Brittain's Ida or Venus and Anchises: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Brittain's Ida or Venus and Anchises, credited to Edmund Spenser; Phineas Fletcher, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Brittains Ida by Edmund Spenser or Venus and Anchises by Phineas Fletcher. Read in English by Thomas A. Copeland While hunting, the boy Anchises stumbles upon Venus's forest retreat and is so kindly entertained by the goddess that he becomes the proud father of Aeneas, the hero of Vergil's Aeneid. The poem is an epyllion like Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," a short erotic poem with a mythological subject. The style is Spenserian, the stanzas rhyming ababbccc. When Brittain's Ida was published in 1628, the publisher ascribed it to Edmund Spenser. However, in 1926 Ethel Seaton discovered and published Fletcher's original manuscript, whose opening stanzas make clear that this is the work of Fletcher, who entitled it "Venus and Anchises." - Summary by T. A. Copeland

Recording facts

• Recording title: Brittain's Ida or Venus and Anchises
• Author credits: Edmund Spenser; Phineas Fletcher
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 1
• Listed recording duration: 32:26

Catalogue topics

• mythology
• epyllion

Track guide

1. 01 - Brittain's Ida — 32:26

Listen to this recording

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Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.