INTRODUCTION ΤΟ VENUS AND ADONIS. THE first edition of VENUS AND ADONIS was a quarto pain phlet of twenty-seven leaves, the latter part of the title-page reading thus: "London. Imprinted by Richard Field, and are to be sold at the sign of the white Greyhound in Paul's Church-yard. 1593." On the 18th of April, 1593, the poem was entered at the Stationers' by Field, as "his copy, licensed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Wardens." A second edition was made by the same publisher in 1594. There were also editions of it, by John Harrison in 1596 and 1600, and by William Leake in 1602. After this time it was often republished, and copies are known, bearing the dates of 1616 and 1620. It was also printed at Edinburgh by John Wreittoun in 1627. This frequency of publication sufficiently witnesses the great popularity of the poem. It is often alluded to, also, by the Poet's contemporaries, and in such terms as show it to have been a general favourite. Meres, in his Wit's Treasury, 1598, speaks of it thus: "As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honeytongued Shakespeare: witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends." What use was sometimes made of it, may be inferred from Sharpe's Noble Stranger, 1640, where Pupillus exclaims, -"O, for the book of Venus and Adonis, to court my mistress by!' The tenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, as translated by Arthur Golding, probably furnished Shakespeare the story of Venus and Adonis. Golding's translation was first published complete in 1567, and reissued in 1572, 1584, 1587, and 1593; so that it must have had a large circulation when the poem was written. The Poet evidently worked upon the plan of concentrating all the interest on the passion of the goddess, and took only so much of the story as would directly serve this end. His treatment of the subject is eminently original and inventive; his genius playing with, perhaps, al' the freedom it could find out of the Drama, where alone he could be thoroughly at home. The story is also briefly told in Spenser's description of the tapestry of Castle Joyous, and in The Shepherd's Song of Venus and Adonis, by Henry Consta ble, published in England's Helicon, 1600. But Shakespeare's nзe and treatment of the subject are altogether different from Spenser's. Constable was not known as a poet till 1594, when his Diana was published; and, as The Shepherd's Song was not included in that collection, we may presume that it had not then been written. In the dedication of Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare speaks of it as "the first heir of his invention;" yet he had then become so distinguished in the Drama as to be squibbed by Robert Greene, and patronized by the Earl of Southampton. The greater part of Greene's squib is quoted in our Life of the Poet, Chapter iii. Whether Shakespeare dated the heirship of his poem from the time of writing or of publishing, is uncertain: probably the former; and if so, then of course it must have been written several years before 1593. The general opinion refers the composition of the poem to the period before he left Stratford; but this is a point on which we are without evidence of any sort either way. The merit of Venus and Adonis, and indeed of the author's poems generally, sinks into littleness beside that of his dramas. We have already seen how great was its contemporary popularity. This excessive applause was followed by a long period of undue neglect or depreciation; but in later times the fashion has rather Deen to overpraise it. Hazlitt, who wrote at the time when this fashion was at its height, and who could hardly see an extrav agance in one direction without becoming equally extravagant in the opposite, delivers himself on the subject as follows: "In his plays, Shakespeare was as broad and casing as the general air:' in his poems, on the contrary, he appears to be coop'd and cab in'd in' by all the technicalities of art, by all the petty intricacies of thought and language which poetry had learned from the controversial jargon of the schools, where words had been made a substitute for things. His imagination, by identifying itself with the strongest characters in the most trying circumstances, grappled at once with nature, and trampled the littleness of art under its feet the rapid changes of situation, the wide range of the universe, gave him life and spirit, and afforded full scope to his gei ius; but, returned into his closet again, and having assumed the badge of his profession, he could only labour in his vocation, and conform himself to existing models." In this extract, the writer, as usual, has a knack of suggesting the truth while departing from it. Hazlitt is comparing the poems, not with the dramas written at or near the same time, but with those of a much later date, when the Poet, after working by "ex isting models," had constructed an art of his own. In his poems |