This Week, We Are Looking at Two Epyllia . Epyllia Is the Plural Form of Epyllion ; And

1

This week, we are looking at two ‘epyllia’. ‘Epyllia’ is the plural form of ‘epyllion’; and ‘epyllion’ literally means ‘little epic’. It’s a useful word because it’s short and snappy, and therefore very convenient; but in a way, you might find it more helpful to think of these two poems as ‘erotic mythological narrative poems’, a more cumbersome term, but one that sums up the key features of the two texts we’re looking at today.

These poems take an episodefrom classical mythology, and they re-tell that story in an interesting way, expanding on certain details or themes; especially the erotic details and themes. Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is based on a 350-line poem by the Greek poet Musaeus; Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonisexpands on a short passage of about 80 lines from the Metamorphoses, by Ovid.

Both poems take a mythological love story, and use it, re-appropriate it, to do two things: first, to say something about love; second, but no less importantly, to say something about poetry. The question I’m asking in this lecture is: what do these poems say about love and poetry?

These poems were almost certainly written in 1592 or 1593, at a time when the theatres in London were closed down due to a devastating outbreak of the plague.While the theatres were closed, these two brilliant playwrights, Marlowe and Shakespeare, decided to devote their energies to poetry for a while, instead of drama.

Both writers were fairly young at this time, they both turned 29 in 1593; they had both achieved some fame as playwrights; but with these poems they were proving something new about their talents, their capacities. In 1593, they were at the start of their careers – Marlowe was actually at the end of his career, but he didn’t know he was going to be fatally stabbed through the eye in a pub, he must have thought this was the beginning of a long and brilliant career.

By appropriating this classical material from ancient Greek and Latin poetry, both Marlowe and Shakespeare areentering into competition with those classical authors, they’re saying, ‘I can do what Ovid did; I can take this story from Ovid, or Musaeus, or whoever, and expand on it, make it my own, establish my authority as a serious English poet’. And because the material they are imitating and re-appropriating and expanding on is specifically about love, that means that this project of establishing their authority as poets also involves establishing their authority – not as lovers, exactly, but as men who know about love. So poetic authority and erotic authority are closely intertwined; when these poems talk about love, they are often saying something about poetry as well.

To get a sense of how these two layers are intertwined, how love and poetry are related to each other, I’m going to tell you a story from Ovid’sMetamorphoses. The Metamorphoses is a huge sequence of mythological tales about change, metamorphosis: the poem begins, ‘Changes of shape, new forms, are the theme which my spirit impels me now to recite.’ The poem revolves around the idea that change, metamorphosis, is the driving force of existence throughout the universe; and most of the time, sexual desire is the energy that motivates those changes. One of the most famous stories in the sequence is that of Daphne and Apollo. Apollo is the god of poetry, among other things, and he makes the mistake of insulting Cupid, the god of Love; Cupid decides to take revenge on Apollo by making him fall in love with a mortal woman, Daphne, while at the same time making Daphne totally incapable of requiting Apollo’s love. Apollo chases the fleeing Daphne, until eventually she feels her strength failing her; and at this moment, she appeals to her father, the river god Penéüs, to save her from being raped by Apollo:

‘Her strength exhausted, the girl grew pale; then overcome by the effort of running, she saw Penéüs’ waters before her: “Help me, Father!” she pleaded. “If rivers have power over nature, mar the beauty which made me admired too well, by changing my form!” She had hardly ended her prayer when a heavy numbness came over her body; her soft white bosom was ringed in a layer of bark, her hair was turned into foliage, her arms into branches. The feet that had run so nimbly were sunk into sluggish roots; her head was confined in a treetop; and all that remained was her beauty. Tree though she was, Apollo still loved her. Caressing the trunk with his hand, he could feel the heart still fluttering under the new bark. Seizing the branches, as though they were limbs, in his arms’ embrace, he pressed his lips to the wood; but the wood still shrank from his kisses. Phoebus then said to her: “Since you cannot be mine in wedlock, you must at least be Apollo’s tree. It is you who will always be twined in my hair, on my tuneful lyre and my quiver of arrows. The generals of Rome shall be wreathed with you... As I, with my hair that is never cut, am eternally youthful, so you with your evergreen leaves are for glory and praise everlasting.” Apollo the Healer had done. With a wave of her new-formed branches the laurel agreed, and seemed to be nodding her head in the treetop.’

