Читать книгу A Life of William Shakespeare with portraits and facsimiles - Sir Sidney Lee - Страница 73

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During the busy years (1591–4) that witnessed his first pronounced successes as a dramatist, Shakespeare came before the public in yet another literary capacity. On April 18, 1593, Richard Field, the printer, who was his fellow-townsman, obtained a license for the publication of ‘Venus and Adonis,’ a metrical version of a classical tale of love. It was published a month or two later, without an author’s name on the title-page, but Shakespeare appended his full name to the dedication, which he addressed in conventional style to Henry Wriothesley, third earl of Southampton. The Earl, who was in his twentieth year, was reckoned the handsomest man at Court, with a pronounced disposition to gallantry. He had vast possessions, was well educated, loved literature, and through life extended to men of letters a generous patronage. [74] ‘I know not how I shall offend,’ Shakespeare now wrote to him, ‘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 burden. … But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather.’ ‘The first heir of my invention’ implies that the poem was written, or at least designed, before Shakespeare’s dramatic work. It is affluent in beautiful imagery and metrical sweetness, but imbued with a tone of license which may be held either to justify the theory that it was a precocious product of the author’s youth, or to show that Shakespeare was not unready in mature years to write with a view to gratifying a patron’s somewhat lascivious tastes. The title-page bears a beautiful Latin motto from Ovid’s ‘Amores:’ [75a]

Vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo

Pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua.

The influence of Ovid, who told the story in his ‘Metamorphoses,’ is apparent in many of the details. But the theme was doubtless first suggested to Shakespeare by a contemporary effort. Lodge’s ‘Scillaes Metamorphosis,’ which appeared in 1589, is not only written in the same metre (six-line stanzas rhyming a b a b c c), but narrates in the exordium the same incidents in the same spirit. There is little doubt that Shakespeare drew from Lodge some of his inspiration. [75b]