Hero and Leander

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In high culture

Literature

• Ovid
  Ovid
  
  Publius Ovidius Naso was a Roman Empire poet known as Ovid to the English language-speaking world, who wrote about love, seduction, and Roman mythology transformation....
   treated the narrative in his Heroides
  Heroides
  
  The Heroides ' , or Epistulae Heroidum , are a collection of fifteen wiktionary:epistolary poems composed by Ovid in Latin elegiac couplets, and presented as though written by a selection of aggrieved heroines of Greek mythology and Roman mythology, in address to their heroic lovers who have in some way mistreated,...
  , 18 and 19, an exchange of letters between the lovers. Leander has been unable to swim across to Hero in her tower because of bad weather, her summons to him to make the effort will prove fatal to her lover.
• Byzantine
  Byzantine Empire
  
  Byzantine Empire and Eastern Roman Empire are conventional names used to describe the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, centered on its capital of Constantinople....
   poet Musaeus
  Musaeus
  
  Musaeus was the name attributed to three Greek poets....
   also wrote a poem; Aldus Manutius made it one of his first publications (c. 1493) after he set up his famous printing press in Venice (his humanistic aim was to make Ancient Greek Literature available to scholars). Musaeus's poem had early translations into European languages by Tasso (Italian), Boscán (Spanish) and Marot (French). This poem was widely believed in the Renaissance to have been pre-Homeric: George Chapman reflects at the end of his completion of Marlowe's version that the dead lovers had the honour of being 'the first that ever poet sung’. Chapman's 1616 translation has the title The divine poem of Musaeus. First of all bookes. Translated according to the original, by Geo: Chapman. Staplyton, the mid-17th century translator, had read Scaliger's repudiation of this mistaken belief, but still could not resist citing Virgil's 'Musaeum ante omnes' (Aeneid VI, 666) on the title page of his translation (Virgil's reference was to an earlier Musaeus
  Musaeus
  
  Musaeus was the name attributed to three Greek poets....
  ).
• Renaissance
  Renaissance
  
  The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe....
   poet Christopher Marlowe
  Christopher Marlowe
  
  Christopher "Kit" Marlowe was an Kingdom of England Playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. The foremost English Renaissance theatre tragedy next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his own mysterious and untimely death....
   began an expansive version of the narrative. His story does not get as far as Leander's nocturnal swim, and the guiding lamp that gets extinguished, but ends after the two have become lovers (Hero and Leander (poem)
  Hero and Leander (poem)
  
  Hero and Leander is a mythological poem by Christopher Marlowe. After Marlowe's death it was completed by George Chapman. Henry Petowe published an alternate completion to the poem....
  );
• George Chapman
  George Chapman
  
  George Chapman was an England dramatist, translator, and poet. He was a classical scholar, and his work shows the influence of Stoicism. Chapman has been identified as the Rival Poet of Shakespeare's Sonnets by William Minto, and as an anticipator of the Metaphysical Poets....
   completed Marlowe's poem after Marlowe's death; this version was often reprinted in the first half of the 17th century, with editions in 1598 (Linley); 1600 and 1606 (Flasket); 1609, 1613, 1617, 1622 (Blount); 1629 (Hawkins); and 1637 (Leake).
• Sir Walter Ralegh alludes to the story, in his 'The Ocean's Love to Cynthia', in which Hero has fallen asleep, and fails to keep alight the lamp that guides Leander on his swim (more kindly versions, like Chapman's, have her desperately struggling to keep the lamp burning).
• Shakespeare also alludes to this story in the opening scene of Two Gentlemen of Verona, in a dialogue between Valentine and Proteus (the two gentlemen in the play):

VALENTINE- And on a love-book pray for my success?

PROTEUS- Upon some book I love I'll pray for thee.

VALENTINE- That's on some shallow story of deep love: How young Leander cross'd the Hellespont.

PROTEUS- That's a deep story of a deeper love: For he was more than over shoes in love.

VALENTINE- 'Tis true; for you are over boots in love, And yet you never swum the Hellespont.

