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 Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

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

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 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Editor A person, family, or organization contributing to a resource by revising or elucidating the content, e.g., adding an introduction, notes, or other critical matter. An editor may also prepare a resource for production, publication, or distribution. For major revisions, adaptations, etc., that substantially change the nature and content of the original work, resulting in a new work, see author. LEMDO uses the general term editor only in edition metadata and only to indicate when a person is responsible for editing all parts of an edition. Otherwise, use the more granular terms to describe the precise nature of the editorial role. Supervising Editor An editor who supervises the work of a student editor. Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Education Classical Literature Literature and the Arts Lucrece (text) Narrative Poetry Ovid (43 BCE–17/18 CE) Venus and Adonis (text) Published file. Updated metadata proofed Review of article finished. updated author respStmt. Created File. Michael Best 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.

 Leah Hamby 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.

 Navarra Houldin 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.

 Camryn Longmuir Camryn Longmuir

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

 Kate McPherson 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.

 Melissa Walter 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.

 LEMDO Team 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 https://www.uvic.ca/
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/.