The Ovidian Recusatio in Marlowe's Hero and Leander

Summary

When in this work's first verse I trod aloft,

Love slack’d my muse, and made my numbers soft.

—All Ovids Elegies, 1.1.21–22

EARLY in Hero and Leander, Marlowe's narrator suspends a promised revelation of Leander's fleshly beauty with a protest: “but my rude pen / Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men, / Much less of powerful gods” (1.69–71). More than a formulaic gesture of humility, Marlowe's full protest unfolds in three distinct stages: first, it identifies Leander as the property of a god “whose immortal fingers did imprint / That heavenly path with many a curious dint, / That runs along his back” (1.67–69); second, it exposes the poet as growing mute before the evidence of such mastery (1.69–71); finally, it anticipates the poet's embrace of a “slack Muse [who] sings of Leander's eyes” (1.72) rather than his love-marked flesh. The final term in this series, that of the “slack muse,” is charged with double meaning. On the one hand, this image suggests that Marlowe's narrator is disempowered, that the erotic signature already pressed into Leander's back slackens the poet's phallic pen, mutes his confidence, and necessitates his description of a lesser subject. Simultaneously, however, this image privileges the poet by identifying him with the ancient poets of recusatio. Defining his muse as “slack,” Marlowe incorporates himself within a poetic genealogy that reaches from Callimachus to Ovid. He effects this identification, moreover, at a highly strategic juncture: he embraces the “slack muse” just as he discovers that his writing of Leander is haunted by an earlier writing whose association with a “powerful god” (1.71) recalls the “divine Musaeus” named in 1.52. Invoking the “slack muse” upon the heels of this discovery, Marlowe dramatizes a programmatic turn: a turn from the example of Musaeus, whose fifth-century minor epic would seem to be his privileged source, to the precedent of Ovid, whose recusatio in Amores 1.1 significantly informs the recusatio in Hero and Leander.