SOURCE: Segal, Erich. “Hero and Leander: Góngora and Marlowe.” Comparative Literature 15, no. 4 (fall 1963): 338-56.

[In the following essay, Segal contrasts Marlowe's and Luis de Góngora y Argote's versions of the Hero and Leander story.]

That contemporaries like Góngora and Marlowe should have chosen the same classical myth is hardly a remarkable literary phenomenon.¹ What is interesting about their versions of the Hero and Leander story is that, while their approaches are similar, they stand diametrically opposed to all previous treatments of the legend. Both poets have made mock heroic a tale hitherto treated only with high seriousness, casting an unsentimental eye on what was traditionally the tenderest of love stories. In their cynical interpretations, Marlowe and Góngora employ similar images, make similar mythological allusions, and describe their protagonists in similar artificial terms. Yet these two comic epyllia, independently conceived though remarkably akin in spirit, also exemplify the two poets' individual stylistic characteristics.

The legend of Hero and Leander did not appear in classical literature until relatively late, and attained popularity only after the Augustan age. Ovid's version (Heroides, XVIII-XIX) is the earliest extant account of this star-crossed pair. For the Renaissance Hero and Leander had much the same psychological appeal as Icarus. Philippe Desportes wrote:

Il mourut pursuivant une haute aventure
Le ciel fut son désir, la mer sa sépulture
Est-il plus beau dessein ou plus riche tombeau?

If le ciel were interpreted metaphorically, this could well be a poetic epitaph for Leander, though it is the final tercet of the sonnet, “Icare est chu ici, le jeune audacieux.” It is, indeed, the common audacieux quality of their actions that unites these two bold adventurers whose tomb was the sea.²

Icarus had a special fascination for the Renaissance mind, since he simultaneously exemplified bold striving and punishment for overreaching. In the Renaissance ambition and virtù were celebrated, but the Horatian moral feriuntque summos fulmina montes was never totally forgotten; the closer one came to the heights of achievement, the more probable it was that some fall would occur. Boccaccio's De Casibus epitomizes this view, and the Hero and Leander story fits into the pyramidal tragic pattern which characterizes the Boccaccian tales of misfortune.

Ovid's Heroides, verse epistles rightly described by Hermann Fränkel as “capsule tragedies,”³ are fraught with tragic irony; the reader is fully aware of the inexorable fate of its heroes. Laodamia, for example, begs her newly wed husband, Protesilaus, who is on route to the Trojan War, “inter mille rates tua sit millensima puppis.” (XIII, 97). Ovid's readers knew that Protesilaus would be on the first of the thousand ships to land and was himself to be the first Greek fatality. There is equally bitter irony in the letters exchanged between Hero and Leander. Standing on the shore as the sea swells before him, the youth of Abydos is determined to cross, come what may.

Aut mihi continget felix audacia salvo
          Aut mors solliciti finis amoris erit

(XVIII, 195-96)

It is interesting to note that he refers to his projected exploit as audacia. Earlier, this jeune audacieux had exclaimed:

Nunc daret audaces utinam mihi Daedalus alas
          Icarium quamvis hinc prope litus abest.
Quidquid erit patiar, liceat modo corpus in auras
          Tollere, quod dubia saepe perpendit aqua.

(XVIII, 49-52)

The well-known fate of Icarus foreshadows the impending failure of Leander to “corpus in aquas tollere.”

Perhaps more popular than Ovid's version in the Renaissance was the Greek epyllion by Musaeus (c. 500 a.d.). In the introduction to his translation of this poem, George Chapman remarked, “In the originall, it being by all the most learned, the incomparable Love-Poem of the world.” Boscán called it a tale of “amores lastimeros qu'n suave dolor fueron criados … dos fieles y dulces amadores.” There is, clearly, no doubt that these two prototypes for the Renaissance versions were conceived as tales of heroic tragedy.

It may be precisely because this legend had been treated so reverently, that iconoclastic poets like Góngora and Marlowe could not forbear cynical comment. There is in both poems a complete absence of romantic emotion. Sympathy is supplanted by ironic condescension (at best). The affair may be seen as mere sensuality (Marlowe) or mere foolishness (Góngora), but love is never the issue. Gone is the basic premise of “the incomparable Love-Poem of the world,” and, with its departure, heroic tragedy becomes mock-heroic comedy.

