Over the course of this book, I have described the effect that Ottoman and Asian imports, in their verbal and visual representation, had on early modern English poetry, how they disrupted and reconfigured early modern attitudes to literary classical antiquity. Both the imports (words, sugar, zero, horses, bulbs) and the network of poetic images representing them within a given literary text functioned as mediators and intermediaries, reshaping how people thought about language, style, poetry, nothing, writing, hybridization, and textual reproduction. In this chapter, I will examine a final set of Middle Eastern and Asian imports: pearls and pigments. Like the imported words and things examined in the previous chapters, these two commodities reconfigured Elizabethan culture in complex and different ways. Pearls functioned as intermediaries in premodern narratives of chastity and purity, figuratively representing virginal whiteness and impenetrability. Once pearls acquired the adjective orient, they were marked as non-Western, and yet they continued to represent female sexual purity and whiteness symbolically. Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander inverts this symbolic vocabulary, reconfiguring—and remediating—pearl imagery into its opposite: sexual fluidity and freedom. The trade in pigments and recipes for colorfast dyes was regulated by the Ottoman Empire, and the recipes for Turkey Red and Tyrian Purple were closely guarded secrets. Dye technology was thus a cultural mediator, but one that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English were unable to retrieve. However, English merchants were adept in the use of figurative pigments: the colors of rhetorical and mercantile dissimulation. Both types of coloring surface in Chapman’s poem, which transforms dyes and ink into images of failure, and poetry into a mediator between mortals and gods, as well as East and West.
This concluding chapter synthesizes the several actions I have attributed to imported words and things. Previously, I have examined the semantic disruptions that foreign imports create in such literary representations of classical antiquity as the Roman state (Jonson) and ars poetica (Jonson and Puttenham), as well as the way that networks of imagery and words representing imported things allow poets like Shakespeare to imagine more redemptive and productive legacies to Ovidian narrative poetry. Here, in the Hellespont of Marlowe’s and Chapman’s Hero and Leander, I find an early modern literary depiction of classical antiquity not at odds with the contemporary Ottoman Mediterranean but coterminous with it. In Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, the imagery of oriental pearls liberates the characters in the classical source narratives (by Musaeus and Ovid) from their tragic condition, just as the imagery of zero and O, horses and bulbs allows Shakespeare to recuperate and rehabilitate the tragic loss he locates in Ovidian epyllia. Unlike Shakespeare’s epyllia, which I argued use imagery of Middle Eastern and Asian merchandise to depart from classical source narratives, Marlowe’s poem cycles back to his classical sources, reorienting Asian pearl imagery to celebrate Ovidian sexual freedom, or libertas. And though Chapman’s view of empire is more anxious and precarious than Marlowe’s, Chapman’s references to Ottoman pigments, paints, dyes, and inks allow his characters to negotiate across the precarious and heavily policed Hellespont, mirroring the way rhetorical dissimulation worked in the same space within early modern Anglo-Ottoman diplomacy. In Chapman’s continuation of Hero and Leander, vocabularies and imagery of imported things do not simply disrupt and reconfigure attitudes toward classical poetry; the colors of the East merge with the colors of classical rhetoric, working together to advance the power of figurative language and poetic dissimulation not only within the poem but in the early modern Hellespont as well. In both Marlowe’s and Chapman’s versions of the poem, Asian and Middle Eastern commodities complement the poem’s Greek and Roman inflections. Much of this is accomplished geographically, by locating the story in and around the Hellespont, a layered, palimpsestic landscape that is also fluid and shifting because it is a body of water.
The two sets of imports I will examine here—Marlowe’s pearls and Chapman’s pigments—appear in each poet’s version of Hero and Leander as both words (names for colors) and images. Much of Marlowe’s poem is characterized by jewel-encrusted imagery—Hero’s clothing is gilded and ornamented with “hollow pearl and gold”; she cries streams of pearl; the temple of Venus, where she is a priestess, is a monument of sculpted semiprecious stones and minerals; and Neptune’s palace below the sea brims with shipwrecked treasure. Additionally, Hero’s virginity is repeatedly referred to as a precious jewel. All of this gemstone imagery makes more sense when we locate Marlowe’s poem in the Hellespont, the center of European and Ottoman trade, straddling the Aegean and the Black Sea, separating Europe from Asia Minor, and central Asia from the Mediterranean. In the early modern period, these gems were primarily Middle Eastern and South Asian imports, and their role, as I will argue, is to reconfigure Western ideas about sex and chastity. Chapman’s continuation is similarly shot through with imagery, but in his case, the imagery is of colors, many of which derived from imported valuable pigments and dye-stuffs from eastern Europe, central Asia, and the Far East: pigments like alkermes (the scarlet grain beetle and the source of the English word crimson), Rubia tinctorum or madder, and Syrian oak galls for producing black dyes and ink. In Chapman’s poem, black dyes transfer onto skin, and characters drown in floods of ink. Brilliant colors imported from the East mask the truth, representing poetic dissimulation, which the poem both warns against and advocates. Both poets draw upon the language and imagery of precious natural and mineral imports in a commercial Ottoman-inflected landscape, reorienting an ancient classical myth through poetry.
Published in 1598, five years after Christopher Marlowe’s death, Hero and Leander narrates an ancient Greek myth of lovers living on either side of the Hellespont (now called Dardanelles, located in western Turkey). Hero and Leander is usually treated as a narrative poem—a playful Ovidian epyllion, or erotopaignon—written by Christopher Marlowe. But for early modern readers, it was a longer poem with a tragic outcome, as stated on the title page of the second edition of 1598: “begun” by Marlowe and “finished” by George Chapman.1 Marlowe’s poem, first printed alone in 1598, tells the story of ancient lovers separated by the Hellespont, a story that ends after their second parting but before their watery deaths. It was assumed unfinished, but later that year, Paul Linley printed an edition of the poem appending George Chapman’s continuation (twice the length of Marlowe’s original text), and the eight editions that followed until 1637 continued to be printed as a Marlowe-Chapman joint effort. By 1609, the poems were printed as one continuous text, omitting Chapman’s dedicatory material that broke the text in two. And Chapman continued his work with Hero and Leander, publishing the first English translation of the sixth-century Byzantine poet Grammaticus Musaeus’s version of the Hero and Leander story under the title The Divine Poem of Musaeus (1616).2
At first glance, the two parts of the epyllion contrast starkly: Marlowe’s rhetorically playful pansexual comedy of young love seems unprepared for Chapman’s somber moral tragedy. Where Marlowe celebrates insouciant desire, Chapman has the gods brutally chastise his protagonists for indulging in premarital sex. In Marlowe’s text, Hero’s nakedness lights her chamber like a second sunrise; in Chapman’s, her shameful blushes darken the room. In Marlowe’s part, the god Neptune courts Leander; in Chapman’s, heterosexual deities fiercely regulate morality: while the goddess Ceremony lectures Leander on the social necessity of marriage, a sadistic Venus frightens the chastity back into Hero by whipping one of her swans senseless.
Nevertheless, both Marlowe’s and Chapman’s poems reconfigure the classical literary past in early modern geographic and mercantile terms. In both texts, the bodies and spaces of the characters are charged with references to England’s newly established but precarious mercantile trade in the East. For Marlowe, the boundaries of empire are permeable and dynamic. Marlowe’s Hellespont is a fluid, synchronic space, at once ancient and modern, European and Eastern. The dominant imagery of historical and geographical fluidity in Marlowe’s poem is also that of sexual fluidity, illustrated by a symbolic vocabulary of nacreous, orient pearls. In Marlowe’s Hellespont, the bottom of the sea glitters with gold, abalone, coral, and pearl, available for anyone to seize—anyone who can reach them without drowning, that is. Marlowe’s amorous Neptune treats water-borne Leander as one such gem, making this free-trade zone a bit more like a “rough trade” zone. For Chapman, the boundaries between West and East and past and present are similarly fluid and shifting, but they are also consistently contested and renegotiated.
Chapman’s use of exotic imports presents a more anxious view of empire than Marlowe’s. The imagery of Middle Eastern and Asian luxury goods—in this case, that of Turkish and Persian dyes, pigments and colored cloth—is employed to represent the lovers’ attempts to conceal their premarital activities from the gods. The gods here respond as if the boundaries of their empire have been contested, attempting to colonize and contain the lovers’ heedless sexual misdemeanors against the background of a shifting commercial and political landscape in which slippage and indeterminacy reign supreme. For Chapman, rich crimsons, dense blacks, and purples indicate the lovers’ loss and betrayal by bleeding and staining their bodies.
Furthering the analogy this book has made between Bruno Latour’s intermediaries, mediators, and early modern imported words and things, pearls and dyes function as modified mediators and intermediaries in early modern English mercantile culture and in Marlowe’s and Chapman’s texts.3 Marlowe converts an early modern English symbolic vocabulary of pearls-as-chaste into an argument for sexual freedom, emphasizing pearls’ fluidity. Part of this transformation depends upon new, early modern uses of the word orient to mean pearly. In this way, Marlowe remediates a Western early modern cultural commonplace—the pearl-as-blazon—relocating it at the crossroads between East and West. Within his poem, pearly imagery and words work as intermediaries, where the nacreous, watery nature of the substance of pearls comes to symbolize a longed for social change, in this case a change in sexual mores. Chapman’s text, on the other hand, dramatizes English and European anxieties and fantasies about a longed- for mediator—Ottoman colorfast dye technology—while at the same time revealing an expanded social network that connects mercantile and diplomatic practices of deception to classical rhetoric and early modern poetics. Therefore, Chapman’s use of colors and dyes suggests that rhetorical tropes, and poetry itself, could function as a mediator, changing the fabric of late Elizabethan culture.
