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 Marlowe's oeuvre is such dissidence clearer than in the epyllion Hero and Leander, a homoerotic poem in the tradition of the 1590s vogue for amorous narratives penned by such other notables as Thomas Lodge, John Marston, and William Shakespeare. Following an outline of the theoretical, critical, and historical contexts pertinent to the topic, I hope to demonstrate how the deployment of homoerotic desire in Hero and Leander undermines the production of sexualized personal and textual identities, thereby making nonsense out of so-called “sensible” orthodoxies.

A historicized rereading of Hero and Leander that attends to the work's homoerotic dissidence brings to light the sexual dimension of psychosocial identity construction that is largely obfuscated by the political intrigues at the centre of Marlowe's more often discussed homoerotic works, Dido Queene of Carthage and Edward II.²Hero and Leander problematizes Bruce R. Smith's teleological argument, made through reference to Edward II, that Marlowe's art expresses “the beginnings of a specifically homosexual subjectivity” (23; cf. 223). Rather, the poem's strategic deployment of the discourse of homoeroticism interrogates and destabilizes early modern society's burgeoning penchant to establish “sexuality” as a principal root of subjective identity. Paradoxically, this fictional, unified self is also capable of denaturalizing, at the level of desire, the authority and processes that engendered it in the first place. By investigating the signs of early modern resistance to normalizations that today are widely accepted in Western society as essential, it is possible not only to revise our ideas of the past, but also to contribute to an ongoing rethinking of current psychosocial constructs.³

Hero and Leander's homoerotic dissidence invades the social construction of sexualized identity through unruly appropriation and travesty of the symbols of normativizing orthodoxy and tradition. The poem's dissident strategy manifests an early modern carnivalesque “transgression of signs and symbols” through rearticulations that express “a general ‘refusal of identity’” (Bristol 69)—in Marlowe's case, the identity of “the homosexual.” Homoerotic dissidence in the poem plays on and through what Jonathan Dollimore characterizes as “the paranoid instabilities at the heart of dominant cultural identities” (237). As Hero and Leander reveals, these paranoias are both the means to effect repression as well as to bring about its dissolution. Marlovian dissidence achieves an effect analogous to the destabilization of apparent norms that Judith Butler discusses when she argues that, if undermining is possible, it will occur

from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its “natural” past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities.

(93)

In Hero and Leander, Marlowe shows the “law” of sexual identification turning against itself, thereby disrupting and denaturalizing the production of reified identities that are both the cause and effect of homophobia.⁴

Criticism of Hero and Leander has generally been characterized by either outright erasure of homoerotic desire, or, if it is mentioned, a failure to acknowledge homoeroticism's dissident potential. While today the former approach is all but dead, the latter is at the centre of numerous recent analytic endeavours. Robert Logan, for example, takes the homoerotic “incident” of Neptune's pass at Leander—a scene that is crucial to the poem's treatment of sexuality and identity—to be an example of the frequent failure of Marlowe's own authorial detachment. Logan suggests that, in this episode, the author “pulls away from the human issues of the encounter with brisk comedy and, in so doing, points to the boldness of the incident without pointing to anything beyond it” (289). Actually, as I hope to show, when Leander “pulls away” quite the opposite is true.

Although Smith is, unlike Logan, appreciatively attuned to the homoerotic delights of Leander's body and Neptune's sensual seduction of the youth, his interpretation of Hero and Leander similarly does not note the work's dissident potential. Smith argues that, as a result of Marlowe's decision to stop writing his poem without having completed its traditional tragic ending, “[s]tructures of prohibiting power, [and] questions about the social limits of desire, never obtrude to spoil our pleasure in the poem's homoerotic fantasy” (134). And yet, shortly thereafter, he suggests that Leander, and numerous young men like him in contemporary epyllia, “inspire in other men, especially in older men, a desire to initiate the youths into maleness, to incorporate them, physically, into the male power structure” (136). The chief problem with Smith's analysis is that he unproblematically deploys concepts such as “maleness” and the “male power structure” without considering either their historic specificity or the poem's ability to deconstruct such ideals. Indeed, one wonders by what logic can the “male power structure” not be considered to be a “prohibiting power” or complicit in setting the “social limits of desire”?

Smith's analysis partially stems from a reading of Leander as androgynous and “innocent of both sexual experience and gender identity” (136). As Marlowe depicts him, however, Leander is a fully formed male of the species and, though “innocent” of prior sexual experience, he certainly has a clear idea of what, to him, constitutes essential gender identification. In fact, it is the fusion of his conception of gender identity with an aversion to engaging in same-sex erotic activity that demonstrates the link between the prohibitive powers of gender definition and homophobia, and which intervenes in any supposedly apolitical, transhistorical discourse of maleness. In Smith's reading, “innocence” is a loaded term in relation to Leander's self-conception because it presupposes an inverse corollary—absolute “knowledge”—, an epistemological ideal that the poem throws into radical doubt by questioning the very possibility of ever speaking from, or about, a coherent, essential identity.

