Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage - for I love thee not, – And yet I hate thee not.

Dido, Queen of Carthage by Christopher Marlowe, a romantic comedy* based on Book IV of The Aeneid, is Marlowe’s first play, or his last, or from somewhere in the middle.  I will say what I imagine it to be.

Marlowe translated Ovid’s Amores (published as Ovid’s Elegies in 1599) as a teenager (probably), and I take Dido, Queen of Carthage, or let’s say some early version of it, as another work of the prodigious young classicist.  A substantial number of lines are translations or paraphrases of Virgil, which is suggestive.  Marlowe likely returned to the play – polished, completed – when he became involved with the London theater.

The play was at some point performed by one of the boy’s companies, and published in 1594, soon after Marlowe’s death, with Thomas Nashe as co-author, which he may well have been, or not.  Maybe Nashe fixed it up for performance.

So, the first play, but then again not.

Dido is a marvelous little play, a deft piece of poetry that works as drama, if a little underbaked.  Queen Dido is the only major character who approaches “real.”  She has just been nipped by Cupid’s arrow so that she will fall in love with Aeneas.  Dido and Aeneas have been a bit flirty but now Dido tips:

AENEAS: O, happy shall he be whom Dido loves!

DIDO: Then never say that thou art miserable,

Because, it may be, thou shalt be my love.

Yet boast not of it, for I love thee not, –

And yet I hate thee not. – O, if I speak,

I shall betray myself! – Aeneas, come:

We two shall go a-hunting in the woods;

But not so much for thee, – thou art but one, –

As for Achates and his followers.  (III,ii, 168-76)

The declaration that is too direct, the retraction, the reversal of the retraction, the aside, the date but with friends – the uncaring, manipulative gods have reduced a powerful woman to a teenager with a crush.  The language expresses – I am thinking back to Gorboduc – not just a declaration of a position but emotions as they change, as they are experienced. 

Dido gets most of the language like that (although see below).  She steals the show.

Two other scenes.  The play opens with Jupiter “dandling GANYMEDE upon his knee”, an outrageous, openly homosexual beginning to an otherwise conventionally heterosexual story.  I remind myself that every character was played by a teenage boy.  The scene, not from Virgil, is just a couple of pages.

Another scene, not even two pages, that is Marlowe’s invention is Act IV, Scene 5.  Love-crazed Dido, hoping to keep Aeneas and his crew from leaving Carthage, has directed a servant to kidnap Ascanius, Aeneas’s son, and hide him in the countryside:

NURSE: No, thou shall go with me unto my house.

I have an orchard that hath store of plums,

Brown almonds, services, ripe figs, and dates,

Dewberries, apples, yellow oranges; (ll. 3-6)

And so on, a little blank verse pastoral poem.  Neither Dido nor the Nurse know that Ascanius is actually Cupid in disguise.  Whether it is Cupid’s trick or the effect of his aura, the nurse’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love:

O what mean I to have such foolish thoughts?

Foolish is love, a toy. – O sacred love!

If there be any heaven in earth, ‘tis love,

Especially in women of your years. –

Blush, blush for shame! Why shouldst thou think of love?

A grave, and not a lover, fits thy age. –

A grave! Why, I may live a hundred years;

Fourscore is but a girl’s age: love is sweet. –

My veins are wither’d, and my sinews dry:

Why do I think of love, now I should die?  (ll. 25-34)

Perhaps the idea was to make fun of a comic old lady (played by a boy), but the effect has a lot of pathos, and the back-and-forth of the language, not a speech but more like a dialogue, the nurse changing as she overhears herself, is how it is done.  The great playwrights did not need more than a page to create these terrific minor characters.

My text of Dido is from the 1969 Penguin Classics Marlowe, The Complete Plays.

Next week, the big one, Tamburlaine.  Both parts if plans go well.

I am still walking in France with a donkey but will respond to comments when feasible.

* For the first four-and-a-half scenes.