Let base conceited wits admire vile things,
Fair Phœbus lead me to the Muses’ springs!
[75b] Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis, by James P. Reardon, in ‘Shakespeare Society’s Papers,’ iii. 143-6. Cf. Lodge’s description of Venus’s discovery of the wounded Adonis:
Her daintie hand addrest to dawe her deere,
Her roseall lip alied to his pale cheeke,
Her sighs and then her lookes and heavie cheere,
Her bitter threates, and then her passions meeke;
How on his senseles corpse she lay a-crying,
As if the boy were then but new a-dying.
In the minute description in Shakespeare’s poem of the chase of the hare (ll. 673-708) there are curious resemblances to the Ode de la Chasse (on a stag hunt) by the French dramatist, Estienne Jodelle, in his Œuvres et Meslanges Poétiques, 1574.
[77a] Rosamond, in Daniel’s poem, muses thus when King Henry challenges her honour:
But what? he is my King and may constraine me;
Whether I yeeld or not, I live defamed.
The World will thinke Authoritie did gaine me,
I shall be judg’d his Love and so be shamed;
We see the faire condemn’d that never gamed,
And if I yeeld, ’tis honourable shame.
If not, I live disgrac’d, yet thought the same.
[77b] Watson makes this comment on his poem or passion on Time, (No. lxxvii.): ‘The chiefe contentes of this Passion are taken out of Seraphine [i.e. Serafino], Sonnet 132:
Col tempo passa[n] gli anni, i mesi, e l’hore,
Col tempo le richeze, imperio, e regno,
Col tempo fama, honor, fortezza, e ingegno,
Col tempo giouentù, con beltà more, &c.’
Watson adds that he has inverted Serafino’s order for ‘rimes sake,’ or ‘upon some other more allowable consideration.’ Shakespeare was also doubtless acquainted with Giles Fletcher’s similar handling of the theme in Sonnet xxviii. of his collection of sonnets called Licia (1593).
[79] ‘Excellencie of the English Tongue’ in Camden’s Remaines, p. 43.