So Daphne is changed into a laurel tree; and because Apollo can’t possess her now, as a lover, he chooses instead to enshrine her as a symbol of great achievements: from now on, poets, generals, anyone who accomplishes something impressive, will be crowned with a laurel wreath. That’s why we talk about people ‘resting on their laurels’ – resting on their past achievements; that’s why there is such a thing as the Poet Laureate, to be ‘laureate’ means to be crowned with laurel, and the Poet Laureate is the crowned poet of the realm. But the paradox of the laurel, in Ovid’s story, is that it serves as a reward for great achievements, and yet it also symbolises Apollo’s failure as a lover. These achievements, crowned by laurels, are substituted for erotic fulfilment, they make up for that failure, and yet because these achievements are crowned by the laurel wreath they also continuallyrefer back toand reiteratethat original erotic failure, that frustrated, futile love.

More disturbingly, this is also a story about rape; Apollo tries to rape the unwilling Daphne, but is prevented by her metamorphosis into a tree; but then, when Apollo embraces and kisses the tree, and when he appropriates its branches as a symbol of various kinds of success, that in itself is a violation of Daphne’s body, in its new form. One of the most chilling lessons of the Metamorphoses is that when a god wants you, they will get you; they cannot hear the word no. As well as signifying that Apollo can never possess Daphne, the laurel wreath also signifies that he will always possess her.The laurel tree flees Apollo’s kisses, but then it seems, ambiguously, to consent to the appropriation of its branches for symbolic purposes; these paradoxesare typical of the Ovidian conception of love, andjust as typical of the Renaissance conception of love that draws on these Ovidian narratives.

Love, in both the poems we’re looking at this week, is characterised by aggression and failure; love is seen as violent and destructive, but also as essentially futile, doomed to be cut short or to remain unsatisfied. I’ll show what I mean by that with reference to both these poems; and then in the final part of the lecture, I’ll suggest a slightly different way of looking at them.

Let’s see how this works in Hero and Leander. The poem begins with two elaborate descriptions of the main characters, first Hero, then Leander. One of the first things we learn about Hero, the woman, is that she was courted by Apollo; that might make us think of Daphne, certainly it figures Hero as a woman who has resisted the love of a god. She wears an extraordinary costume, on which is pictured a mythological scene:

Where Venus in her naked glory strove

To please the careless and disdainful eyes

Of proud Adonis, that before her lies.

The comparison with Adonis is very telling; again, a mortal resisting a god.And just in case we haven’t got the message, Marlowe also tells us this about Hero’s costume:

Her kirtle blue, whereon was many a stain,

Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain.

Men are constantly falling in love with Hero, and because of her refusal to love them back, these lovers kill themselves in front of her, staining her blue kirtle with their red blood. Hero, in Marlowe’s poem, is described as ‘Venus’ nun’. So she’s a nun, she’s taken a vow of celibacy; but unlike a Catholic nun, who would worship God and venerate the Virgin Mary, Hero’s life is dedicated to the worship of Venus, the goddess of erotic love. At the start of the poem, she’s celebrating the feast of Adonis, a man Venus loved and lusted after but was unable to possess, to hold onto. So the paradoxes are already conspicuous here: Venus is associated with erotic love, with sexuality; but her nun, Venus, is celibate, and her celibacy seems to commemorate the frustrated, un-fulfilled desire of Venus for Adonis.

Hero is described almost entirely in terms of her clothes, we hear almost nothing about her body: we hear about her virginal white hands; the sweetness of her breath; but Marlowe doesn’t really describe her body, he describes all the stuff that covers her body. And there is so much of it – these clothes are ridiculously elaborate. If Hero were a character in The Faerie Queene, she would represent the sin of over-dressing. And that feeds into this paradox of her role as Venus’ nun: when you look at Hero’s dress, there’s Venus in her naked glory, there’s a naked woman on Hero’s dress; but Hero is the opposite of naked, she is buried in garments.

Leander, by contrast, is all body, all glorious, naked, sexualised body. The narrator tantalises us with a partial blazon of Leander’s beauty:

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.

He’s saying, I can hardly give an adequate description of the kind of beauty that ordinary mortals fall in love with, much less an adequate description of Leander who was the object of immortal desire, who was loved by the gods. Notice that Marlowe starts at Leander’s breast and then moves down to his belly, and then stops; and then goes around the back and describes the little dints and dimples running down Leander’s spine, and then stops again; he says he can’t describe any more, his pen is unable to go any further; we have to use our imagination to picture the divinely beautiful nether regions of Leander’s body. The narrator goes on to say:

Some swore he was a maid in man’s attire,

For in his looks were all that men desire:

A pleasant smiling cheek, a speaking eye,

A brow for love to banquet royally;

And such as knew he was a man, would say,

‘Leander, thou art made for amorous play;

Why art thou not in love, and loved of all?

