“Wanton loves, and yong desires”: Clandestine Marriage in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Chapman’s Continuation

Abstract

“Wanton loves, and yong desires”: Clandestine Marriage in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Chapman’s Continuation Katharine Cleland Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and George Chapman’s continuation offer commentary on a controversial Elizabethan social practice: clandestine marriage. After the Protestant Reformation, clandestine marriages became more controversial as they violated not only the tradition of arranged marriages in the upper ranks but also the new marriage rituals of the Book of Common Prayer.1 The ecclesiastical courts could punish those who wed secretly but not invalidate their marriages because the marriage vows, not the church ceremony, resulted in a legally binding union.2 The fact that marriages [End Page 215] performed without a church solemnization were transgressive, but not illegal, resulted in confusion over what constituted both a legitimate and a proper match. In light of this controversy, the paradigm of the Hero and Leander myth—a secret courtship and consummation-would have translated in an early modern reader’s imagination into a story about clandestine marriage.3 In his continuation of the myth, Chapman concentrates on the marriage ceremony, confirming that the issues of heterosexual courtship and marriage were originally at stake in Marlowe’s poem. Recent scholarship, however, has been most interested in Marlowe’s exhilarating tour-de-force of young love and sexuality, with particular attention paid to the latent homoeroticism in the description of Leander and in the Neptune episode.4 By neglecting Chapman’s continuation, we neglect an early modern literary conversation that can shed light on Elizabethan marriage practices and the way in which Marlowe’s poetry is likely to have been interpreted in its own day. Whether or not we consider Marlowe’s poem to be a “fragment,” the difference in the style and tone of Chapman’s continuation suggests that he did not finish Marlowe’s Hero and Leander so much as he responded to it.5 [End Page 216] Just as the issues of love and agency are central to most recent criticism, so do they lie at the heart of the early modern discourse on clandestine marriage. Since mutual consent was the only requirement for a match, entering into a clandestine marriage through a handfasting or trothplight gave couples complete freedom in their marital choice.6 Henry Swinburne’s A Treatise of Spousals, or Matrimonial Contracts outlines the meaning and significance of the spousal vows that could accompany a trothplight or handfasting.7 According to Swinburne, such contracts could take the form of de praesenti or de futuro vows. While the de praesenti contract, or vows spoken in the present tense, resulted in a union, the de futuro contract indicated the promise of future marriage.8 The sexual consummation of a betrothal (a de futuro contract) also resulted in a legal union. While the Protestant ideal of companionate marriage might seem to encourage individual freedom when making matches, private spousal contracts (individually, and one might assume, “freely” negotiated) were considered to be motivated by sexual desire rather than mutual love and the common good.9 In an effort to suppress [End Page 217] the practice, spousal vows were eventually absorbed into the public wedding ceremony (as they are today) to help eliminate the possibility of irreversible, and potentially regrettable, clandestine contracts. Complicating the issue further, the formation of spousal contracts did not have to follow a particular formula. A variety of verbal and nonverbal expressions of love could result in, or at least be confused for, a promise of marriage.10 A lack of witnesses and the ambiguity surrounding the practice could make clandestine marriages of any sort difficult to prove in the church courts. In order to assuage the problems associated with early modern marriage, domestic handbooks and marriage pamphlets circulated as a means to instill normative marriage practices and to contain the agency available to couples when making matches.11 During the Elizabethan period, poetry, particularly sonnets, served as a valuable means through which lovers might carry out courtship rituals.12 Marlowe’s evident rejection of the sonnet craze in the 1590s, however, signifies his resistance to the inactive, and thus effeminate, subject position of the Petrarchan lover.13 Edmund Spenser enfolded [End Page 218] the...