Marlowe’s Hero and Leander opens with a geographic description. We enter the story in a liminal space, the body of water that divides the lovers from one another:
On Hellespont guilty of true loues blood,
In view and opposite, two Cities stood,
Seaborders, disioined by Neptune’s might:
The one Abydos, the other Sestos hight. (1–4)
The Hellespont divides more than Hero from Leander, Sestos from Abydos, and the Mediterranean from the Black Sea: it also separates Europe and Asia Minor. Here, “On Hellespont,” is where the early modern Ottoman Empire begins to encroach on the world of classical mythology and where, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European merchant companies clashed, competing for the right to import fine cloth, jewels, medicine, and spices. An Italian faience plate (1525) shows that Marlowe was not the only artist to transpose the myth of Hero and Leander into the world of early modern seafaring and trade. Set against a background of a busy Renaissance port, the lovers court amid ships and canons (Figure 10).
When Ovid wrote his Heroides (the earlier of Marlowe’s two source texts) between 25 and 16 BCE, the Emperor Augustus had already planned the eastward expansion of the Roman Empire. This was later completed during the reigns of Nero and Trajan in the first century CE, with both sides of the Hellespont (Thrace and Asia Minor) formally added to the Roman Empire. By the fifth century, the time of the Byzantine poet Grammaticus Musaeus (and author of Marlowe’s second source), Thrace and Asia Minor were firmly established as part of the Roman Empire. The space became a zone of conflict between East and West as early as the First Crusade at the end of the eleventh century, when at the bequest of Pope Urban II, Catholic Europeans came to the aid of Byzantine Christian Emperor Alexios I Komnenos to help him repel the Muslim Seljuk Turks invading from Anatolia. And in early modern England, the Hellespont belonged to another Empire: though the Dardanelles remained Orthodox until the 1380s, from the 1450s onward, they formed the center of the Ottoman Empire. And very near to the Dardanelles was the prized capital Constantinople or Byzantium, which the Eastern Christians lost to the Ottoman (Muslim) Turks in 1453. Mercator’s Atlas of 1595 depicts the vastness of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period. It easily encompassed all the parts of Asia Minor that the Romans had conquered.
To early modern English eyes, the Hellespont might have appeared as a geographical palimpsest, a text written over a partially obscured earlier text, a space layered with ancient loss, medieval betrayal, and early modern commercialism. In the Introduction, I discussed the English antiquarian and Ovidian scholar George Sandys’s perception of the Ottoman Empire as characterized by ambivalence, combining grief with discovery. Sandys struggled to make sense of the multiple temporalities that infused the landscape. Finding the layers of the ancient classical world, which must have appeared so vivid in his well-read humanist mind, fragmented and in ruins, Sandys was instead confronted with the rich and colorful, multiethnic and multireligious hustle and bustle of contemporary Ottoman sea trade and urban life. A similar ambivalence infuses his experience of the Hellespont, and his narrative of the seascape is a chorography layered with loss and control. Sandys describes three histories of the Hellespont, the first history classical, the second a medieval romance, and the third an early modern, commercial account.
Figure 10. Plate with Hero and Leander, artist unknown. Italian Faenza ware (tin-glazed earthenware), c. 1525. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
First, Sandys characterizes the Hellespont as the site of several Greek myths of tragic loss. Sandys contends that the Hellespont takes its name from the tragic fate of the maiden Helle, “the daughter of Athamas King of Thebes, and sister of Phryxus, who, flying the stratagems of their step mother Ino, was drowned therein.”4 The ancient city of Troy was located on the Asian side, but rather than describe the Greek encampment and the destruction of Troy (as Fynes Moryson did two years later), Sandys dwells on Chersonesus, the peninsula jutting out into the Hellespont, which he links to the story of Hecuba’s postwar captivity and demise. Hecuba was supposedly buried on this peninsula in a tomb called Cynossema. The other stories of loss tied to this landscape include “the vnfortunate loues of Hero and Leander, drowned in the vncompassionate surges,” and the Persian king Xerxes’ bridge of boats built across the water to (unsuccessfully) invade Thrace (on the European side). The general, who famously whipped the Hellespont in a futile attempt to make it obey him like a horse, rows back across the same waters broken and disgraced (here Sandys quotes Lucan, in Sandys’s own English translation): “But how return’d? Dismaid, through bloud-staind seas, / With one boate, stopt by floting carcasses.”5
For his second tale, Sandys jumps ahead to the Middle Ages, noting that both sides of the Hellespont have been under Ottoman control since the mid-fourteenth century, “in the reign of Orchanes,” or Orhan I (1326–59). For Sandys, the loss of the Hellespont foreshadows the later Eastern Christian “loss” of Constantinople to the Muslim Ottoman Empire in 1453. Sandys recounts that the defining moment of the loss of the Hellespont came when a Byzantine Christian woman living in Abydos (the city on the Asian side of the Hellespont) betrayed her people for the love of a Muslim Turkish general. The daughter of the general of Abydos dreams that she falls into a ditch and is rescued by a gorgeously clothed gentleman who gives her rich garments. She then spots the Turkish general, believes he is her dream lover, and helps him take her castle by stealth. This story is actually Turkish in origin—and early modern.
This exogamous romance derives from the chronicles of Hoca Sadeddin Efendi (Sad’ud’din, 1536–99), the court historian for Sultan Murad III, who was the first sultan to allow the English to trade on Ottoman soil.6 Sadeddin’s original history of this siege located it not in Abydos, but in Aydos, a city in northern Anatolia near Iznik, but early modern English readers continued to associate the romance with the Hellespont, certainly up to and after Robert Stapylton’s translation of Musaeus in 1646.7 Sandys probably read a paraphrased version of the tale in Richard Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turks, published in 1603.8 Here the Hellespont has begun to be associated with trade, as the Byzantine lady is enticed by the material riches of the Ottoman Empire, the heavy damasks, and precious gemstones found along the Silk Road.9 In a sense, this account recasts the tale of Hero and Leander, the lovers from European Sestos and Asian Abydos, as an exogamous romance of religious difference and Muslim conquest. This is not an unusual way for an early modern to think about the Hellespont. As Sujata Iyengar has pointed out, in early modern drama, the Hellespont is a metaphor for a cuckholded husband who separates a European lady from her Eastern lover.10
Sandys’s classical and medieval narratives characterize the Hellespont as treacherous and unstable, but his third narrative catapults his readers into the Hellespont of 1610, a busy commercial customs port, heavily policed and guarded on both sides by the Turkish military. This echoes descriptions made by earlier French travelers André Thevêt and Nicolas de Nicolay.11 On the sites of ancient Sestos (Thrace) and Abydos (Asia Minor), the Turks have built two castles, each of which is more like a military garrison than a palace, “nothing lesse then inuincible, by reason of the ouer-peering mountaines that bracket the one, and slender fortification of the other to land-ward.”12 These edifices are illustrated in the engraving accompanying the text (Figure 11).13 The “castles” operate as customs gatekeepers, detaining the flow of European merchant ships, calling for passports and searching the commodities on board: “All ships are suffered to enter, that by their multitude and appointment to threaten no inuasion; but not to returne without search and permission.”14 So strict is the Ottoman control over the water and both banks of the Hellespont that Sandys describes it as imprisoning the landscape: “the Turke, as it were, chaineth vp the Propontick Sea: so that none passe in or out, without his allowance, and discharge of duties.”15
Fynes Moryson’s journey across the Hellespont (published two years after Sandys’s) corroborates and augments Sandys’s description, emphasizing the military precision and rigor of the Turkish customs searches:
For the ships that come from Constantinople, vse to bee detained here some three daies. . . . Besides, these searchers and Customers looke, that they carry no prohibited wares, neither can the ship, nor any passenger be suffered to passe these Castles, except they bring the Pasport of the great Turke, which the chiefe Visere or Basha vseth to grant vnto them. Thus when no ship without the knowledge of the chiefe Visere can either passe these Castles leading to the Mediterranean Sea, or the two Castles aboue leading into the Euxine Sea, noted with (D E), surely these foure Castles are the greatest strength of Constantinople by Sea.16
Moryson’s text is illustrated with a woodcut map of the Hellespont and its edifices, one of which looks like a fortified wall of connected towers to the west of the channel, more of a military complex than a castle (Figure 12).
Figure 11. Map of the Hellespont. From George Sandys, A Relation of a Iourney begun an: Dom: 1610 (1615), 24. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Figure 12. Map of the Hellespont. From Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (1617), 260. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
The Hellespont was the only way merchant ships could reach both Constantinople on the Black Sea, the capital and busiest port of the Ottoman Empire, and the Greek islands, responsible for many of the most valuable commodities to the Mediterranean: Candia, or Crete, supplied olive oil and flour to the Ottomans, while Zante (Zakynthos) and Cephalonia supplied the tiny dried raisins—currants—that kept the European economy rich. By policing the Hellespont, the Ottoman Empire ensured that it controlled access to international mercantile trade, which in turn strengthened its empire. In the Introduction, I have drawn on Palmira Brummett’s portrayal of the early modern Ottoman Empire as an institution built not around land battles but trade routes. It is worth returning to her depiction of the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. It is a merchant state in which conquest and commercialism are atemporal and inseparable, “not fixed in time and space,” and “negotiable, like commerce.”17 This meant that the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire were unfixed and fluid, located in the seas along trade zones, rather than delineated on maps or patrolled territories, and that these spaces carried their histories with them.18
The early modern Hellespont was an important Ottoman boundary and trade zone. By regulating the flow of ships and goods through the Hellespont, the Ottoman Empire maintained its imperial hold on the countries and nations on either side of the channel, as well as the goods that were traded between them. Materially, bodies of water function differently from landscape, as Steve Mentz points out in his reading of Shakespeare’s oceans.19 In the water, says Mentz, our senses are warped and reconfigured; we see, hear, taste, and feel things differently; we are forced to move more slowly.20 Marlowe’s and Chapman’s Hellespont is as much about the water as it is about the Asian and European towns on either side. Pearls are found at the bottom of the ocean and characterized by jewelers and merchants by their water, a term used alongside orient to describe their shine and nacre. From the Middle Ages to the late seventeenth century, it was believed that pearls were made from water, formed when oysters rose to the surface of the ocean at night to receive seminal dew from the moon. For Marlowe, it is the water’s transformative properties, which he associates with pearls, that allow his young lovers to cross the threshold from innocence into sexual maturity. Water is also a necessary ingredient in dye baths and ink. As much as it can wash bodies clean, it combines with pigments to darken and mark them. For Chapman, the waters of the Hellespont both obscure the truth by gilding Leander’s limbs when he swims home and reveal it as Hero’s shameful salty tears wash the black dye from her veil and onto her cheeks.
