Poems. Sonnets

A sixth edition, also printed for Jackson, was issued in 1624.

The fifth and sixth editions differ considerably in their readings from the first four, in which there are no important variations.

A Lover's Complaint was first printed, so far as we know, in the first edition of the Sonnets, which appeared in 1609. The Passionate Pilgrim was first published in 1599, with the following title-page :

In the middle of sheet C is a second title:

SONNETS To sundry notes of Musicke. | AT LONDON | Printed for W. Iaggard, and are to be sold by W. Leake, at the Grey- | hound in Paules Churchyard.

The book was reprinted in 1612, together with some poems by Thomas Heywood, the whole being attributed to Shakespeare. The title at first stood thus:

The Bodleian copy of this edition contains the following note by Malone: "All the poems from Sig. D. 5 were written by Thomas Heywood, who was so offended at Jaggard

for printing them under the name of Shakespeare that he has added a postscript to his Apology for Actors, 4to, 1612, on this subject; and Jaggard in consequence of it appears to have printed a new title-page to please Heywood, without the name of Shakespeare in it. The former title-page was no doubt intended to be cancelled, but by some inadvertence they were both prefixed to this copy and I have retained them as a curiosity."

The corrected title-page is, except in the use of Italic and Roman letters, the same as above, omitting "By W. Shakespere."

It will be observed that this is called the third edition; but no other between 1599 and 1612 is known to exist.

In 1640 a number of the Sonnets, some of the poems from The Passionate Pilgrim, and A Lover's Complaint, together with some translations from Ovid and other pieces evidently not by Shakespeare, were published in a volume with the following title:

The first complete edition of Shakespeare's Poems, including the Sonnets, was issued (according to Lowndes, Bibliographer's Manual) in 1709, with the following title:

A Collection of Poems, in Two Volumes; Being all the Miscellanies of Mr. William Shakespeare, which were Publish'd by himself in the Year 1609, and now correctly Printed from those Editions. The First Volume contains, I. VENUS AND ADONIS. II. The Rape of LUCRECE. III. The Passionate Pilgrim. IV. Some Sonnets set to sundry Notes of Musick. The Second Volume contains One Hundred and Fifty Four Sonnets, all of them in Praise of his Mistress. II. A Lover's Complaint of his Angry Mistress. LONDON: Printed for Bernard Lintott, at the Cross-Keys, between the Two Temple-Gates in Fleet-street.

The Phoenix and the Turtle first appeared, with Shakespeare's name appended to it, in Robert Chester's Loves Martyr: or Rosalins Complaint, published in 1601 (reprinted by the New Shakspere Society in 1878).

The earliest reference to the Venus and Adonis that has been found is in the famous passage in Meres's Palladis Tamia (see M. N. D. p. 9, and C. of E. p. 101). As to the date of its composition, Dowden says (Primer, p. 81): "When Venus and Adonis appeared, Shakspere was twenty-nine years of age; the Earl of Southampton, to whom it was dedicated, was not yet twenty. In the dedication the poet speaks of these 'unpolisht lines' as 'the first heire of my invention.' Did Shakspere mean by this that Venus and Adonis was written before any of his plays, or before any plays that were strictly original-his own 'invention?' or does he, setting plays altogether apart, which were not looked upon as literature, in a high sense of the word, call it his first poem because he had written no earlier narrative or lyrical verse? We cannot be sure. It is possible, but not likely, that he may have written this poem before he left Stratford, and have brought it up with him to London. More probably it was written in London, and perhaps not long before its publication. The year 1593, in which the poem appeared, was a year of plague; the London theatres were closed: it may be that Shakspere, idle in London, or having returned for a while to Stratford, then wrote the poem." Even if begun some years earlier, it was probably revised not long before its publication.

The Lucrece was not improbably the "graver labour promised in the dedication of the Venus and Adonis; and, as Dowden remarks, it "exhibits far less immaturity than does the 'first heire' of Shakspere's invention." It is less likely than that, we think, to have been a youthful production taken up and elaborated at a later date.