In constructing my own interpretation of Hero and Leander I turn first to William Keach's comprehensive study of Elizabethan erotic narratives which, in addition to providing copious historical and generic information, asserts the fundamental point that the poem is characterized by a “subversive erotic ambivalence” (xviii). As sensitive and important as the reading that Keach offers is, however, it does not demonstrate the link between erotic and psychosocial dissidence, thereby giving the false impression that the two are necessarily separate. More recently, Gregory W. Bredbeck has analyzed how Marlowe positions homoeroticism at the centre of erotic experience, “momentarily essentializing the language of homoeroticism” in order to break apart “orthodox sexual epistemology” (134). While Bredbeck is incisive in his reading of the poem's destabilization of the heteronormative tendencies of the genre, his study does not examine how Hero and Leander undermines the production of the modern, reified individual that is the construct of a liberal humanist myth of inward self-discovery. As Catherine Belsey has shown in the context of a study of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama's destabilization of fixed identity, liberal humanism “locat[es] agency and meaning in the unified human subject,” a creature “understood to be both single and stable, and thus synchronically and diachronically continuous” (33-34). According to this model of identity, interiority, “consciousness which is also being, defines the humanist subject, the author and origin of meaning and choice” (35).⁵ Reification of “the homosexual” colludes with a general strategy of manufacturing subject types through what Michel Foucault refers to as “sexual saturation,” a system of “inciting and multiplying” sexualities as a “mode of specification of individuals” (46-47) for the purpose of instrumental control conducive to new forms of state power and capitalist enterprise.⁶

But what form of identity would Marlowe have conceived of as an alternative to the unified, essentialized self? In order to answer this it is useful to turn to Raymond Williams's history of the concept of individual identity in which he observes that the word “individual” “originally meant indivisible. That now sounds like a paradox. ‘Individual’ stresses a distinction from others; ‘indivisible’ a necessary connection. The development of the modern meaning from the original meaning is a record in language of an extraordinary social and political history” (133). In a recent study of the epistemological dimensions of identity in early modern England, Peter Stallybrass endorses Williams's conclusions and points out that Shakespeare took the word “individual” in its older sense, to signify “a relation (of part to whole, of part to part, of member to body, of body to body) not a separate entity” (606). Shakespeare, Stallybrass argues (and his comments apply equally well to Marlowe), did not produce atomized individuals “but something more interesting: shifting relations of power and desire which form and transform the person, in a process of naming, unnaming, and renaming” (606-07). As a dissident intervention in the “extraordinary social and political history” alluded to by Williams, Hero and Leander challenges the prescriptive homophobia that asserts an individual's “distinction from others” based on nonessential sexual object choice, stressing instead the importance of relation, contingency, and transformation to the psychosocial formation of identity.⁷

What Hero and Leander reveals of the relational nature of identity manifests itself in the ambiguous social and symbolic space occupied by male same-sex erotic activity in early modern England. Alan Bray argues that “outside an immediately sexual context, there was little or no social pressure for someone to define for himself what his sexuality was” (70). As long as homosexual relations were contained within the confines of the theatre, prostitution, and patriarchal institutions such as the home, the school, and the workshop, and as long as society was sailing along on an even keel, “homosexual behaviour went largely unrecognized or ignored, both by those immediately involved and by the communities in which they lived; in this the individual and society were at one” (75; cf. 42-57). Bray can claim that “the individual and society were at one” not because early modern culture possessed a utopian open-mindedness, but because male homosexual behaviour was considered to be merely a species of debauchery, and “debauchery was a temptation to which all, in principle at least, were subject” (16). In England at the time, it took an extraordinary, diabolical effort of the will to make sodomy out of men loving men.⁸ As Stephen Orgel observes of a slightly later period than Marlowe's, while King James's public liaisons with beautiful young men were thought to be “in bad taste, … not even the most rabid puritan connects them with the abominable crime against nature” (21), largely because during the early modern period male homosexual relations were regarded as acts, not as indicators of identity. In early modern England, Bray notes, same-sex eroticism was “[m]ediated … by social relationships that did not take their form from homosexuality and were not exclusive to it,” and therefore “the barrier between heterosexual and homosexual behaviour … was in practice vague and imprecise” (69). Hero and Leander is a powerful testament to the dissidence sparked by attempts to terminate this pragmatic ambiguity by the erection of clear and precise reificatory barriers.

