Having bought love with such a bloody spoil.

KING RICHARD

Look what is done cannot be now amended.

Men shall deal unadvisedly sometimes,

Which after-hours gives leisure to repent.

If I did take the kingdom from your sons,

To make amends I’ll give it to your daughter.

If I have killed the issue of your womb,

To quicken your increase I will beget

Mine issue of your blood upon your daughter.

A grandam’s name is little less in love

Than is the doting title of a mother.

They are as children but one step below,

Even of your mettall, of your very blood:

Of all one pain, save for a night of groans

Endured of her for whom you bid like sorrow.

Your children were vexation to your youth,

But mine shall be a comfort to your age.

The loss you have is but a son being king,

And by that loss your daughter is made queen.

I cannot make you what amends I would,

Therefore accept such kindness as I can.

Dorset your son, that with a fearful soul

Leads discontented steps in foreign soil,

This fair alliance quickly shall call home

To high promotions and great dignity.

The king that calls your beauteous daughter wife,

Familiarly shall call thy Dorset brother.

Again shall you be mother to a king,

And all the ruins of distressful times

Repaired with double riches of content.

What? We have many goodly days to see.

The liquid drops of tears that you have shed

Shall come again, transformed to orient pearl,

Advantaging their loan with interest

Of ten times double gain of happiness.

Go then, my mother, to thy daughter go.

Make bold her bashful years with your experience.

Prepare her ears to hear a wooer’s tale.

Put in her tender heart th’aspiring flame

Of golden sovereignty. Acquaint the Princess

With the sweet silent hours of marriage joys.

And when this arm of mine hath chastised

The petty rebel, dull-brained Buckingham,

Bound with triumphant garlands will I come

And lead thy daughter to a conqueror’s bed—

To whom I will retail my conquest won,

And she shall be sole victoress: Caesar’s Caesar.

QUEEN ELIZABETH

What were I best to say? Her father’s brother

Would be her lord? Or shall I say her uncle?

Or he that slew her brothers and her uncles?

Under what title shall I woo for thee,

That God, the law, my honour, and her love

Can make seem pleasing to her tender years?

VENUS AND ADONIS

WITH Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare made his debut in print: his signature appears at the end of the formal dedication to the Earl of Southampton in which the poem is described as ‘the first heir of my invention’—though Shakespeare had already begun to make his mark as a playwright. A terrible outbreak of plague, which was to last for almost two years, began in the summer of I592, and London’s theatres were closed as a precaution against infection. Probably Shakespeare wrote his poem at this time, perhaps seeing a need for an alternative career. It is an early example of the Ovidian erotic narrative poems that were fashionable for about thirty years from 1589; the best known outside Shakespeare is Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, written at about the same time.

Ovid, in Book I0 of the Metamorphoses, tells the story of Venus and Adonis in about seventy-five lines of verse; Shakespeare’s poem—drawing, probably, on both the original Latin and Arthur Golding’s English version (I565-7)—is I,I94 lines long. He modified Ovid’s tale as well as expanding it. In Ovid, the handsome young mortal Adonis returns the love urged on him by Venus, the goddess of love. Shakespeare turns Adonis into a bashful teenager, unripe for love, who shies away from her advances. In Ovid, the lovers go hunting together (though Venus chases only relatively harmless beasts, and advises Adonis to do the same); in Shakespeare, Adonis takes to the hunt rather as a respite from Venus’ remorseless attentions. Whereas Ovid’s Venus flies off to Cyprus in her dove-drawn chariot and returns only after Adonis has been mortally wounded, Shakespeare’s anxiously awaits the outcome of the chase. She hears the yelping of Adonis’ hounds, sees a bloodstained boar, comes upon Adonis’ defeated dogs, and at last finds his body. In Ovid, she metamorphoses him into an anemone; in Shakespeare, Adonis’ body melts away, and Venus plucks the purple and white flower that springs up in its place.

Shakespeare’s only addition to Ovid’s narrative is the episode (259-324) in which Adonis’ stallion lusts after a mare, so frustrating Adonis’ attempt to escape Venus’ embraces. But there are many rhetorical elaborations, such as Venus’ speech of attempted seduction (95-1174), her disquisition on the dangers of boar-hunting (6I3-7I4), her metaphysical explanation of why the night is dark (72I-68), Adonis’ reply (769-8I0), culminating in his eloquent contrast between lust and love, and Venus’ lament over his body (I069-II64).

Venus and Adonis is a mythological poem whose landscape is inhabited by none but the lovers and those members of the animal kingdom—the lustful stallion, the timorous hare (679-708), the sensitive snail (I033-6), and the savage boar—which reflect their passions. The boar’s disruption of the harmony that existed between Adonis and the animals will, says Venus, result in eternal discord: ‘Sorrow on love hereafter shall attend’ (II36).

In Shakespeare’s own time, Venus and Adonis was his most frequently reprinted work, with at least ten editions during his life, and another half-dozen by I636. Like his other non-dramatic works, it was not included in the Folio of I623. It fell out of fashion until Coleridge wrote enthusiastically about it in Biographia Literaria (I8I7). Though its conscious artifice may limit its appeal, it is a brilliantly sophisticated erotic comedy, a counterpart in verbal ingenuity to Love’s Labour’s Lost; the comedy of the poem, like that of the play, is darkened and deepened in its later stages by the shadow of sudden death.