Study guide

Hero and Leander

by Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman

Overview

Authors: Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) wrote the first two sestiads, about 820 lines; George Chapman (c. 1559–1634) wrote the last four, about 1,560 lines, and a verse Argument for each of the six
Written: Marlowe's part probably in 1592–93; Chapman's continuation by 1598
Registered and printed: Entered in the Stationers' Register on 28 September 1593, four months after Marlowe's death; first printed in 1598, twice: Marlowe's poem alone (Edward Blount) and the completed poem in six sestiads (Paul Linley)
Form: Rhyming iambic pentameter couplets (heroic couplets), with a short-lined wedding song in Chapman's fifth sestiad
Genre: Epyllion, or 'minor epic': a short, witty mythological narrative on an erotic subject, in the manner of Ovid
Sources: The Greek Hero and Leander of Musaeus (late fifth or early sixth century AD) and Ovid's paired verse letters of the lovers, Heroides 18–19 (Trypanis 1975)
Setting: Sestos and Abydos, the towns facing each other across the Hellespont (the Dardanelles), in a mythological antiquity
'Sestiad': Chapman's coinage, from Sestos, on the model of 'Iliad' from Ilion; Marlowe's own text has no divisions
Line references: Given here as sestiad and line (HL I.176), counting the verse lines of this archive's texts, without the Arguments; they may differ by a few lines from modern editions in Sestiads I, III and IV
Texts in this archive: Sestiads I–II are printed under Christopher Marlowe; Sestiads III–VI form the edition linked from this guide

Context

The story of Hero and Leander comes from late antiquity. Leander, a youth of Abydos, loves Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite at Sestos on the opposite shore of the Hellespont. Every night he swims the strait to her, guided by a lamp she sets in her tower, until a winter storm puts out the lamp and drowns him; Hero, finding his body, throws herself from the tower. Ovid gave the lovers a pair of verse letters (Heroides 18–19), and the Greek poet Musaeus, writing around the year 500 AD, told the whole tale in a short hexameter poem that Renaissance scholars, misled by the name, sometimes believed to be the work of the legendary pupil of Orpheus. Marlowe names him at once: Leander's 'tragedy divine Musaeus sung' (I.52) (Trypanis 1975) (Braden 1978).

In the 1590s the story suited a new English fashion: the epyllion or 'minor epic', a short narrative poem that retold a myth of desire with Ovidian wit, ornament and moral ambiguity. Thomas Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589) is usually counted the first; Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593) made the form famous; Marlowe's Hero and Leander is its masterpiece. These poems were written for a sophisticated, often Inns-of-Court readership that enjoyed erotic subjects, learned allusion and a narrator who comments on his own story with knowing irony (Keach 1977) (Hulse 1981) (Brown 2004).

Marlowe was killed at Deptford on 30 May 1593, stabbed by Ingram Frizer in a quarrel over a bill, in circumstances that historians still dispute. On 28 September 1593 the poem was entered in the Stationers' Register, but it did not appear until 1598. That year the publisher Edward Blount issued Marlowe's text alone, dedicated to Marlowe's patron Sir Thomas Walsingham; later the same year Paul Linley reissued it with George Chapman's four-sestiad continuation, divided the whole into six 'sestiads', and supplied each with a short verse Argument by Chapman. Henry Petowe, an obscure young poet, also published a rival Second Part of Hero and Leander in 1598, which spares the lovers their legendary drowning (Nicholl 1992) (Riggs 2004) (Martz 1972) (Gill 1987).

Chapman, best known today as the translator of Homer, was already the author of two difficult philosophical poems, The Shadow of Night (1594) and Ovid's Banquet of Sense (1595). His continuation openly changes key: his Muse, he says, must now be 'more grave and high' (III.3). Where Marlowe's narrator delights in desire and mocks moral sentence, Chapman's moralises the lovers' secret union as a breach of Ceremony, the goddess of rite and social form, and fills the story with allegorical figures, an inset tale of the marriage-god Hymen, and a learned wedding song. The poem that most readers knew from 1598 onwards was this composite work of two very different poets (Bartlett 1941) (Waddington 1974) (Snare 1989).

The poem was immediately admired. In one of his very few direct allusions to a contemporary, Shakespeare honoured Marlowe when Phebe in As You Like It (3.5) quotes 'Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?' (I.176) as the 'saw' of a 'dead shepherd', and Rosalind in the same play mocks the legend's tragic ending. The poem was reprinted many times in the seventeenth century and has remained the best-loved of Marlowe's non-dramatic works (Cheney 2004) (Orgel 1971).

Plot overview

Hero, a beautiful priestess of Venus at Sestos, and Leander, a youth of Abydos whose beauty enchants men and women alike, meet at the annual feast of Adonis in Venus' temple and fall in love at first sight. Leander argues at length that virginity is worthless and that Venus' nun should serve her goddess by making love. Hero is won over in spite of herself and lets slip an invitation to her tower. The narrator explains why the Fates are hostile to Cupid by telling how Mercury, punished for a country girl's sake, lost their favour.

At their first meeting in the tower the lovers are too innocent to complete their love. Leander returns home wearing Hero's tokens and, unable to bear the separation, swims the Hellespont. Neptune, mistaking him for Ganymede, seizes and courts him, and Leander escapes him only with difficulty. He reaches the tower naked and exhausted, and after a comic struggle the lovers spend the night together; at dawn Hero is exposed blushing to his sight. Here Marlowe's poem ends.