Water’s transformative and unstable properties make it an effective vehicle for understanding how seafaring European merchants conducted themselves around the Mediterranean Sea. Alison Games’s historical analysis of early modern English mercantile travelers’ experience in the Ottoman Mediterranean provides a frame of reference for my reading of the poetic Hellespont. Games reveals that the English who trafficked in the Ottoman Mediterranean viewed the seascape and its peoples as both alluring and dangerous and, in order to establish themselves as legitimate traders in this unstable space, engaged in tactics of disguise, dissimulation, and role-playing.21 In other words, they adopted the fluid, shape-shifting qualities of water in their behaviors on land, sometimes darkening their skin to blend in. To the English setting out on their mercantile ventures, the Ottoman Mediterranean was an unstable space in which one might encounter riches, piracy, and alternative sexualities, much as Marlowe characterizes the rough currents of the Hellespont governed by Neptune. As Games notes, “Travelers were interested in cloistered communities, polygamy, the harem, eunuchs, and homosexuality, and so, it seems, were their readers . . . In their manuscript and published accounts of the Mediterranean . . . Scots and English visitors described it as a place where all sorts of appetites could be satisfied and all sorts of domestic living and sexual arrangements could be sanctioned.”22 Marlowe also connects water to nonnormative sexualities. Across the Hellespont from his home in Anatolia, Leander is courted by “the barbarous Thracian soldier” (1.81) and embraced by the god Neptune as he swims across it (2.167).
In order to succeed in their ventures, English merchants in Ottoman lands had to engage in rhetorical and visual deception and equivocation, just as Chapman describes Hero doing with imagery of colors and dyes in his continuation of Marlowe’s poem. In addition to adopting native dress and gesture as soon as they arrived, English traders were advised to keep a low profile and not to admit to being English, for self-preservation as well as for political reasons: “For those who journeyed in the Mediterranean, deceit was important both for minor advantages—better sightseeing—and for major considerations—saving life and limb.”23 Engaging in Mediterranean trade had much in common with navigating the treacherous currents of the Hellespont. It was sink or swim, and English traders learned to swim by swiftly disguising and adapting themselves to other cultures.
Though Sandys’s and Moryson’s Hellespont is a precarious space, Sandys’s three histories stress a continuity, rather than abrupt shifts from Roman to Christian to Ottoman. The same cultural expansion and proliferation of imports that Ovid describes in his poetry might be seen to apply to the early modern European view of the Ottoman Empire. As a body of water, the Hellespont is also a space of fluid borders rather than strict boundaries and must therefore be policed and guarded carefully by the Turks in order to ensure their continued commercial and imperial success. The early modern Hellespont, then, can be read as a liquid palimpsest. As Jonathan Gil Harris has argued, the tension between temporal layers in palimpsests creates an additional temporality of disruption, one that “allows [the] past to speak back.”24 This chapter explores how the ancient Hellespont “speaks back”—or, rather, across—both to the early modern commercial Hellespont and to early modern English readers of poetry. Marlowe’s and Chapman’s Hero and Leander overwrites its classical literary past with early modern English mercantilism. Marlowe’s text functions as a linguistic and poetic palimpsest as well, weaving contemporary English words associated with Eastern sea trade into classical epic similes. The bodies and spaces of his characters are charged with references to England’s newly established and uncertain mercantile trade in the East. Here, the boundaries of empire are permeable and dynamic. Marlowe’s Hellespont is a fluid, synchronic space, the intersection of East and West, antique and modern, English and Ottoman. It is finely layered, like a pearl.
Marlowe’s poem is replete with pearly imagery. Adding to this copia or net of pearls, the word orient appears twice in Marlowe’s poem, referring to bodies as pearls and thus oriental imported objects. In late sixteenth-century English, orient was an adjective and a noun that described not only the East but the glittering nacre of pearls; according to the OED, it meant “the color or special lustre of a pearl of great quality.”25 Both appearances of orient in Marlowe’s poem are significant as each configures Hero’s and Leander’s bodies as erotic objects—imported luxury goods—rather than as subjects, but these bodies are also desired for their pearly white skin. Worshipped for his near-feminine beauties, Leander possesses Narcissus’s “Orient cheeks and lips” (1.73), which can indicate either central Asian facial features (Abydos, where Leander lives, is in Anatolia) or shining, pearlescent skin. When Hero disrobes, she lights up the room like a sunrise “from an Orient cloud” (2.320). So the “Orient cloud” to which Hero is compared can be both a cloud brightened by an eastern sunrise and a white, pearlescent cloud.
By the end of the sixteenth century, Europe had become infatuated with the riches of the Ottoman Empire, Persia, the Maghreb, and Asia. As John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne put it, “The richest, the fairest, and best part of the world [was] topsiturvied, ruined and defaced for the traffick of Pearles and Pepper.”26 The word orient was bound up with pearls and precious goods originating in the Middle East, India, and Africa. It had a range of intersecting meanings, all of which create a network of associations linking precious gems and minerals with the geographical space from which they were imported. Here is how those meanings operated: orient derives from Latin oriens, the east and the place in the sky where the sun rises. Thus, the deponent form of oriens, orior, is the root of the word origin. But because in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, pearls were imported into England and Europe from Sri Lanka and Bahrain, orient designated not only a geographical direction (east) but bright and shiny things like pearls and gold. This range of overlapping meanings can be found in Florio’s definition of the same word in Italian, oriente. His Italian-English dictionary Queen Anna’s New World of Words (1611) defines the Italian cognate oriente as “the east part of the world. Also the East-winde. Also shining, bright, glistering and oriant, sun-shining. Also Gold among alchemists.”27 Adding to orient’s scintillating quality, the OED also notes that around 1573, orient was used to indicate a “sparkle of the eyes.”28 Though pearls can be found across the globe, and many early modern jewel merchants did find them in North and South America as well as in the Middle East, the primary ports where pearls of superior quality were traded and imported (and still are today) were in Bahrain and Sri Lanka. These Eastern or “oriental” locations can also be tied etymologically to the adjective and noun orient that described highly valuable pearls in medieval and early modern English.29
Orient as lustrous and white was a new meaning for an older, Latinate word, and writers and translators began to use it to supplement classical Latin texts about pearls. In the first complete English translation of Pliny’s Natural History, published in 1601, Philemon Holland supplies the new English word orient several times (six) over four pages to describe the bright luster of the most nacreous pearls, whereas Pliny’s Latin text (composed around 77 CE) has only candor (whiteness), clarior (clarity), and vigor (liveliness)30: “In the very whitenesse it selfe, there is a great difference among them. That which is found in the red sea, is the clearest and more orient. . . . The most commendation that they have is in their colour, namely, if they may be truly called Exaluminati, i. orient and cleare as Alume.”31 In early modern English as today, the word union meant a joining together of more than one thing: a political alliance, a marriage, or a sexual consummation. But for Pliny’s Romans as for early modern Europeans, union was also another word for pearl. This is because, as Pliny states, no two pearls are alike. Pearls are unique, “singular, and by themselves alone.”32
If orient could mean bright and glistering, the phrase orient pearl comes to seem a bit redundant, given that pearls are already shiny. But orient pearls were the pearliest pearls: merchants with the Goldsmith’s company in London frequently used the term orient to indicate a pearl particularly high in nacre and thus high in value; thus, orient may be closer in meaning to another technical term Elizabethan and Jacobean goldsmiths drew on to describe a pearl’s luster: water.33 The latter definition held true for Ralph Fitch, an Elizabethan merchant who traveled to the Middle East in 1583 with the jeweler William Leedes. In an account published in the 1600 edition of Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations, Fitch reports seeing “many Ilandes, and among others the famous Ilande Baharim from whence come the best pearles which be round and Orient.”34 Fitch pairs orient with round, which suggests that he is using the word to describe the pearls’ visual characteristics. One of the two primary ports in the early modern pearl business, Bahrain was controlled by the Portuguese from 1507 to 1602 (the other, Sri Lanka, was under Dutch control from 1517 to 1658). Later passing through Sri Lanka, Fitch notes that the pearls there are of a lesser quality, “not so orient as the pearle of Baharim in the gulfe of Persia.”35 In Fitch’s sentence, the word orient cannot mean Eastern since from his perspective, Sri Lanka lies further east than the Persian Gulf, so orient here must indicate the pearl’s quality and value, its nacre.36 The Dutch merchant John Huyghen van Linschoten traveled to Goa and the Persian Gulf between 1579 and 1592. In his Itinerario, translated into English in 1598, van Linschoten attests in a play on words that the most orient pearls are also Eastern in origin: “The principal and the best that are found in all the Oriental Countries and the right Orientale pearles, are between Ormus and Vassora in the straights, or Sinus Persicus, in the places called Bareyn, Catiffa, Julfar, Camaron.”37 Most of these travelers also observed how pearls were laboriously harvested by skilled and overworked Arab laborers in the Persian Gulf, and South Asian natives poorly paid in leftover pearls.38 Marlowe’s poem gives us some indication of the laborious challenges of fishing for pearls when Leander is dragged, thrashing, to the bottom of the Hellespont by Neptune, where “underwater he was almost dead” (2.170). In the Hellespont, Leander becomes Neptune’s pearl, just as Hero will become Leander’s in their bed (2.260–80). Fishing for both bodies and pearls, the poem acknowledges, is life-threatening work.
