Hero and Leander

Marlowe was not the first Elizabethan poet to write an epyllion (or brief epic) with an erotic theme. Such narrative poems, most of which were based on stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, were in vogue at the time and attracted a large readership. The first was the collection of 17 tales in Thomas Lodge’s Scilla’s Metamorphosis (1589). One of these stories tells of how the sea god Glaucus courted a nymph named Scilla. She was cruel to him, and he punished her by turning her into a rock in the middle of the sea.

William Shakespeare also wrote an erotic mythological poem, Venus and Adonis, which was published in 1593. Some scholars believe that Shakespeare had read Marlowe’s Hero and Leander in manuscript form and was influenced by it, perhaps even writing in imitation or competition with it. Shakespeare certainly knew the poem by the time he wrote the comedy As You Like It, likely around 1599 (a year after Marlowe’s poem was published), since he quotes Line 176 from Marlowe: “Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?”

In Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis—based on his source in Ovid—Venus, the lusty goddess of love, makes multiple attempts to seduce Adonis, a handsome but bashful young man who is more interested in hunting than love. The myth is thus rather different from Hero and Leander in that it features an eager female who pursues a reluctant male rather than the other way around. However, like Marlowe, Shakespeare injects much humor into the narrative. Just like Leander’s words to Hero, Venus makes long, eloquent speeches to Adonis trying to persuade him to give in to her and make love. Virginity is not to be prized (just as Leander tells Hero); beauty does not exist only for itself, and Adonis’s duty is to pass on his beauty to his offspring. However, the more Venus lectures him, the less willing he is to comply. He just wants to get away from her. The difference from Marlowe is that Leander actually has a willing listener in Hero, even though she pretends not to be, and they eventually end up together. Venus and Adonis, in contrast, seem never to share a single moment of harmony, and the poem has a tragic outcome, when Adonis ignores her warning and goes hunting, only to be killed by a boar. At least Hero and Leander, before their story ends in tragedy—beyond Marlowe’s poem—have one night together, during which passionate love is freely given and received.