Allusion as Plunder: Marlowe’s, Hero and Leander, and Colluthus’s Rape of Helen

Summary

We do not prove the existence of the poem.

It is something seen and known in lesser poems.

It is the huge, high harmony that sounds

A little and a little, suddenly,

By means of a separate sense… .

—Wallace Stevens

Defining literary allusion as “a way of dealing with the predicaments and responsibilities of ‘the poet as heir,’” Christopher Ricks recommends that we pay special attention “when the subject matter of an allusion is at one with the impulse that underlies [its] making.” This paper responds to Ricks’s challenge by considering how an image from Colluthus’s Rape of Helen shapes an important turn in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Marlowe issues the reference within the long-awaited moment when Leander enters Hero’s virgin body: “Leander now, like Theban Hercules, / Entered the orchard of th’ Hesperides, / Whose fruit none rightly can describe but he / That pulls or shakes it from the golden tree” (2.297–300). In these lines, the Hesperides’ fruit suggests an otherworldly bliss that is nearly ineffable; such bliss is achieved, however, only through rough violence. Colluthus describes the same glistering fruit in similarly contradictory terms. For him, the golden apple appropriated by the goddess Strife is both “beauty’s offering, the great treasure of Aphrogeneia” and also “the plant of war, of war an evil seed” (169–70). With the Hesperides’ fruit, Colluthus catalyzes a narrative of enmity and rape. When Marlowe applies this charged image to Hero and Leander’s consummation, he confounds our appreciation of what his lovers have achieved. Simultaneously, he presents allusion itself as a kind of plunder, an exercise that is at once canny and vertiginous.

There is good reason to assume that Marlowe was closely familiar with Colluthus’s Rape of Helen. That fifth-century poem, like Marlowe’s named source, the fifth-century Hero and Leander of Musaeus, enjoyed a privileged status in early modern letters. The Aldine edition of Colluthus’s minor epic was in circulation after 1505. René Perdrier’s literal Latin prose translation of its Greek hexameters was printed in Basel in 1556. This translation (bound with Foratulus’s Epigrammata) circulated in a volume of English provenance whose cover carried the seal of the Order of the Garter.