Classical alld Modem Literature, 27.

2 (2007): 31-46
Violent Acts and Ovidian Artifacts in
Marlowe's Hero and Leander
Efterpi Mitsi
The ekphrasis' of "Venus' glass" in Christopher Marlowe's Hero alld
Leallder occurs after the initial descriptions of the two protagonists and sets
the tone for their fateful meeting:
Of Chri stall shining faire, the pavement was,
The towne of Sestos, cal'd it Venus glasse,
There might you sec the gods in sundri e shapes,
Committing headdi e ryots, incest, rapes:
For know, that underneath thi s radi ant floure,
Was Dtl llaes statue in a brazen tower,
/ OI1C, slyli e stealing from hi s sisters bed,
To dallie with Idaliall Call ill/ cd:
And for hi s love Europa, bellowing loud,
And tumbling with the Rainbow in a cloud,
Blood-quaffing Mars, heaving the yron nct ,
Which limping VII/call and hi s Cyclops set:
Love kindling fire, to burne such townes as T ~ ) I ,
Sylval/us weeping for the lovely boy
That now is turn' d into a Cyprcs tree,
Under whose shadc the Wood-gods love to bee. ( 14 1- 156)2
I By "ckphrasi s" I mean the description of art in literature, using thc modern rather
than the ancicnt definition of the term. In a recent articl e (Webb 1999), Ruth Webb has
argued that modern definiti ons of ekphrasis ignore or devise strategies to dismi ss the
original sense of the t erm, which referred to descripti on generall y, but for the purpose of
thi s cssay thi s current sense conveni entl y links cl assical and earl y modern descriptions of
works art in literature. Although Renai ssance writers would not have understood the term
in its modern sense, thi s kind of ekphras is was conventional to epi c poetry both cl assical
and medi eval , and the practi ce, if not the name, as Kell y Quinn points out (Quinn 2004),
was familiar to Engli sh poets like Marlowe, Spenser, and Shakespeare.
2 All citati ons of Marl owe are from Mart z 1972. I normali ze the use of u and I'
throughout.
32 EFTERPI MITSI
The crystal floor of the temple of Venus represents the loves of the gods,
images of transgressive sexuality ("ryots, incest, rapes," 144) that combine
comic with tragic elements. The sexual aggression and greed of the gods
have tragic consequences for humanity, foreshadowing the obsessive and
selfish human love that causes pain and disappointment later in the poem,
even as the artful description entertains readers. Although this ekphrasis
alludes to Arachne's tapestry in Book 6 of Ovid's Meta/llorphoses, which
depicts the transformations of the gods as they love and deceive mOlial
women, Marlowe's mocking tone challenges the traditional moral or
allegorical readings of the Latin text prevalent in his time. In the same way
that Ovid's ekphrasis functions as a microcosm of his entire poem,
suggesting both its form and subject, Venus' glass, a miniature of Marlowe's
source, reflects not only the form of the English epyllion but also its
rclation to the ancient tradition. As a maker of beautiful images, which
include the blazons of the protagonists, the narrator of [lero ({lid Le({lIrier
comments on the nature of both love and poetry, distancing himself from
Ovid's scepticism about the power of art.
Marlowe and Musaeus
Although the text acknowledges Musaeus' Greek poem as its
immediate ource (52), the role of Ovid (who had treated the myth of Hero
and Leander in his Heroirles 18 and 19, an exchange of letters between the
lovers) and his Arachnean tapestry raises questions about the aesthetics and
the eroties of ancient poetry. Marlowe revisits Ovid through an
intermediary, the Greek poet and scholar
l
Musaeus, who lived around the
end of the fifth or the beginning of the sixth century. Musaeus' text is the
only extant ancient Greek poem that treats the tragic love of Hero and
Leander. Hero is a priestess of Aphrodite, living in a tower in Sestos, at
the edge of the Hellespont , and Leander a young man from Abydo , on the
other side of the strait. Leander falls in love with Ilero during the festival
of Aphrodite and Adonis and convinces her to abandon her vow of chastity,
arguing that a virgin cannot worship the goddess of love. Every night he
swims across the Hellespont to make love to Hero, guided by the lamp she
lights at the top of her tower. Musaeus calls their love aAA'
"a wedding without a dance" and aAA' tX,e:p ufJ.vwv, "a
bedding without hymns" (274) for the morning light never sees the lovers
together in their marriage bed: Leander swims back to Abydos under cover
'l In a heading attached to Ilero IIIId Lellllder Musaeu\ is called a YP"'f.l.f.I."'HXO:;.
