My answer to this question is little more than a guess. There are lines in Chaucer which read much more naturally as Fifteenth-Century Heroics: ‘Whan Zéphirus eék with his swéte bréeth’,* or ‘Bút a góvernour · wýly and wýs’.* His licenses at the middle of the line may not be incompatible with the true decasyllabic movement; but his habit of knocking off the initial unaccented syllable is so foreign to that movement that I question whether any decasyllabic poet from Surrey to the present day has dreamed of imitating it, though the corresponding licence in octosyllabics (‘Towered cities please us then’) is so common and natural that we hardly notice it. On the other hand, there are hundreds of lines in Chaucer that demand pure decasyllabic reading—‘God woot no lussheburgyes payen ye’,* &c. And the pleasure which not a few generations have now had in Chaucer thus read is strong, though not conclusive, evidence that they have read him correctly.

  Chaucer could not transport the rhythm of the French decasyllable directly into English, for that metre, being unaccentual, has no rhythm in the English sense. You cannot export snakes from Iceland.14 Chaucer had run against this difficulty very early in his career when he was translating the Roman de la Rose and had sometimes adopted the desperate solution of writing English verses which have the right number of syllables and ignore accent. Such lines as

  With a thredë basting my slevis (104)

  And litel coude of norture (179)

  Upon any worthy man falle (255)

  would seem metrical to a Frenchman: to us they are not verse at all. When, in his maturity, he began to naturalize the ten-syllabled line he did not repeat this blunder. What exactly he did I doubt if we shall ever know; but it seems likely to me that he attempted a compromise. On the one hand, he followed the French in having (usually) ten syllables in a line, and sometimes he had five full stresses, thus attaining the modern decasyllabic tune. But the other tune—that which I have attempted to describe—was running in his head and he allowed it to intrude; he even welcomed it by having many strong medial pauses, by admitting hypermetrical syllables at the pause, and, above all, by sometimes dropping the unaccented first syllable of the whole line and thus forcing the first half-line into a more native rhythm. Such compromise was possible because, as all my examples show, the one metre slips easily into the other. I suspect that his verse was a precarious balance of different metrical forces. He himself knew how to read it aloud; but perhaps, even from the first, few others could read it exactly as he wished. Hoccleve and some of the poets of the Chauceriana may have learned the art, but in Lydgate the strong medial pause and the essentially undecasyllabic movement (‘Írows and wóod ànd maléncolík’) are already normal, and the fact that we usually have nine or ten syllables makes little difference.* In the poets who follow, down to, and partly including, Wyatt, the number of syllables ceases to matter and the rough metre which I call the Fifteenth-Century Heroic is established.

  A glance at the earlier history of English verse will perhaps render my theory more acceptable. The starting-point of that history, and the key to some of its mysteries, is the alliterative metre of Beowulf and Pseudo-Caedmon. This consists of two sharply divided half-lines, of which each has normally two stresses. But what are called the D and E types of half-line show an all-important variation; they have two and a half—two full stresses and one medium stress. From the decay of the alliterative metre the metre of Laʒamon’s Brut is engendered. In the Brut the type with two stresses (‘Hórs and Héngest’) is retained, and so, unless my ear plays me false, is a type with two and a half (‘And Haéngest swíðe faeíre’);15 but we also find—and doubtless as a development of the old two and a half—a type with three full stresses—‘Þá queð Héngest to þan kínge’.16 The total result is that the formula for Laʒamon’s metre is ‘Two, or two-and-a-half, or three’.

  Two different developments then follow. In King Horn, on the one hand, we find the type with three stresses erected into the norm, though lines that seem to have only two are still occasionally permitted (‘Þe héued of wénte’,17 ‘Réynild mi dóʒter’18). But in ‘On God Ureisun’ liberty is still allowed between two and three. Thus we can have two stresses in the first half and two in the second:

  Pléieð and swéieð · and síngeð bitwéonen.19

  Or three in the first, and two in the second:

  Crístes mílde móder · séynte Maríe.20

  Or three in both:

