SOURCE: Haber, Judith. “‘True-loves Blood’: Narrative and Desire in Hero and Leander.” English Literary Renaissance 28, no. 3 (autumn 1998): 372-86.

In the following essay, Haber offers a stylistic analysis of Marlowe's treatment of desire in Hero and Leander, contending that the poem “refuses the comforts of a conventional, mastering narrative.”

Most critics would agree that throughout Christopher Marlowe's corpus there exists a tension between orthodox and heterodox modes of thought, between containment and resistance. This tension is frequently figured within the texts themselves as a dialectic between the assertion of a phallic point and an acknowledgment of complete pointlessness. In Edward II, for example, Marlowe repeatedly evokes—and links—pointlessness in all its senses: impotence, lack, non-meaning, indeterminacy, incompleteness; yet the threat posed by these ideas is effectively contained when both Edward and the audience get the point in the end.¹ In Hero and Leander, Marlowe is able more fully...