Career Rivalry and the Writing of Counter-Nationhood: Ovid, Spenser, and Philomela in Marlowe's "The Passionate Shephered to His Love"

Marlowe’s lovely pastoral lyric, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” occupies a special place in the canon of English poetry. Ever since Izaak Walton referred to “that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago,” critics have eulogized “The Passionate Shepherd” as “[o]ne of the most beautiful lyrics in English literature.” ¹ In accord with such a famous poem, critics have long emphasized a wide array of topics: the complex history of the manuscript; the problem of dating the poem; the maze of classical and Renaissance sources from which Marlowe drew; his recurrent use of the poem in his plays; subsequent writers’ imitations of Marlowe; the version of pastoral he pens; the philosophy of sexuality he expounds; and, most recently, the “political aspects of the Marlovian invitation as mode.” ² This extensive commentary prepares us well to turn to a contextualizing principle that can help us organize the disparate topics and extend the fruitful scholarship on them: Renaissance ideas of a literary career, especially “the commonplace of Renaissance criticism—the [Virgilian] progression from pastoral to epic.” ³

No one has yet examined the “career” principle, but long ago Harry Levin briefly situated “The Passionate Shepherd” within the first of three phases of Marlowe’s literary career—what he termed the “youthfully lyric phase” of “libido sentiendi” or “the pastoral fields of Ovidian lyricism.” ⁴ Levin’s model approximates the career principle when he fuses a psychoanalytic-based appetitive model of Marlowe’s career, structured on “the triad of basic urges,” and a triadic generic model of literary “modes,” derived from classical Roman authors: “the lyric pleas for libido sentiendi, the epic vaunt for libido dominandi, and the tragic lament for libido sciendi. . . . If Marlowe learned the lyric mode from Ovid and the epic mode from Lucan, it may well have been Lucretius who schooled him in tragic discernment of the nature of things.” ⁵

Although Levin leads us to a genre-based career idea as an organizing principle for “The Passionate Shepherd,” he overlooks four significant facts. First, Marlowe could have found a three-phase generic model—amatory lyric, epic, and tragedy—in Ovid himself, and in a poem that Marlowe had translated: the Amores. Second, in the Amores Ovid inscribes his three-genre cursus precisely as a competitive alternative to the Virgilian cursus of pastoral, georgic, and epic—a literary context that Marlowe naturally builds into his translation. Third, in rivaling Virgil, Ovid is writing a “counter-nationhood”—a poetics of nationhood founded not on a patriotic and imperial system of the state but rather on what Ovid’s literary heir, Lucan, calls simply libertas—in that other poem that Marlowe translates: the Pharsalia. ⁶ And fourth, in “taking” this precise counter-Virgilian “course” from the lower to the higher genres Marlowe is contesting the authority of a contemporary who was just then styling himself the “Virgil of England”—to use Thomas Nashe’s 1592 phrase for Spenser. ⁷

Marlowe was the first Western writer in any vernacular to translate the Amores and thus the first to make the three-genre Ovidian cursus his own. ⁸ The five programmatic poems of the Amores (I.i, II.i, II.xviii, III.i, and III.xv) highlight the drama of Ovid’s turn from elegy to the “area maior” (translated by Marlowe as “greater ground”). ⁹ As E. J. Kenney writes, “The phrase area maior suggests the major genres of tragedy and epic.” ¹⁰ The three-genre cursus dramatized in the Amores turns out to predict fairly accurately the three genres that Ovid went on to pen before his exile: the series of elegiac poems, including the Amores, the Ars amatoria, the Heroides, and the Fasti; his one known tragedy, Medea (extant in two lines); and his epic, the Metamorphoses. ¹¹

We can profitably situate “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” within the inaugural or amatory phase of Marlowe’s Ovidian career and thus within its contemporary context of Spenser’s Virgilian career. In this situation, Marlowe...