II

Since Classical times, the tale of the doomed romance of Hero of Sestos and Leander of Abydos has had great currency in the Western literary tradition. Musaeus, the supposed original divine singer of the tragedy, provided the authoritative model of the story as a Christian Neoplatonic allegory describing the soul's mystical union with God (Gelzer 319). By the late sixteenth century in England, the story of Hero and Leander was, according to Abraham Fraunce, “‘in every mans mouth’” (qtd. in Keach 123). Yet, what was communicated was not, necessarily, a traditional, allegorized retelling. Hero and Leander's tragedy had become, among the “smart set” of 1590s London, a site of conflict between competing philosophical and social visions of how desire ought to be inscribed in order to shape individual and collective destinies.⁹

Contrary to Marlowe's poem, George Chapman's 1598 orthodox “continuation” of the supposedly unfinished work asserts that Hero and Leander were “ideally faithful lovers doomed to an early death” (Keach 124). That same year, Henry Petowe warranted his own tendentious rewriting by claiming that Marlowe's poem ends “though not abruptly, yet contrary to all men's expectation” (91; my emphasis). In 1599, however, Thomas Nashe's Lenten Stuff and William Shakespeare's As You Like It joined the fray and showed that “all men” did not, in fact, expect or even desire the same things. Referring to his audience's knowledge of the competing accounts of “Kit Marlowe” and the conservatives, Nashe took up the carnivalesque spirit of Marlowe's poem and bluntly deflated the subsequent pretentious moralizations by reporting that, in the end, the gods turned Leander into a ling, Hero into a “Cadwallader Herring,” and her old nurse into a mustard seed because she was “a-cowering on the back side whiles these things were a-tragedizing” (429).

Shakespeare's As You Like It similarly provides a potent example of a dissident rearticulation that finds much of its motivation in Marlowe's poem.¹⁰ The cross-dressed shepherd(ess) Rosalind, sporting in “a holiday humour” (IV.i.62) with the hyperbolic and idealized love protestations of Orlando, reproaches the love-sick youth for his clichéd approach to desire, arguing that “[t]he poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love-cause.” Troilus, Rosalind bluntly informs Orlando, “had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club,” while Leander, bathing on a hot midsummer night in the Hellespont, was “taken with the cramp [and] drowned.” From these two examples Rosalind concludes epigrammatically that “men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (IV.i.85-98). In Marlowe's poem, as in Nashe's and Shakespeare's dissident reinterpretations, the penchant for “a-tragedizing” what is simply common mortality is subjected to sardonic, carnivalesque reminders of the levelling reality that life and love both amount to a rather unexalted materiality. The social fallout of such a practice is that consciousness and identity are rendered positively problematic and unstable.

In Hero and Leander this instability is early on shown to underwrite any apparently pure, absolute discourse of desire by contextualizing not only the love affair at the centre of the poem, but also the ideal of Love itself. Turning to survey the temple at Sestos where Hero is initially glimpsed, Marlowe's narrator relates that “So faire a church as this, had Venus none” (135). Upon inspecting the place further, however, the first carving that greets the reader is of the god Proteus, a fitting emblem of ceaseless, slippery change for the shrine—and the poem itself—where one might “see the gods in sundrie shapes, / Committing headdie ryots, incest, rapes” (143-44). As a sea god, Proteus emblematically prefigures Neptune's appearance and nimble, yet potentially violent, caressing of Leander's body, as well as the fluid contingency and changefulness of desire (cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII.915-923). The catalogue of deities that follows reinforces this image of rampant sensuality:

For know, that underneath this radiant floure,
Was Danaes statue in a brazen tower,
Jove, slylie stealing from his sisters bed,
To dallie with Idalian Ganimed:
And for his love Europa, bellowing loud,
And tumbling with the Rainbow in a cloud,
Blood-quaffing Mars, heaving the yron net,
Which limping Vulcan and his Cyclops set:
Love kindling fire, to burne such townes as Troy,
Sylvanus weeping for the lovely boy
That now is turn'd into a Cypres tree,
Under whose shade the Wood-gods love to bee.

(145-56)

Two instances of Classical homoerotic passion (Jove and Ganymede, Sylvanus and Cyparissus) are set within accounts of incest, bestiality, adultery, and opposite-sex desire. Indeed, as Marlowe merrily makes clear, the “riots” of erotic engagement traverse a multitude of ontological, psychic, and sexual boundaries without discrimination.

Leander is abstractly aware of the tumultuous and polymorphic nature of desire and therefore calls Hero a “holy idiot” for vowing chastity, arguing that

                                                                                          The rites
In which Loves beauteous Empresse most delites,
Are banquets, Dorick musicke, midnight-revell,
Plaies, maskes, and all that stern age counteth evill.

(299-302)

Leander's reasoning resembles the erotically charged defences of the narrator of Ovid's Elegies, of which Marlowe was the first English translator. His knowledge, furthermore, conforms to what Bray points out united homosexual and heterosexual experience in the early modern period—in literary terms, a shared participation in an economy of Ovidian erotic debauchery that undermines any absolutes in the realm of desire.¹¹ In Leander's case, however, this knowledge is purely abstract; his words do not represent a deeply held conviction, but are merely a rhetorical means of coercing his girlfriend into performing an act that she would rather not. The irony of Leander's relation with Hero is that it inversely echoes his own conflicted encounter with Neptune. Whereas, for instance, Leander begs Hero to “love for pittie sake” (731), Neptune convinces himself that he is beloved when he sees Leander “with pittie to be moved” (703). A pattern of such repetitions throughout the poem empties out any claims to a discrete, essential ontology for any one expression of desire, thereby underlying the relatedness of, rather than the differences between, various erotic identifications and attachments.

