success when published in a series of editions, going through some 16 issues before 1640. The tendency in the Renaissance to look back to the ancient world is evident in this work, which is based on a story found in Ovid's Metamorphoses. Ovid seems to have been Shakespeare's favorite Latin poet, one he studied in a translation by Golding from 1567. He seems to have picked up two different stories in Ovid and melded them, for there is no evidence in Ovid of a reluctant youth wooed by the goddess of love, while there is a story of such a passionate wooing by a nymph named Salmacis of the boy, Hermaphroditas:
Apparently he picked up suggestions for this fusion from various contemporary poems which represented Adonis coldly rejecting the advances of Venus. Here, as in his plays, it is not so much Shakespeare's power of invention
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