4 In the introduction to his text, Thomas Gelzer asserts that "no traccs of this story
arc to be found in any Ildlcnistic poet" (Gelzer 1975: 305), and that the earliest certain
reference to Hero and Leander in Greek poetry occurs in late first-century BeE epigrams of
Antipater of Thessalonica (304) , preserved in the Palatine Anthology (7.o(,() , 9.215).
VIOLENT ACTS AND OVIDIAN ARTIFACTS 33
of darkness; thus Hero, fearful of her parents, lives vuXL-f)
"a maiden by day and a wife by night" (287). 5 All summer the lovers
enjoy their secret union. But when winter comes, one stormy night the
wind blows out Hero' s lamp and Leander, losing his way in the waves,
drowns. When Hero sees his lifeless body cast upon the rocks, she throws
herself from the tower to join her lover in death for a final embrace.
Musaeus' poem links the literature of antiquity with the romances of
the late Byzantine era, continuing on the one hand the tradition of
Hellenistic erotic fiction and initiating on the other a new genre, narrative
poems about separated lovers, which would become velY popular in
Byzantium as well as in late medieval Europe. Indeed, Aldus Manutius
made Hero alld Leanner one of the first publications (ca. 1493) of his famous
printing press in Venice, while Julius Caesar Scaliger set Musaeus above
Homer and Orpheus in his Poetics (Gelzer 1975: 323), and the Renaissance
poets Juan Boscan Almogaver in Spain (1540), Clement Marot in France
(1541), and Bernardo Tasso in Italy (1555) offered vernacular versions of
the Greek poem (Gelzer 1975: 324).
Marlowe and his contemporaries believed that the poem was pre-
Homeric, the work of a mythical poet, the son or pupil of Orpheus. By
invoking the Greek poet as the "divine Musaeus" (52), Marlowe alludes to
the Muses and to the supernatural origin of poetry.6 Marlowe's own
version of 818 iambic pentameter lines does not get as far as Leander's
drowning and Hero's suicide but ends right after the consummation of the
couple's love. The incompleteness of such a famous stOlY prompted a
second version that included Marlowe's poem, now divided into two
sestiads, together with an additional four sestiads, written by George
Chapman, leading the lovers to their expected deaths.
7
At the end of the
completion of his predecessor's poem, Chapman reflected that the dead
lovers had the honor of being "the first that ever poet sung," while Sir
Robert Stapylton, the mid-seventeenth-century translator, despite having
read Scaliger's repudiation of this mistaken belief, could not resist citing
Virgil's MusaulIl allte Ollllles (ACIleid 6.667) on the title page of his translation
(Stapylton 1647).
5 All citations of Musaeus arc from Gelzer 1975.
" The allusion is also found in Marlowe's Doctor Fallstlls 1. 1. 1 18 (in the text of
Bevington and Rasmussen 1993). See Pincombe 200 I: 167.
7 Although Marlowe's poem has been considered unfinished by posterity, recent
critics have persuaSively argued for the completeness of the text as it See Campbell
1984 and Godshalk 1988.
34 EFTERPI MITSI
Musacus, like Marlowe, was a scholar, appropriating a myth from the
Graeco-Roman tradition into his own Christian era. llis stylc and language
are learned and highly ornate, including words and forms that had long
since been obsolete (Gelzer 1975: 3(2). The beauty of the two young
lovers dominates a poem that from its very beginning hints at their tragic
end. Marlowe, however, expands his source (Musaeus' text is only 343
lines, less than half as long as Marlowe's version) without privileging its
tragic and even didactic perspective. For Warren Boutcher, Marlowe's
Musaeus is in fact an "Ovid ian Musaeus" (Boutcher 2000: 18), mediated
through the vision of his continental predecessors, primarily Boscan.
