Hero and Leander, Christopher Marlowe | Elizabeth Bieman (essay date winter 1979)
Elizabeth Bieman (essay date winter 1979)
SOURCE: Bieman, Elizabeth. “Comic Rhyme in Marlowe's Hero and Leander.” English Literary Renaissance 9, no. 1 (winter 1979): 69-77.
[In the following essay, Bieman argues that Hero and Leander “offers many hilarious moments through incongruities of situation and language.”]
For all its heroics in celebration of the glory and pathos of young love, Marlowe's Hero and Leander offers many hilarious moments through incongruities of situation and language. When noticed at all, at a more solemn time in literary study, these could be chidden lightly and absolved indulgently on the grounds of the poet's untimely death.1 Now we need no longer seek excuses for Marlowe, although we may be disposed to lavish a little sympathy on one so long, and so grievously, misunderstood. Recent criticism takes fully into account the comic ironies of character and situation in the...
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