Hero and Leander, Christopher Marlowe - S. Ann Collins (essay date fall 1970)
S. Ann Collins (essay date fall 1970)
SOURCE: Collins, S. Ann. “Sundrie Shapes, Committing Headdie Ryots, Incest, Rapes: Functions of Myth in Determining Narrative and Tone in Marlowe's Hero and Leander.” Mosaic IV, no. 1 (fall 1970): 107-22.
[In the following essay, Collins maintains that the mythological episodes of Hero and Leander function “both as indicators of the poem's tone and as emblematic parallels of segments of the narrative.”]
Hero and Leander, the unfinished epic which was almost solely responsible for Christopher Marlowe's reputation as a poet among his contemporaries, has frequently proved at worst blinding and at best enigmatic to modern critics. Like Hero, “Moving severall ways / At one self instant,” they have found it to be variously a tragic epic of love pure as the driven snow (admittedly a minority view of days past, chiefly held by C. F. Tucker Brooke), a cynical dumb show of...
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