Through the poem's narrator, readers are involved in a similar response that undermines conventional generic and erotic expectations and also problematizes attempts at instigating absolute definitions of identity. While Hero is undeniably haute couture in her apparel, the epithet “Hero the faire” (5) hardly compares to the description given of Leander's physical beauty. As Bredbeck amusingly notes: “Hero has a head, but it seems to be little more than a support for her intricately described headgear” (111). It would be incorrect, however, to claim that the narrator has no sympathy for Hero, that his perspective is entirely one-sided and catty. As Keach points out, despite a greater interest in the physical wonders of Leander's body, the narrator sympathizes with Hero's emotional state much more than with Leander's (112). Keach misses the point, however, of the inclusive, non-discriminatory breadth of the narrator's perspective when he writes that “the narrator's capacity for projecting himself into the feminine psyche balances and complements his capacity for responding to masculine sexual beauty,” as though one man's erotic response to another's appearance were something that is “unbalanced.” Keach's recourse to a divisive binary logic based on supposedly essential gender identities reinforces a discourse of separation and exclusion that is antithetical to the effect of the poem.

Unlike Hero, Leander is fleshed out in delectable fullness for our approval. The detailed portrait is accomplished through a carnivalesque deployment of food metaphors which make him especially ingestible, and through images of erotic hunger mingled with a cool, statuesque quality that jointly establish his wide desirability:

Amorous Leander, beautifull and yoong,
(Whose tragedie divine Musaeus soong)
Dwelt at Abidus, since him, dwelt there none,
For whom succeeding times make greater mone.
          …
His bodie was as straight as Circes wand,
Jove might have sipt out Nectar from his hand.
Even as delicious meat is to the tast,
So was his necke in touching, and surpast
The white of Pelops shoulder, I could tell ye,
How smooth his brest was, & how white his bellie,
And whose immortall fingars did imprint,
That heavenly path, with many a curious dint,
That runs along his backe, but my rude pen,
Can hardly blazon foorth the loves of men
Much lesse of powerfull gods.

(51-54; 61-71)

The magic of Leander's physical being exceeds even the boundaries of description open to the appreciative narrator. This chafing at the limits of language is echoed formally by what Bredbeck argues is Marlowe's use of homoeroticism to replace the conventional figuration of heterosexual love and appreciation of female beauty that the tradition of the erotic blazon demands (110-15). By means of the blazon, Marlowe's narrator makes other men regard Leander as do he and Neptune: as an object of homoerotic desire. This sort of “transgressive reinscription” (to borrow a term from Dollimore) forces the reader to question the way language is conventionally used to misrepresent, through exclusionary tactics, the expansive range of human relations and attitudes, a point that is of crucial importance in Leander's later rejection of same-sex love.

Marlowe's strategy of denaturalizing the formal conventions of amorous verse against a backdrop of tumultuous eroticism reaches its apogee in the two linked quatrains that complete the initial picture of Leander and which provide the opposed paradigms of identity formation that the poem explores. The first passage—given here—is used as a foil for the homoerotic gaze of the second:

Some swore he was a maid in mans attire,
For in his lookes were all that men desire,
A pleasant smiling cheeke, a speaking eye,
A brow for Love to banquet roiallye.

(83-86)

This is the only section of the poem in which Leander's beauty is confused with a woman's. The narrator, however, is not among the deceived “some”; he is well acquainted with the physical details of Leander's body and desires that, not a misconstrued, hyper-aestheticized chimera. Marlowe plays here on the margins of homoerotic titillation; however, the transvestite image is not the object of a homoerotic gaze. Indeed, the eroticism of these lines is strangely de-sexualized and artificialized by the reliance on conventional conceits to figure Leander's cheek, eye, and brow—extremely non-sexual aspects of his anatomy in comparison to what has been given by the introductory blazon just a few lines before.

This hollow fetish is immediately juxtaposed against a no-nonsense statement of desire based on substantive corporeality:

And such as knew he was a man would say,
Leander, thou art made for amorous play:
Why art thou not in love, and lov'd of all?
Though thou be faire, yet be not thine own thrall.

(87-90)

In this instance, if a biological male is what one desires, then Leander is a fit beloved. Since, by this point in the poem, the reader knows Leander is a man, he or she is caught up in the invocation to love despite any sexual “orientation.” This is unlike the case of the former quatrain where gender confusion initiates a desire based in normativizing fantasies of what a woman ought (sic) to look like. Keach mistakenly blends these two representations by linking Leander's rejection of Neptune's advances to the sea god's supposed misreading of Leander's sex in the same way as those “some” who “swore he was a maid” (96). The whole point, however, of Neptune's act of wooing is that he desires “amorous play” with a man. Leander is naked and Neptune slips in and around his body inspecting every nook and cranny. It is safe to presume that, with such a thorough survey (even more intimate than the one we are earlier given) Neptune would not have missed Leander's pertinent features.