To understand fully the mock-heroics in Góngora, one must first realize that it is Boscán's Leandro as much as Musaeus' poem that he is satirizing. And the merits of Boscán's rambling 2,793-line epyllion are dubious at best. Horace's famous critique of Lucilius is no less valid for Boscán: “cum flueret lutulentus, erat quod tellere velles” (Sat., I, iv, 11). Paraphrasing Musaeus most of the time,⁴ Boscán emphasizes at the very outset that Leander was a “gentil moço,” Hero “pura y virginal.” Both were

iguales en linaje y en hazienda
en valer en saber y en hermosura

(Lines 35-36)

Naturally, the first Spanish author of poetry in the Italian style describes his heroine with innumerable Petrarchan conceits, and concludes that, if Jupiter had seen her long ago,

¡Quán lexos fuera Leda de ser madre
De Cástor y de Póllux y d'Helena!
¡Y quán lexos de ser Dánae burlada …

(Lines 163-65)

This is the device which later became comic in the mouth of Mercutio: “Laura to his lady was but a kitchen-wench … Dido a dowdy; Cleopatra a gypsy; Hero and Helen hildings and harlots” (II, iv, 40-42).⁵

But Boscán is attempting to portray the nobility characteristic of tragedy. That he wishes to add the dimension of tragic foreboding is evident from his description of Hero's reaction when Leander introduces himself, “Sintiéndose venir su muerte cerca.” (Line 212). After almost a hundred lines, Hero finally identifies herself by name. Her home, she says, is Sestos, “cabe la cual parece un alta torre.” (Line 811). And, when the assignation is arranged, Leander

a un estado tan alto de fortuna
dexóse star assí por un buen rato

(Lines 837-838)

With joy at its apogee (the sense of height reinforced by the language), the stage is set for a casus. And Boscán gives us another hint of doom as Leander travels homeward. In a sombre soliloquy (without precedent in Musaeus) he compares the “mudanças” of the sea and wind to “las prestas mudanças de la fortuna.” Then, strangely enough, Boscán breaks the narrative and translates all of Vergil's Georgics, IV, prolonging it with touches of his own, then throws in some of Heroides, XVIII before returning to his rendition of Musaeus.⁶ We shall see how Góngora makes light of this excursus.

Boscán now becomes impatient in his narration. We suddenly find Leander on the stormy shore, wondering if he will be able to swim all the way to Sestos.

Mas el amor que aún d'esto no s'hartava
y quería acabar ya su tragedia

(Lines 2491-92)

As Leander is about to dive into the Hellespont, Boscán pictures the Fates taking their knives in hand (line 2600). Vain are Leander's prayers to Venus (because of her, he says, he has fallen into this situation). But, after all, Leander “era de carne,” and he succumbs.

La postrer cosa que hizo el desdichado
Fué alçar los ojos a mirar su lumbre

(Lines 2761-62)

Hero's fall from the tower is quickly described (exactly as in Musaeus), and Boscán's fabula ends with the broken bodies upon one another and assurance that their souls are reunited in Elysium. However pedestrian the execution, the conception is lofty enough. Boscán tried valiantly to produce a Spanish Renaissance version of “The incomparable Love-Poem of the world.”

In Góngora's rendition, we have a classic example of mock-heroic poetry.⁷ He employs that same technique of comic reduction used by Shakespeare to diminish the great argument of the Trojan War to “a cuckold and a whore.” The mighty Hellespont has become a “charco de atunes” and the fate of the noble protagonists like two broken eggs (“El Amor como dos heuvos / Quebrantó nuestras saludes”). This catastrophe is now of no more gravity than the catastrophe of Humpty-Dumpty.

Góngora establishes the comic tone immediately by precluding any serious emotional involvement. He does not know the tale first hand; he has casually read of it in Musaeus (and Boscán):

Aunque entiendo poco Griego
En mis greguescos he hallado
Ciertos versos de Museo

(Lines 1-3)

The spirit is set in the very first lines by a Gongoresque play on words: he found this Greek poem in his Greek-style trousers. The accuracy of the story is, of course, imperiled by his own confession, “entiendo poco Griego.” Nonetheless, he makes a mock-serious attempt to be scrupulously accurate, entering now and then in the first person to confess his lack of information or his doubts.

We have seen how Boscán emphasized the equally noble stature of his protagonists,

iguales en linaje y en hacienda
en valer en saber y en hermosura …

(Lines 35-36)

This is reduced quite simply by Góngora to a statement that they were

                                        … tan pobres ambos
Que ella para una linterna
Y el no tuvo para un barco …

(Lines 6-8)

What is more, we now have a very bourgeois explanation of the “tragedy”: Hero could not afford a lantern (which, unlike a candle, would not blow out in the wind) and Leander had to swim the Hellespont because he was too poor to own a boat!

When we read in the succeeding lines that “doña Hero” was the child of an hidalgo, we discover another aspect of Góngora's mock-heroic technique—realistic, bourgeois Hispanification of the classical story. An identical comic approach (opening many possibilities for the humor of anachronism) was used to great advantage by Ben Jonson in treating this same legend. Thus, in the Hero and Leander puppet show which Littlewit has composed in Bartholomew Fair, Hero (“Nero?” “No, Hero”) “Is come over to Fish Street to buy some fresh herring.” Jonson's Anglification is complete as Abydos and Sestos become Puddle Wharf and Bankside, and the noble Hellespont which to Góngora was a little charco, is here the muddy Thames.