B
Moreover, the Engli h poet adds descriptions, ekphrases, and digressions,
such as the story of Mercury and the country maid (386-484), and comic
scene, like Neptune's amorous interest in Leander (639-712). Although in
Musaeus ' poem many lines are devoted to the appearance of Hero (55-68),
of the two lovers' secret union (256-290), and of the storm that signals the
end of Leander (309-330), there is no emphasis on detail and none of the
vivid imagery that marks Marlowe's epyllion. Musaeus mentions that the
scene of the fateful meeting of the two lovers occurs at the temple of
Aphrodite in Sestos, during a festival in honor of the goddess and her lover
Adonis (42-43). But Venus' glass, the description of the mirror-like floor
of the church, is Marlowe's invention, a web-like weaving or a broken-
mirror reflection of source, including the Metalllorphoses and Edmund
Spenser's The Faerie Qllccl/e. According to Patrick. Cheney, Marlowe uses
Ovid to criticize Spenser, "to pcn a poetics of coullter-nationhood" and to
subvert the erotic cult of the virgin Queen (Chency 1997: 239). Resisting
the Spenserian fear of beautiful images and his ambivalence toward
ekphrases, Marlowe creates an amoral pagan cosmo as an ornament of his
own world, not just of Musaeus' church.
Ovid's Arachne
Ovid plays an important role in late Elizabethan culture, the
Met((lIlorphoses epitomiLing creativity, especially its sclf-consciou promotion
of the relationship between transformation and literary imagination.
Critics such as Leonard Barkan, Jonathan Bate, Patrick Cheney, Lynn
Enterline, and Georgia Brown, among others, have documented the
significance of Ovid in Renaissance England, emphasizing readings of the
Met((lIlorphoses that link the aesthetic with the erotic.'! Cheney views Ovid
" Boutcher 2000 is an extensive discussion of the adaptations of t h.: Greek poem in
Renaissance Europe, and espeCially the relationship between Marlowe and Hoscan's
version.
9 Barkan 1986. Hate 1994. Brown 2004, and Enterline 2000.
VIOLENT ACTS AND OVIDIAN ARTIFACTS 35
as an alternative to the Virgilian-Spenserian model, one that enables
Marlowe to fashion a literary career in opposition to the moral and generic
principles associated with Virgil's literary authority. Ovid's reputation for
indecency, particularly in texts like the Ars Amatoria, also made him an
ambiguous influence for Elizabethan authors. The admiration for the
Roman poet was coupled with a sense of gui lt, leading to the association of
his qualities of "literariness, verbal fluency and imaginative facility" with
"wantonness and guiltiness" (Brown 2004: 40). The generic fluidity and
hybridity of the MetalllOlpltoses challenged the existing conceptions of
literature, and its endless movement and fragmentation called into question
conventional categories and structures of thought, including the reader's
"ability to categorize experience at all" (Hulse 1981: 42). The epyllion, a
popular genre of the 1590s, not only derived its subject matter from
Ovidian poetry but, Similarly to the Metamorphoses, it also confronted the
epic tradition, pIiviJeging the trivial, the ornamental, and the erotic. The
use of Ovid in the epyllion freed poetry from the didacticism of the epic,
while exaggerating certain of its aspects, including ekphrasis and digression
(Brown 2004: 103).
In the context of the Ovidian influence on the Renaissance epylli on
Marlowe's choice to enrich Musaeus' story with a visual artifact alluding to
one of the most famous episodes in the Metamorphoses signifies his concern
with the role of art, especially when it depicts-and beautifies-power and
violence. Arachne's tapestry explores a recurrent issue in the Metamorphose,
the relationship between aesthetic form, rhetoric, and violence. Enterline
argues that one of the most troubling features of Ovid's poem is the
recurrence of rape, not only because the text associates sexuality with power
but mainly because it "repeatedly links sexual violence to a sense of beauty"
(2000: 3)). In Book 6, Arachne, in depicting the rapes of mortal women by
gods, weaves a tapestry so beautiful and flawless that it enrages Minerva,
who tears it to pieces and then attacks the girl with a spindle. When the
indignant Arachne hangs herself, the goddess restores her to life by
transforming her into a spider, an example of divine punishment:
non illud Pallas, non illud carpere Livor
possit opus: doluit successu flava virago
et rupit pictas, caelestia crimina, vestes,
utque Cytoriaco radium de monte tenebat,
ter quater Idmoniae frontem percussit Arachnes.
non tuIit infeIix laqueoque animosa ligavit
gutLura (6.l29-135)'"
10 All citations of Ovid are from Anderson 1982.
36 EFTERPI MITsl
Not Pallas, no, nor spight it selfe could any quarrell picke
To thi s hir worke: and that did touch Minerva to the quicke.