  Mi líf and mí tohópe · min héale míd iwísse.21

  Traces of similar variability can be found in the Middle English Bestiary and in the Proverbs of Alfred; and it has never been denied that in the later developments of the alliterative metre itself, in Gawain and the Green Knight for example, three-stressed and two-stressed types occur side by side in the first half of the line. If this background to Chaucer’s metrical activities be remembered, and if it be also remembered that the French decasyllabic, being unaccented, was no metre at all to English ears, the hypothesis which I advance about the true nature of his verse will not be judged very improbable. Nor is it unlikely, if such a native rhythm were allowed a footing in Chaucer, that in his successors it would rebel, and rebel successfully, against its foreign and syllabic master, thus giving the Fifteenth-Century Heroic. When this also begins to decline, the Elizabethans, attending to one only of its many variations, try to read it as the rough four-beat line which Gascoigne apparently attributes to Chaucer and which Spenser uses in his February eclogue. To that tune Chaucer was read for centuries, and to such reading, perhaps, we owe the heavy overemphasis which the older critics laid on his comic elements, since these best survived such treatment. Then came the beginnings of modern scholarship and the discovery of final -e. Critics whose ears had been trained on the Greek iambic and the modern decasyllable then learned to read the verse of Chaucer as if it were that of Milton or Pope. What could not be so read was quarantined as ‘licence’ or emended, and the metre of Chaucer’s successors was dismissed as a blundering attempt at pure decasyllabics. But all this time the rhythm of the Fifteenth-Century Heroic had continued a humble existence in popular lyric and nursery rhyme: it had, perhaps, contributed in some degree to our choice of the Italian decasyllable as our principal metre; it had started from hiding to delight even learned readers in The Shepherds Sirena; and it survived to produce a few poems ‘choice and light’ in modern times. It is this survival which has now enabled us—if my theory is true—to recover the metrical history of the later Middle Ages in England.

  CHAPTER 5

  HERO AND LEANDER

  Chapman’s four books or sestiads on Hero and Leander are, I believe, very seldom read in conjunction with Marlowe’s two. The whole temper of modern criticism, which loves to treat a work of art as the expression of an artist’s personality and perhaps values that personality chiefly for its difference from others, is unfavourable to a poem by two authors.1 It comes naturally to us to treat the total Hero and Leander as two separate works. Nor, of course, is there any reason why we should not do so. There are some composite works—for example, the Romance of the Rose—which are best dealt with in this way. But there are others such as our composite English Morte Darthur, where earlier English work and French work and Malory and Caxton so subtly grow together into ‘something of great constancy’ that the modern approach is baffled. I am not claiming that Hero and Leander is in that class. We know quite well which parts are by which poet, their styles are clearly distinct, there is no ‘contamination’ (in the textual sense), and pseudo-Musaeus is so far in the background that we can ignore him. Yet I think we shall be richly rewarded if we obey the apparent invitation of the old editions and read the poem, at least sometimes, as a whole. For here, as I shall try to persuade you, collaboration has produced an extremely fortunate result. Each poet has contributed what the other could not have done, and both contributions are necessary to a worthy telling of the story. For the difference in style and outlook here corresponds to the two movements of which that story consists. If we feel young while we read the first two sestiads and feel in the remaining four that youth has died away, our experience is very like Hero’s. If Venus dominates Marlowe’s narrative and Saturn that of Chapman, the same may be said of the events which each narrates. It is almost, as it ought to be, like passing from a Song of Innocence to a Song of Experience.

  Of course, when we speak of ‘innocence’ in connexion with the first two sestiads we are using the word ‘innocence’ in a very peculiar sense. We mean not the absence of guilt but the absence of sophistication, the splendour, though a guilty splendour, of unshattered illusions. Marlowe’s part of the poem is the most shameless celebration of sensuality which we can find in English literature—unless we extend the category of literature to include such works as the booksellers call ‘curious’. It does not even keep within the bounds of what might be called, either in the older or the modern sense, a ‘kindly’ sensuality. It exults to see

  the gods in sundrie shapes,

  Committing headdie ryots, incest, rapes

  (I, 143),

  and the loves of Neptune in Sestiad II are what Saintsbury called ‘Greek style’. The point need not be laboured. A critical tradition which can stomach the different, but far worse, depravities of Tamberlaine, can well put up with Hero and Leander. The question which Marlowe’s sestiads invite is not a moral one. They make us anxious to discover, if we can, how Marlowe can write over eight hundred lines of almost unrelieved sensuality without ever becoming mawkish, ridiculous, or disgusting. For I do not believe this is at all easy to do.