When Jonson remarked elsewhere, “no country's mirth is better than our own,” he was epitomizing the guiding comic principle in Góngora's poem. Everywhere in Hero y Leandro there are typically Spanish realistic touches of petty bourgeois existence. Hero's father is the local alcalde, “mal vestido y bien barbado” (line 12). And the classically balanced rhetorical statement heightens the comic effect. (This construction is repeated again, of all places, when Leander is drowning “menos nada y mas trabaja.”)

Hero's family is so poor that they must celebrate fast days all year round. Leander is equally impoverished, although “no pobre de plumas y de penachos” (line 36). He is depicted by Góngora as a young gallant, and, if there were any doubt whether the reader should take Leander's nobility seriously, Góngora adds that his greatest quality was being “Grande orinador de esquinas” (line 39). Góngora never hesitates to insert a scatological joke. At another point, he describes the storm which hinders Leander, “Y se orinaron las nubes” (II, 16).

Góngora also delights in classical allusions, some more obscure than others. He remarks, for example, that Leander was also a poet (a new feature in the legend) not unlike Orpheus. Of course he was not enough of an Orpheus to calm the sea with his song, but

                                                  … ya de Amphion
Imitando algunos passos
Llamó assi muchas mas piedras
Que tuvo el muro Thebano—.

(Lines 45-48)

Góngora's humor ranges easily from scatology to mythology. Here, of course, the reference is to Amphion who, by the power of son, caused the stones of Thebes to move and build themselves. Exactly why Leander's song could cause more stones to “move,” is suggested in splendid ironic understatement.

The author enters the poem almost at the outset to chide the reader for seeking too many details. The curious should consult Boscán's version (II, 56-58). All the while, Góngora protests his own faithfulness to detail, always apologizing for the paucity of his sources:

[Salió]
No sé si a pie o a cavallo …
I assi, no sé donde fueron
Ni como se convocaron

(Lines 50, 61-62)

This confession of ignorance is a slap at Boscán's Virgilian excursus, whose tenuous justification was to explain “como se convocaron.” Góngora sticks to the classical facts. “Esto solo de Museo Entendí …” (lines 69-70). And at this very point he describes the mounts on which each member of Hero's family rode to the festival

Llegó en un rocín mui flaco
El noble Alcalde de Sesto
I la Alcaldesa en un asno …

(Lines 72-74)

This is Hispanification again, all the more humorous since it follows hard upon the heels of the author's protestation of fidelity to the classical account.

Góngora's description of Hero is in keeping with the general tone of artificiality throughout the poem. (We shall see later how very similar this is to Marlowe's technique.) There are no flesh tones depicted; Hero is only “marfil” (line 116), “evano recien asserado” (line 120), “perlas” (line 139), and “alabastro” (line 142). In short, to use the poet's own phrase, she was “un ídolo de mármol” (line 150).

It is at this point in the description that we have one of the only bits of sexual humor in the entire poem (in contrast to Marlowe's far more sensual version). Góngora speaks of Hero's petticoat being

Entre lo que no se vee
I lo que bruxuléàmos

(Lines 145-146)

Note too the entrance of the author evident in the first-person plural, bruxuléàmos.⁸ He joins the reader in a bit of harmless sexual fantasy, adding another twist to his intrusion by admitting that Hero's charms

Tentaciones son, señor
Sed liberanos a malo

(Lines 143-144)

After this admonition to the reader, Góngora describes the first encounter of these great lovers, which ends abruptly when Hero

… le dió un bello
Crystallino cintaraço

(Lines 99-100)

Here is a very typical Gongoresque metaphor (crystalino is his favorite epithet), suitable for loftier moments than a slap in the face. This touch of the ridiculous (imagine Juliet having Romeo thrown out of the garden) reinforces the artificiality (sc. by transferred epithet, “crystalina mano”) of their description of Hero, mentioned earlier.

The lofty metaphor stands in contrast to the subsequent description of their encounter, painted with heavy strokes of mundane realism. The lovers have met in church, and can continue their conversation freely since Hero's mother,

                                                  devota
Se estuvo siempre reçando
I senor padre (poltrón)
Se salió a dormir al claustro

(Lines 157-160)

Here is an unmistakable cuadro of a Spanish bourgeois family!

With all clear, Leander “attacks.” The metaphor of love and war was well worn when employed by Ovid (“Militat omnis amans”), and was a very popular Renaissance conceit. Yet here the attack has a far too literal, too rapine quality to be merely a conceit. The literalness of words like “assalto” (line 162), “escalasse” (line 163), and “rebato” (line 164) adds a humorous touch by reversing conceit into reality. Marlowe, too, in his description of the lovers' encounter, makes his conceits far too lustful to be merely figurative (II, 269-278).

In general, Góngora's account is remarkable for its lack of sensual detail. There is, in fact, no mention at all of the lovers' assignation or the subsequent consummation of their amorous expectations. He knows that his readers are familiar with those details and he is definitely not the poet who dwells on the joys of love. He skips immediately from the first meeting to the fatal swim. Aristotle (and Dr. Johnson) would disapprove, since Góngora provides a beginning and an end, but no middle.