• Ben Jonson
  Ben Jonson
  
  Benjamin Jonson was an England English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satire plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist , and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his Lyric poetry poems....
  's play Bartholomew Fair
  Bartholomew Fair
  
  Bartholomew Fair is a comedy in five acts by Ben Jonson, the last written of his four great comedies. It was first staged on October 31, 1614 in literature at the Hope Theatre by the Lady Elizabeth's Men....
   features a puppet show of Hero and Leander in Act V, translated to London, with the Thames serving as the Hellespont between the lovers.
• It is also the subject of a novel
  Novel
  
  File:2009 stapelweise Neuerscheinungen im Buchladen.JPGA novel is today a long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern Romance and in the tradition of the novella....
   by Milorad Pavic
  Milorad Pavic (writer)
  
  Milorad Pavic is a noted Serbian poet, prose writer, translator, and literary historian.Pavic has written five novels that have been translated into English language: Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel, Landscape Painted With Tea, Inner Side of the Wind, Last Love in Constantinople and Unique Item as well as m...
  ;
• Leander is also the subject of Sonnet XXIX by Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega
  Garcilaso de la Vega
  
  Garcilaso de la Vega , was a Spain soldier and poet. The prototypical "Renaissance man," he was the most influential poet to introduce Italian Renaissance verse forms, poetic techniques and themes to Spain....
   of the 16th Century;
• The story has also been briefly alluded to in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing
  Much Ado About Nothing
  
  Much Ado About Nothing is a romantic Shakespearean comedy by William Shakespeare set in Messina, Sicily. The story concerns a pair of lovers named Claudio and Hero who are due to be married in a week....
  , both when Benedick states that Leander was "never so truly turned over and over as my poor self in love" and in the name of the character Hero, who, despite accusations to the contrary, remains chaste before her marriage. It was also briefly alluded to in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
  A Midsummer Night's Dream
  
  A Midsummer Night's Dream is a romantic love Shakespearean comedies by William Shakespeare, suggested by "The Knight's Tale" from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, written around 1594 to 1596....
   in the form of a malapropism accidentally using the names Helen and Limander in the place of Hero and Leander. The most famous Shakespearean allusion is, however, the debunking one by Rosalind, in Act IV scene I of As You Like It
  As You Like It
  
  As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 or early 1600 and first published in the folio of 1623....
  :

Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and being taken with the cramp was drowned and the foolish coroners of that age found it was 'Hero of Sestos.' But these are all lies: men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

• Sir Robert Stapylton published a translation of Musaeus's poem in 1645, which he republished with annotations in 1647, also including his versions of Ovid's Heroides 18 and 19. His dedication of the volume to 'the Ladyes' expresses the wish that the poem might encourage married women to have sex with their partners: ‘Courtship here is directed to a Sacred end, and onely invites you after our Deluge of bloud …to restore your now unpeopled Country’. Stapylton also wrote a heroic tragedy on the lovers, unperformed, but published in 1669.
• In the same year, William Wycherley published his 'Hero and Leander in Burlesque', a lengthy parody, culminating a tradition of parodic treatments initiated by Ben Jonson. Versions by Alexander Radcliffe, and a scatological treatment of the theme probably by James Smith followed.
• Hero and Leander (Hero y Lleandro) is the title of one of the first preserved works of Asturian literature, written by Antón de Marirreguera
  Antón de Marirreguera
  
  Ant?n Gonz?lez Reguera, better known as Ant?n de Marirreguera was the author of the first preserved literary works written in the Asturian language, the ?Pleitu ente Uvi?u y M?rida pola posesi?n de les cenices de Santa Olaya? , of 1639, that takes the first prize in a poetical contest dedicated to Saint Eulalie....
  .
• Hero and Leander inspired the feat commemorated in the poem, "Written After Swimming from Sestos To Abydos" by Lord Byron. Byron found the swim hard going, and caught a cold.
• Composer Adam Guettel's song cycle Myths and Hymns features the song "Hero and Leander" sung from the perspective of Leander.
• Metaphysical poet John Donne
  John Donne
  
  John Donne was an England Literature in English#Jacobean literature poet, preacher and a major representative of the metaphysical poets of the period....
   composed a two-line poem featuring the famous lovers

Both robbed of air, we both lie in one ground

Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drowned.

• Franz Grillparzer
  Franz Grillparzer
  
  Franz Seraphicus Grillparzer , an Austrian dramatic poet, was born in Vienna....
  's play Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (1831) dramatizes the story of Hero and Leander.
• Herman Melville
  Herman Melville
  
  Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet. His first three books gained much attention, the first becoming a bestseller, but after a fast-blooming literary success in the late 1840s, his popularity declined precipitously in the mid-1850s and never recovered during his lifetime....
   also makes a reference to the myth in his novel, "Mardi," on page 124 of the Northwestern-Newberry edition.
• Chicago
  Chicago
  
  Chicago is the largest city in the U.S. state of Illinois and the Midwestern United States, as well as the List of United States cities by population city in the United States with more than 2.8 million residents....
   director Kit McKay adapted the myth into a puppet show.

Art

Architecture

See also

• HMS Leander
  HMS Leander
  
  Six ships of the Royal Navy, have been named HMS Leander after the Greek hero Hero and Leander:* was a 52-gun fourth rate launched in 1780....
  

External links