WARREN BOUTCHER

"WHO TAUGHT THEE RHETORICKE TO DECEIVE A MAID?": CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE'S HERO AND LEANDER, JUAN BOSCÁN'S LEANDRO, AND RENAISSANCE VERNACULAR HUMANISM

The culture that produced the Elizabethan Renaissance of Spenser and Sidney was, to be sure, rooted in the Latin-and-English pedagogy of the grammar schools, as well as the Graeco-Latin humanism of the universities. By 1593, however, English culture had developed an emulative consciousness of Italian, French, and Spanish "pragmaticians" and their vernacular applications of classical themes and knowledge to the circumstances of sixteenth-century politics. This held even in the case of a volume of lyric poetry such as Boscán's and Garcilaso's.

The shape of this new culture is revealed in a critical light by Marlowe's grotesque treatment of the theme of Hero and Leander. Because it was understood to have been exploited by Ovid in his declamatory familiar verse letters, Musaeus's short Greek poem represented from the start of the printing revolution a tempting set of rhetorical opportunities for the refinement of the heroic genus familiare, for vivid descriptions of place and time and action, and for mythographical digression. Elizabethan humanists of the 1580s judged that these opportunities had been most heroically seized by the Augustan poet Ovid and by the modern vernacular poet of Imperial Habsburg Spain, Juan Boscán, whose version had trumped the prior Tuscan version by Bernardo Tasso of Spanish Naples. Furthermore, Boscán's poem became part of the literary "institution" of emotionally powerful, frank speech in Elizabethan heroic courtly letters, an institution allegorized within the Spanish poem itself in the story of Proteus.

Marlowe's English version touches initially upon its Greek "source," but then digresses self-consciously to allude, especially in the counter-allegory of Mercury, to the institutionalized and rapacious pragmatism with which Musaeus's crowd of continental and English vernacular imitators had exploited his divine verse and inflated it with declamations and inset pastoral histories that appealed to readers avid for the imperial grandeur of "heroic" poetry. In doing so, Marlowe criticizes a culture that had pressed him without adequate reward into clandestine service for the state in the 1580s, and that in its vernacular literature was striking classical-heroic poses based on the (to his mind) ill-founded assumption that a glorious future awaited England and her scholars, as it had Spain and the poets of Charles V's Empire in the 1520s.