Leander is next seen naked on the Abydos shore,

Haciendo con el estrecho
Lo que el día de la purga
El enfermo con el vaso …

(Lines 193-196)

At the most heroic moment of the tale, Leander's feelings are the exact opposite of heroism. His is the reaction of more humble Spaniards when faced with fear, e.g., Don Quixote's Sancho and Don Juan Tenorio's Catalinón. After commending himself to Venus,⁹

Arrojóse el mancebito
Al charco de los atunes
Como si fuera el estrecho
Poco más de medio açumbre

(II, 1-4)

An intensified mock-heroic reduction begins at this point. The Hellespont no longer seems narrow to Leander (as earlier, “le parece estrecho”) but now is, as Góngora himself sees it, a little pond which Leander considers “a bit more than a quart in volume.” This device of measuring with comic exactitude is employed later by Góngora with even greater effectiveness.

Like other heroic figures before him, Leander had to leave something behind on the farther shore. He does not lose anything as important as a Palinurus; rather he must forsake his handsome “pedorreras,” removed to facilitate swimming. It was these fancy pants

Con que enamoró en Abido
Mil moçuelas agridulces

(II, 7-8)

A thousand is an appropriately heroic number; here Leander seems a fit rival for Don Juan.

If the Hellespont has been reduced to a pond, the rest of nature must suffer accordingly. The fierce storm which hinders the young swimmer is described, “se orinaron las nubes” (II, 16). This may be poetic justice for a “grande orinador de esquinas,” but, whatever the reason, the subsequent effect results from another uniquely Gongoresque collocation of the scatological and mythological.

Los vientos desenfrenados
Parece que entonces huien
De el odre donde los tuvo
El Griego de los ambustes

(II, 17-20)

“El Griego de los ambustes” is Odysseus (in another poem he is “el astuto Griego”), the “odre” is the bag of winds which Aeolus provided in Odyssey, X. This sudden climb to a lofty classical plane prompts Góngora to throw in another classical reference; speaking of the Hellespont, he is reminded “Al exercito de Xerxes” (line 23). One has the impression that the poet's main reason here for evoking the classical past is the possibility of a clever alliteration.

Hero's “candil” blows out and we find her

… entonces derramando
Dos mil perlas de ambas luces.

(Lines 41-42)

This commonplace conceit, re-echoed also in Marlowe (I, 296-297), reinforces the tone of artificiality with comic exactitude.

When Leander perishes, Góngora wastes little time in ending his poem. His object was description, not narration (quite characteristic of his muse in general); and, with one protagonist gone, he hastens the death of the other. In eight lines, Hero spies her lover's body washed up at the foot of her tower and hurls herself upon it. Traditionally (i.e., in Musaeus and Boscán) the tale ends here, but Góngora has Hero's maidservant discover the two shattered bodies

I viendo hecha pedaços
Aquella flor de virtudes
De cada ojo derrama
De lagrimas dos almudes.

(II, 77-80)

Here the comic exactitude of dos almudes is enhanced by the incongruous rhyme with virtudes.

Góngora has now built to the ne plus ultra mock-heroic effect. Since the two lovers are now in pieces, the maid (somewhat like Theseus in Seneca's Phaedra) attempts to put the pieces together again,

Iuntando los mal logrados
Con un punçon de un estuche.

(II, 81-82)

This touch again reinforces the artificiality of the tale, as if the “ídolo de mármol” were cracked and could be glued together.

Their epitaph underlines Góngora's attitude toward this love affair (Hero is talking):

Hero somos y Leandro
no menos necios que illustres …
El fue passado por agua
Io estrellada a mi fin tuve.

(II, 85-92)

There is almost a Lucretian disparagement of the force of love. Hero and Leander were not courageous, they were just foolish; no bold exploit is here celebrated. The comic reduction is complete, for the image is of eggs: Leander is “pasado por agua” (boiled) and Hero “estrellada” (fried). Góngora's heroine ironically laments,

El Amor como dos huevos
Quebrantó nuestras saludes.

(II, 89-90)

What was marble and alabaster is now no more than eggshell.

In the works of Christopher Marlowe we find corroboration for our suggestion that Leander is an Icarus figure. Marlowe, who is often described as possessing an “Icarus complex,”¹⁰ characteristically depicts (and eulogizes) the man with excessive ambition, “the wish to outsoar other men.”¹¹ The Icarus image and its many mythological recastings (like Phaethon, for example)¹² is everywhere visible in the heroic overstrivings of Marlowe's characters.

The prologue to Doctor Faustus explains its protagonist's downfall,

His waxen wings did mount above his reach
And melting, heavens conspirde his overthrow.(13)

Wagner likens his master to Phaethon, and fire is also involved in Faustus' wish to see the face that “burnt the topless towers of Ilium.” An even more striking parallel to the poem we are about to discuss is Faustus' subsequent association of love with destructive conflagration,

Brighter art thou than flaming Iupiter
When he appeared to haplesse Semele.