Though thou be fair, yet be not thine own thrall.’ (83-90)

So Hero and Leander are similar in the sense that they both represent ideal beauty;and both are also inaccessible, both of them provoke desire without feeling it. However, the difference between them is also crucial: Hero, the woman, is wrapped in clothes; Leander, the man, is pictured to us as a naked body.

These two meet and fall in love, and the story that follows is essentially about the stripping of Hero by Leander.

We are told that Hero loves Leander, and yet she expresses her desire in terms of repeated denials. Leander uses all his rhetorical skill to try and seduce Hero, and here is how she responds to his persuasions:

These arguments he used, and many more,

Wherewith she yielded, that was won before.

Hero’s looks yielded, but her words made war:

Women are won when they begin to jar.

Thus, having swallowed Cupid’s golden hook,

The more she strived, the deeper was she strook.

Yet, evilly feigning anger, strove she still

And would be thought to grant against her will. (329-36)

These are the kind of rape myths that remain central to much of the discourse surrounding rape to this day:the idea that ‘women are won when they begin to jar’, that a woman’s resistance signifies consent; that her lips say no but her eyes say yes; that she ‘would be thought to grant against her will’, so the impression that this is against her will is just an impression, it’s just what she wants you to think; the woman is feigning, she is pretending.

The poem tells us that Hero loves Leander, and that she desires him; but to state the obvious,what we’re dealing with here is not an actual woman, but a man, Marlowe, writing about female desire in what you might think is a transparently self-interested way. It’s like a manifesto for rapists.

Marlowe’s poem goes much further than its source text, the poem byMusaeus, in exploring the disturbing idea that female resistance is not only a sign of consent, but is actually the thing that most excites male desire. When Hero and Leander first meet in private, they try to make love, but Leander is too inexperienced and naïve to know what he’s supposed to do; eventually, he figures it out by instinct:

Albeit Leander, rude in love and raw,

Long dallying with Hero, nothing saw

That might delight him more, yet he suspected

Some amorous rites or other were neglected.

Therefore unto his body, hers he clung;

She, fearing on the rushes to be flung,

Strived with redoubled strength; the more she strived,

The more a gentle, pleasing heat revived,

Which taught him all that elder lovers know.

Just to translate that: Leander grapples Hero’s body; she is afraid that he will ‘fling her on the rushes’, which I think is a fear of being raped; so she struggles; and that struggling turns Leander on. When it says ‘a gentle, pleasing heat revived’, that might seem to suggest that the heat is pleasing to both of them, but actually the focus here is on what pleases Leander, what turns him on. And what turns him on is Hero’s striving, her struggling.

At the end of the poem, when Leander has swum across the Hellespont to get to Hero’s tower, he is dripping wet and freezing cold, and he climbs into her bed to warm himself. Hero tries to hide under the sheets, but Leander won’t take no for an answer:

Love is not full of pity, as men say,

But deaf and cruel, where he means to prey.

Even as a bird which in our hands we wring

Forth plungeth and oft flutters with her wing,

She trembling strove; this strife of hers, like that

Which made the world, another world begat

Of unknown joy. Treason was in her thought,

And cunningly to yield herself she sought.

Seeming not won, yet won she was, at length.

(In such wars women use but half their strength.) (771-80)

That word ‘prey’ in the second line defines Leander as a hunter, with Hero as his prey; and this is followed by the image of wringing a bird, wringing its neck to kill it, that’s what Leander’s love-making resembles; Hero is like a bird being slaughtered.

At the very end of the poem, after having sex with Leander, Hero tries to get out of the bed, but Leander grasps at her and she slips onto the floor, losing the sheet she was trying to cover herself with. She stands up, naked, and her blush is likened to a sunrise, she blushes so brightly with shame that it seems like it’s morning; and her own blush lights her up, illuminates her so that Leander can see her and stare at her:

So Hero’s ruddy cheek Hero betrayed,

And her all naked to his sight displayed,

Whence his admiring eyes more pleasure took

Than Dis on heaps of gold fixing his look. (807-10)

Dis is the god of the underworld, and the god of riches; Leander is like Dis staring at heaps of gold. At the beginning of the poem, we were introduced to Hero covered in her elaborate garments, encased in that absurd costume. At the end, she stands naked, ‘betrayed’, blushing with shame, with Leander staring greedily at her.

The poem ends a few lines after this; Marlowe never finished the story. In his source text, what happens next is that Leander swims to Hero’s tower again on another night, but is drowned by a storm; his body washes up on the shore beneath Hero’s tower, she sees it, and she jumps from the tower to her death. The original myth is supposed to be about two lovers who are separated from each other, who try to overcome that distance between them, but who die tragically in the attempt.