by David Riggs
14.1 Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Miniature by Nicholas Hilliard.
What did Marlowe mean by this avowal? Lady Pembroke had previously inspired Fraunce and Watson to write poems about the pastoral swain Amintas; but the recently issued Third Part of Fraunce’s Ivychurch announced that Amintas, ‘late transformed into a flower’, was dead. The countess, who had tired of pastoral, now wanted her entourage to write Ovidian poems of metamorphosis. To that end, she urged ‘every man to remember / Some God transformed or that transformed another’; and she enjoined ‘each nymph to recount some tale of a Goddess / That was changed herself, or wrought some change in another’. Whence the Third Part of the … Ivychurch, which contained ‘the most conceited tales of the Pagan Gods … together with their ancient descriptions and Philosophical explications’. Marlowe’s Epistle to the countess conveys his own response to Lady Pembroke’s call for Ovidian poetry. He has completed the elegiac phase of the Ovidian career pattern; now she is inspiring him to attempt the greater genre of the brief epic. Midway through Fraunce’s rendition of Venus and Adonis, the hero recalls ‘How Leander died, as he swam to the beautiful Hero’. Fraunce’s gloss on his own text notes that ‘Leander and Hero’s love is in every man’s mouth’ and cites standard versions of the story by Ovid, in the Heroides and by the Spanish poet Juan Boscan. Marlowe took on the task of freely rendering the poem into English.
Hero and Leander is the kind of project that Nashe recommended to the gentlemen students of both universities, and that Lady Pembroke encouraged by patronizing verse translators like Fraunce and Daniel. Humanist scholars took seriously Virgil’s assertion that Musaeus stood foremost among the poet-priests who spent eternity in the Elysian Fields. Hero and Leander was among the earliest Greek texts published in Europe. Aldus Manutius’s Preface commends the printing of Musaeus, ‘the most ancient poet’, as a suitable introduction to his forthcoming editions of Aristotle ‘and the other wise men’. Marlowe’s contemporary George Chapman saluted Hero and Leander for inspiring the world’s first love poem (And this true honour from their love-deaths sprung / They were the first that ever Poet sung’) and published his own translation of Musaeus as ‘the First of all Books’. The eminent critic J. C. Scaliger actually preferred Musaeus to Homer on the grounds that ‘he is more cultivated and polished’: ‘if Musaeus had written what Homer wrote, I believe he would have written it better.’
Musaeus’s exalted reputation rested on an intricate set of misunderstandings. The real author of the Greek Hero and Leander was a grammarian and poet who flourished in the fifth century AD, more than a millennium after Homer and several centuries after Virgil. The grammarian adopted the pseudonym Musaeus because he wanted readers to identify him with the fabled pupil of Orpheus. A scholar corrected this mistake in 1583, but the news travelled slowly. Although the scholar’s finding eventually pushed Musaeus back to the second rank in the canon, it could well have improved his attractions for Marlowe, a grammarian-poet standing on the threshold of Greek literature. Musaeus had made the leap from imitation to creation. He could teach Marlowe how to be better than Homer!
Marlowe used Marcus Musurus’s Latin translation of Musaeus, but also went back to the original Greek text and occasionally corrected Musurus’s mistakes. The Greek Hero and Leander is a Neoplatonic fable about desire. Leander, the philosophical soul, falls in love with Hero, the embodiment of material beauty, while worshipping at the temple of Venus. When the Greek Hero protests that she is a chaste priestess of Venus, Leander tells her to assume the nature of her divinity, like Socrates’ ideal lovers in the Phaedrus: ‘if you are willing / To learn the amorous laws of the goddess, and her goodly rites, / Here is our couch, our wedding.’ Even though the course of this love turns tragic with Leander’s fatal swim across the Hellespont, and Hero’s suicide on discovering his drowned body, their willingness to die for one another keeps them united in death: ‘and they had joy of each other even in their last perishing.’
