Hero and Leander, Christopher Marlowe | Judith Haber (essay date autumn 1998)
Judith Haber (essay date autumn 1998)
SOURCE: Haber, Judith. “‘True-loves Blood’: Narrative and Desire in Hero and Leander.” English Literary Renaissance 28, no. 3 (autumn 1998): 372-86.
[In the following essay, Haber offers a stylistic analysis of Marlowe's treatment of desire in Hero and Leander, contending that the poem “refuses the comforts of a conventional, mastering narrative.”]
Most critics would agree that throughout Christopher Marlowe's corpus there exists a tension between orthodox and heterodox modes of thought, between containment and resistance. This tension is frequently figured within the texts themselves as a dialectic between the assertion of a phallic point and an acknowledgment of complete pointlessness. In Edward II, for example, Marlowe repeatedly evokes—and links—pointlessness in all its senses: impotence, lack, non-meaning, indeterminacy, incompleteness; yet the threat...
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