Who thereupon did rende the cloth in pieces every whit,
Bicause the lewdnesse of the Gods was biased so in it.
And with an Arras weavers combe of Box she fiercely smit
Arachne on the forehead full a dozen times and morc.
The Maide impacient in hir hea rt , did stomacke this so sore,
That by and by she hung hirselfe. (6. 16 1- 168, trans. Arthur Golding)"
Arachne's depiction of the unjust relations of the immortal gods to mortal
women is thereby crowned with another act of divine injust ice. Although
Minerva's own tapestry represents her triumph over Neptune in becoming
the patroness of Athens, including her gift of the olive branch, a symbol of
peace, her actions against Arachne undermine her role as bearer of peace,
order, and justice. Instead of accepting defeat and giving the prize of the
weaving contest to Arachne, Minerva's "behavior toward Arachne
contradicts the principles that her tapestry upholds" (Jones 1996: 195).
Although Nancy Miller, in a feminist reading of Arachne's story,
separates Arachne's art from Ovid's, interpreting her weaving as a protest
soon to be punished through her disembodying (Miller 1986: 287), when
this particular narrative is placed within the context of the entire poem it
reminds the reader that every artist in the Metalllorphoses is ultimately
destroyed, including the narrator himself. Ovid's emphasis on the skill with
which Arachne weaves many of the poem's previous rapes connects the
arti stic quality of her ani fact to the achievement of the entire poem. In his
commentary on the passage, W. S. Anderson has pointed out that the
border of the tapestry represents ivy, "a floral symbol with connotations to
rival those of Minerva's olive" (1972: 167), and here suggesting poetic
excell ence: ultima pars telae, tCIIlli circumdata limbo I lIexilibliS .flores hederis habet
illtertextos (6. 127-128), "Round about the utmost Verdge was et l A narrow
Traile of preti e floures with leaves of lvie fret" (6.159-160 Golding).
Arachne's artistlY recall s the narrator' s own ski ll in maki ng poetry out of
violent acts, art out of cruelty and injustice.
12
Anderson also suggests that
Ovid treats Arachne's tapestly-itself a kind of microcosm of the long poem
in which it is embedded-morc sympatheti cally than Athena's work, which
II I am citing from Arthur Golding's translation of the MetnlllOlphoses because I will
later refer to Golding's interpret at ion of the story of Arachne, and because thi s translat ion
precedes Marlowe's own reworking of Ovid by al most a generation, revealing the process of
appropriation of the Roman poet in sixteenth-centuIY English culture. Citations are from
Nims 2000.
12 Arachne's weaving resembles Philomela's later on in the poem, where the
mutilated, speechless victim weaves the story of her rape for her sister's eyes, another
artifact created Out of rape and suffering (Enterline 2000: 35).
VIOLENT ACTS AND OVIDLAN ARTIFACTS 37
is "flawlessly Classical, perfectly centered, balanced, and framed, highly
moral and didactic in content" (1972: 160) . The narrator of the
MetamOlphoses thus identifies with Arachne not only as a skilful artist but
also as an irreverent narrator of "celestial crimes" (caelestia crimilla, 6.131).
The girl, representing by her examples all the victimized mortals in Ovid's
poem, defines metamorpho is itself as a celestial crime rather than the
result of human crimes, which is how Athena defines it in her tapestry
(Barkan 1986: 4). The text (textllS, from texo, "I weave") is analogous to the
textile; the unconventional, episodic, and subversive weaving of the poem is
likewise akin to the weaving of Arachne's tapestry, certainly a more
dramatic and less didactic "text" than Athena's work.
Ovid's Arachne in Marlowe's world
Marlowe's ekphrasis in Hero and Leallder evinces a complex relation
to his source: rather than depicting a tapestry (like Busyrane's tapestries in
Book 3 of The Faerie Quee1le), the English poet all udes to the subject of the
MetalllOlphoses, as well as to the ekphrasis of Arachne's tapestry, by using a
glass floor to represent the injustice of the gods, their sexual aggression
toward not only mortal women but also young men (Ganymede and
Cyparissus), the latter being Marlowe's addition to his source. The strange
"crystal pavement" encompasses and appropriates hi s sources in the context
of a poem openly concerned with narration, description, and digression.
