Elizabethan Narrative Poems ― The State of Play

Shakespeare saw only two poems through to publication: Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. They were both extremely popular in their day, with one contemporary comparing Lucrece to Hamlet as a work to “please the wiser sort.” This volume traces the larger conversation that took place in the 1590s within the vogue for minor epic narratives as Shakespeare and a coterie of Ovidian imitators composed and published erotic epyllia to, for, and against one another. These poems take place in imagined worlds far removed from urban world of London. But despite that apparent remove, these classicizing narratives are in fact deeply engaged in wide-ranging critiques of 16th century norms for masculine conduct – whether professional, poetic, economic, legal, emotional, or sexual.

The essays put Shakespeare's two epyllia into conversation with a wide variety of contemporary writers in the vernacular – particularly from the Inns of Court (Thomas Lodge, Francis Beaumont) but also with other playwrights (Marlowe, Heywood), poets (Spenser), and in one case, with the neo-Latin poetry of the law student, Thomas Campion. This volume contributes to the current, vigorous reassessment of humanism's unintended consequences by drawing attention to the highly diverse forms that early modern classicism might take in the hands of those educated by this “new” Latin pedagogy. On the one hand, these essays bring a wide variety of current critical methodologies to bear on Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, Hero and Leander, and the many other epyllia with which Shakespeare engaged. On the other hand, they demonstrate how classical rhetorical training in general and Ovid's Metamorphoses in particular gave early modern writers a highly developed, shared language for social and poetic critique.