Marlowe’s narrator weaves in and out of Musaeus’s story, embellishing his Greek source with decorative tableaux, meandering digressions and seductive ploys. These devices interrupt the forward momentum of the plot and allow Marlowe’s voyeuristic ‘I’ to tell the story from his own point of view. His narrator espouses a radical naturalism that dispenses with law and order. The Italian motto ‘if it pleases, it is lawful’ sums up his view of the world. When he proclaims, ‘It lies not in our power to love or hate / For will in us is overruled by fate’ (i.167–68), he means that we live in an Epicurean universe where men and women are continually subject to chance. There is no divine plan. Instead, Marlowe affirms the force of untutored natural instinct: ‘Where both deliberate, the love is slight; / Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?’ (175–76)
Where Musaeus adopts a tone of vatic rapture, Marlowe’s narrator sounds like the jaded amorist of Ovid’s Amores. A learned libertine, he views the naïve young lovers with amused detachment, maintaining his distance with comic rhymes, witty hyperbole and deft strokes of irony. His blazon of Hero, ‘Venus’ nun’ (i.319), evokes the truism that ‘chastity is a weapon of Venus, which arouses the very passions it professes to restrain.’ Leander has tremendous sex appeal for other males, including ‘the vent’rous youth of Greece’ (57), Jove (62), ‘wild Hippolytus’ (77), the ‘rudest peasant’ (79), the ‘barbarous Thracian soldier’ (81) and even the narrator himself, who
… could tell ye
How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly,
And whose immortal fingers did imprint
That heavenly path with many a curious dint
That runs along his back, but my rude pen
Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men,
Much less of powerful gods …
(65–71)
The speaker displaces his own desire for Leander on to the divine creator who made the ‘heavenly path’ that runs along the swain’s back. As he approaches Leander’s buttocks, the narrator regrets that his ‘rude pen’ is unable to ‘blazon forth the loves of men’. Marlowe’s self-conscious parade of carnal knowledge gave Hero and Leander the range and variety of humanist textbooks like Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, Watson’s Passionate Century of Love or Fraunce’s Ivychurch series. This enormously popular poem taught Elizabethan readers everything they needed to know about sex but were afraid to ask – both normative and illicit, heterosexual and homosexual.
Marlowe’s narrator takes full possession of the poem at the close of the first seduction scene, when Hero agrees to emulate her goddess. At this point, Marlowe abandons the story he found in Musaeus and digresses on the theme of Love and Destiny. His digression is a parable about the poetic soul, alias Mercury, the ancient god of letters. Mercury’s adventures recapitulate the poem’s master narrative. He pursues a country maid, as if he would ‘needs discover / The way to new Elysium’ (i.410–11). The country maid says yes, provided that Mercury procures for her a draught of Jove’s immortal nectar. In the ensuing battle between Jove and Mercury, Cupid sides with the underdog, and makes the three Fates, or Destinies, ‘dote upon deceitful Mercury’ (446). Mercury’s triumph restores the Golden Age, until the victor, ‘reckless of his promise did despise / The love of th’everlasting Destinies’, with predictable results: ‘They seeing it, both Love and him abhorr’d, / And Jupiter unto his place restored’ (461–64).
This parable is an epitome of Marlowe’s project. Mercury, the Passionate Shepherd, effects an inversion of the social order. The imaginary space of his rebellion and brief triumph affords a glimpse of an earthly paradise where ‘once again / Saturn and Ops began their golden reign’ (i.455–56). But the poetic soul is fated to lose out in the struggle for power, for he takes no account of Destiny. The only way for Mercury (Hermes) to escape from hell is through his superior knowledge:
14.2 ‘Modesty’ from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 1613.
And but that Learning in despite of Fate,
Will mount aloft, and ent
er heaven gate,
And to the seat of Jove itself advance,
Hermes had slept in hell with Ignorance.
(465–68)
Learning, however, can never regain the paradise lost of Mercury’s fleeting triumph. The Fates decree that Mercury’s education, like Marlowe’s, will enable him to envision a plenitude that he can never enjoy:
Yet as a punishment they added this,
That he and Poverty should always kiss.
And to this day is every scholar poor;
Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor.
Likewise the angry Sisters, thus deluded,
To venge themselves on Hermes, have concluded
That Midas’ brood shall sit in honour’s chair,
To which the Muses’ sons are only heir …
(469–76)
In theory, the scholars’ poverty signifies their contempt for the world. In fact, it subjects them to the rich boors that occupy the seats of power. The poet’s complaint recalls the confrontations between the scholar and the Knight in Dr Faustus; between the favourites and the earls in Edward II; and between Peter Ramus and the Duke of Guise in The Massacre at Paris. What especially galls the author of Hero and Leander is the impact of wealth on the world of learning. Not only do scholars labour under a sentence of poverty while gross gold runs headlong to the boor; rich boors actually claim the places of honour that rightfully belong to the scholars. Although the poet attributes this injustice to Fate, the poet’s own Fate is determined by money.
