Stump - Marlowe's Travesty of Virgil: Dido and Elizabethan Dreams of Empire

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Comparative Drama, Vol. 34, 2000

Marlowe's Travesty of Virgil: Dido
and Elizabethan Dreams of Empire

by Donald Stump

Several recent studies(1) of Christopher Marlowe's Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, have focused on its relation to the development of English imperialism. Since the play represents a female ruler from North Africa who is brought down by her love for a male voyager intent on founding an imperial dynasty, the play invites studies of the politics of gender, nationality, and race. Lurking in the background, however, is also a political agenda of a more specific sort. As William Godshalk has suggested, Queen Elizabeth's abortive marriage negotiations with the Duke of Anjou in the years 1579-81 seem to have been on the playwright's mind, though their precise relation to the details of the play has never been worked out.(2) It seems to me that recognizing allusions to the French Marriage is crucial in understanding Marlowe's position on the expansionist sentiment that was gathering strength in England in his day. The Queen's courtship of Anjou was a major turning point in Elizabethan foreign policy, one that set in motion England's sustained and ultimately successful attempt to project military power against Spain in the Low Countries, the New World, and beyond. For that reason, if for no other, the negotiations deserve more attention in studies of the play than they have so far received.

In considering possible connections between Dido and the French Marriage, it is helpful to begin with the literary context in which the play was written. As founder of an empire that rivaled that of ancient Rome, Dido was a convenient analogue for Elizabeth in her challenge to the sixteenth-century Roman imperium controlled by the Pope and his powerful allies in France and Spain. Interest in the myth at the English court appears as early as 1564, when Edward Halliwell staged a Latin play entitled Dido (now lost) before the Queen at Cambridge.(3) The myth attracted later writers of Elizabethan panegyric for various reasons, the most important of which are made plain in William Gager's Latin play of the same name, which was performed at Oxford during a royal visit in 1583. In the Epilogue, where the author attempts to "reckon up" the good to be derived from his work, he stresses three parallels between the two queens, saying, "Dido, one woman surpasses you by far: our virgin queen. In her piety, how many reversals has she endured! What kingdoms has she founded! To what foreigners has she plighted her trust!"(4) The lines call to mind Dido's sufferings at the hands of her brother Pygmalion, who forced her and her followers to flee from Tyre and settle in Libya; her subsequent achievement in founding the kingdom of Carthage; and her peaceable dealings with surrounding peoples. The Epilogue also mentions her "trust and aid to the wretched," evidently an allusion to the assistance that she gave Aeneas and his storm-tossed men. As Gager's Epilogue suggests, Elizabeth's life followed a similar pattern, beginning with her "piety" amid sufferings caused by her sister Mary, proceeding through "reversals" inflicted by her Catholic enemies, and ending with the "founding of her kingdom" as the trusted ally of Protestant "foreigners" on the Continent.

Other works of the period also compare Elizabeth with Dido because of her generosity toward the needy, her piety in the face of adversity, and her attainments as the founder of an empire, though other qualities such as courage and love of her people are also important. In a passage in James Aske's 1588 poem "Elizabeth Triumphans," which was written to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the author exalts the English queen as "the only Empress that on earth hath lived." He calls her a "Goddesse" who accompanies her troops into battle, a "Generall" who promises "the meanest man" and the greatest an equal share of honor and reward.(5)

Comparisons between Elizabeth and Dido were, however, not always so favorable. In the period 1579-81, when Protestants rose up in opposition to the Queen's marriage negotiations with Anjou, writers and artists placed more stress on the self-destructive desires that led to Dido's fall. Though largely favorable to Elizabeth, the Epilogue to Gager's play touches on this element of the myth, remarking that "Pliable women are moved by tears, but the strong one must stop her ears" and concluding that "Venus forbids us to trust an ancient foe" Though Gager treats Elizabeth as one of the strong ones, he goes on to say with playful reference to the Polish prince Albertus Alasco, Elizabeth's foreign guest at the performance, "may no Aeneas sway her affections!"

Two works that express more serious doubts about her vulnerability to foreign suitors are of special interest in reading Marlowe's play. The first is one of the so-called "Sieve Portraits" of the Queen. Although the four paintings of that name differ in content, all juxtapose the image of Elizabeth with mottoes by Petrarch and props such as globes, maps, imperial columns, and the triple crown of the Holy Roman Empire in order to claim for her the position of an empress.(6) Most interesting for our purposes is the Siena Portrait, recently discovered to be by an obscure Dutchman, Quentin Massys the Younger (see Figure 1.)(7) Placing in Elizabeth's left hand a sieve like that with which the Vestal Virgin Tuccia proved her chastity by miraculously carrying water from the river Tiber to the Senate in Rome, Massys portrays the Queen as a pensive woman in black standing between a globe and a pillar. On the latter, the story of Dido and Aeneas is depicted in a series of nine gold inlays, with another miniature below them representing an imperial diadem cast to the earth. Behind the Queen, in a receding gallery bathed in sunlight, stands a group of courtiers, including one speaking with great animation who is identifiable as Sir Christopher Hatton, a staunch opponent of the French marriage and advocate of an English bid for world empire.

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In this context, the import of the inlays on the imperial column is ambiguous. At first glance, they seem to imply a contrast between the intemperate Dido, who cast down her imperial crown out of infatuation with a foreign suitor, and the more sober and reflective figure of the English Queen. Walter Oakeshott and Constance Jordan make the best case for this interpretation, associating the imperial column with Archduke Charles, the younger brother of the Holy Roman Emperor, and identifying the figure attended by a page approaching Hatton along the gallery as Philip II of Spain. Both were imperial potentates whom Elizabeth rejected as suitors in the first decade of her reign. In this reading of the portrait, Elizabeth is represented as one whose bright prospects as mistress of an empire derive from her refusal to subordinate herself and her realm to any foreign prince, including her more recent suitor Anjou.(8) Yet this interpretation is undercut by subtle suggestions that the lady in the portrait is hardly immune to the attractions of such a prince. For one thing, she has turned her back on Hatton and the sunlit gallery and seems to be making her way into a darker interior. For another, the emblematic sieve has been lowered to her side, where she grasps it lightly, seeming to give it little thought. By contrast, earlier Sieve portraits, such as that painted in 1579 by George Gower, show the Queen holding the central symbol up as if to display it.(9) Massys's Elizabeth also looks distracted, and judging from the approach of the dignitary with the page, whom Julia Walker identifies by his attire as a Frenchman involved in the negotiations with Anjou,(10) the cause of her thoughtfulness may well be matrimonial diplomacy. Be that as it may, as the Queen poses with the miniatures of Dido on her right (or favored) side, with the disregarded sieve on her left, and with the world (symbolized by the globe) at her back, she seems more akin to Dido than Oakeshott and Jordan's interpretation allows. Having turned away from her imperial calling, represented in Hatton, she seems to have little regard for the sieve, which is a symbol not only of virginity by also of the wisdom to sift out right from wrong. Even the tracery on her sleeves adds to this impression, for it recalls the geometric patterns surrounding the miniatures of Dido formed by faceting in the jasper of the adjacent column. If, as Strong suggests, the painting was executed around the time of the French Marriage negotiations, and if, as Jordan and Oakeshott argue, it was painted for the Earl of Leicester--a bitter opponent of the Anjou match--Massys's work may well represent the Queen at a crossroads and offer a delicately understated warning of tragic consequences to come should she proceed further in the direction that she is heading.

