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Christopher MarloweA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The legend of Hero and Leander is so well-known that likely everyone who has read Marlowe’s epic, from his own time to ours, knows that the story ends in tragedy. Marlowe’s poem ends after the lovers consummate their love and does not show their deaths by drowning. Throughout the poem, the narrator frequently implies that love and tragedy are thus often inextricably linked.
The early part of the poem foreshadows the eventual unhappy ending. Line 52, for example, refers to Leander “Whose tragedy divine Musaeus sung”—Musaeus was the Greek poet who wrote of the legend. Marlowe alludes further to tragedy in the next lines. After Leander, “dwelt there none / For whom succeeding times make greater moan” (Lines 53-54), that is to say, there is no one after Leander who was more strongly mourned. Later, of the feast of Adonis, where Hero and Leander meet, the narrator comments, “oh cursèd day and hour!” (Line 131). The fatal encounter takes place when Hero goes from her tower to her temple, “where unhappily / As afterchanced, they did each other spy” (Lines 133-34, emphasis added). The love affair is therefore framed as doomed from the very start.
Marlowe immediately follows this with a description of the unhappy escapades of the gods as they pursue their various love affairs. Lying in the background, too, especially at this festival of Adonis, is the story of Venus and Adonis, in which Adonis, failing to heed Venus’s warning, is gored to death by a boar. Hero even sports a depiction of Venus and Adonis on the sleeve of her gown. The signs of tragedy are therefore all around, foreshadowing what fate awaits Hero and Leander.
Furthermore, the narrator carefully explains how Cupid, who causes Hero and Leander to love each other, appeals to the Fates to bless them, but the Fates refuse Cupid’s request because they loathe him (Lines 377-84). From that point on, the love of Hero and Leander can have only one outcome. Indeed, the future is also foreshadowed in the coming of dawn at the end of the poem, which puts an end to their night of bliss and love. A more permanent ending awaits them both before much more time elapses.
The way Marlowe incorporates these allusions to tragedy and foreboding suggests that he may indeed have intended to write a longer poem that would complete the story, but he died before he could complete it. As it stands, even in its unfinished state the poem makes it clear what the ultimate outcome of this love affair will be.
Hero and Leander is primarily a story of heterosexual love, but Marlowe introduces into his version an element of eroticism and powerful attraction to members of the same sex. The poem suggests that love is not limited to heterosexual forms, and that gay desire is just as strong—and just as valid—as the desire experienced by heterosexual lovers for the opposite sex.
The eroticism is first noticeable in the loving and lingering description of Leander’s body early in the poem. Leander is not only “beautiful and young” (Line 51) with long hair that has never been cut, he also has perfect posture: “His body was as straight as Circe’s wand” (Line 61), a reference to an enchantress in Homer’s Odyssey. In an unusual simile, Leander’s neck is to the touch “as delicious [as] meat is to the taste” (Line 63) and it is even whiter than Pelops’s shoulder (Pelops, a king in Greek mythology, was said to have a shoulder of ivory). White skin was considered highly desirable, and there is more: “How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly” (Line 66), and along his back is a “heavenly path” (Line 68) of exquisite dints—the soft impressions that make up the contours of his backbone. Leander is so physically attractive that even men are drawn to him, and because his beauty is so refined some even take him to be a woman: “For in his looks were all that men desire” (Line 84).
This description foreshadows Leander’s later encounter with the god Neptune, who mistakes him for Ganimed, a beautiful boy, and is similarly enchanted with Leander’s physical form. Neptune kisses Leander, plays with his hair, and looks upon him with desire, admiring “his breast, his thighs, and every limb” (Line 673). Indeed, Neptune falls in love with him, which unfortunately leads him nowhere since Leander, for his part, has no erotic interests toward Neptune; he is completely heterosexual and cannot wait to get away from Neptune and leap into the arms of Hero.
It is, however, fair to say that the narrator admires and lavishes more attention on the male body than on the female. At the beginning of the poem, the narrator describes Hero almost solely in terms of the clothes she wears, and at the end, when she stands naked in front of Leander, the narrator offers no description of her body—unlike what he has done with Leander—other than to say that she is blushing. Perhaps in this connection it is significant that when Leander does feel a moment of pity and tenderness for Neptune—after the god’s hand is cut by his own mace—the narrator offers these words of praise and censure:
In gentle breasts
Relenting thoughts, remorse, and pity rests.
