English Narrative Poetry and Shakespeare

Introduction

Para1In early modern England, narrative poetry, or poetry that has characters and tells a story, gained popularity as secular literature became more widespread in the 16th century. Many authors were influenced and inspired by classical authors of narrative poetry such as Ovid, author of a well-known book called Metamorphoses, stories of love and transformation from Greco-Roman mythology. Both Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare explored these topics in narrative poems.

Ovid

Para2Publius Ovidius Naso, also known as Ovid, was born in Italy in 43 BCE, just as the Roman Empire was forming. After attempting to work in law, Ovid decided on a career as a poet instead. He became friends with other established poets such as Horace and quickly became successful and popular in the Roman literary world. His poetry was nearly always about love, his most famous collection being Metamorphoses, which is concerned with retelling classic myths about the gods and the transformations of humans they so often cause. In early modern England, Ovid’s poetry was used in the grammar school curriculum, so Shakespeare and Marlowe (who were born the same year) likely first encountered Ovid’s narrative poems as they learned to read and write in Latin.
Para3Researcher Will Tosh from Shakespeare’s Globe reports that
It’s possible Shakespeare owned his own copy of Metamorphoses from a young age: a Latin edition of 1502, printed in Venice, survives in the Bodleian Library in Oxford with the frustratingly vague signature ‘Wm Sheʼ and the unverifiable assertion, dated 1682, that ‘this little book of Ovid was given to me by W. Hall who said it was once Will Shakespeare’sʼ.
Scholars cannot be sure if this book belonged to Shakespeare, but the influence of Ovid’s work on Shakespeare is unmistakable.

Ovid & Shakespeare

Para4Just about the time Shakespeare and Marlowe were born, Arthur Golding published the first verse translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in English, which raised the popularity of the stories it includes. Scholars have found similarities between some of Ovid’s works and those of writers like Marlowe and Shakespeare. Marlowe translated some of Ovid’s Elegies and also used the tale of Hero and Leander from Ovid’s Heroides for one of his narrative poems of the same title. Some of Shakespeare’s works that adapt Ovid’s work from Metamorphoses include the tale of Procne and Philomel, which appears in Shakespeare’s 1592 tragedy Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare also transforms the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, comically retold as the play-within-the-play at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare’s two major narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, are imitations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and another work by Ovid called Fasti.

Comparing Narrative Poems

Venus and Adonis

Para5In Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, which was his first published poem, the goddess Venus attempts to seduce the young hunter Adonis. He resists her seduction as she offers him a transformation of beauty. She tells him she will enhance his beauty by making his lips red, and pale, with fresh variety (1.21). This is Venus’ attempt to transform Adonis from asexual to sexual (Cousins 19). At the end of the poem, Venus also changes Adonis into a snake’s head frittilary, a kind of flower. He becomes a purple flower sprung up, checkered with white/resembling well his pale cheeks (2.1160–1170)

Lucrece

Para6Shakespeare’s Lucrece, inspired by Fasti by Ovid, relates the tale of the Roman warrior Tarquin’s sexual assault on Lucrece. Lucrece goes through a transformation after the assault, previously being described as a woman whose eyes are mortal stars bright as heaven’s beauties (1.13) to eyes full of fear and confusion. Overcome by shame at the loss of her chastity, Lucrece dies by suicide.

Marlowe & Shakespeare

Para7Christopher Marlowe’s use of narrative poetry may also influenced Shakespeare’s narrative and dramatic poetry. Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander has been compared to Venus and Adonis, since both explore Elizabethan gender models and morals in their adaptations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.Marlowe’s poem was not published until 1598, five years after Marlowe’s death in 1593.
Para8Some scholars speculate whether the poem was intentionally left unfinished as a commentary on religious morals in Elizabethan England. Comparatively, Shakespeare’s poem is left morally incomplete in that the sexual relationship between Venus and Adonis is never consummated, and Adonis is punished for unknown reasons (Drahos 85). Whatever the poets’ ulimately unknowable intentions were for their narrative poems, both authors reveal their debt to classical authors such as Ovid.

Key Print Sources

Armstrong, Rebecca. Ovid and His Love Poetry. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.
Bate, Jonathan. Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Cousins, A. D. Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Narrative Poems. Routledge, 2013.
Foster, Brett. The Collected Poems of Christopher Marlowe. Kenyon Review vol. 31, no. 4, Sept. 2009, pp. 179–183.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. Narrative Poems. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions. University of Victoria. 4 Jan. 2011. https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/literature/poetry/narrativepoems.html.
Drahos, Jonathan Wade. Shakesperean and Marlovian Epyllion: Dramatic Ekphrasis of Venus and Adonis and Hero and Leander. University of Birmingham. Unpublished Thesis. 2015. https://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/5911/1/Drahos15PhD.pdf.
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Shakespeare’s Poems. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/shakespedia/shakespeares-poems/. Accessed 2 Mar. 2024.
Tosh, Will. Shakespeare and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Shakespeare’s Globe. 22 Sep. 2021. https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/blogs-and-features/2021/09/22/shakespeare-and-ovids-metamorphoses/.

Prosopography

Camryn Longmuir

Camryn Longmuir was a student at the University of Fraser Valley.

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Melissa Walter

Melissa Walter is Associate Professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on early modern English drama and English and European prose fiction. She is the author of The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines (U of Toronto, 2019), and co-editor, with Dennis Britton, of Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Authors, Audiences, Digital Technologies (Routledge, 2018). Her work on English theatre and the European novella has appeared in several edited collections, including Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2008), and Transnational Mobility in Early Modern Theater (Ashgate, 2012). She has also written about Translation and Identity in the Dialogues in English and Malaiane Languages (Indographies, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris. Palgrave 2012). At the University of the Fraser Valley, she is a lead coordinator of UFV’s Shakespeare and Reconciliation Garden.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title English Narrative Poetry and Shakespeare
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series
Source
By Camryn Longmuir, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published, peer-reviewed
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
License/availability
Intellectual copyright in this entry is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.