Chapman's continuation begins as Leander swims home. The goddess Ceremony appears to rebuke him for enjoying love without the rites of marriage, and he resolves to bring Hero to Abydos as his bride. Hero, alone, despairs over her broken vow, then argues herself into accepting it. Venus descends in anger, crowns her with yew in place of her icy crown of chastity, and creates Eronusis, the spirit of dissimulation, from the remnants of her sacrifice. To pass the long day Hero celebrates the marriage of two attendants, at which the nymph Teras tells the tale of Hymen and Eucharis and sings a wedding song.

At night Leander sets out with his father's fleet waiting to bring Hero to Abydos. The Fates, who have pretended to calm the winds, now set them fighting over the Hellespont; the storm blows out Hero's torch, and Neptune, trying to save Leander, hurls his mace at the Fates and cuts the thread of Leander's life by mistake. At dawn Neptune brings the battered body to the tower; Hero falls dead on it, and Neptune turns the lovers into a pair of goldfinches, the 'thistle-warps'.

Part by part

Part 1: First Sestiad (Marlowe): Venus' Nun and the Feast of Adonis

1–484

Summary

The poem opens on the Hellespont, 'guilty of true-love's blood', and on its two towns, Sestos and Abydos. Hero of Sestos is described from head to foot in a dazzling catalogue of her clothes, embroidered with the story of Venus and Adonis and stained with the blood of lovers who died for her. Leander of Abydos is described as lavishly, with an eye that lingers on his neck, breast, belly and back, and with the remark that some thought him a girl in disguise. At the yearly feast of Adonis Hero goes from her tower to Venus' temple, whose crystal floor displays the gods 'Committing heady riots, incest, rapes'; there, as she sacrifices, Leander sees her and they fall in love at a glance.

Leander kneels and then speaks. In a long, ingenious speech he argues that beauty is made to be used, that virginity is an idol with no real being, and that Venus is best served by those who break their vows of chastity. Hero resists in words while yielding in looks, asks who taught him rhetoric to deceive a maid, and, describing her lonely tower, lets 'come thither' slip out. She renews her vows; Cupid beats down her prayers and goes to the Destinies to ask that the lovers may be happy. They refuse him, and the narrator tells why: Mercury once seduced a country girl who demanded nectar; Jove expelled him from heaven; Cupid made the Fates love Mercury, who used them to overthrow Jove and then scorned them. In revenge they doomed learning to poverty, and they hate Cupid still.

Analysis

Marlowe sets the tone in the first hundred lines. The descriptions of Hero and Leander are blazons, the Renaissance catalogue of a beloved's beauties, but pushed into wit and excess: bees seek honey from Hero's breath, Nature weeps because she has nothing left, and the narrator coyly declines to describe Leander's body while describing it. The temple floor, a 'glass' showing the gods' sexual crimes, warns us that this is an Ovidian world where divine power and desire go together and where the narrator's moral comments are never quite to be trusted. Hero is 'Venus' nun', a priestess of the goddess of love sworn to chastity, a paradox the whole poem exploits (Keach 1977) (Leech 1965).

The love at first sight is presented as fate, and then justified by the most quoted line in the poem (I.176). Leander's seduction speech borrows the commonplaces of carpe diem poetry and the logic of the schools; the narrator calls him a 'bold sharp sophister', and its brilliance lies partly in its bad faith. The long digression on Mercury and the Destinies seems to wander away from the lovers, but it gives a mock-mythological explanation of why their love is doomed and ends in a pointed complaint, close to Marlowe's own experience, that scholars are poor while 'Midas' brood' sit in honour's chair (Cheney 1997) (Orgel 1971).

So lovely fair was Hero, Venus' nun, As Nature wept, thinking she was undone,

HL I.45–46

The paradox of a priestess of love vowed to virginity is the comic engine of Marlowe's poem; Nature's tears are a typical piece of hyperbolic wit.

Where both deliberate, the love is slight: Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

HL I.175–176

The narrator's maxim, quoted by Phebe in As You Like It. It comes at the end of an argument that love is ruled by fate, not choice.

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Part 2: Second Sestiad (Marlowe): Neptune and the First Night

1–334

Summary

Hero faints at the sight of Leander, is revived by his kiss and runs away, dropping her fan as a lure. Leander sends a letter, and Hero's reply brings him to her tower, where she has prepared a feast and strewn the room with roses. But both are inexperienced: they kiss and embrace 'as a brother with his sister', and Leander only suspects that 'Some amorous rites or other were neglected'. At dawn he leaves wearing her myrtle, her ribbon and the ring of her vow, so that the whole of Sestos and Abydos soon knows of the affair. His father rebukes him; restraint only inflames him, and from a rock he sees her tower and leaps into the Hellespont crying 'Love, I come'.

Neptune takes him for Ganymede, drags him to his coral palace, and courts him with kisses, gifts and the bracelet of Helle. Leander protests 'I am no woman, I', and Neptune begins a tale of a shepherd's love for a boy until Leander breaks away. The god throws his mace at him but repents, and the weapon wounds his own hand. Leander reaches the tower naked and frozen. Hero, startled, flees to her bed; he begs to be warmed; she defends herself 'as a soldier stout' until a truce, after which she yields. At daybreak she tries to slip away, but he catches her and she stands blushing by the bed, her glowing face a false dawn. The sestiad ends as Hesperus brings in the day and Night sinks to hell.