(Lines 1343-44)

Since we know how Jupiter's flaming presence could burn Semele to ashes, we must strain our imaginations to the utmost to conceive how utterly Faustus will be consumed, if Helen's brightness outshines Jupiter's. This is destructive sensuality like the love in the Sestos temple frescoes, a “love kindling fire to burn such townes as Troy.”

In Dido Queen of Carthage, Marlowe's only play in which love is the central theme,¹⁴ he depicts his heroine burning for her escaping lover,

Ile frame me wings of waxe like Icarus
And ore his ships will soare unto the Sunne,
That they may melt and I fall in his armes:
Or els Ile make a prayer unto the waves,
That I may swim to him …

(Lines 1651-55)

It is noteworthy that, at the height of passion, Dido will either fly or swim, a subtle re-echo of the Icarus-Leander association. These words of Dido anticipate Leander's impassioned exclamation, “O that these tardie armes of mine were wings!” (II, 205). No doubt Ovid's “nunc daret audaces utinam mihi Daedalus alas” (Heroides, XVIII, 49) was their common inspiration.¹⁵

The Icarian element of a watery death is, of course, obvious even in Marlowe's unfinished poem, yet there is also a more subtle implication that Leander's goal is the sun, since Apollo had courted Hero and “offred as a dower his burning throne” (I, 7). What is more, the women of Sestos gathering for the festival gleam like stars, causing

Eternall heaven to burne, for so it seem'd,
As if another Phaeton had got
The guidance of the sunnes rich chariot.

(I, 100-102)

And with a characteristic touch, the author adds that Hero shone brighter than all these, “crown'd with blazing light and maiestie” (I, 110).

The appeal of the Hero and Leander myth to Marlowe's imagination is quite comprehensible. But he did not treat this theme as he had that of Dido or Faustus. Edward Blunt (who first published the poem in 1598) is mistaken in calling Hero and Leander an “unfinished tragedy.” George Chapman, who “completed” Marlowe's work, acknowledged that “this partly excellent poem of Maister Marloe's” was quite unlike the original version in Musaeus, “a different character being held through both the style, the matter and the inventon.” Chapman would no doubt have concurred that Marlowe's poem was as much like Musaeus' as the “Tedious Brief Scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisby” was like Romeo and Juliet. It is the difference between high tragedy and “tragicall mirth.”

Like Góngora, Marlowe is emotionally detached. And, if he does not take his subject seriously, neither can his reader. Again, as in Góngora's poem, the story has reached him through a second source,

Amorous Leander, beautifull and yoong,
(Whose tragedie divine Musaeus soong)

(I, 51-52)

Both Marlowe and Góngora have chosen this theme as a vehicle for cynical views of conventional love. To Góngora, love is all foolishness (“no menos necios que illustres”); to Marlowe it is all lust.

The gods themselves set the tone in the frescoes on Venus' temple.

There might you see the gods in sundrie shapes
Committing headdie ryots, incest, rapes.

(I, 143-144)

The Mercury excursus proves how even a pure-minded country girl, so simple that her hair (quite unlike Hero's) is adorned with dew, not pearl (I, 389), can be corrupted. The Neptune excurus, one of several touches of homosexuality in the poem, provides anything but an example of the noble love divine that Musaeus sang. Unnatural love is nowhere more explicitly portrayed than in the portion of the fresco where Marlowe shows

Iove slylie stealing from his sisters bed,
To dallie with Idalian Ganimed.

(I, 147-148)

This is a portrait of incest as well as homosexuality, with an implicit note of infidelity, since the woman Marlowe here chooses to call Jove's sister is more commonly known as his wife, Hera.¹⁶ The protagonists are no purer than their gods. Leander “as a brother with his sister toyed” (II, 52).

Marlowe twice alludes to Mars' and Venus' dalliance, once in the temple fresco where the god of war is already toiling in Vulcan's net (I, 150 ff.), and again when describing Hero and Leander's embrace:

And them like Mars and Ericine display,
Both in each other's armes chaind as they lay.

(II, 305-306)

In both allusions there is a metallic, galvanized quality. The lovers are reduced to machines and become, by Bergsonian definition, comic. Venus and Mars also represent the destructive quality of a “love kindling fires to burn such townes as Troy.” Góngora also alludes to Mars and Venus in a manner which debases them. Venus is described as

                                                                      la que iba
A las ancas de su hermano …

(Lines 67-68)

Divine incest is again emphasized. How unlike the “tranquilla pax” of Lucretius' Mars and Venus are these sensualists of Marlowe and Góngora.

Even Marlowe's language has a harsh metallic quality, epitomizing his view of the false and unnatural quality of the love of Hero and Leander.

Her vaile was artificiall flowers and leaves
Whose workmanship both man and beast deceaves.

