The question leads us to a discussion of literary kinds (further broken up into genres). Technically, Shakespeare didn’t write “novels,” if we look at the definitions given us by Aristotle: epics (the forerunners of novels) have several narrators (the classic example is The Odyssey); poetry has one narrator (often in the first person – “I think that I shall never see…”); drama has no narrator – this is where Shakespeare’s work (excluding for this discussion his poems) fits in – his stories are told by the characters themselves with no interloping narrator. Jane Austen wrote “novels,” defined as full-length stories told by a narrator (omniscient) and including dialogue, which is another narrative form (sometimes called an “unreliable narrator.” Of course, the literary works of these two authors differ in many other respects, also.
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