A second instructive analog to Marlowe's play is Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, which was published in 1579 at the height of the initial furor over the French marriage and which also lends itself to interpretation as a warning against the match. As Paul McLane has argued,(11) the funeral lament for the dead shepherdess Dido in the November eclogue seems calculated to raise the specter of death and calamity should Elizabeth marry Anjou. Connections with Virgil and the first four books of the Aeneid are established earlier in the work, principally in the April eclogue. There, a song by the lovelorn shepherd Colin Clout, who is associated with Spenser himself, is sung in celebration of "Eliza, Queene of shepheardes all," whom E.K., the contemporary annotator of the Calender, identifies with Queen Elizabeth. Since the April Eclogue begins and ends with references to Colin's misery, it leaves the impression that the happiest days of Eliza's reign are past and that Spenser himself is distraught over the current turn of affairs at court. By November, celebrations of the springtime of Eliza's early reign have turned to dirges over the tragedy of Dido.

When Marlowe finished his own Tragedy of Dido in the 1580s, then, the connection between his protagonist and the Queen of England was already well established. Elizabeth's supporters had exploited it to idealize her as the founder of a new and glorious social order that they hoped would one day rival the empires of ancient Carthage and Rome. Her detractors had employed it to express their distress at her amorous entertainment of a French Prince of the Blood. Even if Marlowe had not gone out of his way to call attention to such parallels by changing Dido's Phoenician name "Elissa" to "Eliza" at a key moment in Act 4,(12) politically informed members of his audience would have had good reason to suspect that the work reflected the French marriage negotiations.

That scholars of our own day have been slow to entertain the same suspicion is surprising. One reason may be that we have been too quick to assume that the play is, as it purports to be, a tragedy. Though much fine work has been done on its comic and satiric elements, critics who focus on its relation to sixteenth-century colonialism and imperialism have been rather serious in their interpretations. To Emily Bartels, for example, the playwright is an early anticolonialist who, because he gives an alien woman from North Africa a voice and an imperial agenda of her own, offers his audience an alternative to "the kind of appropriation [of Virgil] that was supporting European supremacy."(13) To Margot Hendricks, Marlowe's depiction of Dido "valorizes an emerging cultural tendency toward reductive caricatures of both women and Africans" and so provides "prophetic confirmation of England's racial and imperial heritage."(14) As fascinating as I find such readings, I wonder if they do not pay too little attention to the play's tone, which strikes me as too full of youthful derision to advance any agenda as serious as valorizing English colonialism or offering a sober critique of prevailing attitudes toward women and aliens.

Another reason that scholars have been slow to connect Marlowe's play with other works that link Dido and Aeneas with Elizabeth and Anjou may be that we cannot agree about the circumstances in which the play was first written and performed.(15) If it was produced in London in the late 1580s or early 1590s, as Margot Hendricks suggests, then its immediate political context has more to do with the Armada than with Anjou. If it was staged in Norwich or Ipswich in the years 1586-87, as Norman Rabkin argues,(16) it appears during a period marked by hostilities between English and Spanish forces in the Netherlands rather than by concern over the French marriage negotiations, which were suspended nearly half a decade earlier.

What little we know about the play's first performance further complicates the issue. Although the title page of the 1594 edition informs us that Dido was "Played by the Children of her Maiesties Chappell," records of the company's activities are not of much help in establishing where and when it was performed. Some assume that it was presented at court before the Queen,(17) but this strikes me as unlikely. After the spring of 1584, when the Children lost their lease at Blackfriars, we know of no occasion during Marlowe's lifetime when the company performed in London or at court.(18) Prior to that date, moreover, they had little reason to involve themselves with an unknown Undergraduate playwright from Cambridge and even less to undertake this particular script, which would have posed substantial hazards for them. From the fall of 1579 until the end of 1581, when the French marriage negotiations were officially suspended, Elizabeth struck out furiously at those who publicly opposed her plan to marry Anjou, banning sermons on the subject, calling in broadsides and pamphlets, and punishing those who dared distribute such material. Two offenders, the writer John Stubbs and a gentleman who distributed copies of Stubbs's treatise against the marriage, had their right hands publicly chopped off.(19) The severity of the Queen's reaction forced everyone involved--from old and trusted officials such as Leicester and Walsingham to young writers with court aspirations, such as Sidney and Spenser--to be extremely circumspect.(20) Even as late as the spring of 1584, the Children of the Chapel Royal had good reason to be wary of a play like Dido, and it is hard to believe that they would have risked performing it at or near the court.

The most likely hypothesis, then, is that the company first staged Dido sometime after they lost their lease at Blackfriars and that they played it on the road. Though the troupe is known to have performed only twice in the mid-1580s, both appearances were in Marlowe's vicinity. As Norman Rabkin notes, the Children were in Norwich for the winter playing season of 1586/87 and in Ipswich in September of 1587,(21) and neither town is more than sixty miles from Cambridge. Rabkin's suggestion does not, however, help to explain another mystery, namely Marlowe's reasons for concerning himself with royal marriage negotiations that had broken off more than half a decade earlier.

Since scholars disagree on such fundamental issues of dating, audience, context, and tone, I must pause over them briefly before going on. I begin with tone, since Marlowe's extensive borrowings from the Aeneid and the derisive humor with which he incorporated them into his play bear on all the other issues that I have raised. The time when he would have been immersed in studying Virgil in his grammar-school and university curriculum sheds light on the question of dating. The place where he might have found spectators capable of understanding the subtleties of his revisions to the Aeneid bears on questions of audience and context. Finally, the nature of his response to Virgil's celebration of Roman nationalism and imperialism illuminates the playwright's attitude toward similar stirrings in Elizabethan England.

I would argue that Marlowe's overriding aim in The Tragedy of Dido is to make a laughing stock of the Aeneid. If the resulting travesty offers a critique of the geo-political ambitions of his countrymen, it does so, I think, by the simple expedient of deriding the same aspirations in Virgil.

III

Since the publication of Clifford Leech's 1962 study of Marlowe's laughter and Jackson Cope's 1974 article on Dido and the "titillating Children," the number of critics who have taken the humor in the play seriously has risen appreciably. Few, however, are willing to acknowledge the full extent of the playwright's derision or to characterize his intentions as, first and foremost, satiric. Although Leech regards the play's dominant tone as comic, he shies away from the notion of derisive satire, circumscribing the playwright's intended effects within the bounds of "gentle and delighting humor."(22) Cope sees more that is raucous and scurrilous, but even he suggests a complex interplay of "farce with poetry" in which the latter evidently predominates, for he calls the play "the best English Aeneid before Dryden."(23) Roma Gill comes closer to the truth, I think, when she remarks that Marlowe "replaces Virgilian high seriousness with deflationary satire."(24) Even she, however, holds out for an unresolved "tension" between comedy and tragedy that I find hard to reconcile with her comments on the satiric nature of the play. While tragedy and comedy can certainly coexist in a single work, the same cannot be said of tragedy and sustained deflation. When Marlowe undercuts the high seriousness of Virgil, he can hardly help robbing the characters of their tragic dignity and their pathos.