These two opposed quatrains—one, patently absurd, and the other of a kind with the embodied sensuality of the poem's tenor—provide a backdrop against which to evaluate the pivotal scene in the text's clarification of the epistemological dynamics underlying identity construction and homophobia: the episode of Neptune's infatuation with, and seduction of, Leander. One of two scenes invented wholly anew by Marlowe, Neptune's seduction of Leander ranks as one of the aesthetically richest homoerotic passages in all of early modern English literature. As Leander swims across the Hellespont, Neptune “wantonly” (666) dallies with him in a way that actualizes the sensuous representations found within the temple of Venus and earlier extolled by Leander himself:

He watcht his armes, and as they opend wide,
At every stroke, betwixt them would he slide,
And steale a kisse, and then run out and daunce,
And as he turnd, cast many a lustfull glaunce,
And threw him gawdie toies to please his eie,
And dive into the water, and there prie
Upon his brest, his thighs, and everie lim,
And up againe, and close beside him swim,
And talke of love.

(667-75)

The repeated conjunction “and” emphasizes the wilful passion of Neptune as he literally surrounds Leander on every side in a passionate plea for love. Unfortunately, however, the only climax to which Neptune's loving caresses bring Leander is a crisis of identity. Responding to this sensual storm of desire, Leander stiltedly declares: “You are deceav'd, I am no woman I” (676). When we read Leander's words we smile knowingly along with the god of the sea (677) in the awareness that, as the foregoing details of the poem have prepared us to understand, desire does not concern itself with ephemeral questions of gender, let alone the ontological difference between mortal and divine. Neptune's smile is a manifestation of what Butler describes as the laughter that arises with a realization not only of a “loss of the sense of ‘the normal’,” but also that this idealized “norm” or “original” is “a copy, and an inevitably failed one, an ideal that no one can embody” (138-39). Leander's utterance itself underscores the impossibility of embodying an essential masculinity, his very words and syntax ironically undermining and obscuring that ideal. He does not say: “I am a man I” but, rather, that he is “no woman,” the negative form of his statement thus itself suggesting the dissident, deconstructive potential within the gendered discourse he deploys. Neptune knows that Leander's refusal is based on a repressive, constructed binary that assumes normative sex-gender encodings as the basis of selfhood. He smiles—and so, I think, do we—because he sees through this production to the limitlessness of identity and sexual engagement.

Leander, however, has internalized the dialectical strategy of identity production and repression of an emergent liberal humanist society, defining himself by exclusion and within a proscriptive binary structure: “I am no woman I.” His sense of gendered, unified, and static identity is expressed through the very linguistic terms of his utterance, the two first-person pronouns framing his sentence in illusory coherence—“I … I”—and even taking shape upon the page as stern barriers to any sort of significatory or intersubjective relation. While Neptune's wooing is simply nonsense to Leander, it is a form of nonsense that challenges both identity reification and the system of meaning that engenders it. For Leander, it is as if gender were somehow essentially tied to sexual engagement, his blinkered appeal to gender in order to refuse Neptune's homoerotic advances supporting Butler's claim that compulsory heterosexuality is behind gender production (31).

In his non sequitur rejection of the sea god's plans, moreover, Leander is rendered alien to himself—“Amorous Leander,” the creature defined by polymorphic love—and to the broad economy of desire that informs most of the poem. Leander's assumption that Neptune is merely confused by outward appearances recalls the earlier description where some men are said to desire him because they perceive a “maid in mans attire,” a discursive formulation of eroticism that, the text makes clear, is based on artifice and fantasy. Leander interprets himself as he imagines Neptune to see him, forgetting that, to be a transvestite, one must sport a more complex costume than bare skin. Discussing the limitations of Leander's erotic knowledge, Keach highlights the irony that, in his wooing of Hero, Leander reveals himself to be “a young man thoroughly versed in the rhetoric of love but as unacquainted with love's reality as Hero herself” (101). What Keach does not note, however, is that a similar irony operates in Leander's declaration “I am no woman I.” Aware of the gap between the theory and practice of love in Leander's mind, readers must interpret his appeal to Aristotelian essentialist ontology to be an analogously empty and rather quaint theoretical utterance.

