Hero and Leander

Marlowe was not the first Elizabethan poet to write an epyllion (or brief epic) with an erotic theme. Such narrative poems, most of which were based on stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, were in vogue at the time and attracted a large readership. The first was the collection of 17 tales in Thomas Lodge’s Scilla’s Metamorphosis (1589). One of these stories tells of how the sea god Glaucus courted a nymph named Scilla. She was cruel to him, and he punished her by turning her into a rock in the middle of the sea.

William Shakespeare also wrote an erotic mythological poem, Venus and Adonis, which was published in 1593. Some scholars believe that Shakespeare had read Marlowe’s Hero and Leander in manuscript form and was influenced by it, perhaps even writing in imitation or competition with it. Shakespeare certainly knew the poem by the time he wrote the comedy As You Like It, likely around 1599 (a year after Marlowe’s poem was published), since he quotes Line 176 from Marlowe: “Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?”

In Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis—based on his source in Ovid—Venus, the lusty goddess of love, makes multiple attempts to seduce Adonis, a handsome but bashful young man who is more interested in hunting than love.