The only way to argue persuasively for a tension between the laughable and the tragic in such a play, it seems to me, is that offered by Michael Shapiro. On the assumption that Marlowe confines his derision to the few scenes analyzed by Cope, Shapiro argues that these are designed to act as "foils" to the tragic matter around them.(25) Yet Marlowe weaves sly parodies of the Aeneid into many passages that Cope did not discuss. A full listing of the most ridiculous or grotesque departures from the Aeneid includes the following:

* Jupiter's notorious neglect of his responsibilities while dallying with Ganymede (1.1.1-80);

* Aeneas's extravagant reaction to images of Troy at the Temple of Juno and his clumsiness when first introduced to Dido (2.1.1-120);

* The lack of heroism revealed in Aeneas's retrospective account of his actions during the sack of Troy, when his mother shielded him from Pyrrhus and he made no attempt to rescue the King and Queen, as he had in Virgil (2.1.210-23);

* His demeaning account of the deaths of Priam and Hecuba, in which the Queen is swung "howling in the emptie the ayre" and the King first has his hands cut off and then grapples pathetically with Pyrrhus, his attacker, "forgetting both his want of strength and hands" (2.1.223-64);

* Aeneas's subsequent abandonment of Cassandra and Polixena despite their piteous pleas for help (2.1.274-89);

* Cupid's use of Dido as his plaything when he climbs into her lap and pricks her repeatedly with one of his arrows, causing her to vacillate uncontrollably between loving and hating Iarbus (3.1.1-55);

* Aeneas's cowardice and Dido's unseemly coarseness in dealing with Iarbus at the beginning of the hunting scene (3.3.1-62);

* Aeneas's obtuseness in responding to amorous advances by the Queen during their tryst in the cave (3.4.1-51);

* Cupid's mischief in arousing Dido's eighty-year-old nurse, who tells the disguised god happily, "Youle be a twigger when you come to age" and declares "I am young,/ Ile have a husband, or els a lover" (4.5.1-37);

* Aeneas's repeated blunders and vacillations after learning of Jupiter's will that he depart for Italy (4.3.1-56, 4.4.1-93, 5.1.1-192);

* His subsequent humiliation when he must beg his enemy Iarbus for the tackle needed to set sail (5.1.62-82); and

* The sudden and bizarre self-immolation of Anna and Iarbus on Dido's funeral pyre (5.1.314-29).(26)

As the list suggests, Marlowe's deflation of Virgil extends to virtually every scene in the play, lending force to Mary Elizabeth Smith's remark that nothing sacred or serious escapes Marlowe's "savage humor."(27)

Consider his rendering of the well-known incident in which Aeneas arrives at the temple of Juno in Carthage and stands wondering at the images of the fall of Troy presented on its walls. In the Aeneid, the hero responds "with many tears and sighs," exclaiming, "Look! There is Priam!/ Here, too, the honorable finds its due." The main point of the incident is not the hero's grief for the past but rather his hope for the future. Since the people of Carthage evidently honor the Trojans, Aeneas is able to comfort his friend Achates, saying, "Forget your fears;/ this fame will bring you some deliverance" (1.656-57).(28) In Marlowe's version, however, the hero forgets the need to calm the fears of his men and, overwhelmed by his own feelings, begins to hallucinate, exclaiming, "Achates, see King Priam wags his hand,/ He is alive, Troy is not overcome" (2.1.29-30). Those around the hero understandably find this reaction worrisome. Young Ascanius tries anxiously to bring his father back to his senses, saying, "Sweete father, leave to weepe, this is not he:/ For were it Priam he would smile on me." Achates, who earlier in the scene had spoken almost as extravagantly as Aeneas, now grows uneasy, telling his commander, "Thy mind Aeneas that would have it so/ Deludes thy eye sight, Priamus is dead/ .../ Aeneas see here come the Citizens,/ Leave to lament lest they laugh at our feares" (2.1.31-38). The exemplary leader of the Aeneid, who puts the honor and safety of his people ahead of his own feelings, has been transformed into a deluded exile who distresses children and embarrasses his fellow soldiers.

He does little better when he first encounters Dido. By the time they meet, the Queen has long since received others in his company and has honored them as guests by exchanging their wet clothing for magnificent garments drawn from her own royal wardrobes. Throughout the scene, however, Aeneas remains in "base" attire. Here, of course, Marlowe is tampering with another famous scene in the Aeneid, where the future founder of Rome is protected from view by a divinely engineered mist and, as it clears, makes a stunning entrance. Virgil describes him as "glittering in that bright light, his face/and shoulders like a god's." Dido responds with suitable wonder, saying, "You, goddess-born" (1.828-29, 862). In Marlowe's version, however, Aeneas looks anything but godlike beside his regally attired men, and he feels the disadvantage acutely. Rather than greeting them warmly, as he does in Virgil, he turns away. When the Trojan Cloanthus finally asks, "Why turnes Aeneas from his trustie friends?" he replies, "Your sight amazde me" (2.1.57-59). His humiliation then becomes a gag line running through the remainder of the scene. Since Dido sees nothing special about the storm-tossed seaman on her doorstep, her first words to him are edgy and suspicious. She says simply, "What stranger art thou that doest eye me thus?" After Ilioneus explains to her who her great visitor is, she reacts in disbelief, exclaiming, "Warlike Aeneas, and in these base robes?" Recognizing her faux pas, she then tries to buck him up by proclaiming grandly "Aeneas is Aeneas, were he clad/ In weedes as bad as ever Irus ware." Irus, of course, is one of Homer's beggars, a point that gives us some sense of the costuming for the scene. The hero, however, remains unconvinced, saying that he is "Too meane to be companion to a Queene" Despite all her subsequent attempts to ease his embarrassment, she cannot bring the hero to shake off a sense of his own unworthiness. In response to the Queen's hearty "be merrie man,/ Heres to thy better fortune and good starres" the future founder of Rome replies, "In all humilitie I thanke your grace." This prompts the Queen to launch into a deliciously schoolmarmish lecture on the subject of self-esteem: "Remember who thou art, speake like thy selfe,/ Humilitie belongs to common groomes" (2.1.74-101). So much for Aeneas as a godlike leader. Though it is interesting to ponder Aeneas's initial humility and his subsequent dominance of Dido in light of incidents in which sixteenth-century colonizers first sought assistance from native peoples and then enslaved them, or to see his confusion as a reflection of losses of personal identity that occur in cross-cultural encounters, I suspect that Marlowe's point here is something simpler. He means to debunk Aeneas, and with him, Virgil's project to glorify the founding of the Roman Empire.