The immediate origin of Leander's identity-quandary is his reified sense of self. A mythological gloss on this is given by the tale Neptune begins to tell in response to Leander's rejection. The sea god recounts “How that a sheapheard, sitting in a vale, / Playd with a boy so faire and kind, / As for his love, both earth and heaven pyn'd” (678-80). In addition to conjuring up the Greek and Roman homoerotic pastoral tradition paradigmatically expressed in the Idylls of Theocritus and Virgil's Eclogues, this boy recalls Narcissus who, in Greek mythology, represents “ultimate desirability” (Bredbeck 133). According to Ovid, when Narcissus's mother, Cephisus, asked Tiresias whether her son would live long, the seer replied: “Yea full long, so that him selfe he doe not know” (Metamorphoses III.433). The truth of this prophecy manifested itself in Narcissus's monocular self-absorption, not unlike Leander's, and his resultant untimely death.¹² Leander, in his encounters with both Hero and Neptune, is similarly encased within his own delusions; like Narcissus, he knows only himself and can gain no satisfaction from loving another, not even Hero. Naïvely, Leander thinks he is helping Neptune out in classifying and delimiting the forms and just objects of desire. In reality, he has fallen victim to the threat of self-limitation forewarned by his admirers who earlier advised him to “be not thine own thrall.” Neptune is enthralled by homoerotic desire for Leander; however, Leander is “in thrall” to a closed, Narcissus-like circulation of desire that can conceive of only one direction and one object.¹³ Ultimately, this similarity between Narcissus and Leander begs of the reader the question: must Leander also die, or does Marlowe offer an escape?

III

In Marlowe's version of the Hero and Leander story the body of the text is linked metonymically to the fleshly, erotic bodies in the poem through a joint deconstruction of the sexual and semantic organization and closure demanded by prescriptive morality and tradition. Just as Leander's negative self-definition inversely acknowledges the possibility of other subject-positions, Marlowe's unorthodox rescripting of the story's conclusion also undermines demands for heteronormative, allegorical closure. This structural dissidence replicates the erotic misrule that informs the poem's perspective on the production of personal and literary identities.

Hero and Leander partially enacts its structural dissidence through an abrupt conclusion that conveys a menacing uncertainty as to what the future shall hold. Marlowe does not present an abstract wingèd love; instead, he offers us a characteristically spectacular scene of human bodies in violent contact—post-coitus, all that can be said of Hero and Leander is that they appeared “like Mars and Ericine displayd, / Both in each others armes chaind as they layd” (789-90). Confused and ashamed, Hero stealthily moves to escape, but Leander seizes hold of her so that she appears like a mermaid caught halfway out of bed. Hero blushes under her lover's objectifying gaze, while in the background “ougly night … o'recome with anguish, shame, and rage, / Dang'd down to hell her loathsome carriage” (816-18).

Marlowe's Hero and Leander was first published in 1598, five years after its author's death. At the very end of this first quarto the poem bore a Latin tag that had been tacked on by its publisher, Edward Blount: “Desunt nonnulla” [“some sections are missing”]. In order to justify this verdict, Blount's preface announces that this is an “unfinished Tragedy.” Case closed; or is it? Is anything in fact “missing” besides editorial circumspection? Chapman's “conclusion” of the poem, published along with Marlowe's text in a second edition a few months after the first, solidified the precedent for interpretations and revisions that take Marlowe's version to be sorely lacking, a notion of textual coherence and sufficiency that has endured to the present day. A recent example of such a reading is given by Kay Stanton, whose analysis illustrates the force that reading the poem as an “unfinished Tragedy” potentially gives to homophobia. Stanton writes that “Leander's difficulty in escaping Neptune's lustful embrace in the Hellespont may foreshadow Marlowe's planned treatment of Leander's end. Leander might indeed have died for love: not because of his own love for Hero, but because of Neptune's unrequited homosexual love for him” (28). Forging an imaginary link between same-sex desire and a supposedly intended but unwritten death scene constitutes an act of fantasy creation unwarranted by the text. In so doing, Stanton forgets Rosalind's sage words—which, ironically, Stanton quotes within her article—that “men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” Chroniclers, Rosalind reminds us, frequently mask and distort basic reality through the power of language in order to produce fanciful myths. There is no reason to privilege, as Stanton does, the views of Blount and Chapman, the former an obscure publisher and the latter a conservative moralist, over the opinions of Rosalind, a personage much closer in attitude and demeanour to the carnivalesque, transformative world of Marlowe's poem.

In order to remain proximate to the dissident spirit of Hero and Leander we ought, if we wish to read beyond the literal limits of the text (not, I hasten to add, a necessary task), to turn our imaginings elsewhere, to other kinds of fulfilment than death by moral annulment. Bredbeck is the most recent critic to notice that the story need not end with the lovers' death. He observes that “there is a strong case to be made that the poem as it stands is complete, particularly given that the length of it as Marlowe wrote it is more or less in line with the general generic conventions of the tradition,” and that Chapman's continuation “works against the purposes of Marlowe's poem, and therefore Chapman is, at best, a questionable authority” (128, n.72). Marion Campbell clarifies the unrelatedness of Marlowe's and Chapman's texts, arguing that the “presiding deity of Chapman's poem is Ceremony, the guardian of social and cosmic order,” a figure who is “unlike anything in Marlowe's poem, which stresses not the need for a controlling social order, but the (potentially anarchic) power of natural desire” (260). This potential for anarchy in the Marlovian rendering destabilizes any forced closure of the narrative, such as the “new directions … more grave and high” Chapman claims are warranted to complete the poem (1-3).¹⁴

