SOURCE: Summers, Claude. “Hero and Leander: The Arbitrariness of Desire.” In Constructing Christopher Marlowe, edited by J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell, pp. 133-47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Summers identifies the central theme of Hero and Leander as “the utter arbitrariness of desire, a perspective that is pointedly at variance with the conventional morality of Marlowe's society and its dominant constructions of sexuality and that has tragic as well as comic potential.”

Hero and Leander is a remarkable achievement, principally because of its curious tone, an unusual blend of apparently affectionate but actually scathingly unsentimental comedy and iconoclastic realism in its depiction of love. If Marlowe's critics can no longer be neatly divided between those who labour mightily to discover (or to impose) a moralistic point to the comedy and those who aver that the comedy is its own reward,¹ that is all...