Similar bits of corrosive humor characterize the "love" scenes in the middle of the play. In the hunting episode that leads to the tryst in the cave, Iarbus takes offence when Dido pairs off with Aeneas and tells her former suitor haughtily, "We could have gone without your companie" (3.3.14). At this point, Aeneas foolishly rushes to Iarbus's defense, remarking somewhat lamely, "love and duetie led him on perhaps." This, of course, is nonsense and pleases nobody, for Iarbus wants no Aeneas to help him, and the Queen wants no Iarbus to spoil her plans for the afternoon. Iarbus sneers in reply, "Why, man of Troy, doe I offend thine eyes?/ Or art thou grievde thy betters presse so nye?" Though the speech is a deliberate provocation that demands a response, Aeneas suffers it in silence, allowing Dido to do his talking for him. She obliges by calling Iarbus a "pesant," at which Iarbus lashes out again, not at her but at Aeneas: "should that man of men (Dido except)/ Have taunted me in these opprobrious termes,/ I would have either drunke his dying bloud,/ Or els I would have given my life in gage" (3.3.15-29). Still Aeneas takes the implicit challenge in silence, leaving the response to Dido. Needless to say, neither the passivity of the hero nor the coarse wrangling between the Queen and Iarbus has any precedent in Virgil.

In the cave, early indications that Aeneas is dull-witted and inept give way to irrefutable proof. Alone with Dido, he fails to understand even her most blatant hints, perceiving her amorous intentions only after she lays them out in words of one syllable. To be sure, his first words are promising. In reply to a question about how he found the cave, he says, "By chance sweete Queene, as Mars and Venus met" (3.4.4). Dido soon learns, however, that when Aeneas alludes to erotic myths, his aims are merely rhetorical. When she banters coyly in reply, alluding to Mars and Venus caught by Vulcan in flagrante delicto, he altogether fails to catch her drift:

DIDO. Why, that was in a net, where we are loose, And yet I am not free, oh would I were.

AENEAS. Why, what is it that Dido may desire And not obtaine, be it in humaine power?

DIDO. The thing that I will dye before I aske, And yet desire to have before I dye.

AENEAS. Is it not ought Aeneas may atchieve?

DIDO. Aeneas, No, although his eyes doe pearce.

AENEAS. What, hath Iarbus angred her in ought? (3.4.5-13)

The "thing" she wants--the sort of "looseness" "freedom" "having" "piercing," and "dying" that she has in mind--are clearly beyond him. Undeterred, she tries again, rhapsodizing that one attracts her "Whose amorous face like Pean sparkles fire,/ When as he buts his beames on Floras bed/ .../ Aeneas, O Aeneas, quench these flames!" (3.4.19-23) At this, however, he simply grows alarmed, asking her, "What ailes my Queene, is she falne sicke of late?" (3.4.24) Only some while later, when Dido finally loses all patience and says bluntly that she "dyes for him" does Aeneas see where all this is tending (3.4.40). Even then, however, he pauses to speechify for a while before he acts, expressing surprise that "your majestie can looke so lowe,/ As my despised worths" and vowing never to leave her:

 [I] vow by all the Gods of Hospitalitie, 
 By heaven and earth, and my faire brothers bowe, 
 By Paphos, Capys, and the purple Sea, 
 From whence my radiant mother did descend, 
 And by this Sword that saved me from the Greekes, 
 Never to leave these newe upreared walles, 
 Whiles Dido lives and rules in Junos towne, 
 Never to like or love any but her. (3.4.44-51)

Not only does this vow invoke some curious objects as collateral and go on a little too long, but it has a certain absurd note of legalism about it, conveyed in the phrases "Whiles Dido lives and rules" and "Never to like or love" In dealing with the tryst in the cave, Virgil had discreetly declined to describe the lovers or to report what they said. Having read what Marlowe devised to fill the gap, lovers of the Aeneid may wish that he had done the same. To the very end, when the hero again turns his thoughts to Italy, the playwright pursues his travesty. In Act 4, he portrays Aeneas as indecisive--so indecisive, in fact, that the god Hermes has to appear not once, as in Virgil, but twice to warn him of Jupiter's displeasure. When Aeneas finally musters the resolution to put an end to what he petulantly calls the "female drudgerie" of life in Carthage (4.3.55), he attempts to escape without so much as saying goodbye to his host. Such discourtesy to a queen who has sheltered his men, repaired his ships, and endured scandal to become his lover is of a piece with his earlier cowardice in avoiding unpleasantness with Iarbus. After Dido sends her sister to fetch him back from his ship, Anna underlines the unmanliness of his desire to flee by remarking laconically, "'Twas time to runne, Aeneas had been gone,/ The saile were hoysing up, and he abourd" (4.4.14-15). Caught out, Aeneas pleads, "O princely Dido, give me leave to speake,/ I went to take farewell of Achates" (4.4.17-18). This, of course, is a lie, for the preceding scene had ended with the hero crying out, "Troians abourd, and I will follow you,/ .../ To sea Aeneas, finde out Italy!" (4.3.45,56). When Dido calls his bluff, asking why Achates did not bid her farewell and commanding that the other Trojans set sail without Aeneas, the hero has no choice but to change his story again. He remarks lamely that sailing is now impossible because "The sea is rough, the windes blow to the shoare." At this point, Dido knows that she has him and cries out, "O false Aeneas, now the sea is rough,/But when you were abourd twas calme enough,/ Thou and Achates ment to saile away" (4.4.25-28). Although the Trojan hero eventually succeeds in defusing her anger by arguing that he could not possibly have meant to leave without his son Ascanius, the audience knows better. We, after all, have just witnessed his attempt to set sail and know that he had momentarily forgotten all about the boy.(29) So much for Aeneas as an exemplum of judicious foresight, diplomatic tact, and paternal love.

By now, even Dido has plumbed his character too deeply to trust him. She therefore impounds the oars and sails from his ships, an action without precedent in Virgil. Not long after, however, Hermes appears to Aeneas for a second time and the hero decides to break his vow to Dido and set out for Italy. Without the necessary hardware, however, he is in a tight spot, and Marlowe contrives to extricate him in the most humiliating way possible. To secure tackle for his journey, Aeneas must endure one last round of withering contempt from Iarbus. When the rival prince happens on the scene, Aeneas is moping. To the sneering question, "How now Aeneas, sad, what meanes these dumpes?" the hero whines about his lack of equipment to carry out Jove's command: "Iarbus, I am cleane beside my selfe,/ Jove hath heapt on me such a desperate charge,/ Which neither art nor reason may atchieve,/ Nor I devise by what meanes to contrive" (5.1.62-66). Only too happy to be rid of the fellow, Iarbus supplies the necessary gear, and the Trojan sets sail. So much for Aeneas as an embodiment of the Roman virtues of steadfastness, courage, resourcefulness, and reverence for the gods.

When the Queen hears news of his escape, she lapses into grief and hallucinations much like those that Aeneas suffered on beholding the image of Priam in Act 1. Thinking herself "a second Helen," Dido cannot bring herself to believe that Aeneas has deserted her and imagines that she sees him turning back. Anna then plays the role that Achates had earlier played with Aeneas, attempting to talk some sense into the deluded Queen. She says, "Ah sister, leave these idle fantasies,/ Sweet sister cease, remember who you are" (5.1.262-63). To this appeal, Dido replies vacantly, "Dido I am, unlesse I be deceiv'd" (5.1.264). Thinking to take ship and fetch her lover back, she then recalls an irritating problem with her plan, namely that Aeneas has taken her fleet. Crying out absurdly, "what shall I doe/ But dye in furie of this oversight?" (5.1.268-269), she then goes off, with Latin lines from the Aeneid on her lips, to set fire to herself.