Dislodged from their rightful station in life, men of letters have no place in the commonwealth, and no choice but exile: ‘And fruitful wits that inaspiring are / Shall discontent run into regions far’ (i.477–78). At the age of twenty-eight, while domiciled in Flushing, Marlowe allegedly planned to go to Spain or Rome. Kyd testified that his former chamber-fellow intended to seek a place in Scotland, where Marlowe’s friend Roydon had already gone. The scholar’s prospects of employment in a noble household are literally a joke, for
… few great lords in virtuous deeds shall joy,
But be surprised with every garish toy,
And still enrich the lofty servile clown,
Who with encroaching guile keeps learning down.
(479–82)
Marlowe refers to the fact that, given the choice, the vast majority of Elizabethan noblemen would sooner employ an amusing jester than a scholar capable of writing a minor epic. This is where Lady Pembroke,
born of a laurel-crowned race, true sister of Sidney the bard of Apollo; fostering parent of letters, to whose immaculate embrace virtue, outraged by the assault of barbarism and ignorance, flieth for refuge,
comes into the picture. Marlowe’s digression appeals to the idealized patroness whom he salutes in his 1592 dedication to the countess. She is the custodian of an aristocratic tradition that values the high calling of poetry for its innate virtue (though her brother Philip complained loudly enough about ‘base men’ disgracing the literary profession); he has the learning and skill to satisfy her lofty standards – as Hero and Leander will attest.
Marlowe’s digression draws the Muse’s sons into the lovers’ contest with Fate; poets and amorists have a common stake in contesting the decrees of Destiny. Where the Greek Hero and Leander make love and die in short order, Marlowe introduces a baroque array of dilatory tactics that fall into the category of the false consummation, or delayed climax. When Leander enters Hero’s tower, ‘he ask’d, she gave, and nothing was denied’ (ii.25) – until we hear that he still ‘suspected / Some amorous rites or other were neglected’ (63–64). And so it goes on: the young lovers’ innocence is the perfect foil for the narrator’s experience. They grope their way through the novice stages of sexual desire; the poet delights in his capacity to hold the climax in suspense.
The critical moment in Leander’s erotic education occurs when Hero puts up physical resistance. The ‘more she strivèd,’ he finds, ‘The more a gentle pleasing heat revivèd / Which taught him all that elder lovers know’ (ii.67–69). Elder lovers know the generative principle of love and strife. This is the central mystery in Abraham Fraunce’s account of Venerian religion, and he discusses it on the page where he talks about Hero and Leander: ‘We must contend to overcome … by loving more, than we be loved, so shall we still be lov’d more’. The same principle underlies the early Greek cosmologies of Hesiod, Homer, Empedocles and Heracleitus, where the procreative interplay of desire and strife brings the universe into being. At the Heracleitan climax of the poem, when Hero ‘trembling strove; this strife of hers (like that / Which made the world) another world begat / Of unknown joy’ (291–93). Marlowe’s embrace of dialectical materialism enables him to suspend indefinitely the tragic ending that he inherited from Musaeus and Ovid. Although his Hero and Leander breaks off abruptly with the coming of dawn, the final effect of incompleteness is integral to a narrative strategy that resists closure at every turn. Like the pre-Socratic texts of Empedocles and Heracleitus, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is a fragment that remains coherent on its own terms.
Hero and Leander reasserted Marlowe’s claim to be a ‘teacher of desire’ in the Ovidian tradition. He writes for the sexual neophytes to whom Ovid appeals in the Amores (‘Let maids whom hot desire to husbands lead / And rude boys touched with unknown love, me read’), but also appeals to sophisticated aristocratic libertines like the Earl of Oxford and Lord Strange. In 1598, the printer Edward Blount dedicated the first edition of Hero and Leander to Thomas Walsingham. Blount’s prefatory letter to Walsingham surmises that Marlowe would have done the same thing, ‘knowing that in his lifetime you bestowed many kind favours, entertaining the parts of reckoning and worth which you found in him, with good countenance and liberal affection’. Perhaps he would have: Marlowe’s friend Watson had grown close to Walsingham through the medium of poetry; this was an opportune moment for Marlowe to take Watson’s place in Walsingham’s affection. When the Council’s agents set out to arrest Marlowe that spring, they sought him on Walsingham’s estate at Scadbury in Kent.
