Hero and Leander, Christopher Marlowe | M. Morgan Holmes (essay date June 1995)
M. Morgan Holmes (essay date June 1995)
SOURCE: Holmes, M. Morgan. “Identity and the Dissidence It Makes: Homoerotic Nonsense in Kit Marlowe's Hero and Leander.” English Studies in Canada 21, no. 2 (June 1995): 151-69.
[In the following essay, Holmes examines Marlowe's portrayal of homosexual desire in Hero and Leander.]
I
Generations of audiences, readers, and critics have proved that few species of literary dissidence can rival the unsettling force of Marlovian homoerotic desire.1 Christopher Marlowe's homoerotic dissidence ranges from a rather mild, titillating naughtiness—as in “The passionate Sheepheard to his love”—to an outright thwarting of English law and custom—as in Edward II. What unites these two instances across a spectrum of transgressions is an opposition to the definition of individual identity through the discourse of exclusive and immutable sexual desire. Nowhere in...
[The entire page is 8602 words long]
Navigate
