Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Textual note
- Introduction: consummate play
- Part I “COME … AND PLAY”: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, BESIDE THE POINT
- 1 Genre, gender, and sexuality in “The Passionate Shepherd” and Tamburlaine
- 2 Submitting to history: Edward II
- 3 “True-loves blood”: narrative and desire in Hero and Leander
- 4 “Thus with a kiss”: a Shakespearean interlude
- Part II DESIRING WOMEN IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
- Afterword: for(e)play
- Notes
- List of Works cited
- Index
3 - “True-loves blood”: narrative and desire in Hero and Leander
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Textual note
- Introduction: consummate play
- Part I “COME … AND PLAY”: CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, BESIDE THE POINT
- 1 Genre, gender, and sexuality in “The Passionate Shepherd” and Tamburlaine
- 2 Submitting to history: Edward II
- 3 “True-loves blood”: narrative and desire in Hero and Leander
- 4 “Thus with a kiss”: a Shakespearean interlude
- Part II DESIRING WOMEN IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
- Afterword: for(e)play
- Notes
- List of Works cited
- Index
Summary
If Edward II ultimately forces its audience to submit, painfully, to history, Hero and Leander provides us with a very different experience. Marlowe is able here more completely to suspend his relation to his society's dominant fiction – which depends, as ours does, on the equation of conventional masculinity and coherence, of the penis and the phallus – partially because Hero and Leander is not a drama, but a less “pointed” form of play, and (what is the same thing in Marlowe's terms) because it is theoretically incomplete. The aesthetic of pure pointlessness that underlies “The Passionate Shepherd” is developed more fully here, enabling the poem radically to question the sexual and textual order upon which conventional sense depends.
The text is structured around a series of what Patricia Parker has termed “preposterous events” – “arsie-versie” inversions of “natural” sequence. It begins, preposterously, with its foregone conclusion:
On Hellespont, guilty of True-loves blood,
In view and opposit two citties stood,
Seaborders, disjoin'd by Neptunes might.
(1–3)Marlowe's inverted opening implicitly equates end and origin, locating the ending of a traditional narrative as the point (the Hellespont) that, to quote Slavoj Žižek, “retroactively confers the consistency of an organic whole on preceding events.
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- Information
- Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England , pp. 39 - 49Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009