The Scholarly Eroticism of Hero and Leander

This essay explores Marlowe’s reception of Ovid in Hero and Leander. Although scholars have long acknowledged the complicated Ovidianism of Marlowe’s epyllion, they have elided the implications of that Ovidianism for the poem’s sudden conclusion. Though studies of early modern Ovidianism generally center the Metamorphoses, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander references many of Ovid’s poems, including the Amores, the Ars Amatoria, and the Heroides—all of which offer different conceptions of love, sex, and power. This paper argues that Marlowe structures Hero and Leander on the erotic ambivalence inherent in Ovid’s corpus. By playing Ovid’s unruly texts against one another, Marlowe creates a poem that collapses under the pressure of its conflicting influences, thereby challenging Elizabethan efforts both to censor and integrate Ovid’s eroticism into English culture. In its failure to control its literary influences, Hero and Leander figures classical reception not as literary assimilation, but instead as a vulnerable encounter with the radical alterity of the past.