Dis-Covering the Female Body: Erotic Exploration in Elizabethan Poetry

Summary

Yet Ovid's wanton Muse did not offend: He is the fountain whence my streams do flow; Forgive me if I speak as I was taught . . .

(Thomas Nashe, The Choice of Valentines)

The first and, arguably, greatest Elizabethan 'bed-scene' takes place in the last hundred lines of Marlowe's Hero and Leander (2.235-334). By physically staging the drama of lust-in-action, the great literary pioneer engages in a highly original dialogue with classical tradition, and in a feat of poetic trail-blazing. Surprisingly enough, the literary origins and techniques of this memorable scene, as well as its impact on the Elizabethan erotic imagination, do not seem to have aroused much critical interest. Judging from this neglect, the representation of the body in sensuously inviting intimacy appears to be a more disreputable topic in Renaissance literature than in the fine arts of the period. Thus in what is probably the most influential treatment of Hero and Leander, the corruption of 'the Greek maiden of Musaeus' by the 'fleshliness of the Amores' is being emphatically deplored: 'One wonders what miracle Marlowe might have achieved if he had been able to approach Musaeus directly.' One wonders.

Unlike Renaissance painting, Elizabethan poetry in the 1580s had not yet discovered the lure of the body. It was Marlowe who led the way, and in doing so he proved the brilliantly gifted pupil of his magister amoris Ovid, whose love poems he had formerly translated line by line.