Analysis

The second sestiad is the comic heart of the poem. Marlowe makes the lovers' ignorance a source of both tenderness and farce, and the narrator's sententiae ('Love always makes those eloquent that have it') are often at odds with what we see. The Neptune episode, longer than anything in Musaeus, turns the swim across the Hellespont into an erotic comedy in which the male body of Leander is the object of desire. Bruce Smith and other critics have read it as one of the most open representations of homoerotic desire in Elizabethan poetry, and as a reversal of the poem's earlier play on Leander's girlish beauty (Smith 1991) (Keach 1977).

The consummation is narrated through images of war, siege and mythological conquest: the fort defended, the 'ivory mount' scaled, Hercules entering the orchard of the Hesperides. The language is witty and sometimes uncomfortable; the narrator remarks that love is 'deaf and cruel where he means to prey', and critics disagree over whether the scene celebrates mutual pleasure or exposes the violence in the conventions of seduction. The famous final image of Hero's blush as a false dawn, and the ending with Night's descent, leave the lovers at the peak of their happiness, which is one reason some readers think Marlowe chose to stop here (Martz 1972) (Leech 1965).

The lusty god embraced him, called him "Love," And swore he never should return to Jove.

HL II.167–168

Neptune mistakes Leander for Ganymede, Jove's cupbearer, and claims him for himself: the start of the poem's most discussed episode.

This strife of hers (like that Which made the world) another world begat Of unknown joy.

HL II.291–293

The lovers' struggle is compared to the strife of elements from which the cosmos was created; Marlowe's wit turns seduction into a creation myth.

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Part 3: Third Sestiad (Chapman): Ceremony

1–419

Summary

Chapman announces a change of subject and style: love's 'edge is taken off', and his 'stern Muse' must judge the delights that Marlowe described. Leander swims home, his body gilded to express 'The double guilt of his incontinence', shows his sister Hermione the joys of his love, and lies down still burning with desire. A divine music and a rainbow light break through the roof, and the goddess Ceremony descends, leading Religion in a chain of eyes and ears, attended by Devotion, Order, State and Reverence, and beating back Barbarism and Avarice. She rebukes Leander: substance without rites is like an unsigned bill or unseasoned meat. He vows to marry Hero at once, and his father agrees to send ships to bring her secretly to Abydos.

The narrator turns to Hero, but first invokes the 'free soul' of Marlowe, who 'drunk to me half this Musæan story', and asks it to approve his continuation. Hero, alone, is compared to Cádiz sacked by the English under Essex in 1596. She fears her guilt will show in her face, wraps herself in a black robe, tears her hair and faints. Then her spirits revive: she reasons that 'Hero Leander is, Leander Hero', so that she has lost nothing, that vows made in ignorance do not bind, and that love is the only sure joy. Her goddess will not hear her prayer, but she ends by kissing the place where Leander lay.

Analysis

The opening lines are Chapman's manifesto, and they define his relation to Marlowe. He does not repudiate the earlier poem, but he reads it as a story of rash and secret love that 'being enjoy'd, ask[s] judgment'. Ceremony, his own allegorical invention, stands for the social, religious and legal forms that give private desire public meaning; the gilt/guilt pun shows how his narrator moralises even physical description. Readers who prefer Marlowe have found this heavy-handed, but critics such as Raymond Waddington and Gerald Snare have taken Chapman's philosophical ambitions seriously, reading his sestiads as a deliberate Neoplatonic and ethical completion of an erotic fable (Waddington 1974) (Snare 1989) (Bush 1932).

Chapman also complicates his own moralising. The address to Marlowe's spirit is a generous act of homage and a claim to inheritance. Hero's long soliloquy, with its lovers' logic that two made one cannot be separated, gives her an inner life she lacks in Marlowe and argues so persuasively for love against the vow that the narrator's judgment is never simple. The topical comparison with Cádiz, flattering Essex, ties the ancient story to the politics of the 1590s and reminds us that Chapman was writing for a world Marlowe did not live to see (Bartlett 1941).

More harsh, at least more hard, more grave and high Our subject runs, and our stern Muse must fly.

HL III.3–4

Chapman's announcement of his new, graver manner; the shift from Marlowe's comedy to moral judgment is the central fact of the composite poem.

whose living subject stood Up to the chin in the Pierian flood, And drunk to me half this Musæan story,

HL III.189–191

Chapman's tribute to Marlowe, pictured as drinking deep from the Muses' spring and pledging the unfinished story to his successor.

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Part 4: Fourth Sestiad (Chapman): The Scarf and the Anger of Venus

1–350

Summary

Hero prepares a private sacrifice of her torn hair and robe, putting on her priestly dress: a crown of icicles for chastity, a golden star, a silver wand topped by a dove, and a transparent blue veil. Over it she wears a scarf she has embroidered, in which, guided by Fate rather than her own intention, she has worked a divided blush, a sea of flame with Leander swimming in it, a changing moon, a fisherman stung to death by the serpent he has netted, and a careless country girl whose vine and food are stolen by foxes. Her sacrifice gives off foul smoke and blood-red flames, but when she takes out Leander's picture the omens clear; the picture later works miracles and founds 'Leandrian sects'.