  Marlowe’s success is most easily seen if we compare him with other sixteenth-century specimens of the erotic epyllion. Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis is hardly good enough: despite its frequent beauties it is too static and too lacrimose. Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe suffers from discordant aims and even discordant styles. We shall have to come to Venus and Adonis. And I must frankly confess that, in so far as the two works are comparable at all, Marlowe seems to me far superior to Shakespeare in this kind. Venus and Adonis reads well in quotation, but I have never read it through without feeling that I am being suffocated. I cannot forgive Shakespeare for telling us how Venus perspired (175), how ‘soft and plump’2 she was, how moist her hand,3 how Adonis pants in her face,4 and so forth. I cannot conceive why he made her not only so emphatically older but even so much larger than the unfortunate young man. She is so large that she can throw the horse’s rein over one arm and tuck the ‘tender boy’ under the other.5 She ‘governs him in strength’6 and knows her own business so badly that she threatens, almost in her first words, to ‘smother’ him with kisses. The word ‘smother’, combined with these images of female bulk and strength, is fatal: I am irresistibly reminded of some unfortunate child’s efforts to escape the voluminous embraces of an effusive female relative. It is, of course, true that there are touches of reality in Shakespeare’s poem which cannot be paralleled in Marlowe’s. But I am not sure that reality (in the sense of naturalism) is what a poem of this type demands: at any rate, naturalism such as Shakespeare gives. Shakespeare shows us far too much of Venus’ passion as it would appear to a third party, a spectator—embarrassed, disgusted, and even horrified as any spectator of such a scene would necessarily be. No doubt this unwelcome effect comes in because Shakespeare is, in general, a far profounder and more human poet than Marlowe. His very greatness prevents his succeeding in the narrow and specialized world of erotic epyllion. But it suits Marlowe exactly. He does not see beyond the erotic frenzy, but writes from within it. And that, curiously enough, is his poetic salvation.

  In reading Venus and Adonis we see lust: in reading Marlowe’s sestiads we see not lust but what lust thinks it sees. We do not look at the passion itself: we look out from it upon a world transformed by the hard, brittle splendour of erotic vision. Hence all that sickly weight and warmth which makes unrestrained appetite in the real world so unpleasant to the spectator or even, perhaps, in retrospect to the principals themselves, does not appear at all. Instead of Shakespeare’s sweating palms and poutings and pantings and duckings and ‘lustful language broken’7 and ‘impatience’ that ‘chokes the pleading tongue’8 we have a gigantic insolence of hyperbole. The real world, which Shakespeare cannot quite forget, is by Marlowe smashed into bits, and he makes glory out of the ruin. Hero has been offered Apollo’s throne. The brightness of her neck makes a collar of pebbles shine like diamonds by reflection. The sun will not burn her hands. The ladies of Sestos, walking in procession, make the street a ‘firmament of breathing stars’.9 In that world there are boys so beautiful that they can never drink in safety from a fountain: the water nymphs would pull them in.

  If you compare these hyperboles with one of Shakespeare’s you will easily see the difference. His Venus promises Adonis that her hand will ‘dissolve or seem to melt’ in his.10 That, of course, is hyperbolical, but it is in touch with fact—with the fact that hands may be hot, moist, and soft. But Marlowe’s hyperboles are so towering that they become mythopoeic. They have, none the less, their own wild consistency and co-operate in building up such a world as passion momentarily creates, a topsy-turvy world where beauty is omnipotent and the very laws of nature are her willing captives. This mythopoeic quality is reinforced by Marlowe’s use of what may be called the aetiological conceit, as in his passage about Mercury and the fates at the end of I, or his explanation why ‘Since Heroes time hath halfe the world beene blacke’.11 Though the whole two sestiads celebrate the flesh, flesh itself, undisguised, rarely appears in them for long. Leander’s beauty is presented half mythically: he is a prize like the golden fleece, his body is as ‘straight as Circes wand’,12 and the description of him shines with the names of Nectar, Pelops, Jove, and the cold Cinthia.