The self-consciousness of the poem foregrounds a competition with the
literary past by interrogating the role of antiquity in late Sixteenth-century
culture and by connecting poetics with cultural politics. After examining
the epyllia of the 1590s, Brown concludes that the genre is "largely the
product of middle-class writers who had social, as well as intellectual ,
ambitions," offering those writers access to audiences in "exclusive social
and intellectual circles" (2004: I 13). Besides the obvious identification
with the Roman poet for both aesthetic and political reasons, another
connection can be drawn between Marlowe the poet, successful playwright,
and translator of Ovid, and the myth of Arachne as represented in the
Metamorphoses. Ann Rosalind Jones emphasizes Ovid's figuring of Arachne
"as a self-made woman, distinguished not by place of birth or rank but by
command of her craft" (1996: 196), exposing the class as well as the gender
issues that disturbed humanist readers of the poem centuries later. In the
epistle to his translation of the Metamorphoses, Arthur Golding introduces
the perspective of class, by interpreting the tale of Arachne's "web" as an
admonition for common "folk" not to challenge their "betters": "Arachne
may example bee that folk should not contend / Ageinst their betters, nor
persist in error to the end" (Ep. 130).
Moreover, in the beginning of the following centlllY, George Sandys,
in hi s Ovid's Metamorphoses Ellglisherl, MytllOlogizerl, alld RepresCllteri ill Figures
38 EFTERPI MITSI
(published in 1632) , "reads Arachne not as a craftswoman or an artist but
as a class upstart" (Jones J 996: 198). For Sandys, Arachne, who "sets forth
the rapes and adulterie of the gods" (1970: 220), deserves her punishment
as a traitor, an ambitious commoner questioning the authority of her
superiors. Following the traditional allegorical readings of Ovid, Sandys
interprets the rapes committed by Jupiter as moral allegories, censoring the
sexual violence depicted in Ovid's text and epitomized in the ekphrasis of
Arachne's tapestry. The popular moral, social, and allegorical
interpretations of ancient texts constitute among other things a translation
of the otherness of classical antiquity. Golding, Sandys, and other
Renaissance readers of Ovid, adhering to a long tradition of allegorical
exegeses, "correct" the irreverent representation of godly lust in the Roman
poem. The interpretation of Arachne as the "base-born" artist and victim
of nemesis may be part of an effort to accommodate the cruelty and
violence perpetrated by the divine against the human order within a
Christian and humanist perspective. Golding and Sandys might have in
fact preferred the classicism of Minerva's tapestry, might have voted for
morality rather than beauty. However, Marlowe, another ambitious class
upstart, must have recognized that "the amours of the gods are destructive
but beautiful; the talents of the girl are sacrilegious but magnificent ; the
fate of the girl is degradation but also eternal life as an artist" (Barkan
1986: 5).
Indeed, Marlowe's use of Ovid cherishes the tradition of description
and i l a g i ~ l i c detail associated with the Roman poem. In the
Met(l/llorphoses, "seeing" is evelything. While there are fewer ekphrases in
the Met(l/llorphoses than in the Aeneid, Ovid constantly explores the
relationship between word and image, from the warriors transformed into
statues by Perseus to the animation of a lifeless statue by Pygmalion.
Ekphrasis in Ovid not only links aesthetic and erotic responses to his own
narrative art, as Arachne's tapestry exemplifies, I"l but also evokes the
relation between text and image, the rivalry that exists between the "sister
arts," the opposition between time and stasis, narration and description.
Following Ovid, Marlowe draws on the ekphrastic tradition to dwell on the
connection between art and desire. From the beginning of Hero (lilri
Leal/rier, Marlowe emphasizes description, creating a recognizably Ovidian
world. In particular the ekphrasis of Hero's garments in the first lines of
the poem indicates that the focus of the text is "less on dramatic action
than on the narrator's witty rhetorical displays and his capacity for evoking
lush visual imagery" (Kuchar 1999: 4). Whereas Musaeus engages in stock
descriptions of the white skin and rosy cheeks of the beautiful girl (55 ff.),
Il See Il ardie 2002: eh. 6.