Hero resolves to serve love openly in her heart while keeping up the forms of her priesthood, and the narrator half excuses her by attacking hypocritical priests. Venus then descends in thunder, robed in scarlet, breaks Hero's icy crown and forces a wreath of yew on her, cursing her for dissembling. The swan Leucote, given a voice by Ecte, the goddess of pity, retorts that Venus herself hides her wantonness behind modest cheeks, and is whipped for it. From Hero's burnt offering Venus creates Eronusis, a gorgeous monster of dissimulation, and sends her to infect the world, so that 'Never was any trust in maids or men'. A storm of burning rain follows as Venus returns to heaven; Hero holds up Leander's picture as her shield.

Analysis

The embroidered scarf is a classic ekphrasis, a description of a work of art inside a poem, and a counterpart to the temple floor in Marlowe's first sestiad. But where Marlowe's images showed the gods' crimes, Hero's are emblems of her own mind and fate: the ship that holds all her wealth, the fisherman killed by his catch, the girl who loses everything to make 'a childish snare'. The narrator insists that the omens are 'by Fate into her mind ... sent', so that Hero's art becomes prophecy. Chapman's interest in emblem, omen and allegory is a learned Renaissance way of reading the world, not mere decoration (Waddington 1974) (Bush 1932).

The confrontation with Venus brings Chapman's central moral concern into the open: not desire itself but the gap between inner truth and outward show. Hero's decision to seem a maid while being none is what angers the goddess, and the birth of Eronusis gives a mythological origin to all later deceit. Yet Leucote's bold reply, and the narrator's mocking aside that Venus herself fears the laughter of the Moon, show that Chapman can still be satirical about the gods. Hero emerges as a figure caught between the claims of love, religion and reputation, more tragic than comic (Snare 1989).

She wrought a sea, in one flame, full of ships; But that one ship where all her wealth did pass, Like simple merchants' goods, Leander was;

HL IV.49–51

Hero's needlework turns Leander into the single vessel carrying all her fortune, an image that anticipates his drowning.

Of all dissimulation; and since then Never was any trust in maids or men.

HL IV.313–314

Venus makes Eronusis the 'architect' of deceit: Chapman's aetiology, in Ovid's manner, of a moral fault rather than a flower or bird.

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Part 5: Fifth Sestiad (Chapman): Teras and the Tale of Hymen

1–498

Summary

The day before the lovers' second night is unnaturally long: Aurora holds back the sun, men fall asleep in the streets, and the gods go in vain to the Destinies to save the lovers. To pass the time Hero marries her attendant Mya to her suitor Alcmane and holds a wedding feast. In comes Teras, a tiny prophetic nymph with an ebony thigh and a lute given by Apollo, whose tales always foreshadow what is to come. Seated on an altar, she tells how Hymen, a beautiful Athenian youth, loved the rich and noble Eucharis, disguised himself as a girl to be near her, and rescued her and other virgins from pirates who had seized them during the rites of Ceres.

Love, joined with Proteus in the form of a lily, enters Eucharis through the eye, and she loves Hymen in return. Hymen wins her parents' consent by restoring the maidens, and Teras describes their wedding in learned detail: torches carried by five children (since five is the first marriage of odd and even), the spinning distaff, the priest's veil and silks, the sacrifice of a jay without its gall, and the loosing of the bride's girdle. Hymen is deified for his joy, and the gossiping nymph Adolesche, who arrived too late with the news, becomes the parrot. Teras sings a wedding song with the refrain 'Love calls to war', then leaves, the blackness of her back terrifying the guests. The narrator admits that he uses digressions to delay Hero's grief.

Analysis

This is the longest sestiad and the clearest statement of Chapman's ideal. The tale of Hymen is the reverse of the story of Hero and Leander: a love that begins in disguise and secrecy is brought to fulfilment through courage, patience, parental consent and public ceremony, and its hero becomes the god of marriage. The careful explanation of every wedding custom, drawn from classical sources, makes ritual itself the subject of poetry. Teras's song, in short lines unlike anything else in the poem, is an epithalamion that Hero hears at someone else's wedding while she is denied her own (Waddington 1974) (Bartlett 1941).

The nymph's name means 'portent' in Greek, and the feast is full of signs: Hero's forced mirth, the black back of Teras, the prolonged day. The closing couplet is one of the most revealing moments in the poem: the narrator confesses that his digressions are a way of postponing tragedy, as if the poem itself shared Hero's longing for the day to last. Chapman here meets Marlowe on Marlowe's own ground, for the Mercury episode in Sestiad I was also a digression, but he uses it to build an ideal rather than to mock one (Keach 1977).

Hymen, that now is god of nuptial rites, And crowns with honour Love and his delights,

HL V.92–93

The opening of Teras's tale. Chapman's inset story explains how a mortal youth became the god of marriage, offering a model of love crowned by ceremony against which Hero and Leander's secret union is measured.

Whose wound because I grieve so to display, I use digressions thus t'increase the day.

HL V.497–498

The narrator admits that his long inset tale delays the catastrophe, just as the prolonged day delays Leander's swim.