The play does not, however, end with her death. In a heartbeat, Iarbus follows her into the flames, forgetting his new-found love of Anna and blurting out, "Dido, I come to thee, aye me Aeneas." Though Anna overhears this final avowal of Iarbus's love for her sister, she nonetheless thinks the fellow worth dying for and joins the rush to the funeral pyre, crying out, "Now sweet Iarbus stay, I come to thee" (5.1.318,329). Played by boy actors with high, piping voices, this ending would, I think, have had much the same humorous effect as that in which Pyramus and Thisbe stab themselves in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream.

Although the play contains many lines which, taken out of context, sound grand or tragic, their seriousness is inevitably undermined by succeeding lapses in thought or diction. So persistent, in fact, is Marlowe's deflation of Virgilian high seriousness that moments of elevated sentiment seem to have little purpose other than to remind the audience of the epic being parodied and to gain altitude for the next plunge into bathos. If twentieth-century readers miss the jokes, it is, I suspect, because we lack the intimate familiarity with Virgil that the playwright expected of his original audience. To read the play with a copy of the Aeneid in hand is to see it for what it is, a relentless travesty that in tone and authorial stance owes more to Ovid than to Virgil.(30) As Patrick Cheney has pointed out, Marlowe consciously rejected the traditional Virgilian career track for young poets, which proceeded from bucolic and pastoral treatments of local economic and political matters to epic celebrations of international struggle and the founding of empire. In following an Ovidian cursus, Marlowe was consciously setting himself up as a skeptical critic of, and rival to, the greatest of the Elizabethan poets of empire, Edmund Spenser.(31)

Once one perceives the derisive tone and parodic intent of The Tragedy of Dido, the very bookishness of its humor becomes a clue to the circumstances of its composition. If the play was written for the citizens of Norwich or Ipswich, for example--or even those of London--much of its humor would have been lost on them. Though the best educated would have retained some memory of the first four books of the Aeneid from their grammar-school or university days, few would have remembered the Latin text well enough to catch the subtler jokes at Virgil's expense. It seems reasonable to suppose, then, that Marlowe first intended the play for an audience that had studied the opening books of the Aeneid quite closely and recently, and students at Cambridge seem the obvious candidates.

Even before undergraduates matriculated at the university, nearly all were required to immerse themselves in the story of Dido and Aeneas, since the opening books of the Aeneid were part of the common curriculum for the higher forms in Elizabethan grammar schools.(32) Having studied the text once, most then studied it again. Marlowe himself illustrates the usual course of study. In the fifth form at King's School in Canterbury, where he enrolled in 1578, he devoted much of his time to Horace, Isocrates, and Virgil, including the opening books of the Aeneid.(33) Since the Parker scholarship that allowed him to attend Cambridge was for poor boys who could compose Latin verses as well as write well and sing,(34) it seems safe to assume that he had already developed some skill in poetic translation. When he went up to the university in December of 1580, he may, in fact, have brought a sheaf of his early renderings of the Aeneid with him. Not long after he matriculated at Corpus Christi College the following March, he would have been exposed to the Aeneid again, since the first-year curriculum was devoted to rhetoric, and as then defined, the subject included close analysis of works by Virgil, Ovid, and Horace.(35) Since, moreover, undergraduates concentrated on dialectic and philosophy for the remaining three years of their studies, the first year would have provided Marlowe with his only opportunity to translate passages of the Aeneid as part of his regular studies for the B.A.

This fact carries us beyond the question of audience to that of dating. It is suggestive, I think, that Marlowe's formal study of the Aeneid took place in the years 1579-81, precisely when Elizabeth was most actively pursuing marriage negotiations with the Duke of Anjou. With public interest and indignation at their height, a mischievous undergraduate bent on exploiting the similarities between Dido and Elizabeth would have found a ready and appreciative audience among his fellow undergraduates. We need not suppose that Marlowe composed the entire play at this early date, but only that he took advantage of the opportunity to draft irreverent versions of major scenes. During his later studies, he had ample opportunity to fill out the script and revise it for the Children of the Chapel Royal.

If we suppose that Marlowe followed a gradual process of composition, returning to the script as his studies permitted and as his poetic powers matured, then some of the play's most curious features become easier to explain. It should not surprise us, for example, that many lines are close, even slavish, translations from the Aeneid.(36) Nor should it seem odd that the script combines lofty passages of poetry with long stretches of adolescent humor of the cheeky sort displayed in the opening exchange between Jupiter and Ganymede or of the lurid and boyishly sadistic sort evinced in Aeneas's account of the deaths of Priam and Hecuba. If I am right, the project had its origin in adolescent travesties sketched out by a gifted but mischievous poet who had two main objects in mind. One was to regale his fellow undergraduates by debunking Virgil, an author toward whom they must have felt considerable animus for the many tedious hours of study that he had caused them. The other was to add to the merriment by deriding Queen Elizabeth as an empire builder so blinded by love that she was capable of enlisting the feckless and inconstant Duke of Anjou as her champion.

There remains the question of the play's earliest performance. Whether a version of it was ever enacted at Cambridge is difficult to say. From the time of Marlowe's matriculation until long after his death, officials there prohibited students from attending or taking part in plays other than those in Latin officially sponsored by the University. The severity with which the Vice-Chancellor and the Heads restricted other kinds of dramatic entertainment is evident from an incident in June of 1580, just six months before Marlowe arrived. A company of boy actors sponsored by the Earl of Oxford arrived unexpectedly at the gates of the university bearing letters from the Earl of Sussex and Lord Burghley, the Chancellor of the University, urging that the company be allowed to perform. The Vice-Chancellor and Heads refused, citing a 1575 directive of the Privy Council that prohibited all "Assemblies in open places" at the University or in towns within five miles of it.(37) Until well after Marlowe's death, the prohibition was strictly enforced, not only against "Interludes, Plaies, or Tragedies," but also against "games" such as bear-baiting.(38) The University also discouraged performances of plays in English, as we know from an exchange that occurred in 1592, when the Queen requested that Cambridge prepare an English comedy for her Christmas revels. The Vice-Chancellor declined, saying, "for that we never used any, we presently have none."(39) For these reasons, it seems unlikely that an English play such as Dido, written by an undergraduate, would ever have been sanctioned by the university.

We cannot, however, entirely discount the possibility of an unsanctioned performance. We know of at least one instance in which an offensive script was secretly enacted by a group of Cambridge undergraduates. A 1597 pamphlet attacking one of Marlowe's fellow students, Thomas Nashe, accuses him of having "had a hand in a Show called Terminus et non terminus, for which his partener in it was expelled the Colledge: but this foresaid Nashe played in it (as I suppose) the Varlet of Clubs"(40) We do not know the nature of this "Show" but since Nashe may have met Marlowe at Cambridge as early as 1582 and still regarded him as a friend more than a decade later,(41) the story is suggestive. If nothing else, it reveals that there were indeed "underground" performances at Cambridge in this period, and that one of them involved an aspiring writer in Marlowe's immediate circle. Indeed, Nashe's name appears after Marlowe's on the title page of the 1594 edition of Dido, and though little of his distinctive style appears in the text,(42) he may have been involved with the play in the mid-1580s while the two were together at Cambridge.

