There were love
stories in verse, like Arthur Brooke's _Romeo and Juliet_ (the source of
Shakspere's tragedy), Marlowe's fragment, _Hero and Leander_, and
Shakspere's _Venus and Adonis_, and _Rape of Lucrece_, the first of
these on an Italian and the other three on classical subjects, though
handled in any thing but a classical manner. Wordsworth said finely of
Shakspere, that he "could not have written an epic: he would have died
of a plethora of thought." Shakspere's two narrative poems, indeed, are
by no means models of their kind. The current of the story is choked at
every turn, though it be with golden sand. It is significant of his
dramatic habit of mind that dialogue and soliloquy usurp the place of
narration, and that, in the _Rape of Lucrece_ especially, the poet
lingers over the analysis of motives and feelings, instead of hastening
on with the action, as Chaucer, or any born story-teller, would have
done.
In Marlowe's poem there is the same spendthrift fancy, although not the
same subtlety. In the first two divisions of the poem the story does, in
some sort, get forward; but in the continuation, by George Chapman (who
wrote the last four "sestiads"),[21] the path is utterly lost, "with
woodbine and the gadding vine o'ergrown.
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