Another Kentish connection resurfaced on 14 December, when Sir Roger Manwood, Chief Baron of the Queen’s Exchequer, died at his manor house in Hackington, just outside Canterbury. On the bench, he stood out for his uncommon cruelty towards seminary priests. Marlowe marked his passing in a Latin verse probably intended for Manwood’s eldest son Peter. This sycophantic epitaph is Marlowe’s only known poem in praise of a contemporary figure. Its appearance at the end of 1592 is yet another indication that the poet was actively seeking patronage and protection, and hoped to find it in Kent if not elsewhere. Marlowe had good reason to seek refuge. He was persona non grata with the Justices of the Peace for Middlesex County. The plague continued to rage in London and was believed to infect the urban atmosphere. Blount remarks that Marlowe grew accustomed to ‘the gentle air’ of Walsingham’s liking.
The prolonged closure of the theatres gave both Marlowe and Shakespeare, who wrote Venus and Adonis during the same interval, a professional motive for turning to poetry and patron-hunting. Marlowe bequeathed four poetic works in manuscript: Hero and Leander, ‘Come live with me and be my love’ and his verse translations of Ovid and Lucan. ‘Come live with me’ came early in his career, while All Ovid’s Elegies looks like apprentice work. But his translation of Lucan’s Civil Wars, aptly titled Lucan His First Book Translated Line for Line, is an accomplished feat of literary craftsmanship; it was evidently completed during the latter part of Marlowe’s working life. Marlowe alludes to Lucan’s first book in Edward II, putting a pastiche of its celebrated opening lines into the mouth of Queen Isabella. The printer John Wolfe entered Lucan His First Book and Hero and Leander together in the Stationers’ Register, as if they were contiguous literary properties, just four months after Marlowe was murdered on 30 May 1593.
Johannes Sulpitius’s annotated Latin edition of Lucan’s Civil War familiarized Marlowe with Lucan’s biography. Lucan followed his uncle Seneca, th
e Stoic philosopher and playwright, into the service of the emperor Nero, where he joined the ruler’s ‘cohort of friends’. After Lucan published the first three books of his Civil War, Nero renounced the friendship and banned Lucan from declaiming his work or appearing in public. It is easy to see why. Lucan’s masterpiece depicts the civil war between Caesar and the Republicans from the Republican point of view. Although this conflict marks the origin of Caesar’s monarchical line and is the crucible in which the Roman empire was forged, Lucan sides with the losers, Brutus, Cassius, Cato and Pompey. When Lucan subsequently joined a botched coup attempt, Nero compelled him, his father and both uncles to slit their wrists. As ‘Lucan’s blood was draining from him he felt his hands and feet grow chill’, Tacitus reports, ‘and life gradually ebb away from his extremities: so while his mind was still keen and coherent he recalled verses he had composed, in which he described a wounded soldier dying in a similar fashion and repeated his own lines. This was his last utterance.’
Lucan was off limits for Elizabethan translators. When Barnabe Googe undertook a translation of Lucan at the outset of the reign, Calliope, the Muse of Heroic Poetry, appeared in a dream and told him to abandon Lucan in favour of Christian astrologer Palingenius, ‘whose pen did tread the crabbed ways / Of virtuous life’. In the Preface to his Tragical Tales (c.1575), George Turberville recounted a similar experience. Turberville no sooner began to translate Lucan than the Muse of Tragedy came to him in a dream. Melpomene was more direct than her sister Calliope had been with Googe. She not only warned Turberville to ‘Let lofty Lucan’s verse alone’; she further admonished him to ‘Remember how fond Phaeton fared / That undertook to guide Apollo’s charge.’ This poem was not for him: ‘Lofty Lucan’s verse’, she declared, is ‘meet for noble Buckhurst’s brain’.