Dido Queen of Carthage

Marlowe's Sources

Greeks & Romans

The great classical stories of Dido and Aeneas would have been familiar to many of Marlowe's audience, certainly those who had undergone anything more than the most basic level of school education. The oldest extant accounts of Dido are from Greek writers in the third century BCE, who refer to her as Elissa. When her husband Sichaeus was murdered by her brother Pygmalion, she fled from Tyre to the north African coast, obtained land from local King Iarbus via an ingenuious use of a bull's hide, and founded the city of Carthage. The besotted Iarbus demanded marriage, and then threatened invasion, but the exemplary and honourable queen committed suicide rather than tarnish the memory of her husband.

Before his death in 19 BCE, Virgil wrote the Aeneid, his epic poem telling the story of Aeneas and adding some very Roman twists to the original Greek tale of Dido. The plot is very much under the direction of the Roman Gods, with Aeneas, who is destined to found Rome, blown off course to Carthage where Juno and Venus ensure Dido and he fall in love. But Jupiter intervenes, sending Mercury to remind Aeneas of his original mission. The dutiful Trojan forsakes his love, and sails for Italy. Distraught, Dido commits suicide via pyre and sword.

Writing very shortly after Virgil, Ovid (who was very fashionable with Marlowe and his contemporaries) added his own slant in The Heroides. This included an imagined suicide letter (Epistle VII) from Dido to Aeneas in which the latter is portrayed much less sympathetically and much more the betrayer. The narrative source for Marlowe's play is very much Virgil, but some commentators sense perhaps a degree of general Ovidian influence at play.

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro (70BC-19BC) was one of the finest Classical Roman poets, and he is renowned for three major works: the Eclogues, the Georgics, and his final work the Aeneid, not quite finished at his death, which tells the story of Aeneas. After the dramatic events of 44BC which saw Julius Caesar assassinated before his followers, his adopted son Octavian Caesar (later Augustus) and Mark Antony regained power by defeating Brutus and Cassius. Virgil is thought to have become part of the circle of Maecenas, political advisor to the new emperor. The Aeneid in some respects attempts to legitimise the Julio-Claudian dynasty, tying it to Aeneas and Troy. Virgil was en route to Greece in 19BC with Augustus when he caught a fever and soon died.

The Aeneid was written by Virgil over the last ten year's of his life. It is a complex poem written in 'heroic hexameter', and legend has it that Virgil crafted just three lines a day. Although substantially finished, Virgil still planned further work on it: some lines are incomplete, and he was perhaps unhappy with certain sections and planned rewrites. After his premature death, Augustus ordered Virgil's Aeneid be published with as few amendments as possible, contrary to the author's alleged wish that the unfinished work be burned.

The epic can be divided into two main sections:

• Books I to VI tell the story of Aeneas' journey from Troy to Rome via Carthage, and are modelled on Homer's Odyssey;
• Books VII to XII tell of Aeneas' battles in Italy leading to the foundation of Rome, and are modelled on Homer's Iliad.

Aeneas appears in the Iliad, but Virgil takes this wandering character and his loose association with the foundation of Rome, and built his nationalistic epic around those disparate threads. There were many contemporary editions of Virgil's work in Latin, and the poem and subject matter had been translated, retold and adapted by many other writers. The most popular contemporary English translation of the Aeneid was that by Thomas Phaër (Books I-IX, 1558), completed by Thomas Twynne (1573).

Marlowe's Adaptation

Virgil's Aeneid provided Marlowe with the following core narrative for his dramatisation:

Book I:

• Aeneas' arrival in Carthage following the storm at sea orchestrated by Juno;
• Jupiter assures Venus that Aeneas will be saved in order to build Rome;
• Venus' meeting with her son;
• the substitution of Venus' other son Cupid for Aeneas' son Ascanius;
• the warm welcome accorded to the Trojans by Dido.

Book II:

• Aeneas' account of the fall of Troy.

Book IV:

• the conspiracy of Venus and Juno that leads to the storm and the tryst between Aeneas and Dido in the cave;
• the intervention of Jupiter after Iarbus' appeal;
• Aeneas' leaving Dido;
• Dido's suicide in a self-made funeral pyre.

But perhaps more interesting still for the Marlowe scholar are those elements which the dramatist has himself added. Marlowe's play is far more than a translation exercise. As well as some editing down of speeches, and rearrangements for dramatic purposes, the following plot elements are wholly Marlowe's creation:

• the exchanges between Jupiter and Ganymede at the start of the play;
• the sub-plot involving Anna's love of Iarbus;
• the first attempt by Aeneas to leave Carthage without Dido's knowledge, an action that does little to enhance his character in our eyes;
• the scene with the nurse and Cupid;
• the suicides of Anna and Iarbus that follow Dido's own death, additions that may seem a little over-theatrical to the modern audience.