In the early modern world, pearls were associated with dew, tears, and seminal fluids as much as they represented the opposite, serving as emblems of chastity and sexual imperviousness. The dominant belief (inherited from ancient India, Greece, Persia, and the Arab world) was that pearls were generated when their shells were impregnated by the rain or dew. This was the view held by Pliny, Marbode of Rennes (twelfth century), Albertus Magnus (thirteenth century), and Bartolomaeus Anglicus (fourteenth century).39 Early modern writers citing this etiology included Stephen Batman in his translation of Camillus Leonardus (1516), Olaus Magnus (1555), William Camden (1587), and John Frye in his Newe Account of East India and Perisa (1672–81).40 Though in 1555 Guillaume Rondelet suggested that pearls were the products of disease, formed by layers of the same substance that lines the mussel’s shell, the dew theory of pearl generation remained prevalent in Europe until Filippo di Filippi correctly identified parasitic pearl nuclei in 1852.41
In the symbolic vocabulary of medieval and early modern English poetry, orient pearls are metaphors for female chastity, purity, and impenetrability. We can find the locus classicus of this metaphor in the Middle English poem Pearl (c. 1380–1400), in which the speaker mourns the premature death of his little girl, whom he describes as a lost pearl: “Perle, plesaunte . . . Oute of oryent I hardyly saye, Ne Proued I neuer here precios pere” (3). He falls asleep on a bank of flowers and in his dream vision beholds his daughter as a fully grown maiden in Paradise, clothed in pearls and married to Christ. The poem frequently repeats that the speaker’s lost pearl was “withouten spot,” untainted by sin. Two hundred years later, Queen Elizabeth I, the royal “virgin,” was depicted in gowns, necklaces, and headdresses adorned with pearls to symbolize her sexual purity. Even her effigy in Westminster Abbey is decorated with marble pearls.42 In Elizabethan romances, pearls represented virgin purity.43 Marlowe’s use of pearl imagery, however, converts this commonplace into a new symbolic vocabulary.44
Women—and by extension their unblemished bodies, virgin tears, and impenetrable chastity—appear as “orient pearls” so frequently throughout early modern writing that it is tempting to dismiss the pearly bodies of Hero and Leander as commonplaces, an extension of the blazon tradition. But there is more to an orient pearl than meets the eye. As jewels, pearls are valuable, fungible imports. Furthermore, orient pearls are simultaneously bright white (which, in reference to skin color, marks one as Western) and foreign. In the figure of the orient pearl, the Western ideal of spotless virginity gets reconfigured as an Eastern material object. And, in line with Shakespeare’s ironic uses of pearls, Marlowe’s orient pearls turn chastity on its head. In the poem, Hero’s chastity is consistently compromised and easily won. Leander craftily makes it seem a rhetorical “nothing” (another Eastern import, as we have seen, is the notion of zero). And as a priestess of Venus, the Roman goddess of love and sexual desire, Hero’s virginity is already a joke. I maintain that Marlowe’s poem reconfigures orient pearls not as emblems of feminine purity but as indicative of a kind of sexual fluidity and freedom from Western mores, a freedom that can only take place in the layered landscape of an Ottoman-inflected mythological Hellespont. Patrick Cheney characterizes Marlowe as the Elizabethan poet who celebrates Ovidian libertas, or freedom from traditional authority.45 I will draw on Cheney’s characterization in order to demonstrate how orient pearls in Hero and Leander lay claim to antique libertas, but only through the contemporary language of Eastern and Mediterranean trade. For Cheney, Marlowe’s use of Ovidian libertas allows the poet to engage with Spenser in an opposing rhetoric of counter-nationhood, one that “subverts Elizabethan royal power . . . in order to represent ‘the poet’ as the ‘true nation.’”46 But what happens to counter-nationhood when it is transported to the Ottoman-inflected Mediterranean? Marlowe locates libertas not only in the classical past, I would argue, but in the English mercantile present.
Marlowe compares the bodies of both lovers to precious stones and jewels, especially those associated with water and Eastern sea trade. These allusions turn Hero and Leander into fungible commodities on the Mediterranean market and emphasize the transformative properties of their pearly nature. Hero is decked with jewels culled from the sea: “About her neck hung chaines of pebble stone, / Which lightned by her necke, like Diamonds shone” (1.25–26). Her boots, or “buskins” (1.31), are embroidered with “shells al siluered” (1.31) with abalone or mother-of-pearl, and “blushing corall to the knee, / Where sparrowes percht, of hollow pearle and gold” (1.31–33). Though there is evidence of early modern clothing and accessories adorned with mother-of-pearl—for instance, a sixteenth-century etched purse in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum—Hero’s is a fantastical costume. The sparrows become miniature water organs, filled by her handmaid. This hyperbolic costume immediately constructs Hero as a valuable, Eastern commodity, not only because she is covered in precious materials from the sea but because of the handiwork that has gone into creating her dress and boots—which is also Marlowe’s poetic handiwork.47 With her mechanical mother-of-pearl and coral boots, Hero’s clothes are best suited to a Renaissance cabinet of curiosities containing the marvels of world travel, like one of Wenzel Jamnitzer’s coral Daphnes, which took up residence in aristocratic wonder-cabinets in the early seventeenth century.48 Hero’s blue “kirtle” or petticoat is stained, “Made with the blood of wretched lovers slaine” (1.16). The line’s enjambment halts at the rhyme “whereon was many a stain” (1.15), suggesting that the blood of the line that follows stands in for stains made by other bodily fluids, blood and semen being frequently interchangeable in Renaissance physiology. Compare this stain to the first line of the poem, “On Hellespont, guilty of true love’s blood” (1.1): the Hellespont is laced with the lovers’ blood and, presumably, the fluids of their lovemaking. Given the early modern associative fisherman’s net linking pearls, dew, water, and seminal fluids, it is understandable that there would be pearls—and a great many of them—littering the floor of Marlowe’s Hellespont, which Virgil in his Georgics calls ostriferi or oyster breeding.49 Pearls were valued by the early modern English Goldsmith’s company not just for their size and clarity but for their water, a term that surfaces frequently in Hannibal Gamon’s Gouldesmythe’s Storehowse.50 For English goldsmiths, water is almost indistinguishable from early modern inflections of orient as shiny whiteness: it describes the fineness and amplitude of a pearl’s nacre, but it also locates the pearl more transparently as a precious mineral coming from the sea, and we can almost imagine that an early modern goldsmith or noble in possession of pearl high in water would believe the pearl to carry something of the sea with it, as when we hold conch shells up to our ears to hear the roaring of the waves. Marlowe’s orient pearls do not merely evoke the sea but embody its fluidity and transformative powers.
The jewels that ornament and stand in for Hero’s body and virginity in Marlowe’s poem are numerous. When Leander follows her into the temple of Venus (built of “green sea agate,” sporting a crystal roof and silver altar, 1.138), he launches into a speech to persuade her to yield her virginity (a “faire Iemme,” 1.247) to him. Hero responds with tears, which Marlowe metaphorizes as pearls:
Foorth from those two translucent cisterns brake
A streame of liquid Pearle, which downe her face
Made milk-white paths, whereon the gods might trace
To Loues high Court. (1.296–99)
The speaker compares Hero’s tears not only to precious pearls but also to the celestial Via Lactea, as if she were a mythological heroine immortalized in a constellation. As a sexual commodity (a virgin), Hero is a living, breathing, secreting pearl. When she finally capitulates and accepts Leander, Hero weeps a second time. In this instance, Marlowe playfully has Cupid transform Hero’s tears to pearl, wind them on his arm, and attempt to bribe the Fates into preventing her tragic death (it doesn’t work). Why is Hero’s surrender to Leander—her admission that he is right, that virginity is a nonentity—then turned into a tangible, material artifact of pearls? This string of pearls might contradict Leander, serving as a relic to Hero’s virginity, but it also functions to illustrate the rhetorical brilliance of his reasoning. Early modern English had a term for pithy, quotable arguments: pearls of rhetoric. Over the course of the poem, Hero, who begins as an impenetrable string of perfectly matched pearls, will be converted into a baroque pearl, one whose sexual fluidity exceeds its bounds.
