Hero and Leander

Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander stands as a luminous, if incomplete, example of the Elizabethan erotic mythological narrative. Composed in the early 1590s and first published posthumously in 1598, the poem retells the classical Greek myth of Hero, a priestess of Venus, and Leander, a young man from Abydos, whose nightly swims across the Hellespont to be with her end in tragedy. Marlowe's version, however, is noted less for its narrative trajectory than for its luxuriant language, pla...