The Books: The Redress of Poetry; ‘Extending the Alphabet: On Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander”,’ by Seamus Heaney

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry.

In re-reading this essay, I decided to read the works of Christopher Marlowe this year (or re-read, in most cases). Marlowe has a certain kind of grip on my imagination (one of the reasons why it was so pleasing that he “showed up” in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive). There’s a magic and strangeness to Marlowe. He seems somewhat impossible. I love his stuff. So. There’s one of my reading projects for 2015, along with finishing the Aubrey/Maturin series.

Heaney’s lecture on Marlowe’s sexy sexy poem “Hero and Leander” is multi-tiered. He discusses his own discovery of Marlowe, and the irresistible pull his language had on Heaney. Because this lecture was given in 1991, and not 1941, Heaney addresses the canon again, that battleground of political correctness. Marlowe’s stuff emerged from a time of England’s expansion, and brutality against the Irish. He goes into all of that, the contemporary world from which Marlowe was writing, his branding of other people as truly “Other”, the Irish seen as complete savages, and all that. These truths have been used to try to discredit Marlowe, or other British writers writing at that time: they were members of an imperialist society and therefore we must unmask them. Heaney recognizes the ambiguities and challenges in analysis (and gives it more credence than I do – that’s why he was paid the big bucks, I guess) and understands the complaints of those who live in those “other” societies (and he was one of them), who suffered under imperialism, and can’t stand all that Marlowe symbolizes, or, at least, can’t stand the society from which he arose. But Heaney makes a plea to not allow that to be where you stop. Because figures like Marlowe – so gigantic, so influential – have much to provide those that follow, and if the work is good (as Marlowe’s is) then it can take all kinds of modern-day interpretations. He speaks of the concept of poetry’s purpose as being to “extend the alphabet.” The great writers open up new ground, they chip away at the settled alphabet, at the things one is “allowed” to say: the great ones go further. We can see that in any major figure. Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson. Shakespeare, certainly. And after those new spaces are opened up, they can never be closed again. There is now MORE space for expression. Marlowe was one of those figures, particularly in the realm of sexuality, although it all comes down to the perfection of his verse, his command of rhythm and sound and pattern. None of the sex stuff would matter if he werent so technically proficient. He was sexually fluid, shall we say, and open about that, and you can see it in particular in “Hero and Leander,” especially in the sequence where Leander, swimming the Hellespont, is mistaken for Ganymede by Neptune. It’s pure sex, that sequence. Male-on-male sex. It’s luscious and sensuous and funny. It still remains a SPACE to be explored. A safer writer, a more cautious writer, would not have gone as far as Marlowe does in that sequence (Marlowe is clearly seeing Leander’s naked body as Neptune saw it: he gets it). I mean, here is just one section of the thing, and he goes on and on and on like this throughout:

His body was as straight as Circe’s wand;
Jove might have sipt out nectar from his hand.
Even as delicious meat is to the taste,
So was his neck in touching, and surpast
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: let it suffice
That my slack Muse sings of Leander’s eyes;
Those orient cheeks and lips, exceeding his
That leapt into the water for a kiss
Of his own shadow, and, despising many,
Died ere he could enjoy the love of any.

Hawt, right?

Do you need some alone time, Kit? I know I do.

While Heaney’s specific analysis of all of the different parts of “Hero and Leander” is fascinating (and will make you want to read the poem again in its entirety), I thought I’d excerpt from the earlier section of Heaney’s lecture, where he discusses Marlowe’s reputation (while he was alive and also posthumously). Heaney connects Marlowe with Sylvia Plath (whom Heaney knew personally), and he makes a really strong case. One of the problems with Marlowe is that since he died violently, and so young, it affects how we analyze his work. (This happens to anyone who dies young. We see James Dean’s movies differently because he only made three, and died young, and he’s not still out there, doing cameos in Clint Eastwood pictures. It makes us actually perceive his work differently.)

Marlowe, of course, was stabbed at a restaurant in 1593, apparently in a scuffle over who would pick up the check. But who knows what really went down. Marlowe was an intelligence agent, he had dealings with some pretty shady characters. But his life was so tempestuous that getting into a knife-fight over the check doesn’t seem beyond the pale (speaking of the English domination of Ireland). Marlowe’s untimely death has been used as a retro-active analytic tool: his works are seen in the light of his end, as though everything he wrote was merely a comment on how he would eventually die. One can see the connection with Plath there.

