The Dumbe Knight: Venus and Adonis quoted and referred to by title

Gervase Markham and Lewis Machin’s play The Dumbe Knight, first printed in 1608, both refers to and quotes from Shakespeare’s popular poem Venus and Adonis on folio F1r.

The play comprises two main plots, the second of which concerns the orator Prate’s relationship with his wife, Lollia, who seeks greater wealth and status through an affair with Lord Alphonso. In this latter plot, Veloups and Drap, two of Prate’s clients, seek the orator out in his chamber but find his clerk, Precedent, reading a book he calls “maides Philosophy, or Venus and Adonis,” the “best book in the world” (image 2, fol. F1r) When they ask him to find Prate, Precedent distractedly responds to them in between reciting lines from the poem (lines 229-34 in modern editions). His incoherence seems even funnier when he tells the visitors that Venus and Adonis is “[a] book that neuer an Orators clarke in this kingdome is but beholden vnto.” 

Precedent, excluding asides from Veloups, Drap and himself recites the following lines:

Fondling, said he, since I haue hem’d thee heere,
VVithin the circuit of this Iuory pale.
…
Ile be a parke, and thou shalt be my Deere:
...Feed where thou wilt, in montain or on dale,
...Graze on my lips, and when those mounts are drie,
Stray lower where the pleasant fountaines lie.

Other writers adopted these titillating lines about the deer park as well (without Precedent’s asides to Veloups and Drap). They also appear in a manuscript transcribed by Henry Colling and The Fair Maid of the Exchange.

Katherine Duncan-Jones suggests that, in Markham and Machin’s play, these allusions “have the double effect of paying tribute to Shakespeare’s poem while mocking the simplistic admiration of those who treat it as a sex manual or handbook for wooers” (496), as poor Precedent seems to do.

The Folgers purchased this volume at a Sotheby’s auction on March 20, 1919. Three other copies are held at the British Library, the Huntington Library, and the Houghton Library at Harvard University.  This edition is a reissue of an edition printed in the same year. It has a new title page which attributes the play to Markham and describes it as a “pleasant Comedy” rather than “A historicall comedy.” Only two copies of this earlier edition are known to survive; a single copy of this earlier edition with a variant title page also survives.