“Then Speak, Aeneas, with Achilles’ Tongue”: Ethopoeia and Elizabethan Boyhood in Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage

Christopher Marlowe’s play The Tragedie of Dido Queen of Carthage whiled away the centuries dismissed as mere apprentice work: scorned critically and ignored in production. But recently, scholars and theatre-makers have embraced the play in all its poetic power and passionate subversion.¹ Dido’s long-standing relegation to the plebeian status of “juvenilia” has obscured a more fundamental connection between youth and this piece of theatre. The literary and rhetorical sources, production circumstances, and original reception of Dido Queen of Carthage draw from, depend upon, and illuminate many aspects of Elizabethan boyhood.

Marlowe’s primary literary source is well known. In Dido Queen of Carthage, he reimagines Books I, II, and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid as a five-act play. Like any reworking of a classic, Marlowe’s Dido reflects the peculiar anxieties and pleasures of its time and its creator. While following the Virgilian plot structure and language in many respects, and even including verbatim Latin lines, Marlowe also follows Ovid’s Heroides in focusing his drama around Dido rather than Virgil’s heroic Aeneas.

We know Marlowe spent time at Cambridge translating Ovid, but for the origin of his fascination with Dido, and perhaps with theatre itself, we must peer earlier into his biography. Marlowe studied at the Canterbury King’s School as a day student, a cobbler’s son on scholarship. Park Honan credits his grammar school curriculum with transformative power: Marlowe’s introduction to ancient Roman writers thrilled his senses and captured his imagination. Their words, and the world they conjured, never left him.²

Pupils at the King’s School made “varyings of speech in every mood.”³ This is a reference to a type of drama-based pedagogy called ethopoeia, which formed a central component of the humanist grammar school curriculum. Also known as “impersonation” or “character making,” ethopoeia is one step in the progymnasmata, “the system of teaching prose composition and elementary rhetoric practiced in European schools from the Hellenistic period until early modern times.”⁴ Ethopoeia connected Marlowe’s encounters with Virgil, Ovid, Horace, and Lucian directly to a written and embodied dramatic performance tradition, with roots as far back as Greece in the fifth century BCE.

A student practicing ethopoeia responded to prompts such as “What words would Hecuba say upon the ruin of Troy?” by composing a speech exploring characterization and emotion. Schoolboys wrote and performed character monologues for audiences of their schoolmasters and peers, in a highly theatrical practice of invention, imitation, and identification.

Performing the ethopoeia proved a crucial and formative experience for early modern English schoolboys like Christopher Marlowe. The curriculum trained them in what Lynn Enterline calls “habits of alterity,” producing skills like those of the early modern actor, “who was admired for producing ‘the signs’ of certain passions ‘on demand’—in other words, ‘manifestations of an emotion that he fully embodies, but at the same time is not really his own.’”⁵ The composition and public performance of ethopoeia “turned England’s schoolrooms into a kind of daily theatre for Latin learning,”⁶ opening up a classroom space of fantasy and encouraging imaginative interpretation of canonical material. Considered in this light, dramatic texts based on historical or mythological events can be understood as a series of ethopoeia exercises strung together on the thread of a plot structure: What words would Dido say? What words would Aeneas say? What words would Anna say? As an adolescent, Marlowe did not simply encounter the classics: he played with them. Small wonder, then, that in his twenties, he produced a dramatization of Virgil using some of the same rhetorical techniques that had taught him to translate Latin, make characters, and convey emotion.

But why Dido Queen of Carthage? Why not The Tragedie of Aeneas? Marlowe’s choice of protagonist may owe a debt to the ethopoeia practice as well. Despite (or perhaps because of) their deployment in all-male school environments, ethopoeia speeches frequently focused on the intense emotions of female characters. For a very early example, in his Confessions...