VIOLE T ACTS AND OVIDIAN ARTIFACTS 39
Marlowe mocks the blazon tradition by displaying the lavish clothes rather
than the body of his heroine, clothes that depict a myth, the love of Venus
and Adonis:
The outside of her garments were of lawne,
The lining, purple silke, with guilt starres drawne,
Her wide sleeves greene, and bordered with a grove,
Where VCllIIS in her naked glory strove,
To please the carelesse and disdainful! eies,
Of proud Adonis, that before her lies ... (9-14)
On the contrary, the detailed description of Leander's body, absent
from Musaeus' poem, is both an inversion of the conventional blazon-it
celebrates the beauty of a young man rather than a woman-and an
invocation of the homoerotic classical myth, a catalogue of beautiful boys
desired by the gods: "His bodie was as straight as Circes wand, / Jove might
have sipt out Nectar from his hand" (61-62). For Claude Summers the
descriptions of the two lovers "destabilise the seriou ness and 'naturalness'
of hegemonic constructions of gender and sexuality," e pecially when
Marlowe's classical and literary construction of homosexuality is set against
its condemnation by his own Christian culture (Summers 2000: 135). The
descriptions also celebrate the ornamental and the excessive, whether the
clothes woven as a work of art containing and subsuming entire narratives
(the myth of Venus and Adonis pictured on Hero's sleeve) or the male body
molded by a mythological tradition of both sexual and textual desire.
Similarly, when the two protagonists, already drawn as beautiful
poetic artifacts, both subjects and objects of desire, meet for the first time,
their encounter OCCLII'S in a resplendent world of pagan gods and goddesses,
an amoral universe beyond the sexual conventions of Hero and Leander's
social environment---conventions that seem to reflect those of Marlowe's
own era. The poet presents Sestos, the site of the festival celebrating Venus
and her mortal beloved Adonis, as an erotic space that brings together
divine and human desires. The glass floor is not the only decoration of
Venus' extravagant temple; its walls are also made of precious, multicolored
stones. The figure of Proteus carved on the walls implies metamorphosis,
or rather the paradoxical coexistence of change and permanence, movement
and immobility:
So faire a church as this, had Vel/liS none,
The wals were of discoloured lasper stone,
Wherein was Proteus calved, and o'rehead,
A Iivclie vine of greene sea agget spread;
Where by one hand, light headed Bacchlls hoong,
And with the other, wine from grapes out wToong. (135-140)
40 EFTERPI MITSI
The image of the god of transformation frozen in stone evokes the nature of
literalY ekphrasis as a means both to create the illusion of presence and to
overcome the limitations of immobility and externality imposed on a visual
artist's work. It can also be read as an allusion to the poet of the
Metalllorphoses and his protean art. The green sea, compared to lifelike vine,
is moving though carved in stone, on the one hand recalling the ivy border
of Arachne's tapestry, and on the other alluding to Spenser's description of
the fountain in the Bower of Bliss, "pav'd beneath with Jaspar shining
bright" (2.12.60-62).1'1 The realism of the art contrasts with the
strangeness and exoticism of this church, highlighting the otherness of the
classical past when read in an iconoclastic Protestant present, the very
background of Spenser's fear of art in the Bower of Bliss.
The role of literalY ekphrasis, traditionally seen a transgressive
inasmuch as it confuses boundaries-between visual and verbal art, between
space and time, between reality and illusion-is linked here to sexual
transgression. The violent loves of the gods show that desire breaks evelY
bound: homosexuality (Jove abducting Ganymede), rape (Jove raping
Danae), incest (Jove and Juno) , and adultery (Mars, Venus, and Vulcan) .
Humans have constructed a "church" to praise the goddess, whose power is
ultimately destructive for all, not just for the two young protagonists. The
description of Venus' church concludes with the aphorism, "It lies not in
our power to love, or hate, I For will in us is over-rul'd by fate" (167-168),
suggesting that human beings are not only the pawns of the gods or fate but
of the same desire that overcomes the gods themselves. The glass floor
encapsulates the theme of the entire poem, relating it to the genre of the
epyllion, a form also constructed by crossing limits between genres (and
genders), between the serious and the trivial, and between substance and
ornament.