(I, 19-20)

Hero's beauty is artifice, not nature. The stones about her neck are only like diamonds (line 27) and her shoes are contrived little machines. Hero is described in words such as shells, coral, pearl, gold (I, 31-36), silver (II, 263), all painted, like her fan (II, 1). This artificiality is reminiscent of Góngora, who sums up the cold, stony blazon of Hero's charms as “las bellezas de [un] ídolo de mármol” (line 150).

Leander is also described in artificial, sculptural terms. In describing Hero, Marlowe emphasizes her attire; in his description of Leander, the emphasis is on his physique:

                                                            His necke … surpast
The white of Pelops shoulder …

(I, 64-65)

The learned periphrasis is a typical stylistic feature of the epyllion. The reference is to the piece of ivory which replaced the part of Pelops' shoulder eaten away by an unsuspecting goddess. When Leander strips to his “iv'ry skin” in II, 152, we see that he too is an unreal statue. In Marlowe's version, in fact, it is Leander, not Hero, who is the “ídolo de mármol.” The ivory-like quality of both lovers is again suggested at a more sensual moment.

For though the rising yu'rie mount he scal'd
Which is with azure circling lines empal'd,
Much like a globe …
Yet there with Sysiphus he toyld in vaine

(II, 273-276)

The ivory emphasizes the cold, dehumanized quality; there is no emotion at what should be a passionate moment. Instead, as Leander scales (note the sense of height implied) the iv'ry mount, he is likened to Sisyphus toiling. The image is of gross, sweaty labor and eternal frustration. Yet this conceit, which seems so artificial in Marlowe, can, in a serious context, create poetry of almost divine solemnity, as in Spenser's Epithalamion:

Her goodly eyes like saphyres shining bright
Her forehead yvory white …
Her snowy necke lyke to a marble towre.

It is a question of tone. The sculptural quality of Hero and Leander as Marlowe presents them is like the statues in Venus' temple, e.g., “Danae's statue in a brazen tower.” The tone is brazen, metallic, and unfeeling; even the sky is enamel (I, 249).¹⁷

The emotionally detached approaches in Marlowe and Góngora have another poetic device in common. Compare the description of Hero crying,

Foorth from these two tralucent cesternes brake
A streame of liquid pearle …

(I, 296-297)

with Góngora's

Ella entonces derramando
Dos mil perlas de ambas luces

(II, 41-42)

Both versions achieve the same effect, removing (or depreciating) true emotion by elaborately contrived artificiality.

Another conceit used by both authors is that of love and war. Góngora describes the lovers' encounter in such terms as “assalto,” “escalar,” and “rebato.” In similar context, Marlowe writes:

As he had hope to scale the beauteous fort …
Yet ever as he greedily assayd
To touch those dainties, she the Harpey playd,
And every lim did as a soldier stout,
Defend the fort, and keep the foe-man out.

(II, 16, 269-272)

As in Góngora, there is a realistic, rapacious quality which precludes any feeling except lust. It is the destructive quality of Venus and Mars trapped in Vulcan's “machine.”

Marlowe's poem abounds in irony. His protagonists play at innocence, but their sophistication always shows through. “Simple Hero” is Venus' nun, a paradoxical office which sets the tone for the subsequent repartee. Leander calls his words “rude” and naive (I, 200), but his argument is that of a seasoned Lothario. Still he protests,

My words shall be as spotlesse as my youth
Full of simplicitie and naked truth.

(I, 207-208)

Obviously, “naked truth” adds an extra ironic overtone.

One more example will confirm ever-present comic irony.¹⁸ Excited at the sound of Leander's footsteps, Hero arises,

And drunke with gladnesse to the dore she goes,
Where seeing a naked man, she scriecht for feare
(Such sights as this to tender maids are rare.)

(II, 236-238)

If the irony is not sufficiently manifest in the mock-heroic language, it is confirmed by the fact that the “tender maid” has herself gone to the door in a complete state of dishabille.

We have seen how Góngora's Hispanification, his injection of realistic details of petty bourgeois existence, ultimately reduces the stature of his protagonists to eggshells. Marlowe takes the “high road” to the same destination. Where Góngora uses realistic reduction, Marlowe employs fantastic hyperbole to inflate his characters, who soon become like huge balloons in a Mardi Gras parade. Both are equally valid techniques of comic devaluation; it is Marlowe's Brobdingnag to Góngora's Lilliputia.

Marlowe establishes a mock-heroic tone, in one instance, by the ludicrous comparison of Leander, a youth so tender he is mistaken for Ganymede, to mighty Hercules. Marlowe compares them twice, first calling Leander “Alcides-like” (II, 120) as he is about to plunge into the Hellespont (use of the typically epic patronymic is all the more comic since the anything but heroic Neptune episode follows immediately), and again likens his protagonist to the muscular demigod when the lovers finally consummate their sexual desires:

Leander now like Theban Hercules,
Entred the orchard of Th'esperides
Whose fruit none rightly can describe but hee
That puls or shakes it from the golden tree.