  With this style there go two other characteristics. One, of course, is the metre—a ringing and often end-stopped couplet, compared with which the stanza of Venus and Adonis is unprogressive and the enjambed couplets of Endymion invertebrate. I suspect that the masculine quality of the verse, in fruitful tension with the luxury of the matter, plays an important part in making so much pure honey acceptable: it is a beautiful example of Wordsworth’s theory of metre. The other is the total absence of tenderness. You must not look in Marlowe for what Dryden called ‘the softnesses of love’. You must, indeed, look for love itself only in the narrowest sense. Love here is not ‘ful of pittie’13 but ‘deaffe and cruell’:14 his temple is a blaze of grotesques. Leander woos like ‘a bold sharpe Sophister’.15 The male and immortal lover who first tries to ravish him, ends by trying to kill him. Hero is compared to diamonds, and the whole work has something of their hardness and brightness. Marlowe sings a love utterly separated from kindness, cameraderie, or friendship. If female spiders, whose grooms (I am told) do ‘coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’, wrote love-poetry, it would be like Marlowe’s. But, however shocking, this treatment is an artistic success. We know from some terrible scenes in Keats’s Endymion how dangerous it is to attempt the mixture of tenderness and sensuality in verse. Licentious poetry, if it is to remain endurable, must generally be heartless: as it is in Ovid, in Byron, in Marlowe himself. If it attempts pathos or sweetness an abyss opens at the poet’s feet. Marlowe never comes near that abyss. His poem, though far from morally pure, has purity of another sort—purity of form and colour and intention. We may feel, as we come to the end of the Second Sestiad, that we have been mad, but we do not feel that we have been choked or contaminated. And yet I believe that the final impression left on an adult’s mind is not one of madness or even of splendour, but, oddly enough, of pathos. If we had caught Marlowe striving after that effect in such a poem we should perhaps have turned from him with contempt. But it is not so. What moves us is simply our knowledge that this passionate splendour, so insolent, so defiant, and so ‘unconscious of mortality’, is ‘desperately mortal’.

  That it was doomed, for Hero and Leander, to end in misery Marlowe of course knew well. He wrote only the first movement of the story, the ascending movement; how he would have handled the descent we do not know. If he was to do it successfully, he would have had to use powers not found in the first two sestiads: would have had to ‘change his notes to tragic’. The necessity of this change, even had he lived, renders tolerable the still greater change, the change to another author, which now meets us at the beginning of the Third Sestiad. If ever one poet were to ‘take over’ from another, no happier juncture could be found. At the very moment when the theme begins to demand a graver voice, a graver voice succeeds.

  In his Dedicatory Epistle Chapman describes himself as drawn ‘by strange instigation’ to continue Marlowe’s work. From a line in the Third Sestiad (195), when he describes himself as ‘tendering’ Marlowe’s ‘late desires’, some conclude that Marlowe had asked Chapman to finish the poem. But it is not at all clear why this should be called ‘strange instigation’. Perhaps Chapman poetically feigned, or (quite as probable) actually believed, that he had been strangely instigated by Marlowe since Marlowe’s death. I am certainly inclined to think that when, in the same passage, he sends his own genius (‘thou most strangely-intellectual fire’) to ‘confer’ with Marlowe’s ‘free soule’ in the ‘eternall Clime’, he is speaking seriously: believing, like Scaliger and others, that a man’s genius is a personal, immortal creature, distinct from himself. But the question is not of great importance. The poetic impulse which moved Chapman to write is quite clear from his own sestiads as a whole, and especially from the opening lines of the Third. And it was essentially an impulse to continue, to finish. We cannot doubt that he had entered into Marlowe’s erotic poetry with the fullest (temporary) sympathy. But, to his graver mind, it cried out for its sequel. As he says

  Joy grauen in sence, like snow in water wasts.

  (III, 35)