Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis Sonnets

Summary

William Jaggard’s anthology The Passionate Pilgrim, published in 1599 and attributed on the title-page to Shakespeare, contains versions of Sonnets 138 and 144 (here numbered i and ii), three poems taken from Love’s Labour’s Lost (iii, v, and xvi), four known to be by other authors (viii, xi, xix, and xx) and eleven of uncertain authorship. The most interesting of the last group are the three sonnets on Venus and Adonis numbered iv, vi, and ix, which obviously are connected in some way with Shakespeare’s poem. Malone suggested that they, and also xi, which is on the same theme, were ‘essays of the author when he first conceived the idea of writing a poem on the subject of Venus and Adonis, and before the scheme of his poem was adjusted’. As xi appears in a different version in Bartholomew Griffin’s Fidessa, published in 1596, most modern critics reject this view, and regard all four as imitations of Venus and Adonis written by Griffin. Dissenters include John Masefield, who considered that iv, vi, and ix ‘have the ring of [Shakespeare’s] freshest youthful manner’, and J. Middleton Murry, who had no doubt that vi at least was written by Shakespeare ‘when the thought of a poem on Venus and Adonis was forming in his mind’. The case for Shakespeare’s authorship of all three has never been fully considered, and deserves re-examination.