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Saturday, November 08, 2025

Shakespeare and Joshua Sylvester (or Maybe Not).

Sidney Lee introduced the theory, in his French Renaissance in England (1910), that Shakespeare's description of Adonis's horse, in the 1593 poem Venus and Adonis, was too close to a similar description in Joshua Sylvester's Divine Weekes and Workes to be mere coincidence.

With Sylvester's faithful translation (1613 ed., pp. 286-8) of Du Bartas's account of a 'goodly jennet' (ce beau Ienet) may well be compared Shakespeare's animated description of a ' courser ' catching sight of a 'jennet' in Venus and Adonis (lines 271-4, 295-8 , 301-4) . Shakespeare probably consulted the French text.1

The edition of Sylvester's work that Lee referenced was published in 1613, twenty years after the publication of Shakespeare's poem, therefore Lee suggested that the similarity must have come from Shakespeare reading the original by Du Bartas, published in two parts in 1578 and 1584. He was one of a modest number of scholars, at that point, that credited Shakespeare with being able to read French fluently.

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas's poetic account of the creation of the world, entitled  La Sepmaine; ou, Creation du monde (1578) and a second week, La Seconde Semaine (1584, additions and revisions published until 1590), intended to give an account of mankind's life after being expelled from the Garden of Eden, were immediately enormously popular. Du Bartas died in 1590, without completing the second week.

Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis was published in 1593. The line in question reads “Thin mane, thicke taile, broad buttock, tender hide”. It could arguably be a condensation from several lines describing Cain's horse in La Seconde Semaine.

Sylvester was born about 1563.2 An uncle of some wealth paid for some three years of schooling, at Southampton grammar school. At that time the school's head master required the students to speak only french. The master left after those years and there is no further record of Sylvester's life until the title page of his first published work — a translation of Du Bartas's Canticle of the Victorie obteined by the French King, Henrie the Fourth, at Yvry (1591) — identified him as a member of the Company of Merchant-Adventurers.

Not pleased to make his living as a member of the Company, he was attempting to improve his lot through dedications to various written works — predominantly, translations from the works of Du Bartas. Reference appears in the Stationers' Registers to his Du Bartas' Week in 15913. His Salustius Du Bartas his weeke or Seven Dayes work is formally entered on May 25, 1594.4 An Essaie of the second weeke of the noble Learned and Divine Salustius Du Bartas was entered in 1598.5

The work initially appeared, Alexander Grosart informs us, in a number of “fragmentary issues,” at first, with “dateless title-pages”. These fragmentary issues are not publicly available. They began to be gathered together in 1605, as a single work, and were so often reprinted thereafter as to make clear their great popularity.

Unbeknownst to Lee, then, portions of Sylvester's translation were being circulated as early as 1591 or even slightly before. Shakespeare could have seen it before the publication of Venus and Adonis in 1593. The passage in Sylvester, however, is given in the Second Week, which is entered in the Stationers in 1598, thus unlikely to have been available before 1593. Some have suggested that Sylvester's description of the horse, from Du Bartas, could have been influenced by Shakespeare's poem instead.

Thus begins our meandering journey back and forth through the 15th century Florentine court of Lorenzo de' Medici, stopping briefly at the works of Rabelais, of Matteo Boiardo, various 16th century Italian and English penmen, and Du Bartas's original Semaines. All of this arriving, in the end, at a shocking new finding regarding Shakespeare.

Stratfordian scholars at large, needing an English language model for Shakespeare's description of Adonis's horse, in the poem Venus and Adonis, needed first to quash Lee's suggestion that the uneducated Shakespeare's model was from Du Bartas's original Semaines. To this end, it was soon pointed out that Shakespeare and Sylvester both described their hero's exemplary horse as having a “thin mane”. But Du Bartas's original did not. Sylvester had chosen to translate “Sur qui flotte un long poil crespement espandu” as “Whereon a long, thin, curled mane doth flow.” Perhaps because the french “poil” can refer to short hair which he interpreted to mean “thin”.