Hero is not the only pearl in the poem: Leander’s body is also an Eastern precious commodity possessing Narcissus’s “orient cheeks and lips” (1.73) and “ivory skin” (2.153), as is Neptune, who is “Saphyr-visaged” (2.155). The epithet “Saphyr-visaged” does not merely paint Neptune’s face blue; it also makes it seem carved out of gemstone, just like the gods carved out of jasper, agate, and crystal (1.136–141) in Venus’s temple on Sestos. Neptune resembles an elaborate early modern gem in the shape of a triton or nereid, many of which incorporated baroque or oddly shaped pearls, providing a meta-commentary on the riches of the sea. Unlike the tiny, round, and perfectly matched pearls one might find in a Hilliard miniature of Queen Elizabeth, which emphasize her uniqueness and virgin purity, baroque pearls are oddly shaped, and their form dictated the shapes and frames that jewelers chose for them, not the other way around.51 Perhaps it is no accident that so many early modern jewelers chose to frame baroque pearls as erotic, metamorphic, and monstrous figures like nereids, sirens, serpents, and dragons. Where the miniature round pearl implies impenetrable purity, the baroque pearl suggests sexual fluidity and perversity in excess.52
Like the sea god’s body, Neptune’s palace is full of gemstones, only these are neglected, sunken treasure:
the ground
Was strewd with pearle, and in low corrall groues,
Sweet singing Mermayds sported with their loues,
On heapes of heauy gold, and took great pleasure,
To spurne in carelesse sort the shipwracke treasure:
For here the stately azure palace stood. (2.160–65)
Here classical mythology encounters the early modern East, only to snub it. The sea floor of the Hellespont is littered with “shipwracke treasure” (2.164) and “heapes of heauy gold” (2.163), treasure for which some seafaring merchants or corsairs may have paid dearly with their lives. But the sea god’s nereids willfully ignore the lost spoils of the present in favor of Neptune’s mythological “azure palace” (2.165). Although Neptune is obviously besotted with Leander, the god treats Leander like a possession, dragging the youth (who cannot breathe underwater) down to the bottom of the sea. Ivory-skinned Leander seems in danger of becoming a sunken treasure himself. This is the sexual freedom of Marlowe’s Hellespont: in the wrong hands, it can become dangerous. Therefore, the watery currents of the Hellespont where Neptune encounters Leander could be read as a queering space, its pearl-strewn bottom and powerful waves emphasizing sexual fluidity and metamorphosis, despite Leander’s struggle to resist it and conform to heteronormative desire. Shakespeare would later draw on this transformative power of the sea in The Tempest, when he has Ariel sing about a corpse with pearls for eyes sea-changing into “something rich and strange” (1.2.405). Rubens’s nearly identical paintings Hero and Leander (1605 and 1606) similarly incorporate elements of sea nymphs and sunken treasure (Figure 13). As a marginalized Hero flings herself from her tower (on the right), a tangle of nymphs adorned with coral and pearl carries Leander’s body to a pearl-and-shell-strewn shore. The painting depicts the Hellespont as a conflicted space, overpopulated with bodies, sea monsters, and roiling waves. Its title, Hero and Leander, seems almost ironic, as it is difficult to identify which of the fifteen bodies is Hero and which Leander. In Rubens’s painting as in Marlowe’s poem, pearls are transformed from emblems of sexual purity into markers of sexual freedom and excess. Rubens was twenty-one when Marlowe’s poem was published. Given Marlowe’s connections with the Netherlands, it would not be too far-fetched to imagine the classically educated teenaged painter encountering or at least learning of the poet in Antwerp in 1590s and reading his final masterpiece eight years later.53
Neptune threatens to depose Leander’s precious chastity much as Leander will later conquer Hero’s, for as Hero knows, “Iewels been lost are found againe, this neuer. / ’Tis lost but once, and once lost, lost forever” (2.85–86). This narrative interjection is Marlowe himself making a rhetorical “pearl” or commonplace out of a figurative pearl (Hero’s virginity) and thus mocking both Hero’s soon-to-be-lost pearl and the practice of extracting “pearls” of wisdom itself. Once he arrives at Sestos, Leander struggles with Hero, mirroring Neptune’s struggle with Leander: “Ne’re King more sought to keepe his Diademe, / Than Hero this inestimable gemme” (2.77–78). Hero’s bed sheets become billowy waves as Leander attempts to chart this territory, fishing for Hero:
Figure 13. Hero and Leander, by Peter Paul Rubens, 1606. By permission of the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.
His hands he cast vpon her like a snare:
She ouercome with shame and fallow feare,
Like chaste Diana when Acteon spide her,
Being sodainly betraid, diu’d down to hide her
And as her siluer body downeward went,
With both her hands she made a tent. (2.259–64)
Tent and silver body suggest a silver ship with sails, mirroring an elaborate pearl ship pendant or salt-cellar nef of the period.54 The tent-ship then becomes an ivory mountain and finally a globe “with azure circling lines empal’d” for Leander to navigate: “Much like a globe (a globe may I tearme this / By which loue sailes to regions full of blis)” (2.275–76). The imagery of navigation, trade, and conquest intersect as Leander tries to lay claim to Hero’s pearly body. When Leander finally succeeds, Hero slips from his grasp, flopping “Mermaid-like vnto the floore” (2.315). Sex transforms our heroine: once a virgin who cried tears of perfectly round, impervious pearls, she is now a watery, animated baroque pearl jewel, becoming one of the numerous mermaids and sirens that jewelers constructed around these oddly shaped marine minerals.
Like the Hellespont, Hero’s bed and, by extension, her body becomes another fluid space where borders must be negotiated and crossed, sometimes violently. When she finally disrobes, Leander has charted the globe and conquered the East. Hero becomes “a kinde of twilight” (2.319) breaking “from an Orient cloud” (2.320), and as the lovers embrace, Apollo plays his “golden harpe” (2.327), and Marlowe’s poem ends in the Orient with the sun rising and driving night far away and “downe to hell” (2.334). Although the last lines of the poem, “danged down to hell her loathsome carriage” (2.334), foreshadow darkness to come, and Chapman will take up this dark thread in his follow-up to Marlowe, the image we are left with is one of night being swallowed up by the underworld, so that the brilliant, shimmery light of the Eastern sun can refract off Hero’s skin, emphasizing her pearliness once more. As the lovers begin to consummate their desire, they are surrounded by a pearly sunrise. Hero’s chastity may be lost, but the orient pearls and gold of the poem’s afterglow appear to commend rather than punish Hero for having sex. Though Hero is warned against losing her “inestimable gemme” (2.78), the poem repeatedly reassures us that she will continue to shine. Her pearly tears suggest not one gem to lose but a whole string of them to barter with. At the end of the poem, it is not Hero’s virgin pearl that is lost but Hero and Leander’s sexual union, a pearl itself, that the poem validates.
Where Marlowe celebrates the dangerous libertas afforded by his Ottoman-inflected landscape in the watery figure of the orient pearl, Chapman emphasizes the treachery and political dissimulation of Anglo-Ottoman trade in his use of color and textile. Chapman’s rich crimsons, dense blacks, and purples indicate the lovers’ loss and betrayal by bleeding and staining their bodies. Chapman employs classical rhetorical devices to highlight such betrayals, simultaneously imitating and undoing much of Marlowe’s dominant imagery. Marlowe’s poem opens famously “On Hellespont, guilty of true love’s blood” (1.1). Chapman’s continuation returns to the same space but opens with a shift: “new light brings new directions” (3.1). Chapman hastens to pin the “guilt” on Leander rather than on Hellespont, punning guilt with gilding and inverting Marlowe’s description of Hero and Leander’s “true love” (1.186) by transforming it into impulsive sin: “The God of gold of purpose guilt his lims / That this word guilt including double sense / The double guilt of his Incontinence” (3.24–26). The word limbs, spelled here lims, draws attention to the way the golden light upon the water paints or “limns” Leander’s limbs. Thus, Chapman’s poem opens by transposing Marlowe’s bloody, guilty Hellespont onto Leander, whose guilt is masked with gold paint.
Chapman’s Hellespont is instantly a space where disguise and concealment can occur. Games’s analysis of early modern English mercantile travelers’ role-playing and disguise emphasizes the practicality of mercantile deception.55 As it appeared to the English setting out on their mercantile ventures, the Mediterranean (and by extension the Hellespont and Black Sea) was a volatile waterway in which one might encounter riches, piracy, and alternative sexualities, much as Marlowe characterizes Neptune’s Hellespont.56 In order to succeed in their ventures, English merchants in Ottoman lands had to engage in rhetorical and visual deception and equivocation, just as Chapman describes Hero doing in his continuation of Marlowe’s poem. As Games has observed, deception was both pragmatic and life preserving for merchants: “deceit was important both for minor advantages—better sightseeing—and for major considerations—saving life and limb.”57
In addition to disguising Leander’s guilt with gilt, Chapman also has Hero’s loss of innocence transform her into a foreigner. As soon as Hero realizes she has lost her “inestimable iemme” (2.78) and remains unwed, she becomes “even to her selfe a straunger” (3.203). Not only does Chapman compare Hero in her defiled state to a foreigner in a strange land, but he goes on to compare her to Cádiz, the Spanish city that the English army (led by Essex) sacked in 1596:
[Hero] was much like
Th’ Iberian citie that wars hand did strike
By English force in princely Essex guide
Whence peace assur’d her towers had fortifide
And golden-fingered India had bestowd
Such wealth on her, that strength and Empire flowd
Into her Turrets, and her virgin waste
The wealthy girdle of the sea imbraste. (3.203–10)
The port from which Columbus set sail for his second and fourth voyages, Cádiz was the site of many Spanish imperial successes. Its ships were constantly under attack, sometimes successfully (for example, by Francis Drake in 1587), sometimes unsuccessfully, by numerous Barbary corsairs. Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations contains an account of Drake’s voyage to Cádiz.58 Rich with the wealth of eastern sea trade (in this instance), Hero is a valuable foreign city plundered too soon, desired by Leander (as Essex) too impetuously. To describe Hero’s body as Cádiz is to contain her sexuality as a captured and spent commodity. The epic simile also invokes a sense of English inferiority and anxiety about its Spanish and Portuguese mercantile and imperial competition. Though the English were sometimes successful in plundering Cádiz and defeated the armada, they could not hold a candle to the Spanish and Portuguese for imperial and mercantile control of Southeast Asia and the New World in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Some of the most valued commodities Europeans imported from the Ottoman Empire were color pigments and dyes, especially reds, purples, and blacks. Colorfast dyes were prepared using guarded, ancient formulae. After Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, Europeans lost the recipes for imperial (Tyrian) purple and colorfast crimson. Crimson “grains” (kermes beetles) and madder were imported from eastern Europe and central Asia to dye European textiles, but even these reds were likely to fade and bleed. The Ottoman recipes for making reds colorfast were guarded from European merchants until 1750.59 Ottoman dye recipes might be read as Latourian mediators: material and chemical changes to dye baths meant a less costly but technologically more advanced way of producing textiles. If a European nation could get its hands on this technology, it would be able to reproduce vibrant, durable color on British wool without having to import foreign predyed cloth from Turkey. But because such technology was out of reach, the early modern English imagined Ottoman dye recipes as fantasy mediators that would ostensibly reconfigure their own culture and make them more powerful players in global markets.60 Searching out new dye ingredients and formulae, particularly the coveted shades of deep crimson and purple, was a competitive and secretive mission for early modern European merchants. Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations published an itemized list of secrets to obtain from the Turks, written by Hakluyt the elder, under the title “Remembrances for master S.”61 Among the list of techniques and materials to be gathered from the Turks is “to learne of the Diers to discerne all kind of colours; as which be good and sure. . . . Then to take the names of all the materials and substances used in this Citie or in the realme, in dying of cloth or silke.”62 Documents sent by Walsingham to Levant Company officers include lists of commodities from the East like indigo, Rubia (or madder), kermes (tiny beetles mistaken for “grains”), gum-lac (similar beetles, used for lacquer), and sal ammoniac and alum, all materials used in the dyeing process.63 Red and purple dyeing pigments mentioned in Leonard Mascall’s practical household book of dye recipes from 1583 include “grening weed” and “berries,” “crimisine” (dried kermes beetles), “Brasill” (a cheap alternative to kermes, derived from an Asian wood producing a watery red or pink color), “Lack” (gum-lac), and gall nuts.64 None of these recipes were colorfast, though judging by the brown, spattered condition of the 1588 edition in the Folger Shakespeare Library, the recipes were probably widely used.
