English Narrative Poetry and Shakespeare Narrative Poetry and Shakespeare, English Author Camryn Longmuir Supervising Editor Melissa Walter Editor Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England EncyclopediaEMEE

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By Camryn Longmuir, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

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Introduction

In 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

Publius 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.

Researcher 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 She 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’s. Scholars cannot be sure if this book belonged to Shakespeare, but the influence of Ovid’s work on Shakespeare is unmistakable.

Ovid & Shakespeare

Just 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

In 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

Shakespeare’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

Christopher 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.

Some 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 <title level="m">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 <title level="m">Metamorphoses. Shakespeare’s Globe. 22 Sep. 2021. https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/blogs-and-features/2021/09/22/shakespeare-and-ovids-metamorphoses/.