Today’s Poem: Ovid’s Amores, Book One, Elegy 5

Christopher Marlowe translates Ovid. Cue the curtains stirring in the wind.

Feb 06, 2024

What’s sexy about Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), first of all, is that we know hardly anything about him. Allegedly today is his birthday, though all that’s documented is his baptism, on February 26, 1564. His biography provides us with the loosest of sketches. Son of a Canterbury shoemaker. Scholarship boy at the King’s School, Canterbury, whence he was translated, also by scholarship, to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. College rolls and bursary accounts record his conspicuous absence there, not his presence. When present, he spent more money in the college buttery than was possible, let alone prudent, for a normal scholarship student.

When he was absent, where did he go? When he was present, where did his money come from? Nobody knows. Nobody knew then, either. The theory floated at the time was that he was a spy, under the auspices of the Queen’s Privy Council. The rumor persisted that he was at any moment to be sent to the English seminary at Rheims, in the guise of a candidate for Jesuit orders, with a mandate to ferret out Spanish plots to invade England and overthrow the Protestant monarchy.

But that was hardly the only rumor. At the same time that Elizabethan England worried, collectively, about Catholic Spain and the Jesuit threat, it also worried about an atheist conspiracy, whose members supposedly included a number of poets and scientists who might or might not actually have known each other at all. Among them, the whispers ran, was Christopher Marlowe. Corpus Christi finally granted him his degree, in 1587, with some show of reluctance. Why? We can imagine all kinds of reasons, but even they couldn’t quite explain.

Christopher Marlowe, by an anonymous painter, 1585 (Wikimedia Commons)

Marlowe turns up next, in stark black-and-white, as the subject of a series of police reports. September 1587 finds him in Newgate Prison, held on a murder charge. He wins his acquittal and goes to ground again. In 1592, there’s another arrest, this time in the Netherlands, in the British-occupied port of Flushing, on a charge of counterfeiting. Was he working for Catholic plotters there? Was he spying on Catholic plotters, an operation hamfistedly bungled by the unfortunate intervention of the English military constabulary? Again, we don’t know.

All we do know with any certainty is that by the end of the next spring, at twenty-nine, Marlowe was dead. Legend has it that he died a homicide, in a barroom fight. The Crown’s double agent, Robert Poley, is said to have witnessed Marlowe’s murder, but the Elizabethan coroner’s report, which surfaced only in 1925, draws no clear conclusions. Christopher Marlowe died as he lived, slipping through the cracks of the factual, never to be pinned down. And yes, there’s something compelling in that elusiveness: Kit Marlowe, the man of mystery, who becomes any kind of man your imagination wants to construct.

But what’s also, and truly, sexy about Marlowe is the one untransmutable thing: his literary brilliance. Whatever else he might have been doing in the brief, strange span of his adulthood, he was writing with an intensity that’s palpable in his work even now. Between 1585 and 1593, he churned out six tragedies: Dido, Queen of Carthage (c. 1585–870), Tamburlaine, Parts I-II (c. 1587-88), The Jew of Malta (c. 1589–90), Doctor Faustus (c. 1588–1592), Edward the Second (c. 1592), and The Massacre of Paris (c. 1589–1593). He pioneered the blank-verse dramatic line, a form his exact contemporary William Shakespeare would run with, over the course of a longer career. Marlowe’s pastoral lyrics set the standard for the pastoral lyric in English poetry. We may recall, especially, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” whose rapturous opening beats any other pickup line you care to think of.

Finally, speaking of sexy, he somehow found time, in the midst of his mysterious comings and goings at Cambridge, to translate Ovid’s Amores. Today’s poem, though he styles it “After Ovid,” is his translation of Elegy 5 from Book I of the Amores (for comparison, see the 1885 version “Literally Translated into English Prose, With Copious Notes, by Henry T. Riley”).

Ovid’s Corinna lent her name to much rompy pastoral poetry of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Here, in Marlowe’s iambic-pentameter couplets, she appears as Ovid first wrote her: diaphanously dressed and then undressed, her naked perfection on display, as memory or imagination has created her. The poem’s gaze travels over this creation for a languorous moment before the camera pans to the sunlit curtains, stirring mysteriously in the summer breeze. We may just as readily imagine the curtains as we “judge . . . the rest.” What we don’t know, after all, is at least as sexy as what we do.

Elegies, Book One, 5

by Christopher Marlowe

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

after Ovid

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 Laïs 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 bad me kiss,
Jove send me more such afternoons as this.