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Part 6: Sixth Sestiad (Chapman): The Storm and the Deaths

1–293

Summary

Night comes at last. At Venus' request the swan Leucote flies to each of the winds and, by the Fates' authority, makes them be still; but the Fates are dissembling, drawing Leander on to his destiny. Hero lights her torch with perfumed fires, and the narrator moralises on it as an image of virtue, which consumes itself in doing good. At Abydos Leander's father prepares a lavish wedding, though no one knows the cause, and the narrator compares Leander's empty hopes to a fashionable gallant's. Leander, pointing out Hero's torch to his sister, strips and leaps into the sea.

The Fates and Até, goddess of ruin, set the winds fighting over the Hellespont, and the Destinies dance on the waves to watch. Leander calls in vain on Venus and Boreas, then on Neptune, who rises and tries to beat down the waves. The wind blows out Hero's torch though she shields it with her robe. In his rage Neptune hurls his mace at the Fates; it strikes Lachesis and cuts Leander's thread. Hero, leaning from her tower, cries his name; at dawn Neptune brings his bruised body to the rocks below, and she falls on it and dies with his name on her lips. Neptune turns them into the Acanthides, 'thistle-warps', small birds of mixed colours that fly in pairs and never come near the sea.

Analysis

Chapman keeps the tragic ending of Musaeus but gives it his own causes. In the Greek poem a winter storm puts out the lamp; here the storm is the work of the Fates and Até, the winds fight for a 'windy monarchy' like ambitious statesmen, and Neptune, Leander's lover in Marlowe's second sestiad, becomes his unwitting killer. The mace that once wounded Neptune's own hand now cuts the thread of life: a deliberate echo of Marlowe, as is Neptune's reappearance, which binds the two halves of the poem together (Keach 1977) (Orgel 1971).

The metamorphosis into goldfinches is Chapman's addition, an Ovidian consolation that gives the lovers a life in which they fly together forever, though 'near no seas'. The colours of their wings are read allegorically, and the final line claims that they 'were the first that ever poet sung', perhaps recalling the old belief that Musaeus was the first of poets. The ending thus returns to the poem's opening reference to 'divine Musaeus' and closes the work as a story about poetry's own descent from the ancient singers (Braden 1978) (Waddington 1974).

it wounded Lachesis That drew Leander's thread, and could not miss The thread itself, as it her hand did hit, But smote it full, and quite did sunder it.

HL VI.226–229

Neptune's attempt to save Leander kills him: the cruel irony on which Chapman builds his catastrophe.

She fell on her love's bosom, hugg'd it fast, And with Leander's name she breath'd her last.

HL VI.272–273

Hero's death on Leander's body, told with a plainness unusual in Chapman's elaborate style.

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Characters

The lovers

Hero: A priestess of Venus at Sestos who lives alone in a tower by the sea, 'Venus' nun', vowed to chastity in the service of the goddess of love. In Marlowe she is both innocent and coy, resisting in words while yielding in looks, and her blush is the poem's last image. In Chapman she becomes an inward, suffering figure who argues with her conscience, dissembles to the world, is cursed by Venus and dies on her lover's body.
Leander: A youth of Abydos of such beauty that men and women desire him and some take him for a girl. Marlowe makes him an eloquent but inexperienced lover, a 'bold sharp sophister' in argument and a novice in action, and the object of Neptune's desire. Chapman rebukes his secret, 'unceremonious' love, but also makes him resolve on marriage; he drowns on the night he was to bring Hero home as his bride.

Gods

Venus (Cyprides, Cypria): Goddess of love, whom Hero serves. In Marlowe she is the presiding deity of the poem's world of pleasure, whose rites are 'banquets, Doric music, midnight revel'. In Chapman she descends in thunder to punish Hero for breaking her vow and dissembling, an anger her own swan accuses of hypocrisy.
Cupid: Love, who resembles Hero so closely that he takes her for his mother. He shoots her with his arrow, turns her tears to pearls, and pleads with the Destinies for the lovers' happiness, but is refused because of his old quarrel with them.
Neptune: God of the sea. In Marlowe he mistakes Leander for Ganymede, drags him to his palace and courts him in the waves. In Chapman he tries to save Leander from the storm, accidentally cuts his thread of life, and finally turns the dead lovers into birds.
Mercury (Hermes): The hero of Marlowe's digression in Sestiad I. He seduces a country girl, steals nectar for her and is thrown out of heaven; with the Fates' help he overthrows Jove but then scorns them, so that they condemn scholars, his followers, to poverty.
The Destinies (the Fates): The three sisters who spin, measure and cut the thread of human life. Hostile to Cupid since Mercury deceived them, they refuse the lovers happiness in Marlowe and in Chapman feign a calm, then raise the storm and dance on the waves; Lachesis holds the thread Neptune's mace cuts.