Once the thin mane became the main point of identification, it was noted that numerous works were potential matches. Thomas Blundeville’s Arte of Ryding, in particular, contained a similar list of features of the exemplary horse with a thin mane. Not only that but the book was published in 1560 — leaving Shakespeare time to read it before he began his own list during the composition of Venus and Adonis.

Then, as so often happens in these matters, irony struck. Blundeville's book was by-and-large a translation from the Italian of Frederigo Grisone's Gli Ordini Di Cavalcare (1550). The Ordini, it turns out was the source for Du Bartas's description of Cain's horse in the fourth day of the Seconde Semaine. Du Bartas followed Grisone closely yet he has no “thin mane”. Somehow the thin mane skipped from Grisone, past Du Bartas, and reappeared in Sylvester.

Du Bartas, however, was not translating Grisone's work but co-opting only individual items from it's list of superior characteristics of the horse, toward an original work of poetry. Himself not an expert horseman but rather a poet, he needed an impressive description of Cain's horse. Grisone's “thin mane” didn't make the cut, as it were.

As for Blundeville, he recommends a horse with a “crisp mane,” in accordance with the Grisone quote above, garnishing it with the observation that “the creast whereof neither too thick nor too thin”6. Elsewhere he gives “his mane would be thin and long, albeit I do not mislike the opinion of those that would have it to be thicke”7. In fine, both Grisone and Blundeville could equally be cited as the source of a thin or a thick mane.

Those who have done surveys of the matter inform us that thick manes were more often approved in medieval literature and thin in Tudor times. It was a common topic.

But the irony does not end with translations of Grisone that don't keep his “thin mane” which somehow, nonetheless, skips a generation in order to appear in Sylvester's translation and Venus and Adonis. There is another passage in which the mane of Adonis's horse is mentioned:

His eares up prickt, his braided hanging mane

Upon his compast crest now stand on end,8

Edmund Malone, in the 1821 edition of his variorum Shakespeare, notes that the verb “stand” implies the noun “mane” is a plural: “Our author uses mane, as composed of many hairs, as plural.”9 Of course, Grisone, writing in Italian, does the same in the key passage that Du Bartas left out: “I crini rari... crespi”10. In English “mane” is always a singular noun, in Italian it can be “crini,” a plural noun .



1Lee, Sidney. French Renaissance in England (1910). 337n.

2The details of Joshua Sylvester's life, here, are almost entirely taken from Alexander Grosart's two volume Complete Works (1880) of the poet. No other biographical information seems to have been discovered — only bibliographical.

3 Arber, Edward. Transcript of the Stationers' Registers (1875). II.278. “Entred for his Copie vnder th [e h]andes Of master Judson and master Watkyns a book in English Entituled, SALUSTIUS DU BARTAS his weeke or Seren Dayee woork. August 14, 1591.”

4Grosart, Alexander. Complete Works of Joshuah Sylvester (1880). I.xii. Citing Arber. “Entred for his Copie vnder thandes of master Judson and master Watkyns a book in English Entituled, Salustius Du Bartas his weeke or Seven Dayes work, 25th May, 1594: Edward Blunt.”

5Grosart, Alexander. Complete Works of Joshuah Sylvester (1880). I.xii. “A booke Called An Essaie of the second weeke of the noble Learned and Divine Salustius Du Bartas: Translated by Josua Siluester 1598, vjd. Provided that this entrance shall not be effectuall if any other have right to this booke by any former entrance.”

6 Blundeville, 6.

7 Ibid. 3. A correct translation of Grisone's “non vitupero l’opinion di chi vuole che siano folti,” etc. @ viii.

8 Rollins, Hyder Edward. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: the Poems (1938). 33.

9 The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare. XX.26.

10Grisone, Frederigo. Gli Ordini di Cavalcare (1550). viii. “the mane thin... crisp”.



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