Venus and Adonis & The Passionate Pilgrim

First essay assignment for Shakespeare course: after reading Venus and Adonis, write a 3-4 page close reading of one of the four poems in The Passionate Pilgrim (4, 6, 9, & 11) that overlap with the material from V&A. One of them, Poem 11, is not included in the Pelican paperback edition, because it is known to be by Elizabethan sonneteer Bartholomew Griffin, from his sequence Fidessa (one of the more egregiously mediocre sonnet cycles of the period). This typical editorial omission is strange on a couple of levels. First of all, all the omitted material from PP (which also includes a couple of poems by Richard Barnfield as well as Marlowe's "Come Live with Me and Be My Love" and the reply poem by Ralegh) takes up about four pages, tops. Why not just include it, whether it's by Shakespeare or not, so readers can see what the book was like in its entirety? Second, the version in PP is somewhat different from the one in Fidessa, especially in lines 9-12.

I might as well reprint the poems. Here's the version from Fidessa (1596):

Venus, and young Adonis sitting by her,
Under a myrtle shade began to woo him;
She told the youngling how god Mars did try her,
And as he fell to her, so fell she to him.
“Even thus,” quoth she, “the wanton god embrac’d me,”
And then she clasp’d Adonis in her arms;
“Even thus,” quoth she, “the warlike god unlac’d me,”
As if the boy should use like loving charms;
But he, a wayward boy, refus’d the offer
And ran away, the beauteous Queen neglecting,
Showing both folly to abuse her proffer,
And all his sex, of cowardice detecting.
O, that I had my Mistress at that bay,
To kiss and clip me till I ran away!

And here's the version from The Passionate Pilgrim (1599):

Venus with young Adonis sitting by her
Under a myrtle shade began to woo him;
She told the youngling how god Mars did try her,
And as he fell to her, so fell she to him.
“Even thus,” quoth she,.the warlike god embrac’d me,”
And then she clipp’d Adonis in her arms;
“Even thus,” quoth she, “the warlike god unlac’d me,”
As if the boy should use like loving charms;
“Even thus,” quoth she, “he seized on my lips,”
And with her lips on his did act the seizure;
And as she fetched breath, away he skips,
And would not take her meaning nor her pleasure.
Ah, that I had my lady at this bay,
To kiss and clip me till I run away!

Granted, the variants don't do much either way to raise either version any further out of the doggerel zone. Frankly, it seems downright banal even to comment on the difference in interpretation they make: "in the earlier version, the poet takes Adonis to task for his failure to fulfill the requirements of his gender role, etc." But isn't it worthy of notice in and of itself that there's this poem assigned to Shakespeare, and that it appears in some other poet's book in a slightly different form? Wouldn't including this poem (even both versions) in the edition serve the valuable function of illustrating for students the radically unstable status of authorship in the early modern period?

Are these poems supposed to be bad, like dirty limericks? Do they fail even on that level? Is it possible to reconstruct Renaissance canons of taste for vulgar ephemera? Some have consigned Venus and Adonis, and the epyllion as a genre, to that category. Is the difference purely formal/stylistic? I.e., some soft-porn verses are more skillfully versified than others? Or are there elements of V&A that "elevate" it—morally, philosophically, however—above other Elizabethan smut?