As to the first professional performance, evidence of Marlowe's activities while at the university favors Ribner's hypothesis that it occurred in Norwich in the winter of 1586/87 or in Ipswich during the following autumn. Charles Nicholls suggests that Marlowe spent time in London in the years 1585-87 in order to discharge responsibilities in Walsingham's secret service, and if so, he may also have taken the opportunity to make himself known in theater circles. Buttery receipts and records of Parker Scholarship payments at Cambridge show no unusual absences while he was taking his B.A., but afterwards, while he was studying for the M.A., he was away a good deal.(43) Of greatest interest for our purposes is a long absence between January and March of 1587. Since Michaelmas term of 1586 ended on December 16, and since Marlowe was away for much of the following Lenten term, which began on January 13,(44) he would have had ample opportunity to join the Chapel Children for rehearsals and performances in Norwich during the winter playing season, which usually lasted from Christmas to Shrove Tuesday. After he left Cambridge the following summer, he would also have been free to be with the company in Ipswich during September.

If, from the circumstantial evidence that I have adduced, it seems likely that at least parts of The Tragedy of Dido were composed as early as 1581, then we do well to examine its connections with the French marriage negotiations. The passage that most clearly reveals the object of Marlowe's humor is perhaps that in which Dido shows off her private portrait gallery to Aeneas and his men. The gallery is devoted to images of her many former suitors, of whom the Queen boasts complacently, "All these and others which I never sawe,/ Have been most urgent suiters for my love,/ Some came in person, others sent their Legats:/ Yet none obtained me" (3.1.150-53). Though Virgil's Dido has only one suitor, Iarbus, Marlowe's evidently has a large and distinguished following, including prominent men from opposing sides in every major regional conflict in recent memory. Though Aeneas recognizes none of them, his men--who are apparently better traveled than he--point out rival kings from Greece, Troy, Persia, and other lands. In transforming Dido into a collector of love trophies, Marlowe almost certainly had Elizabeth in mind. One point that he stresses is her general strategy of entertaining numerous foreign suitors in order to maintain the delicate balance of power between rival states in Europe.(45) Another point is her specific strategy in courting Anjou. In Act 3, when Aeneas asks, "Wherefore would Dido have Aeneas stay?" the Queen replies, "To warre against my bordering enemies" (3.1.134-35). Elizabeth's primary aim in encouraging Anjou was, of course, to form a military alliance in which French troops would bear the brunt of the war against Spain in the Netherlands.

Marlowe also gives Dido's current suitor, Iarbus, a much more prominent role in the action than Virgil had in the Aeneid. Late in the play, he pairs off secretly with Anna, the sister and chief lady in waiting to the Queen, and in this bit of duplicity, he bears a suspicious likeness to Elizabeth's lifelong favorite, the Earl of Leicester. In 1578, the Earl, too, went behind his queen's back to marry one of her ladies in waiting, Lettice Knollys, and Elizabeth's desire to even the score with him may have played a part in her subsequent decision to encourage the attentions of Anjou.(46) Later, when Dido asks if it means nothing to Aeneas that neighboring kings "Were up in armes, for making thee my love" and that "Carthage did rebel, Iarbus storm" (5.1.142-43), the playwright seems to have in mind both the public uproar over the French marriage negotiations and the private hostility of the Earl of Leicester.

Like Iarbus, moreover, the Earl played something of a double game. Early in 1579, when Jean de Simier arrived in England to urge the marriage, Leicester befriended him and, acting at Elizabeth's behest, claimed to be working on his behalf to gain support for the match among important noblemen and members of the Privy Council. The Earl went so far as to tell the French ambassador that he had already bought new clothes for the wedding.(47) Later, however, after it became clear that Elizabeth had fallen in love with Anjou--writing him amorous poems, nicknaming him her "frog," and cherishing a pair of gloves that he had given her--the Earl showed his true colors by mobilizing his supporters to prevent the match. Like Iarbus, he ultimately rid himself of his rival by sending him off to pursue his dreams of empire in another land. Late in the summer of 1581, the Earl's ally, Sir Francis Walsingham, helped arrange the first installment of funds to allow Anjou to return to battle in the Netherlands.(48) Early in 1582, Leicester himself was a member of the English delegation that escorted the Duke across the Channel and represented Elizabeth at his installation as Duke of Brabant and titular ruler of the Dutch Protestants. Thereafter, the French prince never again returned to England or actively pursued his desire to marry Elizabeth.

Within this general framework of topical allusions to the Anjou affair, Marlowe introduces telling details. When Aeneas first washes ashore in Carthage, storm-drenched and unrecognized, his landing is reminiscent of Anjou's arrival in England on August 17, 1579. The French Prince also suffered through a storm, which delayed him at the Channel. To avoid public notice, he traveled as an obscure Frenchman named Seigneur du Pont-de-Se Because he arrived in relatively plain attire and without his usual large retinue, he was hardly recognizable as a Prince of the Blood.(49) In the play, Dido's initial failure to recognize Aeneas beside his more magnificently clothed men also has a specific historical analogue. Anjou's emissary Jean de Simier, the picture of French elegance and sophistication, had arrived with an entourage eight months before his master and had been coddled and feasted as a favorite of the Queen. Marlowe's joke that the ill-dressed Aeneas initially seemed a person of no account beside his own countrymen was a shrewd hit.

Marlowe's alterations to Virgil's account of the fall of Troy also call Anjou to mind. In the Aeneid, the hero first fights courageously to defend his city and then, after the cause is lost, to rescue his household gods and his family. Marlowe's Aeneas, by contrast, is bumbling, passive, and self-interested. Less concerned with family and religion than with saving his own skin, he says of his escape from Troy, "Yet flung I forth, ... desperate of my life" (2.1.210). The massacre of his people at the hands of the Greeks also calls to mind a massacre in Anjou's past, that carried out in Paris on St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572. On that occasion, the young Duke looked on as a mob set on by his mother and his brothers butchered the Huguenots in Paris. Particularly revealing are parallels between the death of Marlowe's Priam and that of the leader of the Huguenots, Admiral Coligny, whose hands were cut off and whose body was savagely abused. Details of the killing appear in Marlowe's play The Massacre at Paris, where the future King Henry III of France shouts to the murderers of Coligny,"Away with him, cut off his head and handes,/ And send them for a present to the Pope."(50) Departing from Virgil, Marlowe includes a similarly grisly detail in recounting the death of Priam. He makes much of the fact that, before carving up the old man's body, Pyrrhus "strooke off" his hands (2.1.242). That Pyrrhus desecrates the body in order to avenge the death of his father, Achilles, may also have been on Marlowe's mind, for the murder of Coligny was undertaken to satisfy a son's desire for vengeance. The Duke of Guise, who carried it out, was acting on the belief that Admiral Coligny was responsible for the death of his father.(51)

