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Copy-specific information
Creator: William Shakespeare
Title: Venus. and Adonis.
Date: Imprinted at London : [by R. Bradocke] for William Leake, dwelling in Paules Churchyard, at the signe of the Greyhound, 1599.
Repository: Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, USA
Call number and opening: STC 22358a Bd.w. STC 22341.8, title page & A2r-A2v
View online bibliographic record
Heather Wolfe, "Venus and Adonis, sixth edition," Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/202.
Folger Shakespeare Library, STC 22358a bound with STC 22341.8. See Shakespeare Documented, https://doi.org/10.37078/202.
This 1599 printing is the only surviving copy of the sixth edition of Venus and Adonis, first published in 1593. An early owner bound it with other poetic works, including a 1600 edition of Shakespeare's Lucrece and a fragment of the only surviving copy of the first edition of Passionate Pilgrim (1599).
Although Shakespeare is now known primarily as a playwright, in his own time he was equally revered as the author of Venus and Adonis, first printed in 1593, and Lucrece, his two sensationally successful Ovidian narrative poems. Venus and Adonis appeared in more printed editions than any other work of vernacular poetry in his lifetime, and was published twice as many times as his most successful play, Henry IV Part 1.
To learn more about the plot and early printing history of Venus and Adonis, please visit the Folger Shakespeare Library's Shakespeare's Works; to read a modernized edition of the poem, see the Folger Shakespeare edition.
Written by Heather Wolfe
Last updated June 8, 2020