Figures of Chapman's sestiads

Ceremony: Chapman's allegorical goddess of rite and social form (called Thesme in his Argument). She descends to Leander in Sestiad III, leading Religion and attended by Devotion, Order, State and Reverence, and rebukes him for enjoying love without the forms of marriage.
Hermione: Leander's sister, Chapman's invention, who knows all his secrets. He shows her the joys of his love on his return and points out Hero's torch to her before his last swim.
Leucote and Ecte: Leucote is the whitest of Venus' swans, who loves Hero; given a voice by Ecte, goddess of pity or remorse, she defends Hero against Venus and is whipped, and in Sestiad VI she carries Venus' message to calm the winds.
Eronusis: Dissimulation, a monster of shifting colours, wings and a scorpion's tail, created by Venus from Hero's burnt hair and robe and sent to fill the world with deceit.
Teras: A tiny nymph of the Sestian groves, given a lute and prophetic skill by Apollo, whose name means 'portent'. At the wedding of Alcmane and Mya she tells the tale of Hymen and sings an epithalamion, and her black back as she leaves foreshadows the catastrophe.
Hymen and Eucharis: The lovers of Teras's tale: an Athenian youth who disguises himself as a girl to be near the noble Eucharis, rescues her from pirates and marries her with full ceremony, becoming the god of marriage. Adolesche, the chattering nymph who misses the news, is turned into the parrot.
Alcmane and Mya: Two lovers in Hero's service whose marriage she has long refused, since Mya was vowed to virginity with her. Hero marries them on the long day before Leander's last swim.

Themes

Desire and persuasion

Marlowe's poem is about the power of desire and of words in its service. Leander's arguments against virginity are brilliant, sophistical and effective; Hero is won 'that was won before', and the narrator's maxims claim that fate, not choice, decides who loves. The poem enjoys rhetoric and exposes it at once, as Hero's question 'Who taught thee rhetoric to deceive a maid?' shows (Keach 1977).

Chapman answers with a different persuasion: Hero's own soliloquy, in which she argues herself out of guilt, and the narrator's moral sentences. In both halves the reader is invited to admire eloquence and to notice how it serves desire.

Ceremony, form and secrecy

Chapman's great theme is that love needs public form. Ceremony tells Leander that 'substance without rites' is worthless, and the fifth sestiad builds a model of rightly ordered love in Hymen's wedding. Secrecy, dissembling and the gap between face and heart are, for Chapman, the true faults of the lovers (Waddington 1974).

This theme answers Marlowe directly, for Marlowe's lovers meet in secret and his narrator mocks 'stern age' and its idea of evil. The composite poem therefore stages a debate between Ovidian freedom and Renaissance social and religious order.

The gods, fate and the comedy of power

The gods of the poem are lustful, jealous and petty. Jove deposes Saturn and is deposed in turn; Neptune pursues Leander; Venus punishes Hero for faults she shares. Marlowe treats this world with comic irreverence, and his Mercury digression turns cosmic history into an explanation of why scholars are poor (Bush 1932).

In Chapman, fate becomes sinister. The Destinies feign mercy and dance on the waves, and the narrator protests against heaven that 'nothing doth the world with mischief fill, / But want of feeling one another's ill'. The poem moves from a comedy of divine misbehaviour to a tragedy of cosmic indifference.

Art, beauty and the gaze

Both poets describe works of art within the poem: the temple floor, Hero's scarf, Leander's miraculous picture. Beauty itself is presented as a kind of artifice, and the eye, through which love enters, is the poem's privileged sense. Marlowe's narrator gazes at Leander's body as lavishly as at Hero's, unsettling conventional expectations of who is looked at (Smith 1991) (Leech 1965).

Comedy and tragedy

Marlowe begins with a tragedy, 'guilty of true-love's blood', and then tells a comedy. Chapman supplies the tragedy the legend demands, but cannot quite abandon digression and wit. How the reader weighs the two moods, and whether Marlowe's comic irony already contains the shadow of the ending, is one of the poem's central questions (Keach 1977) (Brown 2004).

Motifs

Digression

Both poets interrupt the story: Marlowe with Mercury and the Destinies, Neptune's tale of the shepherd, and the narrator's asides; Chapman with Ceremony, the scarf, the tale of Hymen and the satire on gallants. Chapman finally admits that he digresses to postpone tragedy (V.497–498).

Sententiae

Short general maxims punctuate the narrative ('Love deeply grounded, hardly is dissembled'; 'Without preserve of virtue, nothing lasts'). In Marlowe they are often ironic and fit the action badly; in Chapman they carry the moral argument.

Aetiology

In Ovid's manner the poem explains origins: why half the world is black, why scholars are poor, why there is no trust in maids or men, where the parrot and the goldfinch came from. These myths of origin mix learning with wit.

Siege and warfare

Love is described as war, from Hero's 'fort' defended by every limb in Marlowe to the comparison with Cádiz and the refrain 'Love calls to war' in Chapman.

Symbols

The Hellespont

The strait that separates and joins the lovers, 'guilty of true-love's blood' from the first line. It is the scene of Leander's courtship by Neptune and of his death.

Hero's tower

Her solitary dwelling 'upon a rock', a place of virginity and of secret love, from which she watches the sea and from which, in Chapman, she leans to search for Leander.

The torch

Hero's light, Leander's guide by sea. Chapman makes it an emblem of virtue, which shines by consuming itself; its extinction in the storm marks Leander's doom.

Hero's scarf and Leander's picture

Hero's embroidery prophesies her fate in emblems; Leander's portrait, which clears the evil omens, becomes a relic with miraculous powers. Both show how love turns art into religion.

The thistle-warps

The goldfinches into which the lovers are turned feed on thistles, recalling 'the thorns of love', and never approach the sea; their colours are read as emblems of Venus, truth, death and sorrow.

