are two stanzas :He that hath seen the sweet Arcadian boy

Wiping the purple from his forced wound,

His pretty tears betokening his

annoy,

His sighs, his cries, his falling on the ground,

The echoes ringing from the rocks his fall,

The trees with tears reporting of his thrall;

And Venus starting at her love-mate's cry,

Forcing her birds to haste her chariot

on,

And full of grief at last with piteous eye,

Seen where all pale with death he lay alone,

Whose beauty quailed, as wont the lilies droop,

When wasteful winter winds do make them stoop.

of the Roman raconteur,-that dawn-world in which Adonis, in alternating seasons lost to Venus and restored to her, symbolised the passing of the life of Nature in autumn and its renewal in spring.

Yet the filling in of the story contains elements quite alien to Ovid. Every critic has dwelt upon the wealth of native observation,-the harvest of an eye not 'quiet' indeed, or brooding, or, as yet, subtle and profound, but marvellously accurate and alert, an eye which apprehends every individual trait and detail with a vividness that at times kills for the moment everything else in the picture. Nothing can exceed in explicit distinctness the descriptions of the horse and of the hunted hare; but the first is a classic example of realism which obscures reality in its eagerness to illuminate every corner of it: the horse is lost in its attributes. Far better is the description of the hare; where a touch as luminous as Ovid's works out effects caught not from his enamel and gold and marble, but from the dewy morning meads on Cotswold or by Avon. Yet there are other touches again not of Naturalism. 'There are,' as Mr. Wyndham has pointed out, 'wilful and half-humorous perversions of Nature. When Shakespeare in praise of

Adonis' beauty says that

To see his face, the lion walked along

Behind some hedge, because he would not fear him,

you feel that you are still in the age which painted St. Jerome's lion and St. Francis preaching to the birds.'1 Yet it is to be noted that these perversions occur in the extravagant laments of Venus. They are not very convincingly dramatic, but they are dramatic in intention, symbols of the hyperbole of mortally wounded passion.

1 G. Wyndham: The Poems of Shakespeare, p. lxxxv.

Venus and Adonis was the famous book of its year, and for the greater part of a generation it remained without a rival in the Elizabethan library Vof choice erotics;-the delight of young lovers, the idol of undergraduates, the vademecum of the bashful wooer, the boudoir-companion of the fashionable courtesan. The chorus of praise first becomes distinct, to our ears, in 1598. Richard Barnfield in that year celebrated Shakespeare (in company with Spenser, Daniel, and Drayton) for his 'hony-flowing Vaine' :

Whose Venus and whose Lucrece (sweet and chaste)
Thy name in Fame's immortall Book have flac't.1

Meres, in the same year, delivered his famous testimony, in nearly similar terms, to 'the mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare,' in whom lives 'the sweet witty soul of Ovid,' as witness 'his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his private friends.' Gullio in the Return from Parnassus (c. 1600) is resolved to have the picture of 'sweet Mr. Shakespeare' in his study at court, and 'to lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillow, as we read of one (I do not remember his name, but I am sure he was a king) slept with Homer under his bed's head.' 'Peele's' poetical Tapster had ingrossed Venus and Adonis among other poetic romances.2 Heywood's Bowdler never read anything but Venus and Adonis ;3 and Sharpe's 'Pupillus' in The Noble Stranger (1640) longed, in the manner of Jonson's Master Stephen, 'for the book of Venus and Adonis to court

1 A Remembrance of some English Poets,' in his Poems in Divers Humors.

2 Merrie Conceited Jests of
Peele died in

George Peele.

1598; but the attribution is for the most part mythical.

3 The Fair Maid of the Exchange, 1607.

« ПредишнаНапред »