Tucker Brooke's1 summary of the Marlovian reworking contributes to his hypothesis that the play may have been born out of an initial version during Marlowe's University days with later significant amendment. "Parts of the play follow the corresponding lines of the Aeneid with schoolboy slavishness, whereas the borrowed material is elsewhere altered with a freedom and insight which evidence a mature judgement and no small dramatic skill."

Acts I and V of Marlowe's play are most closely reliant on Virgil, where some of the lines are direct translations. Act II with the description of the fall of Troy also selectively uses the Aeneid. Act III elaborates on some small incidents in the source, whilst Act IV is mostly Marlowe's own plotting. Even where Marlowe is most reliant on Virgil, he is rearranging his source material and modifying the context to suit his own ends. Modern commentators agree that the play is far more than an exercise in translation. "Marlowe transforms the Virgilian story. In Dido, Marlowe aspires beyond imitation: he writes not as Virgil, but as himself."2

Ovid and Homer

Ovid, of course, was a favourite of Marlowe and whose influence pervades all his works. Aeneas and Dido appear in Metamorphoses and Knutowski3 identified many incidental Ovidian influences in passages of Marlowe's Dido. Douglas Cole4 further suggested that Marlowe's sympathy for Dido owes more to Ovid's characterisation than to Virgil. Oliver5 is firm in his view that Ovid (or more specifically Arthur Golding's translation into English which was published in London in 1567) was not used as a direct source.

The extent and form of any Ovidian influence on Marlowe where he diverges from Virgil has been much debated by commmentators. This ranges from "the inadequacies of Aeneas" through aspects of the action to the "emotional and imaginative landscape of the play". Lunney provides a summary of these views, and concludes that the play's "relationship with both Virgil and Ovid is more complicated than is often described. One salient point is that Marlowe is also rewriting Ovid's Heroides as Ovid had rewritten the Aeneid." She also notes that Marlowe diverges from Ovid in some aspects of Dido's characterisation. "Like Ovid's Dido, Marlowe's is more articulate than Virgil's and more eloquent than either".6

Marlowe may well also have been familiar with Homer's Iliad. There was a copy of the Iliad in Greek in Gresshop's King's School library. Latin translations were likely also available to him at Cambridge. The first English translation of Books I-X by Arthur Hall had been published in 1581.

Contemporary Publications

The books of the Aeneid used by Marlowe were well known to Elizabethan scholars in their Latin form, for they were part of the Grammar School and University curriculum. Indeed, Marlowe's headmaster at the King's School had two editions of Virgil's works in his library. Oliver7 cites the sixteenth century text Pub. Vergilii Maromis opera of Willich (Jodocus Willichius) as another likely example and asserts that Marlowe's Latin would have been "more than adequate" for translating Virgil, and indeed we have a few of Virgil's lines in their original Latin included in the play text.

The English translations of the Aeneid that would have been available to Marlowe included:

• Gawyn Douglas, Eneados (1513) - Scots translation of Virgil's Aeneid [Wikipedia | Project Gutenberg text];
• Henry Howard, Certain Bokes of Virgiles Aenæis turned into English meter by the right honorable lorde, Henry Earle of Surrey (London, 1557) - a translation of Books II and IV [EEBO text];
• Richard Stanyhurst, The first foure bookes of Virgil his Aeneis translated intoo English heroical verse by Richard Stanyhurst (Leiden, 1582) [EEBO text];
• Thomas Phaër & Thomas Twynne, The whole .xii. Bookes of the Æneidos of Virgill. Whereof the first .ix. and part of the tenth, were conuerted into English Meeter by Thomas Phaër Esquier, and the residue supplied, and the whole worke together newly set forth, by Thomas Twyne Gentleman (London, 1573) [EEBO text].

Oliver's assessment,8 however, is that Marlowe demonstrates no indebtedness at all to the first three, whilst he merely "could conceivably have borrowed, or remembered, one or two unimportant phrases" from Phaër.

Earlier Productions

There are records of two earlier productions of plays based on the story of Dido:

• Edward Halliwell staged a play entitled Dido at Cambridge before Queen Elizabeth in 1564 which has not survived;
• William Gager's play of the same title (and again in Latin) was likewise performed at Oxford in 15839 before the royal party.

There is no evidence of Marlowe's play being influenced by either of these plays.10