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Page 175
Her chin, like to a stone in gold inchased,
Seem'd a fair jewel wrought with cunning hand,
And being double, doubly the face it graced.
This goodly frame on her round neck did stand,
Such pillar well such curious work sustain'd.
  And on his top the heavenly sphere up-rearing
  Might well present, with daintier appearing
  A less but better Atlas, that fair heaven bearing.
A few writers in the seventeenth century turned to the more sensational myths, particularly those dealing with obsessions, in part because traditional accounts had already been exploited and in part because of the current trend to sensationalism exemplified in the drama. One such was the actor William Barksted, whose
Myrrha, the Mother of Adonis or Lust's Prodigies
appeared in 1607. Two years later he acted with the Children of the Queen's Revels in Jonson's
Epicene
. Shoddily printed,
Myrrha
shows that Barksted was familiar with the two most important exemplars of the genre, especially in his adopting the Marlovian use of aphorisms and etiological conceits. That he was also familiar with dramatic spectacle is shown by a fine image: "Night like a masque was entered heavens' great hall / With thousand torches ushering the way."
Barksted expands on the Ovidian story of Myrrha's passion for her father following on her two earlier experiences with Orpheus and then with Cupid himself. The chaste reaction of the heroine in those two instances serves to highlight the "infernal and unnamed desire" that Cupid inspires in her"his extrem'st love" now having turned to "direful hate." With the connivance of her nurse, Myrrha sleeps with her father for three nights before he discovers her identity. Fleeing his wrath, she then wanders until the birth of the childthe beauteous Adonisand Myrrha's metamorphosis into the weeping tree that still preserves her name. The poet devotes a few stanzas to Venus's later infatuation for the disdainful youth, who in her view is "not flesh" but rather the "stubborn issue of a tree,'' and then ends with a personal tribute to Shakespeare:
But stay, my Muse, in thine own confines keep
And wage not war with so dear-lov'd a neighbor,
But having sung thy day-song, rest and sleep,
Preserve thy small fame and his greater favor;
His song was worthy merit; Shakespeare, he
Sung the fair blossom, thou the withered tree.
Laurell is due to him; his art and wit
Hath purchased it; cypress thy brow will fit.
 
Page 176
Six years later a second version of the tale appeared, carrying only the initials
H. A
., now assumed to refer to Henry Austin, about whom nothing more is known.
The Scourge of Venus or the Wanton Lady with the Rare Birth of Adonis
was undertaken, according to the address to the reader, simply for its author's pleasure; nevertheless, there were two further issues in 1614 and 1620.
The subject continued to appeal, with one James Gresham in 1626 selecting from the vast reservoir of the
Metamorphoses
to translate (but not to elaborate) this particular story as
The Picture of Incest
. With additions and minor modifications the accounts of all three works remain the same, but the versification is different in each caseBarksted opting for a long rhyming stanza, Austen for sixains, and Gresham for couplets.
James Shirley's epyllion
Narcissus or the Self Lover
was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1618when Shirley was in his early twentiesbut not published until 1640, in a collection of his miscellaneous poems where the poet indicates its earlier composition with the epigraph "
Haec olim
. . ."
What little literary attention has been given to this epyllion, set in a pastoral context, stresses the Shakespearean influence. Echo's wooing of the young hunter parallels that of
Venus and Adonis
and, to some degree, that of Heywood's
Oenone and Paris
; the marked verbal echoes can, as in other cases, be considered the poet's tribute to another's achievement oras some would have itplagiarism. A conspicuous instance appears in the very first line with its unusual epithet for Echo as "sick-thought-ed"like Shakespeare's Venus. The pastoral ambience is similar to Drayton's
Endymion and Phoebe
, but doubtless development of pastoral drama in the first two decades of the seventeenth century also exerted its influence. The Italian text of Guarini's very popular
Pastor Fido
had been published in England in 1591, shortly after its initial appearance in Italy, and translated into English in 1602. As a future dramatist, Shirley was probably familiar with the playeither through the original or the translation; in any case he makes use of the echo motif that Guarini had employed in his drama and that Lodge had used even earlier.
In Shirley's epyllion Echo, the child of Sound and Air, has already lost the power of speech except to make a replya loss brought about because her chatter distracted Juno from noting Jove's amorous escapades. Her favored retreat now is one of hills with flowered passageways and trees "like Nature's arras." When Narcissus finds himself separated from his companions and exclaims, "Where am I?" the
 
Page 177
response comes, "Here am I"; to his "Will no man here?" comes the answer "O man hear."
On finding him asleep, Echo fervently kisses him and steals away, but, sensing her presence, Narcissus hails her, "Thou dost excell, and if a heaven, 'tis clear / That here it is, because thou are not there." Unable at first to answer his queries, she is finally given back her voice and becomes the wooer, offering him a catalogue of promised delights, including this enticement:
Lovely Narcissus, prithee stay with me,
If thou do thirst, from every spring shall rise
Divinest nectar, and thy food shall be
The glorious apples of Hesperides;
  A nymph shall be thy Hebe; if thou need,
  Shalt have another for thy Ganymede.
Narcissus flees nonetheless, stopping only at a goodly springthe very one that served Salmacis and Hemaphroditus. Seeing his reflected beauty, he becomes his "own Idolater," but on recognizing his obsession, he dies, with only a saffron-colored flower to mark the spot.
With Shirley's poem the epyllion may be said to have run its course. It was a genre consonant with young poets writing in the first flush of literary achievement, but, as we have seen, during the 1590s and early 1600s many of these same writers essayed other varieties of narrative poetry. Their concern with historical matters, engendered by the
Mirror for Magistrates
and coupled with the stylistic flare of Ovid, produced the unique amalgam we know as Elizabethan.
Further Reading
Bullough, Geoffrey.
Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare
. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966. [Includes the text of Arthur Brooke's
Tragical Historie of Romeus and Juliet
sources for Shakespeare's
Poems
.]
Bush, Douglas.
Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry
. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1932; rev. ed., New York: Norton, 1963.
Campbell, Lily Bess, ed.
The Mirror for Magistrates
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938.
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