SOURCE: Leonard, John. “Marlowe's Doric Music: Lust and Aggression in Hero and Leander.” English Literary Renaissance 30, no. 1 (winter 2000): 55-76.

In the following essay, Leonard underscores Leander's sexual coercion of Hero in Hero and Leander.

Writing in 1948, Tucker Brooke saw Hero and Leander as a celebration of young love: “… there is not an obscene word or a degenerate suggestion. Everywhere we have simply the marriage of true minds; the perfect purity of ocean-dewy limbs and child-like souls.”¹ That opinion now seems dated, but it still exerts an influence, for (as we shall see) Brooke revised the lines describing the consummation, and almost all editors have accepted his text. But even Brooke's text is hard pressed to bear his interpretation. J. B. Steane, in a celebrated essay, has emphasized the poem's “fierceness and destructiveness.” Where earlier critics saw ocean-dewy limbs or a detached and sophisticated comedy, Steane sees “embarrassment, fear...