Marlowe's Dido: Virgilian or Ovidian?

Abstract

CRITICS agree that Aeneid 1, 2, and 4 are the principal source for Marlowe’s Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and that the playwright was an accomplished translator of Latin.1 And yet there is much about Dido that seems un-Virgilian, for it often embellishes the Aeneid in ways that appear to flout the high seriousness of the epic. A strong critical strand has formed around Dido’s treatment of the Aeneid that looks to Ovid for an explanation of Marlowe’s embellishments; as Patrick Cheney puts it, there is critical agreement that ‘Marlowe relies on Ovid as his most recurrent strategy for rewriting Virgil’.2 This strand of criticism, which began in 1962, has constructed a Virgil/Ovid binary that currently dominates criticism of Dido and has become increasingly influential in studies of Marlowe’s poems as well as of his plays.3 In this essay, I suggest that critics may have over-invested in the influence of Ovid to explain Marlowe’s handling of the Aeneid in Dido. I will argue that Marlowe saw dramatic opportunities in more of Virgil’s epic—especially the darker, conflicted elements that permeate the entire poem—than is currently thought to be the case.

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