In Chapman’s poetry, such dyed textiles are simultaneously text and textile, subject to the same problems of masking and bleeding. Chapman invokes the imagery of exotic eastern imports—jewels, damask cloth (named for Damascus), and silk—to describe Hero’s precious beauty and virginity. Chapman invokes red textiles to describe Leander musing on his love for Hero:
Through whose white skin, softer than the soundest sleep
With damaske eies the rubie bloud doth peep
And runs in branches through her azure veins
Whose mixture and first fire his love attains; (3.39–42)
“Damaske” (3.40) describes a cloth woven or embroidered with flowers and named for Damascus and its famous roses, but here it illustrates the patterns of red blood running through blue veins and evokes also the branched pattern of a bloodshot eye. The liquid “rubie bloud” (3.40) peeping through her veins suggests both gemstone rubies and Rubia tinctorum: madder red dye. It also conjures up an image of a cloth that has been dyed with red and blue to create an artificial purple, the red dye already beginning to show.
Chapman’s 1616 translation of Musaeus goes further, bathing Hero and Leander in red during their first encounter even when the Greek text calls for blue: “And as he saw the Russet clouds increase / He strain’d her Rosie hand” (Divine Poem [DP], 169–70).65 Musaeus’s Greek describes the coming twilight as a blue cloak of darkness, “кυανοπεπλων ομιχλειν” (Mus., 114–15), but Chapman modifies this to “Russet clouds.”66 Modestly blushing, Hero becomes “the rubi-color’d maid” (DP, 193), where Musaeus simply describes Hero as “fragrant” (Mus., 133). Though Musaeus does utilize the Greek word for ruddy “ερευθοσαν παρειην” (Mus., 161), which derives from the word for madder, to describe Hero’s bashful glances, Chapman augments Musaeus’s madder reference from one to three types, as Hero’s “Rosy eyes: hid in Vermilion hew” are “Made red with shame” (DP, 229–31).67
As Chapman’s continuation progresses, red turns to purple and to black. Hero and Leander’s desire and shame have begun to mark and seep into their bodies. After Leander departs, Hero’s shameful blushes darken the room in direct opposition to Marlowe’s description of her nakedness as a “false morne”: “And all the aire she purpled round about, / And after it a foule blacke day befell, / Which euer since a red morne doth fortell” (3.176–78). The color purple here, designating her blush, calls to mind the highly expensive dye from the Murex mollusk, found and cultivated in the Greek islands, Tyrian purple. Iyengar has argued that Hero’s blushes function here to “color” her as racial Other through her sin. If we read this poem as an exogamous romance, with Hero on the European side and Leander on the “orient” side of the Hellespont, we might see Hero as having crossed over to the other race, physically colored by her union with the Asian Leander.68
Chapman’s Hero is transformed. No longer a marguerite or pearl (as Marlowe conceives of her), Hero is tarnished, her tears stained black by her mourning veil: “How fast her cleere teares melted on her knee / Through her black vaile, and turned as black as it, / Mourning to be her tears” (3.308–10). We have seen tragic poetic heroines’ bodies streaked with black before: The corpse of Shakespeare’s Lucrece is encircled with blood and a “watery rigol,” some of her blood stained black by sin (Lucrece, 1594). As I interpreted it in Chapter 3, the O of blood around Lucrece’s leaky corpse betrays a truth, serving as mystical evidence of rape, which, in an era long before rape kits and DNA analyses, leaves no physical mark on an ordinary married woman. What truths do Hero’s sooty tears betray? As a European cloth cheaply dyed with unfixed pigments that seep out at the merest hint of water, the veil does more than point out Hero and Leander’s sexual transgressions; it also highlights the precariousness of English mercantile commercial ventures in the Ottoman Empire. Hero drapes herself in her black veil to cover and conceal her shame, but the veil is poorly dyed, and ends up staining her face. The black tears also resemble liquid ink, suggesting that this is alternately a moment of shameful if inadvertent publication of the knowledge that she and Leander have physically consummated their love, too prematurely for the likes of Chapman’s hypocritical custodial gods.69
English merchants trading for the first time with the Ottomans were urged to conceal their missions. In a private letter to the first members of the Levant Company in 1581, Elizabeth’s secretary and spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham urges merchants to let “lies be given out” rather than reveal the reason for their journey.70 If a European competitor gained any knowledge of Anglo-Ottoman trading, he could endanger the whole English enterprise, as William Harborne, the first English merchant and ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, discovered. Harborne boasted too freely about English trading rights, engaged in some indiscreet piracy off the coast of Rhodes, and subsequently lost a number of ships. He was accused of spying and working to ruin the Ottoman Empire. The company nearly lost its trafficking privileges, and Queen Elizabeth wrote the sultan a formal apology.71 Elizabeth describes the affair itself as a deception: “whether it were true or fained, we knowe not . . . but under the colour thereof they have done that, which the trueth of our dealing doeth utterly abhorre.”72 Feigning an activity “under the colour thereof” suggests disguising or mistaking one thing for another, but in the sixteenth century, colouring also referred to the shady mercantile practice of forging signatures in order to avoid paying a particular country’s customs fees. As Alan Stewart explains, to colour was to pass off your own goods as those belonging to another merchant by signing someone else’s mercantile mark on the bill of lading.73 Colouring thus resembles some early modern descriptions of poetic ornament or rhetorical dissimulation (all figurative language in effect) as cosmetic painting.74 In The Arte of English Poesie (1589), Puttenham describes allegory, which he dubs the ringleader of all the other tropes as “a dissimulation under covert and dark intendments.”75 Because metaphor, allegory, and all other figurative tropes “draw” language “from plainness and simplicity to a certain doubleness,” all figurative language is thus “foreign and colored talk.”76 Colors and, by extension, paints and dyes thus become associated with forgery, disguise, and rhetorical dissimulation.
Chapman directly connects deception with colored textiles and Eastern dyes. While violently chastising Hero for attempting to conceal lascivious behavior, Venus—clad in a “scarlet” robe, wearing a “black” headdress (4.240)—conjures a winged, scorpion-tailed, allegorical monster, Eronusis, “Architect of all dissimulation” (4.312). Eronusis has dazzlingly colorful wings: “Cloth had neuer die, / Nor sweeter colours neuer viewed eie, / In scorching Turkie, Cares, Tartarie, / Then shined about this spirit notorious” (4.297–300). As Iyengar reminds us, these colors can also be read as expensive Eastern cosmetics, like the coral, vermillion, and carmine (kermes and cochineal) pounded into powder and rubbed into the cheeks to produce false blushes.77 The same red pigments that were imported for cosmetic use (kermes, brazilwood, gum-lac, coral) were used for paints and dyes. Yet these colors represent not only material cosmetics but rhetorical ones as well, since, taking their cue from the Latin grammar school handbook of classical rhetoric Rhetorica ad Herennium, early modern writers described rhetorical tropes with cosmetic metaphors.78 Eronusis personifies the colores, or the colors of rhetoric described by Geoffrey of Vinsauf in the ad Herennium, but these are foreign rather than familiar colors.79 The marvelous cloth, dye, and pigments produced by the cultures of the East thus mix with the classical colors of rhetoric to create the warning figure of dissimulation. This allegorical figure’s polychromatic dress also might suggest sinfulness, as throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the wearing of various forms of polychromatic textiles was strictly regulated by sumptuary laws. At one point, striped fabric was considered the devil’s cloth.80
Venus uses dissimulation as a notorious exemplum to frighten Hero into owning up to her mistake (pretending to remain a virgin), but Venus’s own multicolored language goes further, branding Hero as a counterfeit coin still in circulation:
Loue makes thee cunning, thou art currant now,
By being counterfait. Thy broken bow,
Deceit with her pyde garters must reioyne, [“pide” 1598]
And with her stampe thou count’nances must coine,
Coyne, and pure deciets for purities. (4.250–54)
Deceit (most likely Eronusis herself, though possibly yet another allegorized concept) is a whorish woman dressed in multicolored clothes, in this case “pyde garters” or bicolored stocking laces. As a counterfeit coin still “currant,” a loose woman circulating as a virgin, Hero upsets the social economy. In this way, she is like a forged merchant’s mark, passing herself off as a virgin when she is no longer one. But this is also a larger, less stable global mercantile economy, one whose currency might easily be swept away by the sea’s currents. Currents is also an Elizabethan word for news or gossip, which ties Hero even closer to dissimulation and rumor.81 Currents are linked homophonically and orthographically here to currants (the dried “Corinth” grape from Zakynthos), which further highlights Hero’s mercantile connections: for the early modern English, currants were practically the gold standard of Mediterranean commodities.82 Venus’s anti-dissimulation lecture reveals anxieties not only about the circulation of women but about England’s risky economic trading position in the Mediterranean, Aegean, and Black Sea, one that depended upon lying and dissimulative rhetoric and, in so doing, unleashed the real possibilities of counterfeiting and mercantile “colouring.”
