Abstract

Christopher Marlowe is one of the most interesting and complex Elizabethan poets and playwrights, and among the favourite candidates to embody at least one of the “rival poetsµ mentioned in some of William Shakespeare’s Sonnets, where it is possible to find different concepts of beauty and poetry. Among these is the idea of a ‘painted’ beauty, connected to other considerations on writing, style and artistic composition. Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, with its polished and refined writing and its lavish and rich images, represents a literary product in which formal and aesthetic beauty are exalted through bodies, garments, and settings. The main aim of this paper is to show how Marlowe managed poetic fashions and rhetorical instruments in order to create a purely Elizabethan literary product. After an introduction on the characteristics of the epyllion as a genre, I will analyse how the bodies and garments of the two young protagonists, and the settings of the poem, are wisely ‘embroidered’ by Marlowe, who used all the most fashionable threads available to an Elizabethan poet, ranging from the widespread Petrarchan rhetoric to a learned display of an abundant mythological apparatus, with the poetical aim of exalting Beauty. It will be necessary to draw some comparisons with one of its primary sources: the Greek epyllion Hero and Leander by Musaeus. The whole paper will take into consideration, as reference points to carry on the analysis, some Shakespearean sonnets so as to better show Marlowe’s expression of a courtly literature glistered with love, beauty, and knowledge.