Marlowe's Fable: Hero and Leander and the Rudiments of Eloquence

Modern scholarship on Marlowe's narrative poem Hero and Leander treats it as an exemplar, if not the exemplar, of a literary genre in vogue in England in the 1590s that filtered erotic, epic, and mythological themes through the sieves of wit, learning, and rhetoric.¹ Variously called "minor epic," "short narrative erotic poetry," or simply "Ovidian," the genre describes mythical stories like Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, complaints like Daniel's Rosamond, legends like Drayton's Matilda, and satires like Marston's The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image.² Of obvious importance and popularity in late Elizabethan England, these poems, and Marlowe's seminal contribution in particular, have been relegated in recent decades to the status of curiosities. Even C. S. Lewis, who gave almost unconditional praise to Hero and Leander at the height of its critical importance in the mid twentieth century, called it a "beautiful monstrosity," reflecting modern incomprehension of the poem and foreshadowing its eventual neglect.³

The relative neglect and general perplexity that Hero and Leander has inspired are consequences of a critical failure to come to terms with its two most salient features: imitation of classical sources and embellishment through the techniques of rhetoric. Marlowe's work begins as a translation of a 343-line Greek poem of the same name attributed to Musaeus, the legendary student of Orpheus.⁴ In a tribute paying homage to the "song" of this archetypal poet, Marlowe refers to his source as "divine Musaeus."⁵ The force of this reference is not, as has been suggested, its indication of Marlowe's apprenticeship to Musaeus but rather its placement between two major embellishments, each over forty lines long, that Marlowe supplies in his version.⁶ The tribute is strategically placed to draw attention to the greater abundance of Marlowe's imitation—its copia, or fullness of discourse, which was a major object of literary imitation in the sixteenth century.⁷ As T. W. Baldwin describes Marlowe's relationship to his source, "For some time he kept his eye upon the text, in at least one place in the conventional Latin translation of Marcus Musurus; but finally he simply followed the trend of Musaeus, presenting the details freely in his own way and making lengthy insertions of his own."⁸ In its unfinished form, Marlowe's Hero and Leander is 818 lines in heroic couplets, or about three times its source in length.⁹

To account for this departure from his source, scholars have looked not to specific techniques of amplification but to transcendental literary movements or fashions—from the popular (Italianate sensuality, Ovidian psychology) to the arcane (Orphic inspiration, Nonnian erudition). ¹⁰ Meanwhile, the mechanics of rhetorical amplification in the sixteenth century, presumably all too pedestrian for such an ambitious and influential poet as Marlowe, have been ignored. By looking to the textual tradition of his source in sixteenth-century editions, I show that Marlowe's imitational technique in Hero and Leander derives from a grammar school exercise of paraphrasing short narratives. The "source" of his imitation is not an isolated poem but a poem appearing in a popular edition of literary models designed for the grammar school.

My approach to Marlowe's imitation of Musaeus is informed by the history of the book, which has become an urgent scholarly concern in recent years.¹¹ In literary scholarship, the history of the book might be productive in the study of imitation, though it has been largely devoted to the study of reception.¹² The study of imitation is a logical step to follow upon the study of reading; writers are first readers and are influenced, to some extent, by the material forms that they encounter. The history of the book, in other words, illuminates the conditions of writing as well as reading.¹³ It presents a critical opportunity to revisit and refine theoretical studies of imitation.¹⁴ The two fields are complementary, sharing a common interest in the study of sources; one might breathe life into the other, for there is much that could be said about...