The major twentieth-century editions of Marlowe’s poems and translations are those of C. F. Tucker Brooke (Oxford, 1910), L. C. Martin (London, 1931), Millar McClure (London, 1968), Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, 1974), and Roma Gill (Oxford, 1987). Though Gill’s edition is now generally considered the standard one, in fact it is textually less reliable than those of McClure and Bowers. Martin’s and McClure’s editions have modernized spelling; all the editions adjust punctuation to some degree. Modernization is an undeniable advantage for the modern reader, who should be urged, however, to bear in mind that sixteenth-century English was far more ambiguous than the language is today, and updating spelling and punctuation is a form of translation. Many of the ambiguities get lost in the process. To give only a single example, the line in Hero and Leander that in a modernized text reads “Ay, and she wished, albeit not from her heart,” (2.37) is in the original, “I, and shee wisht, albeit not from her hart”—for the sixteenth-century reader, Hero’s wish was seconding Marlowe’s.
There is a major emendation in Hero and Leander that has been incorporated into most modern editions, including the present one. Though the emendation is almost certainly correct, the original reading is so striking that it is worth pausing over. In II.279–300, Marlowe describes the lovers’ first sexual intercourse. Hero, having allowed the half-frozen Leander into her bed, resists his initial attempts to penetrate “the ivory mount.” Through “gentle parley” Leander obtains a “truce,” and then his kisses and caresses enable him to enter “the orchard of th’ Hesperides”; at which Hero “wished this night were never done.” In the original version, however, the first twelve lines follow the last ten; so that Leander’s sweet talk and caresses take place after the initial penetration—it is this, as much as the physical entry into her body, that makes Hero wish the night to last forever. A problem with the passage only started to be noticed in the mid-nineteenth century, and the revision, which first appeared in Tucker Brooke’s edition of 1910, was justified on the grounds of common sense. But Vincenzo Pasquarella, a young Italian scholar working on the textual history of the poem, has questioned the emendation in a forthcoming article, and it is certainly true that the original not only makes sense, but makes a more interesting sense psychologically than the revision.
Perhaps the fact that no problem was noticed in the passage for two and a half centuries reflects not the inattentiveness of readers and editors but a change in the psychology of sex. What persuades me, however, that the emendation is correct is the progression of Marlowe’s metaphors. At line 278, “gentle parley did the truce obtain,” and the truce metaphor continues into the transposed passage, where it is completed: “And every kiss to her was as a charm /And to Leander as a fresh alarm,/So that the truce was broke, and she alas/(Poor silly maiden) at his mercy was.” Leander cannot be free to enter “the orchard of th’ Hesperides” until after this. I regret the loss of the garbled original; and Pasquarella seems to me a very good reader. Common sense is not always the bottom line in editorial protocols.
The greatest single problem in annotating Marlowe for the modern reader is the persistent and complex use of classical allusions. It is not feasible to give a complete account of every classical name every time it appears; but allusions have always been glossed in the Notes in sufficient detail to explain their use in their immediate context. Readers’ requirements differ, however, and for the reader who is concerned as well with the larger contexts of classical myth and history, and Renaissance attitudes toward them, a complete dictionary of classical names has been provided. Thus, in order to understand the point of Marlowe’s reference to Hippolytus in Hero and Leander I.77, it is, strictly speaking, only necessary to know that Hippolytus rejected love. But readers might reasonably wish to have a broader sense of such an allusion, and for this they may turn to the dictionary. Again, the significance of the series of classical names in Ovid’s Elegies, III.v is, for the context, sufficiently elucidated by the fact that they are all the names of river gods and their loves. For the reader who wishes to have a more detailed understanding of the allusions the dictionary provides brief accounts of the individual stories. The inevitable duplication in this method of annotation has seemed preferable either to deleting classical names from the notes entirely, and thereby requiring the reader to use the glossary and notes simultaneously merely in order to understand the sense of the text or, alternatively, to filling the notes with a great deal of detail, which many readers will find superfluous.