ESC: English Studies in Canada

IDENTITY AND THE DISSIDENCE IT MAKES: HOMOEROTIC NONSENSE IN KIT MARLOWE’S HERO AND LEANDER M . M O R G A N H O L M E S McGill University I G enerations of audiences, readers, and critics have proved that few species of literary dissidence can rival the unsettling force of Marlovian homoerotic desire.1 Christopher Marlowe’s homoerotic dissidence ranges from a rather mild, titillating naughtiness — as in “The passionate Sheepheard to his love” — to an outright thwarting of English law and custom — as in Edward II. What unites these two instances across a spectrum of transgressions is an opposition to the definition of individual identity through the discourse of exclusive and immutable sexual desire. Nowhere in Marlowe’s oeuvre is such dissidence clearer than in the epyIlion Hero and Leander, a homoerotic poem in the tradition of the 1590s vogue for amorous narratives penned by such other notables as Thomas Lodge, John Marston, and William Shakespeare. Following an outline of the theoretical, critical, and historical contexts perti­ nent to the topic, I hope to demonstrate how the deployment of homoerotic desire in Hero and Leander undermines the production of sexualized personal and textual identities, thereby making nonsense out of so-called “sensible” orthodoxies. A historicized rereading of Hero and Leander that attends to the work’s homoerotic dissidence brings to light the sexual dimension of psychosocial identity construction that is largely obfuscated by the political intrigues at the centre of Marlowe’s more often discussed homoerotic works, Dido Queene of Carthage and Edward II.2Hero and Leander problematizes Bruce R. Smith’s teleological argument, made through reference to Edward II, that Marlowe’s art expresses “the beginnings of a specifically homosexual subjec­ tivity” (23; cf. 223). Rather, the poem’s strategic deployment of the dis­ course of homoeroticism interrogates and destabilizes early modern society’s burgeoning penchant to establish “sexuality” as a principal root of subjective identity. Paradoxically, this fictional, unified self is also capable of denatu­ ralizing, at the level of desire, the authority and processes that engendered it in the first place. By investigating the signs of early modern resistance 151 to normalizations that today are widely accepted in Western society as es­ sential, it is possible not only to revise our ideas of the past, but also to contribute to an ongoing rethinking of current psychosocial constructs.3 Hero and Leander's homoerotic dissidence invades the social construc­ tion of sexualized identity through unruly appropriation and travesty of the symbols of normativizing orthodoxy and tradition. The poem’s dis­ sident strategy manifests an early modern carnivalesque “transgression of signs and symbols” through rearticulations that express “a general ‘refusal of identity’ ” (Bristol 69) — in Marlowe’s case, the identity of “the homo­ sexual.” Homoerotic dissidence in the poem plays on and through what Jonathan Dollimore characterizes as “the paranoid instabilities at the heart of dominant cultural identities” (237). As Hero and Leander reveals, these paranoias are both the means to effect repression as well as to bring about its dissolution. Marlovian dissidence achieves an effect analogous to the desta­ bilization of apparent norms that Judith Butler discusses when she argues that, if undermining is possible, it will occur from within the terms of the law, through the possibilities that emerge when the law turns against itself and spawns unexpected permutations of itself. The culturally constructed body will then be liberated, neither to its “natural” past, nor to its original pleasures, but to an open future of cultural possibilities. (93) In Hero and Leander, Marlowe shows the “law” of sexual identification turn­ ing against itself, thereby disrupting and denaturalizing the production of reified identities that are both the cause and effect of homophobia.4 Criticism of Hero and Leander has generally been characterized by ei­ ther outright erasure of homoerotic desire, or, if it is mentioned, a failure to acknowledge homoeroticism’s dissident potential. While today the for­ mer approach is all but dead, the latter is at the centre of numerous recent analytic endeavours. Robert Logan, for example, takes the homoerotic “in­ cident” of Neptune’s pass at Leander— a scene that is crucial to the poem’s treatment of sexuality and identity — to be...