Ovidian material. The Latin version presents a normal pursuit of a modest maiden Scylla by an impassioned lover Glaucus. Lodge took on himself to reverse the position of the man and woman. His tale tells of the refusal of Glaucus to countenance the lascivious advances of Scilla.' I cannot doubt that Shakespeare was familiar with Lodge's poem, and was influenced by it, inferior though it be to the handiwork of even the immature poet of the Venus and Adonis. Enough has been said of the writings which may possibly have stirred the imagination of Shakespeare when engaged upon his first narrative poem. But, as I have elsewhere written, 'Shakespeare's Poems can be valued aright only when they are viewed in their literary environment, among the works of his contemporaries.' Undoubtedly when so viewed they are seen to take a high rank. The subject of Venus and Adonis might have inspired a great Venetian painter of the Renaissance with a certain enthusiasm. Here was the amorous queen of love in her unclothed beauty; here, the lovely boy whose heart was in the chase, not in amorous entanglements. There was scope in verse for thoughts on sensual passion, on grief, on death, which no painting could fully express. There were occasions for the relief afforded by the prospects and the incidents of external nature, and the sight, present or imagined, of the creatures of the woodland or the plain-the mighty stallion, the boar, the hunted hare, the fawn hid in some brake, the lark mounting from his moist cabinet. But we must judge a poem not merely from the historical point of view; we must endeavour to estimate it at its abiding worth. To me, although Venus and Adonis contains some almost perfect stanzas and many incomparable lines, the poem as a whole appears to be a glittering error of Shakespeare's earlier years. It is a narrative poem which is cloyed with dramatic tirades that are eminently undramatic. Let Coleridge have his word on the one side, and then let Hazlitt appear as devil's advocate, before we grow idolatrous because the poem carries with it the name of our greatest poet. The subject, Coleridge admits, is unpleasing; but for that very reason he thinks it is the more illustrative of Shakespeare; he finds in it the self-detachment of the highest poets: To become all things and yet remain the same,-to make the changeful god be felt in the river, the lion and the flame; this it is that is the true imagination.' And then, etherealizing the frank sensuality of the poem, which is quite in keeping with much of Renaissance art, he adds: 'Shakespeare writes in this poem, as if he were of another planet, charming you to gaze on the movements of Venus and Adonis, as you would on the twinkling dances of two vernal butterflies.' This is exquisitely imagined by Coleridge, but it is the reading of nineteenth-century romanticism, not the interpretation of one who lived in the great age which had produced the inventions of Titian and Tintoretto. To me Venus and Adonis has always seemed a somewhat laborious study of sensual passion, deliberate and overwrought, rather than a poem of genuine youthful rapture, such as we might have obtained from Keats in his earlier years. The two poems of Venus and Adonis and of Tarquin and Lucrece,' wrote Hazlitt,' appear to us like a couple of ice-houses. They are about as hard, as glittering, and as cold. The author seems all the time to be thinking of his verses, and not of his subject,-not of what his characters would feel, but of what he shall say; and as it must happen in all such cases, he always puts into their mouths those things which they would be the last to think of, and which it shows the greatest ingenuity in him to find out. The whole is laboured uphill work. The poet is perpetually singling out the difficulties of the art to make an exhibition of his strength and skill in wrestling with them.' Hazlitt, indeed, fails to perceive that Shakespeare was here following a fashion of his time. Even in the prose Arcadia the narrative wades through a trammelling tangle of deep grasses and flowers; the prose tirades, the endless soliloquies, weary and disenchant the reader. The beauties of phrase, of line, of melody in Venus and Adonis are innumerable. But one who would fain be always in sympathy with a great master cannot but feel disturbed by the frequent intrusion of the judgement, This is not like nature,' and 'This is not like true art'. It brings some soothing to a critic's ruffled self-esteem to read the words of the great lyrical poet of the Victorian age in the General Introduction to this edition of Shakespeare-words with which my slight notice may fitly close: "There are touches of inspiration and streaks of beauty in "Venus and Adonis": there are fits of power and freaks of poetry in the "Rape of Lucrece" but good poems they are not.' VENUS AND ADONIS 'Vilia miretur vulgus ; mihi flavus Apollo TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE HENRY WRIOTHESLEY, EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON, AND BARON OF TICHFIELD. RIGHT HONOURABLE, I KNOW not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolished lines to your lordship, nor how the world will censure me for choosing so strong a prop to support so weak a burthen: only, if your honour seem but pleased, I account myself highly praised, and vow to take advantage of all idle hours, till I have honoured you with some graver labour. But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield me still so bad a harvest. I leave it to your honourable survey, and your honour to your heart's content; which I wish may always answer your own wish and the world's hopeful expecta tion. Your honour's in all duty, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. VENUS AND ADONIS EVEN as the sun with purple-colour'd face Thrice fairer than myself,' thus she began, Nature that made thee, with herself at strife, 'Vouchsafe, thou wonder, to alight thy steed, Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses; And yet not cloy thy lips with loath'd satiety, A summer's day will seem an hour but short, Being so enrag'd, desire doth lend her force 8 12 16 20 24 28 |