The Irreverent Face of Myth: Eroticism, Homoeroticism, and Comic Sensibility in Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander

In the section of Hero and Leander entirely ascribed to Christopher Marlowe, the two protagonists do not die and all the interest is focused on their mutual love and desire. In rewriting the myth, Marlowe succeeds in combining his fascination with the return ad fontes with a lively and mercurial tendency to give a new and original impetus to them. Rejecting the Petrarchan model in favour of an Ovidian idea of love, and running constantly on the liminal space between sensuality and irony, sexuality and parody, Hero and Leander is a supreme example of hybridization, subversion and reshaping of classical myth and traditional poetical modes. This paper aims at shedding more light on the strategies used by Marlowe in his version of the myth: figures of speech, ekphrastic imagery, mythological parallels, digressions and parodies, devising of comic scenes, juxtapositions between artificial and sensorial dimensions, hyperboles and expansions which, while exploring all the possibilities of eroticism, exalt and glorify both the beauty of the human body and the power of the amorous dynamics.