Critical debates

Complete or unfinished? The 'fragment' question

For centuries readers assumed that Marlowe's poem was a fragment broken off by his death; Blount's 1598 edition prints it without divisions, and Chapman's continuation presents it as half of a story still to be told. The legend demands the drowning, and the opening line, with its 'true-love's blood', seems to promise it.

In the introduction to his facsimile of the first edition, Louis Martz argued instead that the poem as Marlowe left it is complete: a comic, symmetrical narrative that ends with the lovers' first night and Night's descent to hell, and deliberately refuses the tragic ending. Others reply that the many hints of doom and the incomplete design of the Destinies' story point to a longer plan. The question affects how we read Chapman, either as a continuator finishing a fragment or as a poet imposing a second poem on a finished first (Martz 1972) (Gill 1987) (Cheney 1997).

Comedy, irony and eroticism

Older criticism often treated Marlowe's poem as a sensuous celebration of youthful love. William Keach's study of the Elizabethan erotic narratives shifted attention to irony and pathos: the narrator's mocking commentary, the lovers' absurdity and the violence beneath the conventions of seduction. On this view the poem is a sophisticated comedy that both indulges and criticises desire (Keach 1977).

Clifford Leech compared Marlowe's Hero with Shakespeare's Venus, as two portraits of women in love, and later feminist readings have asked how far the narrator's wit depends on treating Hero as the object of male rhetoric and male looking. The poem's tone remains contested: comic, cruel, tender, or all three (Leech 1965) (Brown 2004).

Homoerotic desire and the Neptune episode

Neptune's courtship of Leander, unparalleled in Musaeus, has become central to modern criticism. Bruce Smith read it as an especially explicit Elizabethan treatment of desire between men, in a poem whose narrator dwells on Leander's body and plays on his being taken for a girl. Others connect it with Marlowe's reputation, with the Ganymede myth and with the Ovidian tradition of gods' loves for boys (Smith 1991).

Critics differ over whether the episode is mainly comic, with Leander's indignant 'I am no woman, I', or whether it reveals the poem's real centre of erotic interest. Chapman's return to Neptune as the lover who kills Leander suggests that he too recognised the episode's importance (Cheney 2004).

Chapman's moral completion and Neoplatonism

Chapman's continuation was long dismissed as a ponderous moralising of Marlowe. Douglas Bush, in his survey of mythological poetry, found it learned but unequal to Marlowe's grace. Later critics have read it more sympathetically, as a coherent answer to Marlowe grounded in Chapman's philosophical interests: the Neoplatonic doctrine of beauty and love, the value of ceremony and form, and allegorical methods drawn from Renaissance mythographers (Bush 1932) (Waddington 1974).

Gerald Snare has argued that Chapman's obscurity is part of a deliberate self-presentation as a difficult, inspired poet, and that his sestiads should be read in that light. The question is whether Chapman completes, corrects or transforms Marlowe, and whether the composite poem is a dialogue or a contradiction (Snare 1989) (Bartlett 1941).

The epyllion as a genre

Hero and Leander belongs to a short-lived but brilliant vogue for Ovidian narrative poems in the 1590s. Clark Hulse studied them as 'minor epic', a form that defined itself against Spenserian epic and explored the relations of eroticism, rhetoric and visual art. Georgia Brown has argued that such poems were central to a redefinition of literature in the period, celebrating shame, marginality and the ephemeral (Hulse 1981) (Brown 2004).

The comparison with Venus and Adonis, published in the same year that Marlowe died, has been especially fruitful: both poems reverse expected roles of pursuer and pursued, and both end in metamorphosis or death. Whether 'epyllion' is a genuine Renaissance genre or a modern label for a fashion is itself debated (Keach 1977) (Leech 1965).

Marlowe's narrator

The narrator of Marlowe's sestiads is one of the poem's great creations: worldly, intrusive, fond of maxims that do not fit, coy about what he describes in detail, and bitter about the poverty of scholars. Readers have asked whether his voice should be taken as Marlowe's own or as a dramatised persona, and how his irony shapes our sympathy with the lovers (Keach 1977).

Patrick Cheney has read the poem within Marlowe's 'counterfeit profession' as an Ovidian poet in rivalry with Spenser's national, Virgilian career, so that the narrator's mockery of moral sentence becomes a literary and political stance (Cheney 1997) (Cheney 2004).

Shakespeare's tribute

When Phebe in As You Like It quotes 'Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?' as the saw of a 'dead shepherd', Shakespeare names no one but clearly mourns Marlowe, and the reference is one of the few places where he alludes directly to a contemporary. The same play has Rosalind deflate the legend by saying that Leander died of cramp (Cheney 2004).

The allusion has fuelled speculation about the relations between the two poets, and about Shakespeare's reaction to Marlowe's death, which the play may also recall in Touchstone's 'great reckoning in a little room'. It shows, at least, that Marlowe's poem was already famous by about 1599 (Riggs 2004) (Nicholl 1992).

Key passages

On Hellespont, guilty of true-love's blood, In view and opposite two cities stood,

The narrator (Marlowe) · HL I.1–2

The opening couplet names the place of the tragedy before the comedy begins. The 'guilty' sea foretells the drowning that Marlowe's own sestiads never reach, which is one reason the poem has been called a fragment.

but my rude pen Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men, Much less of powerful gods.

