The Bloody Venus of Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander”

     Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” is described in the 1593 entry in the Stationer’s Register as “an amourous poem.” While the adjective is apt, Marlowe’s depiction of erotic delights and dangers is strikingly ambivalent. The susceptible reader may find some passages such a richly brocaded fabric that the poet’s aim can only be beauty and pleasure alone, yet other passages betray a disturbing ambiguity. Marlowe suggests that the experience of love is ecstatic and portrays a sensual paradise in the intoxicating possibilities each lover’s body holds for then other, hardly less enthralling in contemplation than in possession, yet the mythological parallels he cites regularly entail deep suffering. The love of the poem is far from the ingenuous romance of Valentines or the hyperbolic praise of courtly love.

     Unsurprisingly, recent commentary has emphasized dark, ironic, and humorous elements of “Hero and Leander,” but two generations ago a leading scholar could describe the poem as “an unclouded celebration of youthful passion and fullness of physical life,” and “a pretty piece of paganism,” amounting in the end to a “rapturous exaltation of the senses.” [1]

     To another critic of that period the poem “puts aside for the moment the great issues of life and chooses an idyllic theme,” creating a “holiday mood,” “a new and lovely region” with “clear bright air,” “one of the purest things in Elizabethan literature.” This particular reading betrays its blind spots by making the claim that the poem contains “not an obscene word or degenerate description,” [2] though no reader in any era could miss the many double entendres or the repeated introduction of homoerotic content with no direct relation to the central story.

     The very first line calls the Hellespont “guilty of true love’s blood,” foreshadowing a tragic outcome, yet this is easily assimilated under the rubric of “star-crossed love,” the more poignantly affecting for its unhappy conclusion. The reader is likely to be given pause, however, a few lines later, upon discovering that upon Hero’s “kirtle blue” may be found “many a stain/ Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain.” (16-17) The syntax makes it obscure at first reading whether the blood is on Venus’ or on Hero’s garment, but of course the latter is an instance here of the former, so like that the mortal attracts divine love and outshine Nature herself.

     Indeed, the reader very shortly learns details of Venus’ own blood guilt. Her temple, called “Venus’ glass,” (I, 142) is ornamented with depictions of love among the immortals, but these are not tender scenes of affection, but rather “riots, incest, rapes.” (I, 144) The mythological models for erotic behavior include Danae (imprisoned, then victim of rape and attempted murder), Ganymede (abducted), Danae (abducted), Mars (the adulterer), and Sylvanus (whose lover Cyparissus died of grief). [3] Here turtle-doves are quite properly not admired but rather sacrificed, (I, 158) and their blood must come to mind when Hero calls herself a sacrifice to Leander. (II, 48)

     With considerable wit, Marlowe takes pains to ensure that a sinister subtext underlies even what might seem at first glance a conventional compliment.[4] In the description of Leander, for instance, the poet praises the youth: “His body was as straight as Circe’s wand.” (I, 61) Yet the reader thinks more of the fate of Odysseus’ men, transformed to beasts, than of good posture. [5] Immediately following a reference to Leander’s being like “delicious meat” (I, 63) to Jove, his neck is said to surpass “the white of Pelops’ shoulder” (I, 65) whose body was in fact served up in sacrifice. The mention of Pelops suggests the whole multi-generational tragedy of Tantalus and the Atreidai. [6]

     Even a god like Neptune is not merely embarrassed but feels “malice” due to his infatuation with Leander. (II, 208) His own ambivalence causes him to call back his mace thus wounding himself. (II, 213) The digression on Mercury is filled with examples of mortals who came to grief through love entanglements: Ixion, Tantalus, Sisyphus, and Peleus. Leander’s love “is not full of pity (as men say)/ But deaf and cruel where he means to prey.” (II, 287-288) Hero, for her part, is figured as a siren (I, 105) or a terrible harpy (II, 270), a threat to potential lovers.

     This ambivalent or conflicted view of human eroticism, combining the most sublime delights and the most agonized suffering, new life and its complement death, introduced enough cognitive dissonance to render it nearly invisible to early critics. This complex, puzzle-like picture of love is aesthetically pleasing after the manner of a riddle with a similar reader satisfaction once the sense in its nonsense emerges. The fact is that love is compounded of ego and unselfishness, aggression and vulnerability, with immense potential for both violence and tenderness. Evidence is available in the ordinary transactions of life as well as in extreme dramatic phenomena such as sado-masochist fetishes and domestic assaults. With scintillating courtly wit, including a barrage of learned references, Marlowe constructs a picture of two lovers, neither more naïve at the outset nor more doomed in the sequel than his readers. Love may rule the world, but Marlowe leaves no doubt that this means pain and suffering as well as bliss.



1. Douglas Bush, in Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English, p. 33, 125, and 133. Wordsworth had called Keats’ Endymion “a pretty piece of paganism.” The view persisted. Paul Cubeta’s “Marlowe’s Poet in hero and Leander” in College English Vol. 26, No. 7 (Apr., 1965), pp. 500-505 declares “the central purpose of Marlowe’s poem to be “the celebration of erotic rapture.”

2. Paul H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe : a study of his thought, learning, and character, p. 313, 294, and 514.

3. The only image which does not necessarily reflect coercion or deception is that of Iris. Since Marlowe has her tumbling with Jove in a cloud, he likely imagined her as ravished. (I, 150)

4. The similar partially submerged use of the reference to Philomel in Raleigh’s “The Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd” indicates that such sly use of allusion was well-established.

5. Circe had become by the Middle Ages a type of a deceptive seducer who leads men astray. See, for instance, Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris, 1361-1362.

6. Other relevant aspects of Pelops’ myth include his love relationship with Neptune (or Poseidon, see Pindar, Ist Olympian, 71) and his perilous courtship of Hippodamia, who had killed eighteen earlier suitors.