In alluding to Anjou's part in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Marlowe is harder on the Duke than other Elizabethan writers. Sir Philip Sidney and John Stubbs also conjure up images of the horrors of St. Bartholomew's Day, but only to argue that Elizabeth ought not to ally herself with the older members of the Valois family who planned the massacre, not to blame Anjou personally.(52) Marlowe goes further, implicitly attacking the Duke himself for failing to do more to oppose the killing. Whereas Virgil's hero fights valiantly to rescue Priam and Hecuba, Marlowe's Aeneas is conveyed away by his mother, leaving Pyrrhus to slaughter the royal family unopposed. Stubbs claims that Anjou's mother played a similar role in sheltering Anjou during the slaughter of the Huguenots.(53) Marlowe's account is complicated, however, by the fact that Anjou was popularly associated with the Huguenots. After the massacre, a story circulated that the Duke wept while the killing was in progress, and it may well be true. Before the massacre, he had cultivated close personal ties with Coligny, and afterwards, he sometimes made common cause with the Huguenots in opposing the forces of the Duke of Guise and his allies at court.(54) Though the English Protestant John Stubbs characterizes the reports of Anjou's grief as mere propaganda,(55) Marlowe counts Anjou among the aggrieved victims of the violence. This does not, however, serve to exonerate him. In fact, it makes him seem all the more cowardly and treacherous for saving his own neck rather than intervening on behalf of those who loved and relied on him.

It is finally, I think, Anjou's reputation for duplicity, treachery, and incompetence that guides Marlowe in his refashioning of Virgil's Aeneas. Sidney characterizes the Duke as "inconstant" and "full of light ambition," a man who is "carried away with every wind of hope, taught to love greatness any way gotten."(56) The Spanish ambassador to France, Don Frances de Alava, concurs, remarking that "The duke ... counted for little and was a very tricky man.... He was unable to speak with intelligence to anyone. Everything that came out of his mouth ... was nothing but deception."(57) Henry of Navarre held similar views of the Prince, telling the Baron de Rosny, "He is so sly and two-faced, his courage is so lacking, and he is so unfamiliar with every kind of virtue, that I do not think he is capable of performing a generous act."(58) As evidence of his despicable character, Sidney and Stubbs allude to an infamous incident in 1577 in which he betrayed his Protestant allies to accept an advantageous offer of reconciliation from Henry III and then participated in the brutal sacking of the Huguenot strongholds of La Charite and Issoire.(59) It is characterizations of Anjou such as these that Marlowe probably had in mind in transforming Virgil's Aeneas into a slow-witted but ambitious coward who makes hasty oaths of love and loyalty and just as quickly breaks them.

Though Marlowe's satire is hardest on Anjou, Elizabeth also comes in for her share of ridicule. At this pivotal moment in the founding of an English empire, she must have struck the playwright as too weak and too subject to her affections to carry out such an endeavor. Primarily concerned with domestic peace and security, she was a cautious and parsimonious supporter of foreign projects. In the period 1579-81, when Leicester's faction at court was pressing for an invasion of the Netherlands, she allowed her attraction to Anjou and her reluctance to commit her own resources and troops to turn her against the project. Though she came back to it five years later, she did so with great reluctance. By the winter of 1586/87, her schemes to employ amorous favorites such as Leicester and Anjou rather than seasoned military commanders in driving the Spanish from the Netherlands were once again a source of discontent among her people. Many in East Anglia had relatives or acquaintances serving with the army in Flanders, and their concern over Leicester's wasteful incompetence, which resembled that of Anjou five years earlier, may have lent fresh interest to the topical allusions in the play. Such interest may also have encouraged the Chapel Children to risk staging a satire that contained unflattering references to the Queen. Down on their luck and safely away from court in the provinces, they had little reason to fear reprisals and every reason to hope that, by drawing on their reputation as court insiders and exploiting public discontent over the situation in the Low Countries, they might turn a nice profit with a topical play like Dido.(60)

Marlowe's view of major figures involved in the French marriage negotiations may be readily inferred from the play. His attitude toward the founding of an English empire is harder to assess. One possibility is that he shared the expansionist dreams of many in England. Certainly the staging of the Tamberlaine plays in the tense days leading up to the attack of the Armada in 1588 could be taken as an incitement to such ambitions and a slap at a monarch best known in the international arena for her inclination to peace, parsimony, and indecision. If, however, one believes, as I do, that the Tamburlaine plays offer an implicit critique of the intoxicating dynamics of empire-building, then their agenda and that of Dido are more similar than we might otherwise suppose. By burlesquing Virgil's Aeneas as a feckless, self-serving opportunist, the play does more than satirize Anjou's private faults. It also suggests the human failings and vices that inevitably compromise even the noblest aspirations to empire. The Leicesters, the Raleighs, the Anjous of the world are generally better at gaining backers for their grand, expansionist schemes than at carrying them through to a good and successful outcome. By linking Dido with Elizabeth, the playwright extends his satire of imperial pretensions and delusions to the Queen herself. To be a world-dominator, he seems to say, one must be made of sterner stuff than she who, in her endless dalliances with favorites like Leicester and in her fruitless negotiations with foreign princes like Anjou, so nearly resembled the Dido of the play. To see how far short she fell of the kind of leader that Marlowe thought capable of founding an empire, one need only read his next play, Tamburlaine the Great.

NOTES

(1) My warmest thanks to David Bevington for offering helpful comments on the paper and to Patrick Cheney for sharing many insights gleaned from long research into Marlowe's rejection of Spenser and the Virgilian ideal of Roman imperialism.

(2) W.L. Godshalk, The Marlovian World Picture (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 57-58.

(3) E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 1:127.

(4) William Gager: The Complete Works, ed. Dana F. Sutton, 4 vols. (New York: Garland, 1994), 1:343. Since Gager's was a hasty and mediocre piece staged with great pomp at Oxford, it is tempting to see Marlowe's version as a bravura riposte from a cheeky young dramatist at Cambridge.

(5) Reprinted in The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, edited by John Nichols, 3 vols. (London: John Nichols & Sons, 1823), 2:545-82.

(6) On the imperial iconography of the portrait, see Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, rev. ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 101-7; Walter Oakeshott and [Constance] Anson Jordan, "The Siena Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I," Apollo 124 (1986):306-9; and Andrew Belsey and Catherine Belsey, "Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I," in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture, c. 1540-1660, edited by Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 11-35.

(7) On this discovery and the political implications of the portrait, see Constance Jordan, "Representing Political Androgyny: More on the Siena Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I" in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, edited by Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 157-176.

(8) Oakeshott and Jordan, p. 307.

(9) Strong, 95-99.

(10) See Julia Walker, "Spenser's Elizabeth Portrait and the Fiction of Dynastic Epic," Modern Philology 90 (1992): 172-99.

(11) Paul E. McLane, Spenser's "Shepheardes Calender": A Study in Elizabethan Allegory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1961), 47-76.

(12) See 4.2.10. I follow the edition of Roma Gill in Vol. 1 of The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

(13) Emily Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 37, 39-40, 51.