Furthermore, Marlowe subverts Christian morality as well as the
order of the Christian cosmos. By creating a verbal artwork that depicts
disorder and chaos, he challenges the orderly Christian and Neoplatonist
readings of antiquity and undermines their moral and allegorical
interpretations of myth. Summers argues that despite the joking tone of
the description, the loves of the gods have tragic effects for humanity,
suggesting that in this way Marlowe is indirectly attacking the supernatural
order of his own day. By mythologizing humans and humani zing gods, the
poem is also implying that "examples set by the amoral classical deities
14 After comparing MarlOlw"s ckphrasis to Spenser's Bower of Bliss, Cheney
concl udes that "Marlowe 's two-storey Church structure has an origin in Acrasia's two-
layered fountain'" (1997: 248). For comparisons with other ekphrases, such as the Palace
of the Sun in the Metalllorpiroses (2. 1- 18) and the House of Busyrane in FQ 3.11.28-46,
see Gill 1987: 294.
VIOLENT ACTS AND OVIDIAN ARTIFACTS 41
more accurately reflect human nature than do the expectations and
prohibitions of Christian culture" (Summers 2000: 138). The use of the
word "church" in the beginning of the ekphrasis sets the highly ornate
temple against the Reformation ideal of a stem and empty place of worship,
a contrast that confronts Protestant iconoclasm and questions "the
hardening of doctrine in England's late-sixteenth-century turn toward
Calvinism" (Duncan 2006: I).
The political insinuations of the passage rest, on the one hand on the
juxtaposition between the Ovid ian aesthetics of sensuality and indulgence
and the Spenserian anxiety toward image-making and, on the other, on the
representation of religion as erratic and chaotic. The allusions to Spenser's
Faerie QucCile suggest that excess could be an inspiring rather than
corrupting force, that the art of ACt-asia, the creator of the magnificent yet
dangerous artifacts of the Bower of Bliss, could be emulated rather than
violently destroyed by the knight of Temperance. Visual and sexual excess
merge on the glass floor of the temple, where the desire of the amoral pagan
deities obliterates entire civilizations, "kindling fire, to burne such townes
as Trl!Jl" (153). Marlowe refuses to control the violence of desire by
expurgating myth and refashioning paganism in a Christian matrix. The
irreverent depiction of the ancient gods clashes against a culture revolving
around a "Virgin Queen" and a religion seeking to control sexual activity
through institutions and discourses. The poet's refusal to call the union of
Hero and Leander a secret marriage, as Musaeus did, challenges the belief
that sexual rclations can only be permitted within the institution of
marriage. Indeed, Juno, the goddess of childbirth, is not presented here as
the patroness of a reproductive Christian union, but, as Duncan puts it, "as
Jove's incestuous 'sister' from whose bed the god 'slylie steal[s], in order to
'dallic WitJ1 Idalian Ganymede'" (2006: 1). The anticlimactic ending of the
poem further emphasizes the rejection of the chaste domesticity dictated by
the Protestant doctrine. The morning after the two protagonists make love
for the first time, an insolent Leander stares at the spectacle of tJ1e naked
body of a shameful Hero, an image that recalls the selfish, violent (and
quite ridiculous) loves of the gods on the glass floor.
Besides the decoration of the temple of Venus, the gods'
transgressive desires appear throughout Hero a1ld Lea1lder, in the mythical
allusions decorating the blazons of the protagonists as well as in the
encounter between Leander and Neptune, which, like the ekphrasis of the
glass floor, is another Marlovian invention and addition to his source.
Neptune's lust for tJ1e young man and Leander's misreading of the god's
desire upset the idea of a religion carefully organized around the human
effort to interpret the divine will. Leander resists Neptune's sexual
advances with the cry, "You are deceav'd, r am no woman I" (676), a funny
and at the same time pathetic response to the god's desire, exposing the
42 EFTERPI MITSI
young man's naivete and vulnerability. The pagan deity's volatile behavior
toward his human prey-first he mistakes Leander for Ganymede and
almost drowns him, then saves him, then tries to seduce him, then gets
angly when rejected, and finally pities him-recalls the unpredictable godly
desire depicted earlier on the glass floor and in its source, Arachne's
tapestlY in the Metamorphoses. Both the ekphrasis of Venus' temple and the
Neptune episode testify to Marlowe's enrichment of the pagan texts , the
pre-Christian tradition that, as Nicholas Davidson argues, provided the
Elizabethan poet with "many powerful arguments against orthodox
Christian teaching" (1999: 134) .
Critics such as Richard Neuse and L. E. emler have presented
philosophical readings of Venus' glass, viewing the pavement either as "a
Lewis Carroll mirror" suggesting the "Epicurean conception or reduction of
the gods as a preconception of the human mind" (Neuse 1970: 431--132),
or as the image of "Venusian love," a force of desire based on "Ciceronian-
Aristotelian biology and Empedoclean cosmogony" (Semler 2005: 18 I) ,
both readings harmonizing with the allegorical interpretation of the loves of
the gods prevalent in Marlowe's time.