Dissimulation has close ties to Virgil’s Fama or Rumor, the multioptic, many winged beast that spreads lies throughout the land in Book Two of the Aeneid and delivers the prologue to Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part Two. But unlike Eronusis, Fama is colorless (like Chapman’s transparent goddess Ceremony, who visits Leander to educate him on the importance of marriage rites). Chapman extends Virgil’s classical image of Rumor to blend the classical rainbow of Iris (messenger to the gods) with rich, contemporary Ottoman pigments. The connection to dyes also implies a connection to ink, made with many of the same imported ingredients, suggesting that Chapman’s reworking of Virgil’s Fama into Eronusis has ties to the vagaries of the printing process. False gossip and rumormongering take on a similar, multihued shape in the landscape of Chapman’s Hellespont, embodied in the character of an overly chatty teenage maiden named Adolesche, who appears in the story of Hymen, which briefly interrupts the main narrative. Jealous of Hymen’s success, Adolesche perpetuates false rumors of his failure and death. The gods punish her with metamorphosis, transforming her into a parrot:
lightning from aboue,
Shrunk her leane body, and for meere free loue,
Turnd her into the pied-plumed Psittacus,
That now the Parrat is surnamed by vs,
Who still with counterfeit confusion prates,
Naught but newes common to the commonst mates. (5.419–24)
Like Dissimulation, the “Parrat” is ornamented with colors, and like Fama, she is covered with “pied-plumed” feathers (5.421). This multicolored plumage represents her deceitful, misleading speech of “counterfeit confusion” (5.423). Of course, parrots are also exotic imports, reaching England from the New World, Africa, and Asia. Like Hero’s circulating counterfeit virginity, Adolesche’s rumors are “common.” The challenge for early modern merchants, then, is to deceive and dissimulate without being labeled “common,” like whores (4.424).83
Dissimulation’s counterpart in Chapman’s poem is the goddess Ceremony, sent to punish Leander for his impetuousness but also to give him hope by urging him to marry Hero. Unlike Dissimulation’s multicolored coat, ceremony’s body is “cleere and transparent as the purest glass” (3.118). Though she holds a “Mathematicke Christall” (3.130) in her right hand, which, when touched with fiery rays from her eyes, abolishes confusion, even Ceremony dissimulates. Clad in a robe embroidered with “strange characters,” Ceremony possesses a face so “changeable to every eye” that “one way looked ill / Another graciously” (3.124–25).
As the tragic outcome gathers force, Chapman’s epic similes gather references to ships, cargo, the vagaries of the weather, and mercantile loss. Chapman’s poem is dominated by imagery of deceitful coloring, but his conclusion connects the lovers’ tragic deaths to English mercantile risk taking. As Hero struggles internally between truthful love and acknowledged shame, her veins become miniature Hellesponts, conduits on which her emotions toss like ships:
Ebb’d with Leander, but now turn’d the flood,
And all her fleet of spirits came swelling in
With child of sayle, and did hot fight begin,
With those seuere conceits, she too much markt,
And here Leanders beauties were imbarkt.
He came in swimming, painted all with ioyes. (3.323–29).
Leander’s physical beauties resemble a ship laden with merchandise, “painted all with joys” (3.329), one of an entire “fleet” of emotions (3.325), beginning a sea battle with Hero’s morals. Hero’s resolution to this conflict is a wish to dissolve the physical limits separating the bodies of the two lovers entirely: “Hero Leander is, Leander Hero” (3.356). But this is Chapman’s deceitful Hellespont, not Marlowe’s watery, pearly one. In the early modern Hellespont, where both Sestos and Abydos were heavily policed, such border dissolution would be impossible. Likewise, in Chapman’s mythological Hellespont, the gods will not permit the dissolution of such boundaries either. The real tragedy of the poem is not that Hero and Leander have engaged in premarital sex but that the gods cannot maintain consistent order over the Hellespont. Once Hero and Leander agree to marry, the gods are appeased, but the lovers die anyway.
When the poem nears its tragic conclusion, Chapman compares Leander’s false confidence in swimming the Hellespont on a stormy night to an “empty Gallant full of form” (6.108), a Dutch merchant who inflates his inexperience with boasting. The Dutch merchant is then compared to an English merchant’s ship in a double epic simile:
A Ship with all her sayle contends to fly
Out of the narrow Thames with winds vnapt
Now crosseth here, then there, then this way rapt,
And then hath one point teacht, then alters all,
And to another crooked reach doth fall,
Of halfe a Burd-bolts shoote, keeping more coile,
Then if she danc’t vpon the Oceans toyle,
So serious is his trifling company,
In all his swelling Ship of vacantry. (6.122–32)
Trapped in the narrow, overpopulated Thames, this ship is unable to reach open water and can only turn around, bumping into other ships. And though inflated with wind, it is empty of cargo. Like the ship struggling to navigate the Thames, overly confident with all its sails raised, “swelling” with “vacantry,” Leander inflates himself with false confidence before plunging into the Hellespont, where, in a return to the language of coloring, he will drown in a literary dye-bath of “floods of inck” (6.133) from Chapman’s pen.
Chapman’s figurative use of ships to describe the hero’s tragic death converts a traditional European poetic reference, the Petrarchan image of the lover as a storm-tossed ship, into a reference to English and European mercantile ventures in the Ottoman-controlled Mediterranean. A number of nations and geographies converge in Chapman’s image of Leander as a ship: Turkey, Italy, Holland, and Britain. Anatolian Leander caught between the Aegean and Black Seas becomes a seafaring Dutchman who inflates his lack of experience with boasting, which metamorphoses into a wind-tossed ship wedged in the narrow London Thames and a Petrarchan simile. Chapman’s conversions are part of a double epic simile, an ancient Greek and Roman poetic technique, which Chapman deftly translates into the imagery of global trade. Metaphors and similes, as Puttenham tells us, are figures of “transport,” shifting meaning from one frame of reference to another. This double epic simile (perhaps triple, if we add the Petrarch reference) literalizes the notion of metaphor as conveyance, as Chapman transports Leander like a ship or imported cargo from Asia Minor to London, by way of Italy and the Netherlands.
Chapman’s simultaneous drowning of Leander in the fictional waves of the Hellespont and in the material textual “floods of inck” (6.133) ties the waters of the Hellespont back to the materials of coloring, staining, and writing. Floods suggests a deluge of tears or spilt ink, and a river, as the Latin root of flood is fluvus, or river. This Hellespont is not only a dark and impenetrable body of water; it also marks its bodies, gilding Leander’s limbs and blackening his skin. If Leander drowns in “floods of inck,” his body will be painted, stained with pigments and resins imported from the East, an emblem of the perils of dissimulation. Though dissimilar in formula (dyes needed a mordant; inks a resinous binding agent), paints, dyes, and inks were all concocted from the same pigments: oak galls for black paint, dye, and ink; kermes, gum-lac, brazilwood, and cinnabar for red.84 Chapman’s “floods of inck” connect the watery and transformative Hellespont to the equally transformative fluid of watery, gray manuscript ink, which will eventually be converted into printer’s ink, the glossy mixture of linseed oil, iron oxide, gum arabic, and Syrian oak galls (the last two ingredients imported from Turkey) that coated the rollers that printed the poem. Chapman’s success means prolonging and reiterating Leander’s death: Leander will also die/dye over and over again in “floods of inck” (6.133) used in the printing process. Just as Leander drowns in the unstable Hellespont, so he is reborn, dyed in ink, to die again in the early modern printing process. Chapman transforms imported commodities of dyes and ink into poetic images that expose the rhetorical and poetic nature of England’s dealings with the East, but he also returns to classical form in order to celebrate them, championing the colors of rhetoric in his poetry, even as his vengeful goddesses warn against them, and converting Homeric and Virgilian similes into contemporary, global ones.
Secret Ottoman dye recipes may have seemed like a panacea to England’s mercantile economy, but this was a fantasy; poetry and rhetoric are the true Latourian mediators in this story. Reading the rhetorical posturing in the correspondence of Queen Elizabeth and Sultan Murad published in Hakluyt’s Principall Navigations, Jonathan Burton illuminates how both rulers engaged in the political rhetoric of dissimulation, stylistically buffing over the differences between Islam and Protestantism in order to unite commercially against their Catholic foes. Ostensibly, both Elizabeth and Murad engaged in the same kind of deception Walsingham calls upon his merchants to do: “from its foundation, England’s policy on trade with the Ottoman Empire depended upon saying one thing and doing another.”85 Games’s historical analysis supports this, viewing the necessary deception of the English in the Mediterranean as strategy that eventually helped the English begin functioning as a global empire.86 What is missing from both Burton’s and Games’s excellent close readings of strategic dissimulation, however, is its connection to early modern literary practice.87 Games’s discussion of English adaptation and disguise has parallels in theatrical role-playing and poetic imitatio, both of which came naturally to poets educated in the Latin grammar schools where imitation and ventriloquism of classical authors were the chief forms of instruction.88 Both Marlowe and Chapman engage in textual imitatio in their versions of Hero and Leander: Marlowe mimics Ovid’s witty sexual puns—Hero is “Venus’s nun” (1.45 and 1.316) and Marlowe’s “rude pen / Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men” (1.69–70), but it does a pretty good job of eroticizing the hidden parts of Leander’s body through enarratio, rhetorical withholding. The most obvious examples of Marlowe’s and Chapman’s imitatio can be found in their uses of double epic similes, which convert Homeric, Virgilian, and Ovidian technopoesis into examples of early modern English virtuosity. Marlowe packs them in, one after another. Over the course of twenty lines, his poem runs through four different epic similes illustrating the dreadful power of Hero’s beauty (1.100–20), comparing it to Phaeton’s solar chariot, the songs of nereids, the moon, and nymphs chasing centaurs over hill and dale. Chapman’s epic similes are layered and enfolded, rather than successive. His comparison of Leander to a Dutch gallant, a London ship, and a Petrarchan simile encloses one simile within another, like a matryoshka.