(14) Margot Hendricks, "Managing the Barbarian: The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage," Renaissance Drama, n.s. 23 (1992): 174, 179.

(15) Most modern editors conclude that Dido belongs to the period 1584-87, when Marlowe was at Cambridge pursuing his M.A. See Gill, xi-xv and 120. Opposition to this view has come mainly from T. M. Pearce, whose study of stage technique and implicit cues to the actors places it near the end of Marlowe's career, and from Wolfgang Clemen, whose stylistic analysis suggests that it was an early play revised for later performance. For a review of the evidence, see H.J. Oliver, ed., "Dido, Queen of Carthage" and "The Massacre at Paris" (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), xxv-xxx. Though I argue below that the play was written in stages, I see no reason to doubt that the version printed in 1594 was completed while Marlowe was taking his M.A, since in style and method it falls somewhere between the poet's early translations of Ovid and Lucan and his more original works for the London stage.

(16) Norman Rabkin, ed., The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Odyssey Press, 1963), xx.

(17) See Brian Gibbons, "Unstable Proteus: Marlowe's The Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage" in Christopher Marlowe, ed. Brian Morris (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1968), 27-46, and Patrick Cheney, Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counternationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 106.

(18) For the titles, dates, and sites of performance of plays staged by the company between 1575 and the period of its official suppression from 1590/91 to 1600, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 228. See also Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare's Time and Their Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 257-60, 263-66.

(19) On the uproar and Elizabeth's steps to suppress it, see Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Queen Elizabeth and the Making of Policy, 1572-88 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 243-66. On the controversy as seen from Anjou's point of view, see Mack Holt, The Duke of Anjou and the Politique Struggle during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 116-25, 146-65.

(20) Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996), 160-61,164-74.

(21) Rabkin, xx.

(22) Clifford Leech, "Marlowe's Humor," in Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama in Honor of Hardin Craig, edited by Richard Hosley (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1962), 69-81, revised and enlarged in Leech, Christopher Marlowe, Poet for the Stage, ed. Anne Lancashire (New York: AMS Press, 1986), 26-41.

(23) Jackson Cope, "Marlowe's Dido and the Titillating Children," English Literary Renaissance 4 (1974): 315-25.

(24) Gill, 119-20.

(25) Shapiro, 166-67.

(26) I analyze several of these scenes below. On the humor in the rest, see Leech, Christopher Marlowe, 35-41.

(27) Mary Elizabeth Smith, "Love Kindling Fire": A Study of Christopher Marlowe's "The Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage" (Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1977), 157. Though Smith identifies the derisive tone of the play, she does not pursue its implications for Marlowe's representations of Virgil or of imperial aspiration.

(28) The Aeneid of Virgil, tr. Allen Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971).

(29) On his unfatherly haste, see Leech, Christopher Marlowe, 39.

(30) On the influence of Ovid's account of Dido in Heroides VII and the Ovidian "spirit" of the play, see Douglas Cole, Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 46-47, 51-55.

(31) Cheney, 3-17 and passim.

(32) T.W. Baldwin, William Shakspere's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 2:479-96 and passim.

(33) Baldwin, 1:168.

(34) C.F. Tucker Brooke, The Life of Marlowe and "The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage" (London: Methuen & Co., 1930), 26.

(35) William T. Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), 41.

(36) By T.M. Pearce's count, 202 of the play's 1736 lines are close translations of the Aeneid, and another 410 involve conscious echoes. See "Evidence for Dating Marlowe's Tragedy of Dido," in Studies in the English Renaissance Drama in Memory of Karl Julius Holzknecht, ed. Josephine W. Bennett, Oscar Cargill, and Vernon Hall (New York: New York University Press, 1959), 231-47. Though others think Pearce's count too high, even they concede that a quarter of the lines derive from Virgil. See Smith, 102.

(37) From the Vice-Chancellor's letter to Burghley and other University documents, it appears that the policy was intended to prevent spread of the plague, to keep away "evill disposed persons," and to prevent "enticement ... of scholars to lay aside their studies and be dissolute and disorderly" See Charles Henry Cooper, Annals of Cambridge, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Warwick & Co., 1808-66), 2:230, 379, 380, 383, and 514-18.

(38) Only during a brief interval in 1592, when Lord North intervened to allow performances by Lord Strange's Men and the Queen's Men in nearby Chesterton, was it relaxed. See Cooper, 2:514-18.

(39) Cooper, 2:518-19.

(40) Quoted in G.R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 8-9.

(41) Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), 53.

(42) Oliver, xx-xxv.

(43) Nicholl, 98-99.

(44) On the dates of academic terms at Cambridge in this period, see Brooke, 26-27.

(45) Among the suitors depicted in Dido's portraits, only one, Alcyon, is identified by name, and since he appears in none of Marlowe's sources, he is something of a mystery. As Mark Jones of Saint Louis University has suggested to me, however, his name sounds suspiciously like "Alencon" and may be intended to call to mind the ducal title under which Anjou first courted Elizabeth in the early 1570s.

(46) Anne Somerset, Elizabeth I (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), 319; Susan Doran, Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Elizabeth I (London: Routledge, 1996), 161-62.

(47) Somerset, 315-20; Doran, 156.

(48) Somerset, 328; Doran, 184-86.

(49) Doran, 162.

(50) The Massacre at Paris, II. 320-21 (v.42-43), in The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C.F. Tucker Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910). For a detailed account of the massacre, see Robert M. Kingdon, Myths about the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres 1572-1576 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 28-51.

(51) Kingdon, 33. In killing Priam, Pyrrhus performs another act not mentioned in the Aeneid but represented in The Massacre at Paris. He "tooke his fathers flagge,/ And dipt it in the old Kings chill cold bloud,/And then in triumph ran into the streetes" (259-61). After the death of Coligny, when the general slaughter of the Huguenots has begun, the Duke of Guise enters with bloody hands and orders that flags be displayed in the streets, crying out, "Murder the Hugonets, take those pendantes hence" (1.443 [ix.76]).

(52) Sidney, A Letter to Queen Elizabeth, in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 48; John Stubbs's "Gaping Gulph" with Letters and Other Relevant Documents, ed. Lloyd E. Berry (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1968), 23-24, 26.

(53) Stubbs, 24.

(54) Henry M. Baird, History of the Rise of the Huguenots of France, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1879), 2:476.

(55) Stubbs suggests that the young man "was set by his mother to cry and weep at the cruelties, that, so showing some misliking of them, his credit might be saved" (24).

(56) Sidney, 49.

(57) Holt, 14.

(58) Holt, 15. Modern biographers are hardly more kind. John Lothrop Motley calls him "flagrantly false.... ferocious without courage, ambitious without talent, and bigoted without opinions" (Holt, 14). Even Holt, who is more restrained, concedes that he was not gifted intellectually, had only minimal formal education, sometimes betrayed his allies, and lacked aptitude for the only activity that interested him, military engagement (15-16).

(59) Sidney, 48; Stubbs, 24.

(60) On the tradition of including topical satire in plays performed by the children's companies, see Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1952), 66-69.

DONALD STUMP Saint Louis University

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