The Triumph of Cupid: Marlowe's Dido Queen of Carthage

There is a lot for classicists to like in Marlowe's The Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage. There was a lot for theatergoers to like in Neil Bartlett's production of this play at the American Repertory Theatre (ART) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (March 5–26, 2005).

The script of Dido is based primarily on the Aeneid (Books I, II, and IV). Vergil's text contains many formal and thematic allusions to tragedy, especially in IV: the agonistic speeches; Anna's role as nutrix/confidante; comparisons of Dido to a raging Bacchant (301–3), Pentheus (469–70) and scaenis agitatus Orestes 471; and her thoughts of imitating the savage violence of Medea and Atreus 600–602. Aeneid IV raises the possibility that the poem will metamorphose from epic to tragedy, with Dido taking center stage from Aeneas.

That is what happens in Ovid's Heroides 7, and it happens again in Dido Queen of Carthage. Marlowe probably wrote this play—his first—in 1585, when he was a twenty-one year old student at Cambridge University. An excellent Latinist, Marlowe did a superb translation of Ovid's Amores, probably before writing Dido. In writing Dido, Marlowe focused on Aeneid I, II, and IV, the books of the poem best known to ancient, Elizabethan, and modern audiences, and in a few places his characters speak Latin lines from the Aeneid. In dramatizing this material, Marlowe did not simply translate but made many changes in structure, characters, and language. Aeneas' account of the fall of Troy, for example, condenses all of Aeneid II (more than 800 lines) into 163 lines (still a very long speech, which includes horrific details not in Vergil: "young infants swimming in their parents' blood, / headless carcasses piled up in heaps" [II.i.193–94]).¹

Most significantly, Marlowe makes his gods Ovidian rather than Vergilian—selfish and petty, concerned only with status and pleasure, using human beings only to satisfy their desires. Jupiter is a middle-aged man making a fool of himself over a teenager: in the first scene he is not, as in the Aeneid, looking down from Olympus and already thinking about Aeneas, but rather trying to seduce Ganymede, a "female wanton boy," when Venus indignantly interrupts with "Ay, this is it!" (I.i.50).

Venus' encounter with Aeneas in Carthage (Aeneid I.314–417) ends with Aeneas' unanswerable question, "Why talk we not together hand in hand / And tell our griefs in more familiar terms?" (I.i.245–46). Venus and Juno's plot to unite Dido and Aeneas is complete with sexual double-entendre: in the cave, Juno says, they will "interchangeably discourse their thoughts / Whose short conclusion will seal up their hearts" (III.ii.93–94). Costumes in the ART production reflected the gods' iconic status, though more in terms of Hollywood than ancient representations: Juno was a drag queen, Hermes an unearthly figure in gold paint with huge wings, while Venus was played by an African-American actress in white satin and spike heels (including her hunting outfit) with exaggeratedly "black" gestures and intonations—waving her long fingernails, arching her neck, posing her head, and calling Juno "sistah!" Bartlett was clearly not worried about using sexual and racial stereotypes to make an impact.

Marlowe's mortals are dignified, yet wounded and vulnerable. His Dido is proud, independent, initially uninterested in Aeneas; his Iarbas genuinely loves Dido, warmly welcomes Ilioneus and the others; Anna is in love with Iarbas. All try to behave reasonably and honorably but are invariably thwarted by the gods' games. The ART Aeneas was deeply damaged by his experiences in Troy. A craggy man, wearing a scoured breastplate over worn fatigues, he staggered on, stooped, beaten. The text supports this interpretation: before beginning his speech about the fall of Troy, he says "memory . . . beats forth my senses from this...