Chapman infused his own conclusion with transcendent signification that is antithetical to the Marlovian spirit of dissident flux. In Chapman's version, Hero and Leander are transformed into thistle-warps, colourful birds whose markings declare their history and allegorical meaning: “the yellow shows their saint, / The devil Venus, left them; blue, their truth; / The red and black, ensigns of death and ruth” (VI.289-91). Even more insistent on heteronormative convention, Petowe's rewriting ends with an allegory in which the lovers are the archetypes that define “true love” as exclusively heterosexual. In his poem Hero and Leander are turned

Into the form and shape of two pine trees,
Whose nature's such, the female pine will die
Unless the male be ever planted by:
A map for all succeeding times to come
To view true love, which in their loves begun.

(624-28; my emphasis)

Petowe's graceless foreclosure of all other manifestations of desire than heteronormative coupling is a prime example of the paranoid, homophobic responses that Marlowe's dissident text can generate. Indeed, it is entirely in keeping with what we know of his character and literary penchants to presume that Marlowe might have anticipated such a response, and would have been mischievously delighted by the self-exposure of critical and emotional shallowness on the part of his moralistic interpreters.

Contrary to Chapman's and Petowe's orthodox rescriptings, Marlowe's poem repels expectations grounded in conventional, limiting moralizations, thereby emptying out claims for normative and originary personal and textual identities. At the dark, ambiguous point where Hero and Leander ends, readers must choose either to leave the story as such or to continue the narrative themselves by judging the fruits of desire as the poem has presented them. For all the reader knows, Neptune is still off where the narrator left him, gathering gifts for lovely Leander; or, perhaps, like the sea which he emblematizes, restless Neptune is on to a new conquest, a possibility that would be in keeping with Ovid's presentation of the god's manifold dalliances in his own rendering of Hero and Leander's love tryst (cf. Heroycall Epistles sig. S1^r). Another possibility is that the narrator's epigrammatic observation that “'Tis wisedom to give much, a gift prevailes, / When deepe perswading Oratorie failes” (709-10)—a statement made in the context of Neptune's unabated desire for Leander despite his rebuff—prefigures Leander's return to the Hellespont and the arms of the sea god. After all, as the narrator rhetorically queries just a few lines before: “And who have hard hearts, and obdurat minds, / But vicious, harebraind, and illit'rat hinds?” (701-02).

At the open end of the poem the reader is left to wonder whether Leander shall remain a “harebraind” homophobe or whether he will release himself to the full pleasures of the flesh. This second possibility would accord with the narrator's early admission that his “rude pen / Can hardly blazon foorth the loves of men / Much lesse of powerfull gods.” Language again interrupts desire; yet, looked at in a new light, this dissident silence can be interpreted to be a liberating force in the movement away from monologic personal identification and textual exposition. The fissure in Leander's attempt at self-definition that opens up the possibility of other, nonsensical erotic and semantic possibilities is paralleled at the beginning and end of the poem in the paradoxical potential that lies within the limitations of “rude” language. By his silence at the end of Hero and Leander Marlowe declares his control of representation by refusing control, thereby allowing the revelry and dissidence of the poem to overflow the conventional boundaries of textual and individual identities. Perhaps, in Marlowe's retelling and our own responses, the tale does not have to end tragically; perhaps, the fantasy of homoerotic engagement is there to rescue Leander from death and the story, and its readers, from history.

Notes

1. “Dissidence” is a critical term used by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield to denote the contestation of dominant ideology by past, as well as present, writers, audiences, and readers. As Sinfield points out, dissidence usefully replaces “subversion,” a term that suggests achievement. Dissidence, instead, signifies “refusal of an aspect of the dominant, without prejudging an outcome. … [I]t posits a field necessarily open to continuing contest, in which at some conjunctures the dominant will lose ground while at others the subordinate will scarcely maintain its position” (49).

2. A plethora of recent books by such scholars as Gregory W. Bredbeck (1991), Jonathan Goldberg (1992), Simon Shepherd (1986), Bruce R. Smith (1992), and Valerie Traub (1992), as well as articles by Goldberg (1984, 1989), Stephen Orgel (1989), Claude J. Summers (1988), and those in Susan Zimmerman's collection Erotic Politics (1992), reflects the material and interpretative richness of early modern writing vis-à-vis the production and politics of sexuality. What these studies also evidence, however, is a strikingly single-minded attention to dramatic works. Non-dramatic poetry has received relatively scant critical attention in terms of what it reveals about the production and control of sexuality in the early modern period. Important exceptions, and ones that have been formative in my own thoughts on this subject, include Bredbeck's wide-ranging survey, Goldberg's study of Edmund Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, and Richard Rambuss's essay on the queerness of Crashaw.