(II, 297-300)

The image, coming at the end of the series of love-and-war conceits, destroys any idea of tenderness. Hercules, like Mars, symbolizes violence, and there is even a suggestion of rape in the final line.

Even in his serious works, Marlowe is fond of hyperbole. In Hero and Leander, he out-Marlowes Marlowe in comic excess. A distinctive feature of his style, for example, is the simile in the comparative degree. Helen is fairer than the evening air, brighter than flaming Jupiter, more lovely than the monarch of the sky, etc.¹⁹ Leander's neck (and the extensive masculine blazon is itself a comic reversal) is said to surpass Pelops' shoulder (I, 64-65). His dangling tresses, moreover,

Would have allur'd the vent'rous youth of Greece
To hazard more than for the Golden Fleece …

(I, 57-58)

His cheeks and lips exceeded those of Narcissus, who is described in an elaborate mock-heroic mythological periphrasis (I, 73-76).

Hero is portrayed in fewer lines but in a similar tone. She shines more lovely than the heavens (line 102) and is brighter than the moon, which Marlowe periphrastically calls

… that night wandering pale and watrie starre
(When yawning dragons draw her thirling carre
From Latmus mount up to the glomie skie
Where crown'd with blazing lights and maiestie
She proudly sits) …

(I, 107-111)

Hyperbole inflates the tale beyond human proportions; Marlowe is laughing at himself:

And night, deepe drencht in mystie Acheron
Heav'd up her head, and halfe the world upon
Breath'd darkness forth.

(I, 189-191)

Marlowe has also stated, quite matter-of-factly, that the Moon herself is among the many desperately in love with Leander. It is interesting to note that a symbol of chastity longs for physical contact with the protagonist, and it is still more astounding when Marlowe adds:

Had wild Hippolitus Leander seene,
Enamoured of his beautie had he beene.

(I, 77-78)

Loyal devotee of the Moon goddess, Hippolytus was renowned for chastity (indeed prudery) more severe than that of Diana herself. Marlowe's hyperbole corrupts still another figure of purity.

Comic overstatement reaches its peak in the description of Hero, who is presented almost Homerically in terms of her effect on those around her:

And many, seeing great princes were denied
Pyn'd as they went, and thinking on her, died.

(I, 129-130)

Since Marlowe is burlesquing the heroic epyllion, he does not hesitate to add such excursuses as the Mercury episode (I, 385 ff.) and the Neptune digression (II, 155 ff.). Marlowe's inspiration for the Neptune digression (which, of course, does not appear in Musaeus) was undoubtedly Heroides, XIX, Hero's admonishment to Neptune,

At tibi flammarum memori Neptune tuarum
          nullus erat ventis impediendus amor …
Has certe pluresque canunt Neptune poetae
          molle latus lateri compouisse tuo.

(Lines 129-130, 137-138)

But this picture of Neptune as a favorite with the ladies is reversed by Marlowe, who makes him an old pederast. It begins, moreover, with a characteristically comic misunderstanding; for the sea god has misconstrued Leander's cry of “love I come” to be an invitation to him from Ganymede, whom this tender youth resembled.²⁰ Neptune pulls the lad down to his ocean kingdom where, Marlowe shows us, love is just as artificial and glittering as it is on earth.

                                                            … the ground
Was strewd with pearle, and in low corall groves
Sweet singing Meremaids, sported with their loves
On heapes of heavie gold …

(II, 160-163)

Marlowe uses “gold” or “golden” fourteen times in Hero and Leander, where it loses all value and is at best mere glitter. When Hero reveals herself to her lover,

… his admiring eyes more pleasure tooke
Than Dis on heapes of gold fixing his looke.

(II, 325-326)

At what should be a celestial moment, Marlowe makes a hell of heaven. Leander's pleasure is infernal hedonism, totally debased.²¹

In the midst of mythological fancy, Marlowe punctures his hyperbolic balloons with a dart of realism. This is the device he employs to end the Neptune episode. In a sort of comic anagnorisis, the sea god realizes his mistake:

But when he knew it was not Ganimed,
For under water he was almost dead
He heav'd him up …

(II, 169-171)

This is perhaps Leander's only “natural” reaction in the poem. Being after all a mortal (despite the fact that so many gods and goddesses desire him), he cannot breathe under water.

Both Marlowe and Góngora invite heroic comparisons, only to reject them. Though he seemed so at first, Leander is not Ganymede, and though a citharista, Leandro is not, after all, an Orpheus or Amphion. Both stories are cast in extremely artificial, unsentimental molds. Both authors enter the narrative at their pleasure, thereby separating the reader further from the subject. Both claim a secondary source as their pretext for dispensing with seriatim narration of events, and select only those incidents which appeal to their particular poetic imagination. (Góngora entirely omits the lovers' assignation.)