' s
The narrator' s detachment,
however, from the images he describes draws attention to their artificiality;
the violence of desire, which is also the creative force of the poem's own
world (the love of Hero and Leander and their passage from innocence to
experience), is frozen in glass for viewers to reflect (and be reflected) upon.
The humor and irreverence of the description, highlighted by words
("bellowing loud," "tumbling") , sound effects ("slylie stealing," "To dallie
with IrIalinll Gnllilllerf") , and stock epithet ("limping VulwlI") unsettle the
fixed meaning of myth and confuse the tragic with the comic element.
Even the god of war ("Blood-quaffing Mars") appears on the C1y tal floor as
a shamed and powerless lover, caught in the iron net of Vulcan, Venus'
cheated husband. The "headdie Iyots" of the gods emphasize the protean
character of the game of love: predators turn into prey and vice versa, as
Hero and Leander will oon discover in their own awkward ritual of
seduction, a di cove'Y both humorous and sad. The final image of the
ekphrasis, the metamorphosis of Cyparissus, beautifully combines pain and
pleasure: Sylvanus weeping for the loss of the boy juxtaposed to the deities
of the wood enjoying the shade of the cypress. The poet's rhetorical choice,
an ekphrasis with multiple and complex references, connects transformation
with poetry.
15 Semler argues in full that the "inherently imperfect force of de ire animating the
world of Marlowe's love-story is predicated upon Ciceronian-Aristotelian biology and
Empedoclean cosmogony, but formulated according to Ovidian principles of love" (2005:
181 ).
VIOLENT ACTS AND OVIDIAN ARTIFACTS 43
Conclusion
For Murray Krieger ekphrasis exemplifies the aestheticizing of
language in what he calls the "still moment" by shaping language into
formal patterns that "still" the movement of linguistic temporality into a
spatial, formal array (Krieger 1992). Marlowe's verbal representations of
visual experience evoke not just vision, but also stasis, shape, and silent
presence. Venus' glass mocks the anxieties of Protestant, and especially
Spenserian, poetics with the temptations of imagery. Marlowe, like Ovid
and his unfortunate mythic weaver, creates art out of cruel acts, a choice
that colors not only his drama but also his epyllion. Yet rather than sharing
Ovid's pessimism about the role of art and the artist, the narrator of Hero
and Leander, with his detached and mocking tone, controls this potentially
idolatrous and fetishistic ornament.
Although the ekphrastic ornament has, since Lessing's criticism of
the description of Achilles' shield in the Iliad, been considered a kind of
foreign body within the epic that threatens to reverse the literary priorities
of time over space and narrative over description,16 Marlowe's poem
celebrates the otherness of the ekphrastic image, defined by the subject
matter of the visual representation as well as by its very material: the
crystal, mirror-like floor reverses the natural order in many ways (the gods
are literally underneath the treading humans) and reflects the unrestrained
desire hidden under civilization. Hero and Leander endows the alien sexual
dance of the ancient world with a voice, bringing it into view for the
contemporary reader, while freezing the movement of poetic language into
a static, spatial array. The Renaissance text not only subsumes its sources,
Ovid and Musaeus, but also questions the violence of ancient myth and
culture by describing them and by speaking for them; by making them
speak out or speak up, as the Greek verb ekphrazein implies. It engages with
the otherness of the image, with the otherness of the past, and with the
otherness within humanity. The rivalry and appropriation that exist
between the "sister arts" extend to the relations between cultures and
between texts, raising questions of aesthetics and erotics. The radiant floor
in Hero and Leander exposes the barbarism inherent in humanism; the
cruelty of love in classical literature and mythology and the conflict
between the divine and the human order set the pattern for Marlowe's
interrogation of sexuality, religion, and power in his own era.
Ulliversiry of Athens
16 See Mitchell 1994: 177-1 79 on Lessing's criticism of the ekphrasis of Achilles'
shield.
44 EFTERPI MITSI
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TITLE: Violent Acts and Ovidian Artifacts in Marlowes Hero
and Leander
SOURCE: Classical Mod Lit 27 no2 Fall 2007
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