3. My approach to Marlowe's text and early modern identity endorses Steven Epstein's fluid model of “modified constructionism” as a way to theorize “the dialectical relationship between identities as self-expressions and identities as ascriptive impositions” (287). For background outlines and analyses of the essentialist/constructionist debate, see Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking (esp. 107-12) and David Halperin's essay “‘Homosexuality’: A Cultural Construct.”

4. Bredbeck gives a useful aetiology of the term homophobia, arguing that it is “at its basic level a belief that sexual orientation alone removes the subject from ‘nature,’ ‘society,’ and other totalizing schemas” (25, n. 46). Such normative concepts as “nature” and “society,” of course, authorize the sexual subject in the first place, and it is therefore necessary that attempts to combat homophobia must consider how and for what reason these enveloping concepts are produced.

5. Maggie Kilgour turns to René Descartes as a key proponent of the early modern sense of atomistic identity. For Descartes, Kilgour observes, “the individual as inner mind exists independent of its various external expressions and incarnations, just as in the political theory that grows alongside this tradition the individual exists somehow prior to society” (143).

6. Foucault dates the emergence of a new discourse of “sexual saturation” to the nineteenth century; however, a similar—if not necessarily teleologically continuous—production of sexualities occurred in early modern England as well. That alternate eras have been proposed for the emergence of “the homosexual”—Adam points to the eighteenth century, McIntosh to the seventeenth—suggests that there is no terminus a quo for this discourse waiting to be discovered but, rather, various eruptions of homosexual panic that bear a relation to capitalism's production of individuals at the level of sexual desire. See John D'Emilio's argument that “[o]nly when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity” (470). Cf. Lawrence Stone's discussion of possible social causes of sixteenth-century homophobia (378-80), and Keith Wrightson's analysis of the “social polarization” which took place in England between 1580 and 1630 (140-46).

7. A provocative analogue to the early modern assertion of relation through difference exists in current “queer” politics and theory. Douglas Crimp argues that queer analysis points out that identity “is always a relation, never simply a positivity. … And if identity is relational, then perhaps we can begin to rethink identity politics as a politics of relational identities formed through political identifications that constantly remake those identities” (12).

8. In England the crime of “sodomy” encompassed, in addition to male-male sexual intercourse, seditious and anarchic behaviour such as atheism, papistry, treason, and witchcraft (Bray 19-23; see also Bredbeck 3-23; Dollimore 238-39; Goldberg “Sodomy” 371-72, Sodometries 17-19; Orgel 20-21).

9. Keach discusses the “unorthodox openness” to Ovidian eroticism amongst well-educated young men at the universities and, in London, at the Inns of Court. This “piquant anti-authoritarianism” can be traced back to George Turberville's translation of Ovid's Heroides in 1567 (xviii, 32), a work upon which Marlowe drew, in part, for his characterizations of Hero, Leander, and Neptune.

10. Most likely written in 1599, a year after the publication of Hero and Leander, As You Like It contains at least three explicit references to, including one direct quotation from, Marlowe's life and poem (cf. III.iii.10-13; III.v.81-82; IV.i.90-98).

11. The last encounter between Hero and Leander, when they finally have sexual intercourse, proves that heteroerotic passion is as subject to tremors as any other sexual expression. Marlowe's narrator deflates any pretensions to exalted status that this scene might be expected to warrant, bathetically observing that Hero, “drunke with gladnesse,” went to the door “Where seeing a naked man, she scriecht for feare.” Soon after, the mischievous narrator contextualizes Hero's reaction by the pithy observation that “Love is not full of pittie (as men say) / But deaffe and cruell, where he meanes to pray” (720-21, 771-72).

12. Marlowe demonstrates his awareness of the Narcissus myth and its thematic significance to the poem when, early on, he makes an extended comparison between Leander and Narcissus in a way that ironically foreshadows Leander's own conventional demise (cf. 73-76).

13. The OED gives as the figurative definition of “thrall” the following: “One who is in bondage to some power or influence; a slave (to something)” (I.1.b). Leander is certainly “in bondage,” though not in the performative sexual kind for which the lusty old god of the sea might yearn.

14. Marion Campbell correctly labels Chapman's poem a “reactionary attempt to moralize the erotic epyllion” (262) from the standpoint of an allegorized Ovid of the Metamorphoses. As she points out, Marlowe's poem has much more in common with the “tone of sophistication, cynicism, and unconcealed eroticism” of the Elegies (251). Chapman's authority is undermined further when one takes into account the fact that it was he who divided Marlowe's poem up into sestiads and provided verse arguments for each (Campbell 245), amendments that made it appear externally as if Marlowe's original poem was lacking on its own.

I would like to thank Leanore Lieblein and Dennis Denisoff for their advice and support, as well as the members of the McGill-Concordia Queer Academic Coalition for sharing their ideas and friendship.

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