Góngora makes his characters mere types in a bourgeois travesty; Marlowe exaggerates the sensuality of his lovers so that his entire poem resembles the frescoes in the temple of Venus. The result in each case is mock-heroic, either by hyperbole or Hispanification. Both poets laugh cynically at conventional love, reducing tender emotion to subhuman Bergsonian machinery. Góngora's heroes end as broken eggshells, Marlowe's are little more than tinsel. It is a striking fact that two rebellious Renaissance poets should simultaneously level comic broadsides at romantic love, both inspired by “the incomparable Love-Poem of the world.”

Notes

1. Góngora (1561-1625) and Marlowe (1564-93) were exact contemporaries. Hero and Leander was probably composed during Marlowe's last years, while Góngora's fabula was written in two distinct segments. The beginning of the narrative, “Aunque entiendo poco griego,” was composed in 1610, bringing the story up to the fatal swim. Twenty-one years earlier (1589) Góngora had composed the concluding porton (“Arrojóse el macebito”).

2. Harry Levin notes this similarity in The Overreacher, A Study of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 159. We also find this association in Quevedo, who links the two figures in a single quatrain of the sonnet, “En crespa tempestad del oro undoso,”

   Leandro en mar de fuego proceloso
   Su amor ostenta, su vivir apura;
   Icaro en senda de oro mal segura
   Arde sus alas por morir glorioso.

3. Hermann Fränkel, Ovid, A Poet Between Two Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1945), p. 37.

4. Boscán had a Latin translation of Musaeus' poem, by an unknown Spanish writer, c. 1514. One of the first griegos to appear in Spain, it attained great popularity as a result of the edition of 1594.

5. A classic example of this conceit is Petrarch, CLXXXVI,

   Se Virgilio et Omero avessin visto
   Quel sole, il qual vegg'io, con gli occhi miei.

6. Boscán was surely acquainted with the classical epyllion, which quite often included a digression into another myth. Catullus, LXIV, for example, stops the account of Peleus and Thetis' wedding to concentrate on a long description of Theseus abandoning Ariadne. (Boscán's digression is not completely extraneous, since half of Georgics, IV tells of Orpheus and Eurydice, two other star-crossed lovers.)

7. Throughout my discussions of Góngora's poem, the Roman numeral II designates a quotation from the second part of the narrative (composed, however, in 1589). Quotations from the 1610 portion are indicated by line number only.

8. Brujulear can also mean “to examine the cards for the purpose of knowing one's hand.” Góngora was an inveterate card player and may have had some further juego in mind.

9. The 1610 portion ends here. Hereafter the quotations are from the 1589 poem (II).

10. Concerning this psychological syndrome, see H. A. Murray's “American Icarus,” in Clinical Studies of Personality, ed. Burton and Harris, pp. 615-641; and Murray's “Notes on the Icarus Syndrome,” Folia Psychiatrica Neurologica et Neurochirugica Neerlandica, LXI, (1958), 204-208.

11. Levin, op. cit., p. 138.

12. Ibid., p. 160.

13. Prologue, lines 21-22. All Marlowe references are from the Tucker Brooke edition (Oxford, 1929).

14. The love of Tamburlaine for Zenocrate is not really the focal element in Tamburlaine the Great, and Edward's love for Gaveston is too unconventional to permit Edward II to be called a play about “love.”

15. With the significant difference that Dido longs for the wings of Icarus, not Daedalus, another example of the self-consuming love we are discussing.

16. The same homosexual dalliance is the subject of the prologue scene to Dido.

17. As in the Spenser quotation above, the same “artificial” imagery can enhance nature rather than depreciate it, according to the context. Witness Marvell's Bermuda:

    He gave us this eternal spring
    which here enamels everything.

18. Some scholars, however, deny the existence of comic irony in the poem. If we accept Tucker Brooke's explanation, for example, we would consider Hero and Leander “one of the purest things in Elizabethan poetry, the marriage of true minds, the cleanliness of ocean-dewy limbs and childlike souls.” A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York, 1948), p. 514.

19. See Levin, op. cit., p. 20.

20. Marlowe, however, intends no disparagement of homosexuality itself. Edward II, for example, reveals a certain Marlovian sympathy for the homoerotic relationship. The humor in the excursus lies in the confusion of identities, a device dating as far back as New Comedy. Paradoxically enough, the Neptune excursus is the closest example of genuine tenderness in the poem. Neptune is a far gentler lover than either protagonist, and there is even a touch of sensitivity in the waves,

    Which mounted up, intending to have kist him
    And fell in drops like teares because they mist him.

    (II, 173-74)

    Neptune also offers Leander various tokens of his affection and swears lovers' oaths (II, 180). Phrases like “clapt his plumpe cheekes, with his tresses played … steal a kiss,” bear little resemblance to the harsh love-and-war imagery which characterizes the protagonists' love making.

21. Ithamore, in the Jew of Malta, performs the same reversal, in his infernal invitation to love,

    Thou in those groves by Dis above
    Shalt live with me and be my love.

    (Lines 1815-16)