A Lover's Complaint was evidently written long after the

Lucrece, but we have no means of fixing the time with any precision.

The Shakespearian poems in The Passionate Pilgrim were of course written before 1599, when the collection was published. The three taken from Love's Labour's Lost must be as early as the date of that play (see our ed. p. 10). If the Venus and Adonis sonnets are Shakespeare's, they may have been experiments on the subject before writing the long poem; but Furnivall says that they are "so much easier in flow and lighter in handling" that he cannot suppose them to be earlier than the poem.

The Phonix and the Turtle is of doubtful authorship, and the date is equally uncertain.

II. THE SOURCES OF THE POEMS.

The story of the Venus and Adonis was doubtless taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which had been translated by Golding in 1567. Shakespeare was probably acquainted with this translation at the time of the composition of The Tempest (see our ed. p. 139, note on Ye elves, etc.); but we have no clear evidence that he made use of it in writing Venus and Adonis. He does not follow Ovid very closely. That poet "relates, shortly, that Venus, accidentally wounded by an arrow of Cupid's, falls in love with the beauteous Adonis, leaves her favourite haunts and the skies for him, and follows him in his huntings over mountains and bushy rocks, and through woods. She warns him against wild boars and lions. She and he lie down in the shade on the grass-he without pressure on her part; and there, with her bosom on his, she tells him, with kisses,* the story of how she helped Hippomenes to win the swift-footed Atalanta, and then, because he was ungrateful to her (Venus), she excited him and his wife to defile a sanctuary by a forbidden

*"And, in her tale, she bussed him among."-A. Golding. Ovid's Met., leaf 129 bk., ed. 1602.

act, for which they were both turned into lions. With a final warning against wild beasts, Venus leaves Adonis. He then hunts a boar, and gets his death-wound from it. Venus comes down to see him die, and turns his blood into a flower - the anemone, or wind - flower, short-lived, because the winds (anemoi), which give it its name, beat it down, SO Islender is it. Other authors give Venus the enjoyment which Ovid and Shakspere deny her, and bring Adonis back from Hades to be with her " (Furnivall).

The main incidents of the Lucrece were doubtless familiar to Shakespeare from his school-days; and they had been used again and again in poetry and prose. "Chaucer had, in his Legende of Good Women (A.D. 1386?), told the story of Lucrece, after those of Cleopatra, Dido, Thisbe, Ypsiphile, and Medea, 'As saythe Ovyde and Titus Lyvyus' (Ovid's Fasti, bk. ii. 741; Livy, bk. i. ch. 57, 58): the story is also told by Dionysius Halicarnassensis, bk. iv. ch. 72, and by Diodorus Siculus, Dio Cassius, and Valerius Maximus. In English it is besides in Lydgate's Falles of Princes, bk. iii. ch. 5, and in Wm. Painter's Palace of Pleasure, 1567, vol. i. fol. 5-7, where the story is very shortly told: the heading is 'Sextus Tarquinius ravisheth Lucrece, who bewailyng the losse of her chastitie, killeth her self.' I cannot find the story in the Rouen edition, 1603, of Boaistuau and Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques, 7 vols. 12mo; or the Lucca edition, 1554, of the Novelle of Bandello, 3 parts; or the Lyons edition, 1573, of the Fourth Part. Painter's short Lucrece must have been taken by himself from one of the Latin authors he cites as his originals at the end of his preface. In 1568, was entered on the Stat. Reg. A, lf. 174, a receipt for 4d. from Jn. Alde 'for his lycense for prynting of a ballett, the grevious complaynt of Lucrece' (Arber's Transcript, i. 379); and in 1570 the like from 'James Robertes, for his lycense for the prynt*Pliny (bk. i. c. 23) says it never opens but when the wind is blowing.

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