Though Chapman’s goddesses appear to rail against dissimulation and rumormongering, perhaps they protest too much; perhaps they are merely dissimulating. Dissimulation, gossiping, and inflating one’s speech may be morally wrong, but they are also necessary and unavoidable, not only for early modern English traffic in the Ottoman Mediterranean but for English poets who wish to engage with classical authors and themes.89 In addition to his use of rhetorical coloring, Virgilian Fama, and epic simile, Chapman engages in a deeper act of poetic dissimulation: like an early modern merchant, he “colors” his poem with Marlowe’s mark, slipping his Sestiad divisions and introductions into Marlowe’s text as if they were the first poet’s own and inserting himself in the narrative without directly indicating to readers where Marlowe’s poem ends and Chapman’s begins, except in a hidden elegy. Chapman’s recycling of Marlowe’s imagery between the end of the first poem and the beginning of his own—the play on Marlowe’s “guilty” Hellespont in describing Leander’s gilded limbs, the inversion of Marlowe’s “orient cloud” into Hero’s sunset of purple blushes—“colors” his text as Marlowe’s. Chapman’s only acknowledgment of Marlowe occurs in the unnamed elegy he embeds in his poem, aligning the deceased poet with Leander. Chapman describes the poem as a melding of his spirit with Marlowe’s after death, but he buries this information, enfolding it in the middle of the narrative action:
Now (as swift as Time
Doth follow Motion) finde th’ eternal Clime
Of his free soule, whose liuing subject stood
Vp to the chin in the Pyerian flood,
And drunke to me halfe this Musæan storie,
Inscribing it to deathles Memorie:
Confer with it, and make my pledge as deepe,
That neithers draught be consecrate to sleepe;
Tell it how much his late desires I tender
(If yet it know not), and to light surrender
My soul’s dark offspring, willing it should die
To loues, to passions, and societie. (3.187–98)
Such a moment of epic poetic inspiration ought to appear at the beginning of Chapman’s poem, not hidden in the middle of the story, right after Leander has vowed to obey the rites of the Goddess Ceremony by seeking his father’s blessing and before Hero’s chastisement by Venus and Eronusis. Chapman further conceals this transaction by refusing to draw attention to Marlowe’s name: Marlowe is simply “his free soule” (3.187) and “it” (3.198, 199). The imagery of drinking and drowning furthers the connection between Marlowe and Leander, as Marlowe half drowns in poetic inspiration, “Up to the chin in the Pyerean flood” (3.190). Linking Marlowe to Leander, Chapman characterizes the Muses’ Macedonian Pierean spring of inspiration as a “flood” (from the Latin word for river, fluvius) more like the Hellespont than a small river. Marlowe has “drunke to me” (3.191) his tale, a curious phrase that suggests both that Marlowe offered Chapman the poem as one might proffer a drink and that Marlowe has taken too deep a quaff of inspiration, choking on the waters of his own tale. Chapman refers to both poems as “draught(s)” (3.194), drunk ritualistically to seal a contract, his “pledge” (3.196) with the poet’s ghost. Yet the passage also wistfully longs for Marlowe’s absent poetic guidance: “Tell it how much his late desires I tender / (if yet it know not)” (3.197–98), Chapman shyly admonishes. In this striking passage, Chapman imagines becoming one with his dead muse in a watery poetic marriage of inspiration.
The child of this marriage is Chapman’s poem, his “soul’s dark offspring,” which will, if lucky, assume its father Marlowe’s role and “die / To loues, to passions, and societie” (3.197–98). This passage is echoed later when Chapman admits that his dolorous task is to drown Leander in “floods of inck” (6.133). Drowning Leander necessarily entails drowning Marlowe. There are connections to printing’s fluctuating peregrinations here as well: Chapman characterizes his poem as “dark offspring” (3.197), adopting the language of laborious birth that Elizabethan poets conventionally use to illustrate their manuscripts’ migrations into print. The passage is full of allusions to printer’s ink: “dark” (3.197) evokes Chapman’s inky deluge where Leander drowns, and there is a play on the verb “to die / To loues” (3.198), which indicates not only a sexual consummation but also a thick, black dye-bath of ink. Chapman’s textual coloring highlights the numerous routes a printed text can travel, just like a ship laden with imported goods. Like a merchant ship navigating the currents of the Hellespont, the early modern printed text must travel a watery, uncertain way, always subject to “textual drift.”90 The same challenges that imported commodities faced in the eastern Mediterranean, of plundering, counterfeiting, smuggling, and coloring, are faced by Chapman’s appropriation of Marlowe’s poem in print.
Do Marlowe and Chapman engage in a kind of cultural and historical syncretism? Yes and no. Though both poems embrace historical and geographic synchronicity, neither Marlowe’s nor Chapman’s view of the Ottoman Empire presents an ideal of intercultural cooperation between East and West. As much as they make use of Eastern imports to interrogate Western mores, these poets also emphasize the danger, uncertainty, effort, and deceit involved in England’s Ottoman mercantile enterprises. As several recent scholars of early modern Ottoman history and global trade have suggested, there is a dark underbelly to cultural syncretism in the period: for every example of religious toleration under the Ottoman Empire, there is another one of imperial subjugation.91 Chapman’s and Marlowe’s Hellesponts are precarious waterways. In Chapman’s poem, lies and dissimulation color Hero and Leander’s bodies until they drown in murky waters. In Marlowe’s, Leander nearly drowns when Neptune mistakes him for immortal Ganymede, dragging Leander down to ornament his palace full of plundered, sunken “shipwrack treasure,” which calls to mind early modern descriptions of the arduous labor and scant oxygen experienced by early modern pearl fishers. Yet despite the dangers of the Hellespont’s transformative waters, which suggest the conversion from breathing human into pearly ornament (Marlowe) and masking the truth with lies and dissimulative rhetoric (Chapman), both poems allow the imagery of early modern global imports from Asia and the Middle East to rework classical poetic technique and form in new ways. For Marlowe, oriental pearls allow a celebration of Ovidian libertas, and for Chapman, dyed textiles and texts and mercantile practices of deception are appropriated as the colors of rhetoric, necessary both to early modern Mediterranean mercantile diplomacy and to English poetry. For both poets, the space of the Hellespont is not populated by angry Turkish janissaries, renegados, or Barbary corsairs; the only indication of the presence of early modern global trade is in the poems’ references to Eastern imports. Pearls and dyes were oriental and Mediterranean imports in Musaeus’s Byzantine Greece, as they were in Ovid’s Augustan Rome. But in early modern England, they acquired geographical and material associations with the East through the importation of words associated with their trade, orient and crimson (from Persian and Arabic).
These imports do not disrupt the poems’ classical mythological setting, but the new, early modern global network of associations they create is layered on top of an already layered landscape. The layering of contemporary Orient upon ancient Occident continues when Chapman remediates classical poetics through the rhetoric of Mediterranean mercantile dissimulative practices and the material imagery of inks and dyes. On top of this exoskeleton or hardened pearl, Chapman adds a final layer: his own remediation or coloring of Marlowe’s text.92 Though he ambivalently embeds his invocation of Marlowe’s spirit as his muse deep inside his poem, linking Marlowe’s and Leander’s premature deaths, this can also be read as Chapman’s attempt at textual seamlessness. In the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century printed editions of Hero and Leander, we cannot see the seams or layers separating Chapman’s from Marlowe’s text unless we read closely. Some of those layers have hardened with time: most modern editions of Hero and Leander retain Chapman’s division of the poem into sestiads; most are also printed with Chapman’s continuation, despite their placement in anthologies under Marlowe’s name.93 Today, Chapman’s continuation has been absorbed into Marlowe’s poem. If we read Hero and Leander as a palimpsest or pearl composed of layered times, spaces, and authors, even Chapman’s anxious views of imperial global competition are smoothed out.
Marlowe and Chapman were both writers invested in the project of reconstructing England’s classical literary past with critical regard to the cultural and economic present.94 In Hero and Leander, that present is located not in urban London but at the crossroads of Europe and the Ottoman Empire, on either side and deep within the unpredictable currents of the narrow body of water that keeps them apart. As a growing naval and mercantile power, Britain struggled to compete against far more successful cultures for the right to trade in Asia and the Middle East. Richard Helgerson teaches us that, linguistically at least, English writers saw themselves as a conquered culture struggling to establish their own literary empire, to have, as Spenser wished, “a kingdome of their own language.”95 For Helgerson, early modern English writers achieve this by assembling a composite culled from other European literary traditions and imagined elements of native, pre-Roman “Gothish” culture. Ian Smith, too, contends that even as English writers began the process of defining themselves as culturally superior to “barbarous” non-Western languages and cultures, they were haunted by a past in which their own language was perceived of as “barbarous,” through the lens of classical rhetoric.96 But an alternative composite can be found in Marlowe’s and Chapman’s reworking of classical mythology interspersed with references to early modern Eastern geography and trade. Here, orient pearls, ornaments like rhetorical coloring, and imagery of imported jewels and pigments work alongside classical mythology and poetics, halting and reorienting translatio imperii (the spread of knowledge through empire), which traditionally moves between East and West, by placing the literary authority of the ancient Greco-Roman world on the same plane as late sixteenth-century global trade. Even as English writers looked to escape their own barbarous past, they reframed Roman and Greek literary models with an Ottoman-inflected classical poetics. In the end, Marlowe’s and Chapman’s Hellespont is just as fluid and shifting as imperial Ottoman boundaries and trade routes, affirming the larger Mediterranean as a fruitful palimpsest, while at the same time acknowledging the deceptive rhetorical and poetic practices necessary to engage with it.
