THE narrative voice of Marlowe's Hero and Leander likes to express opinions about the events he recounts in this poem; in so doing, he employs the metaphor of sight for the act of knowing or believing. That is, he delights in telling us how we see things, or how we should see things, or how we are, inevitably, going to see things. The most famous of these opinions is, of course, the opinion he voices in line 176, when he asks “Whoever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?” Marlowe's particular description of this widely shared experience of finding one's emotional and cognitive worlds suddenly reconfigured when one meets another person for the first time has, of course, become a commonplace. From Shakespeare’s borrowing of Marlowe's line to give Phebe words to articulate her newly discovered feelings for Rosalind in act 3 of As You Like It to Romeo and Juliet's ill-fated embrace of each other to Hippolyta's response to her first sight of a transfigured Bottom, to the lyrics of thousands of pop songs and to the doggerel verse in a million of last February's Valentine's Day cards, the idea that love, true love, love that is real, happens instantly, upon meeting one’s beloved for the first time.

In spite of the narrator's success in convincing many generations of readers that he is correct in his assertion about the beginnings of true love, however, the context in which this line appears in Hero and Leander suggests Marlowe wants us to take a more careful, even cautious, view of the narrator's claims. Line 176 comes, appropriately enough in Marlowe's poem, right after the narrator has described for us Hero's and Leander's first sight of each other, at an annual feast in Sestos, a feast dedicated to Venus's beloved Adonis, and in Venus's temple, where on this feast-day Hero is at work on her day job “sacrificing turtles’ blood” to the Goddess of Love (line 158); there “unhappily, / As after chanc’d, they did each other spy” (lines 133–34). As a result, we are told,