Besides his Ovid, Marlowe also translated the first book of Lucan into blank verse.
The Elegies from Ovid are polished and witty, but the Ovidian Hero and Leander has
a brilliance of a new kind. This Epyllion (a short epic) draws on Ovid’s Heroides, but
is based on a later Greek version of the tale of Leander’s swimming of the Hellespont
to woo Hero. Before the advent of the University wits – Lily, Lodge, Greene and
Marlowe – Ovid’s tales were moralized, as in Golding’s Metamorphoses.Hero and
Leander, however, is erotic rather than epic. Marlowe’s Acrasia-like delight in sex
becomes high fantasy:
Even as delicious meat is to the taste,
So was his neck in touching, and surpassed
The white of Pelops shoulder. I could tell ye
How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly,
And whose immortal fingers did imprint
That heavenly path with many a curious dint
That runs along his back, but my rude pen
Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men,
Much less of powerful gods ....
The archness of this mock-modesty is as new to English verse as are Leander’s ‘curi-
ous dints’. (One couplet runs: ‘There might you see the gods in sundry shapes, /
Committing heady riots, incest, rapes.’ Could Golding have seen that such lascivi-
ousness is also comic?) Marlowe added homoeroticism to the Greek original.
He was to exploit his discovery of ‘classical’ sexual glamour in his drama. Of more
general note, however, is the sheer assurance of the couplets. By line 818, when he
stopped, Marlowe had lost control of the tone, though not of the verse; its lines
include ‘Whoever loved that loved not at first sight.’ George Chapman finished the
story, more weightily. Epyllion was fashionable in the 1590s; Shakespeare’s effort,
Venus and Adonis, is inferior to Hero and Leander, which Marlowe may have written
as an undergraduate.Song
This was a great time for the ‘twin-born harmonious Sisters, Voice and Verse’,
Milton’s baroque phrase for the sung poem or art song. English music was famed in
the 15th century, but poems-with-music survive in numbers from the 16th century.
Singing was heard at work, in home and in tavern, at court and in church.
Sung words must be singable and their sense taken in at one hearing, yet the
words of 16th-century and 17th-century songs are not, like those of many later art
songs, vacuous, except in refrains such as ‘Hey, nonny, nonny’, or in this song to
Spring:
Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king;
Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,
Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!
(‘jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!’ represents the songs of the nightingale, the peewit
and the owl.) This song is from a play by Thomas Nashe, as is ‘Litany in Time of
Plague’, with its line ‘Brightness falls from the air’. Shakespeare often uses songs in
his plays, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost,As You Like It,Twelfth Night and The Tempest.
Most of his songs have an art which conceals art. There is plenty of anonymous song,104 3 · TUDOR LITERATURE: 1500–1603