Excerpt from The Redress of Poetry, ‘On Christopher Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander”,’ by Seamus Heaney

Both deaths [Marlowe’s and Plath’s] made sensational news and resulted in the poets becoming legendary figures: their tragic ends were seen to have been implicit in their writings all along. Preachers even rigged the Marlowe knifing so that it presented an instructive symmetry; they gave out that the dagger that killed him had been his own and that the fatal wound had been in his head, the very seat of the talent which had made him one of those damnably ‘forward wits’. It was only to be expected, therefore, that the Chorus’s lament for an overweening intellectual [in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus] cut off in his prime should have been understood afterwards as a sort of prediction. To a hot-breathed pubic, high on murder gossip that carried with it the mingled whiff of religious, sexual and political scandal, the note of doom was not only audible: it was ominous and prophetic of Marlowe’s fate.

That fate, moreover, had been predicted by others besides himself. Robert Greene’s death-bed pamphlet, Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance, had been written nine months before Marlowe was stabbed at Deptford. The pamphlet is most famous for its attack on Shakespeare, but before Greene takes his side-swipe at the ‘upstart crow,’ he has already warned a number of his peers about their own destinies, and although he does not use Marlowe’s name, there is no doubt that the ‘tragedian’ being singled out in his deeply minatory address is indeed the same scandalous, atheistical, and morally reprehensible university wit, associate of Sir Walter Raleigh, and student of the School of Night. Marlowe’s intellectual effrontery, in other words, had been enough to put the wind up a man on his death-bed, and take a repentant sinner’s mind off his own predicament – which is to say that the figure Marlowe cut in the minds of his contemporaries in the late 1580s and early 1590s was utterly exciting. The carouser who had been gaoled for a couple of weeks after being on the spot at a fatal street-fight, the university student who had tasted the thrills of espionage among the Catholic recusants of Reims, the blasphemer who seemed to be out to break every taboo and to transgress extravagantly in the realms of both religion and sex – this figure, a star in his late twenties, a kind of cross between Oscar Wilde and Jack the Ripper, moved in an aura of glamorous immorality and political danger and was so riveting and marked that the dying Greene felt free to finger him as the next to go.

And, of course, the danger was not just an aura. Atheism and blasphemy could be as fatal in late-sixteenth-century London as anti-revolutionary sympathies were in Moscow in the 1930s. Marlowe was denounced to the Privy Council, and the depositions of the informers have survived. Even if they are perused with the suspicion that such documents always warrant, they still conjure up the image of a man operating at full tilt, both exhilarated and inflammatory. The whole performance was one of great daring, and the reports of it still transmit something of its original subversive headiness, partly exhibitionistic, partly intellectually driven, but altogether inevitable and unstoppable.

In Marlowe’s case, therefore, as in Plath’s, the daring of the work and the transgressions which it encompassed were the first things to be emphasized in the aftermath of their deaths. Its ironies and complications were relatively neglected; what got highlighted were the points where it conformed to current expectations generated by the extreme behaviour of the writer. In Plath’s case, the image of victimized woman was immediately in place as a consequence of her tragic suicide; in Marlowe’s, it was the image of the sinner’s fall, of divine retribution for blasphemous presumptions. In each instance, the work was read with more regard to what the posthumously created stereotype might have been expected to produce than what the writer actually delivered. Doctor Faustus, for example, was regarded for a very long time as a casebook of humanist ‘overreaching’ before it was reconsidered as an anatomy of Christian despair. And Plath was celebrated as the author of the vindictive ‘Daddy’ and the morgue-cold ‘Edge’ whilst other more positively inspired works were ignored.

It is hardly news to be reminded of all this. Original poets can obviously sustain a variety of interpretations and answer to very different times and needs. What remains mysterious, however, is the source of that original strength, the very fact of poetic power itself, the way its unpredictability gets converted into inevitability once it has manifested itself, the way a generation recognizes that they are in the presence of one of the great unfettered events which constitute a definite stage in the history of poetry. It is the manifestation of this power in Marlowe’s verse, in the first language-life of the poetry itself, that I wish to praise. If I begin by acknowledging that the conditions of a poet’s reception and the history of subsequent responses to his or her work do indeed become a part of the work’s force and meaning, it is only to indicate that I am as aware as the next person that the import of poetry is affected by several different agencies. But I remain convinced by what my own reading experience tells me: namely, that some works transmit an immediately persuasive signal and retain a unique staying power over a lifetime. Some works continue to combine the sensation of liberation with that of consideration; having once cleared a new space on the literary and psychic ground, they go on to offer, at each re-reading, the satisfaction of a foundation being touched and the excitement of an energy being released.