And who have hard hearts and obdurate minds,
But vicious, harebrained, and illit’rate hinds? (Lines 699-702).
In praising the “gentle breasts” (Line 699) who recognize and pity the wounds of love however they may strike—whether heterosexual or gay—and denouncing the “hard hearts and obdurate minds” (Line 701) of those who may neither sympathize nor approve of such attraction, the narrator strongly implies that gay love is just as natural and valid as that of the poem’s heterosexual lovers. In keeping with Greek culture—which both accepted and even idealized eroticism and love between men—the poem recognizes and endorses the validity of attraction between members of the same sex.
Hero and Leander traces the character arcs of both protagonists as they move from sexual inexperience to participating actively in romantic love and sexual consummation. The poem presents this transformation as positive and empowering for both parties, suggesting that love is at its most powerful when it is mutual and experienced to the full, both emotionally and physically.
When Hero and Leander meet at the festival of Venus and Adonis, their mutual attraction is instant and overwhelming. As they take each other’s hands, “The air with sparks of living fire was spangled” (Line 188). Their course seems set from the beginning. Their second meeting, at Hero’s tower, begins with the same kind of mutual joy and excitement:
He asked, she gave, and nothing was denied.
Both to each other quickly were affied.
Look how their hands, so were their hearts united,
And what he did she willingly requited (Lines 509-12).
Complications develop because Hero, although smitten with love, does not want to be too easily won. Moreover, she has to grapple with the fact that she must abandon her chaste devotion to Venus now that someone new has entered her life. The other complication is the fact that Leander, despite his fine speeches designed to seduce her, is a novice when it comes to the practicalities of love and sex.
The two lovers go through a process of learning and development, both about themselves and each other. Leander has to discover how the game of love and courtship is played. It is not all about making speeches full of clever arguments against virginity. Hero’s path of development is more profound. As she wrestles with her awakening feelings for Leander, she goes through a mental and emotional transformation. The sudden and unexpected eruption of love in her life presents a huge challenge to her self-image and public stance as a chaste priestess of Venus.
Hero begins to discover a completely different kind of devotion—not to a deity, but to a man. She wobbles back and forth in her emotions. She wants to go through with the new impulse of love, but she is constrained not only by the traditional role ascribed to women in society but also by her own fears and nervousness. Leander must therefore be the pursuer, Hero the pursued; she cannot be too forward in her dealings with him.
Eventually, whatever tragic fate may await them beyond the scope of Marlowe’s poem, they consummate their love and find their bliss. It is everything they had anticipated and more. Hero finds herself lifted up into a completely new realm of experience, unlike anything she has known before. As they come together in their lovemaking:
She trembling strove; this strife of hers, like that
Which made the world, another world begat
Of unknown (Lines 775-77).
This is Hero’s transcendental moment: a joy beyond all joys. In “this blessed night” (Line 788), which she wishes would never end (Line 785), she has entered a previously undreamt-of world of sexual ecstasy and delight. She has journeyed from the artificiality that characterized her first appearance in the poem to the authenticity of a woman who has discovered true love for the first time.
While Hero has been in the process of self-transformation, Leander has been making his own journey. When he first met Hero, his mastery of rhetoric notwithstanding, he was innocent in terms of actual courtship and sexual experience, but he is different now. He has, in a sense, become a man. He is compared to the great hero Hercules, who stole the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, a garden that produced golden apples and was guarded by a dragon. Thus, Leander too, like Hero, has entered a new world produced by sexual experience, and he gazes on the naked Hero like she is the most precious thing in the world. He gets even more pleasure from the sight presented to his eyes than did Dis (or Pluto), the god of wealth, as he stared at his store of gold. The poem thus valorizes sexual experience and mutual attraction over Hero’s former celibacy and Leander’s prior inexperience, suggesting that the true power of love lies in experiencing it actively.
By Christopher Marlowe