The Poems of Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), also known as Kit Marlowe, was one of the most influential dramatists of Elizabethan theatre. Though he is best known for his plays, his poems were very popular in their time and are still well-regarded today. These include his translation of Ovid's Elegies, his pastoral poem A Passionate Shepherd to His Love, his narrative romance Hero and Leander, his epitaph On the Death of Sir Roger Manwood, as well as excerpts from his play Doctor Faustus.
Ovid's Elegies
Scholars generally agree that Marlowe's earliest work was probably his translation of the Amores, three books of Roman literature by the poet Ovid (43 BCE to c. 17 CE) in which a male narrator addresses his mistress. The original poems, written in Latin when Ovid was still a young man, would have been viewed as rather scandalous in Marlowe's time; indeed, scholar Stanley Wells describes them as celebrating "the delights and excitements of, especially, illicit heterosexual love, of promiscuity, seduction, and adultery" (78). Marlowe's decision to translate this specific work, likely undertaken when he was still a student at Cambridge circa 1584, was therefore "a characteristically transgressive act" against "the religious and moral establishment" (ibid).
Marlowe's translation of the Amores – known in English as the Elegies – was a more groundbreaking work than it may first appear. Not only was it the first known translation of Ovid into English, but it was also the first time that the rhymed heroic couplet was used in such a long-form way in an English text. As scholar Georgia E. Brown explains, "the patterning and arrangement of words carries a lot of the argument in the couplet, which exploits balance and contrast, and lends itself to the process of comparison, juxtaposition, and apposition" (Cheney, 113). Marlowe was not merely translating an existing work, then, but building upon it, and creating something that English literature had not yet seen. One of the most famous poems from Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Elegies is the fifth elegy from Book One, in which the lust and passion of the narrator are on full display:
In summer's heat and mid-time of the day
To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay,
One window shut, the other open stood,
Which gave such light as twinkles in a wood,
Like twilight glimpse at setting of the sun
Or night being past, and yet not day begun.
Such light to shamefaced maidens must be shown,
Where they may sport, and seem to be unknown.
Then came Corinna in a long loose gown,
Her white neck hid with tresses hanging down:
Resembling fair Semiramis going to bed
Or Lais of a thousand wooers sped.
I snatched her gown, being thin, the harm was small,
Yet strived she to be covered therewithal.
And striving thus as one that would be cast,
Betrayed herself, and yielded at the last.
Stark naked as she stood before mine eye,
Not one wen in her body could I spy.
What arms and shoulders did I touch and see,
How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me?
How smooth a belly under her waist saw I?
How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh?
To leave the rest, all liked me passing well,
I clinged her naked body, down she fell,
Judge you the rest: being tired she bade me kiss,
Jove, send me more such afternoons as this.
Read More
⇒ The Poems of Christopher Marlowe
