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Notes On marlowe's Hero and Leander

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Douglas Bush
Douglas Bush*
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

Critics have frequently remarked upon the Ovidian eroticism which Marlowe introduces into his poem, and which is quite lacking in the sober Greek original. A few particular parallels have been noted between Hero and Leander and Marlowe's earlier translation of Ovid's Amores, and this article collects some more. As the two works are commonly placed at the beginning and end of Marlowe's career, the close verbal resemblances suggest that he had a good memory or was rereading his translation when writing Hero and Leander.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 1929 , pp. 760 - 764
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1929

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References

Note 1 in page 760 G. Lazarus, Technik und Stil von Hero and Leander (Bonn, 1915), points out the following:

Marlowe i. 231 ff. and Elegies i. 8, ll. 51 ff. (Lazarus, p. 94).

Marlowe ii. 141 ff. and El. ii. 19 and iii. 4 (Ibid., p. 101).

Marlowe ii. 225 and El. i. 8, l. 63 (Ibid., p. 77).

These three belong to Leander's speeches against virginity. Miss Lazarus also notes many parallels between the poem and the Metamorphoses.

Note 2 in page 760 Quotations from Hero and Leander are from the Works of Marlowe (ed. Brooke); those from Marlowe's Elegies of Ovid from the reprint of Etchells & Macdonald, London, 1925.

Note 3 in page 761 Brooke, p. 554, Cf. Dyce; Bullen—“a somewhat earlier date” [than 1587]; D. N. B., etc.

Note 4 in page 763 Of course the notion was not uncommon. In The Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure, which took the story of Sinorix and Camma from pp. 236-7 of The Courtier, the same dictum is quoted and attributed to Aristotle (ed. Gollancz, I, 82).

Note 5 in page 763 Other borrowings from these two epistles are noted in Jellinek, Die Sage von Hero und Leander in der Dichtung, (Berlin, 1890).

Note 6 in page 763 Heroides xviii. 131-2 and xix. 199 refer to dolphins and fish. There are general pictures of sporting Nereids and Tritons in Adlington's Golden Ass (ed. Seccombe, p. 101), Glaucus and Scilla, pp. 22, 25, 28, and Faerie Queene III. iv. 31 ff. With Spenser Upton compares Iliad xviii. 35 ff. and Georgics iv. 317. F. Pintor (Delle liriche di Bernardo Tasso, Pisa, 1900) mentions the nereids in Catullus's Marriage of Peleus and Thetis. One may note also the association with Leander's swim of dolphins and nymphs in Wotton's Courtlie Controversie of Cupid's Cautels, 1578, pp. 135-6, and of a dolphin in the English translation of Boccaccio's Amorous Fiammetta, 1587, p. 110.