The narrator (Marlowe) · HL I.69–71

A mock-modest refusal to describe Leander's body, after describing it closely. The narrator's coyness, and the hint of gods' love for the youth, prepare for the Neptune episode.

Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?

The narrator (Marlowe) · HL I.176

The poem's most famous line, quoted by Phebe in As You Like It. Coming after an argument that love is ruled by fate, it turns a philosophical claim into a witty proverb.

This idol which you term virginity Is neither essence subject to the eye

Leander · HL I.269–270

The start of Leander's scholastic proof that virginity does not exist. His sophistry is both dazzling and dishonest, and the narrator has warned us that he speaks 'like to a bold sharp sophister'.

Who taught thee rhetoric to deceive a maid?

Hero · HL I.338

Hero sees through Leander's arguments and is won by them anyway. The line sums up the poem's double attitude to rhetoric, admired and distrusted at once.

You are deceived; I am no woman, I.

Leander, to Neptune · HL II.192

Leander's indignant protest to the amorous sea-god is comic, but it also exposes the confusion of gender that runs through the descriptions of his beauty.

Joy graven in sense, like snow in water, wasts; Without preserve of virtue, nothing lasts.

The narrator (Chapman) · HL III.35–36

Chapman's verdict on the lovers' secret pleasures: sensual joy melts unless preserved by virtue. The sententia marks the moral turn of his continuation.

Told him how poor was substance without rites, Like bills unsign'd; desires without delights;

The narrator, reporting Ceremony · HL III.147–148

Ceremony's rebuke uses homely comparisons from law and commerce to argue that love needs public form, the central idea of Chapman's sestiads.

Hero Leander is, Leander Hero; Such virtue love hath to make one of two.

Hero · HL III.357–358

Hero's lovers' logic: if two are made one, nothing has been lost or given away. The line draws on the Renaissance idea of love as the union of souls and shows Chapman giving Hero an eloquence of her own.

And this true honour from their love-death sprung,-- They were the first that ever poet sung.

The narrator (Chapman) · HL VI.292–293

The closing couplet claims for the lovers the honour of being poetry's first subject, perhaps recalling the belief that Musaeus was the earliest of poets, and so returns the poem to its source.

Questions for study

Is Marlowe's poem a fragment, or a complete work in its own right?
Consider the first line, the ending of Sestiad II, the unresolved hostility of the Destinies, and Martz's argument about the poem's design.
How does Marlowe's narrator shape our response to the lovers?
Look at his maxims, his asides about his 'rude pen' and 'slack Muse', and the places where his comments do not fit the action.
What does the Neptune episode add to the story?
Compare the descriptions of Leander's beauty in Sestiad I, the Ganymede myth, and Neptune's return in Sestiad VI.
Is Leander's speech against virginity meant to persuade the reader?
Think about the narrator's word 'sophister', Hero's reply about rhetoric, and the commonplaces of carpe diem poetry.
Why does Chapman introduce the goddess Ceremony, and what does she stand for?
Read the opening of Sestiad III and her rebuke of Leander; consider marriage, religion and social order in the 1590s.
How does Chapman's Hero differ from Marlowe's?
Compare her blush at the end of Sestiad II with her soliloquy in Sestiad III and her dissembling in Sestiad IV.
What is the function of the tale of Hymen and Eucharis in Sestiad V?
Compare it point by point with the story of Hero and Leander, and look at the narrator's last couplet.
How do works of art within the poem (the temple floor, the scarf, the picture) comment on the story?
Ask who made each one, what it shows, and whether it reveals the gods, Hero's mind or the future.
Does the composite poem work as a whole, or does it read as two poems?
Look for continuities (Neptune, the Destinies, digression, the couplet) as well as the change of tone Chapman announces.
What does Shakespeare's quotation in As You Like It suggest about how the poem was read by its first audience?
Think about the 'dead shepherd', the pastoral setting of the play, and Rosalind's comic version of Leander's death.

Hero and Leander

Overview

Context

Plot overview

Part by part

Part 1: First Sestiad (Marlowe): Venus' Nun and the Feast of Adonis

Summary

Analysis

Part 2: Second Sestiad (Marlowe): Neptune and the First Night

Summary

Analysis

Part 3: Third Sestiad (Chapman): Ceremony

Summary

Analysis

Part 4: Fourth Sestiad (Chapman): The Scarf and the Anger of Venus

Summary

Analysis

Part 5: Fifth Sestiad (Chapman): Teras and the Tale of Hymen

Summary

Analysis

Part 6: Sixth Sestiad (Chapman): The Storm and the Deaths

Summary

Analysis

Characters

The lovers

Gods

Figures of Chapman's sestiads

Themes

Desire and persuasion

Ceremony, form and secrecy

The gods, fate and the comedy of power

Art, beauty and the gaze

Comedy and tragedy

Motifs

Digression

Sententiae

Aetiology

Siege and warfare

Symbols

The Hellespont

Hero's tower

The torch

Hero's scarf and Leander's picture

The thistle-warps

Critical debates

Complete or unfinished? The 'fragment' question

Comedy, irony and eroticism

Homoerotic desire and the Neptune episode

Chapman's moral completion and Neoplatonism

The epyllion as a genre

Marlowe's narrator

Shakespeare's tribute

Key passages

Questions for study

Further reading