VENUS AND ADONIS. Villa miretur vulgus, mihi flavus Apollo OVID. SHAK. XV HISTORICAL NOTICE OF VENUS AND ADONIS. This poem, which our author himself has informed us was his first composition, was entered on the books of the Stationers' Company, April 18th, 1593, and is frequently alluded to by his contemporaries. 'As the soul of Euphorbus,' says Meres, in his Wit's Treasury, 1598, was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet, witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakspeare. Witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece,' &c. Shakspeare had without doubt read the account of Venus and Adonis in the tenth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses translated by Golding, 1567, though he has chosen to deviate from the classical story, which Ovid and Spenser had set before him, following probably the model presented to him by a short piece intitled 'The Sheepheard's Song of Venus and Adonis,' supposed by Malone to have been the production of Henry Constable, and published some time previous to the appearance of this poem; although no earlier copy of it can now be found thau that contained in England's Helicon, 1600. |