Hero and Leander, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Christopher Marlowe
Dear Journal,
A trite opening, I know, but I honestly can't think how else I can write in here apart from in informal as hell language (colloquial already, see?) and in rather clichéd phrases. But I digress. I am here, journal, to say that I am in love. With Marlowe's 'Hero and Leander', no less, or, more specifically, its gorgeous, wonderful, amazing rhyme scheme and meter. Iambic pentameter AND heroic couplets, sustained almost throughout the ENITRE poem? Christopher Marlowe, you are proclaimed my newest 'Knight of the Order of the Most Wonderful Poetry' in my heart.
I'm also quite enamoured by its interesting relationship to gender - I can never quite tell whether Marlowe is playing the standard bawdy Elizabethan stereotypes of courtship and romantic relations straight, or whether his depiction is tailored in order to provoke thought about the double standard which is so prevalent in the aforementioned stereotypes. For example, when Marlowe, as the narrator, describes Hero as resisting Leander with 'Treason...in her thought, and cunningly to yield herself she sought', I find it interesting to speculate whether Marlowe was playing this rather misogynistic view straight, or whether he as the narrator was using the opinion to depict Leander's thoughts on her resistance, or whether he was using it as a tongue in cheek comment on the intricacies of Elizabethan courtship play.
The mystery of Hero's consent, or lack of then deepens in the scene depicted just before the end of the poem, where Hero, having given up her virginity to Leander, 'o'ercome with anguish, shame and rage, danged down to hell her loathsome countenance'. This passage, apart from being a possible covert reference to her suicide, portrays Hero as feeling terribly conflicted over the events which have taken place, whilst the narration touches not at all upon Leander. I wonder if it's not a comment on how two people, by virtue of being male and female respectively, can come away with very different views about the same act. (Another possibility my admittedly twisted mind came up with that Hero had desired Leander, had given in to that desire, and had found the experience less than fulfilling, which prompts her 'anguish, shame, and rage', as she has betrayed her vows and brought the wroth of society on her head for an experience she does not consider worthy of the transgression needed to bring it about.).
I was also struck by how effectively Marlowe portrays desire and its ability to transform, both in the seduction scene and in the aftermath. The character of Leander starts off the poem as being quite feminine in nature - indeed, 'some swore he was a maid in man's attire'- and more than a little naive, as when Hero throws herself on him, he 'like a brother with his sister toyed', not realising the sexual connotations of her act. By the seduction scene, he is aggressive, confident, (seemingly) knowledgeable about what he is doing, and does not appear to take any of Hero's resistance seriously. Similarly, Hero begins the poem as a virginal, respectable nun, clothed richly and beautifully - she ends the poem a nude, compromised pariah. Could this perhaps be more commentary upon how the illicit performance of the sexual act meant something very different and had very different consequences for men and women, Marlowe?
He won't reply, he's dead. Curses.
POAST SCRIPT: I mentioned at the beginning how in love with the rhyme scheme and meter of the poem I was, and it has taken me this whole, flaily, incoherent post to really make sense of how Marlowe uses it, too, to create interplay between the genders -The heroic couplet relies on masculine closure of course, but Marlowe keeps disrupting it with feminine rhymes, just as he disrupts a familiar story of masculine triumph with feminine division! Marlowe, you bloody, vice-inclined, bar brawl losing GENIUS.
POST POAST SCRIPT: This formatting is so terrible I wish to gouge my eyes out.