When Leander attempts to convince Hero to abandon her vows, he posits an alternative no more in line with Venus’s sexuality than Hero’s virginity. Instead of suggesting the promiscuity of the gods, Leander offers marriage: “virginity, albeit some highly prize it, / Compared with marriage, had you tried them both, / Differs as much as wine and water doth” (1.262–64). Of course, Leander is willing to say almost anything to forward his seduction, but he remains consistent in opposing “fruitless cold virginity” and “single life” with ceremonialized heterosexual partnership (1.317, 321): he calls upon “never-singling Hymen,” praises celebratory “banquets,” and finally asks Hero to perform “Venus’ sweet rites” without clarifying what he imagines those rites to include (1.258, 301, 320). Leander’s ideal of sexuality, which associates the loss of virginity with social rituals, could easily fit within a Protestant ideal of married chastity.71 Even his confusion over whether “some amorous rites or other were neglected” during the lovers’ first sexual encounter can be read within an ideological framework that privileges marriage, though it also alludes to the fact that Hero is eager to protect the last remaining signs associated with her virginity (2.64). Yet she is no longer chaste. In her rosestrewn room, Hero “seeming lavish, saved her maidenhead,” but her renewed vows of “spotless chastity” were earlier offered “all in vain” (2.76, 1.368).
From her first interaction with Leander, Hero’s virginity has seemed both already lost and not yet relinquished. The ambiguity that dominates the poem’s conclusion can thus be traced to the mind and body of Venus’s nun: while critics have been eager to pinpoint when, exactly, the lovers fully consummate their relationship, the precise moment at which Hero offers or loses her bodily virginity remains mysterious. Her internal renunciation of chastity, on the contrary, leads to immediate linguistic, physical, and emotional signs. Marlowe identifies her as “Chaste Hero” just as she silently acknowledges Leander’s appeal: “‘Were I the saint he worships, I would hear him,’ / And as she spake those words, came somewhat near him” (1.179). Hero quite literally makes the first move, and Leander responds by touching her hand. “These lovers parlèd by the touch of hands; / True love is mute, and oft amazèd stands. / Thus while dumb signs their yielding hearts entangled, / The air with sparks of living fire was spangled” (1.185–88). This emotional entanglement has more immediate and tangible effects than the lovers’ explicitly sexual interactions: before the encounter, Hero is chaste; after, she has “yielded” and vainly attempts to recover her formerly “spotless chastity” (1.330, 1.368). In early modern discourse, as we have seen, virginity and chastity—two terms that Marlowe uses almost interchangeably—had meanings that transcended marital status and the physical condition of the hymen. This is certainly true for Hero, and Marlowe queries the meanings of virginity in both individual and social contexts through his portrayal of her nearly instantaneous loss of conceptual chastity and her far more gradual physical transformation.
The social construction of Hero’s virginity as a religious choice that simultaneously creates and justifies her singular autonomy survives even after she has entertained Leander’s overtures. For the reader, if not the people of Sestos, chastity and virginity thus seem largely meaningless by the end of Marlowe’s poem. Chastity is only identifiable from within—Hero knows when she is no longer chaste and futilely renews her vows to Venus in hopes of regaining her chastity—and yet is defined and interpreted by a community of observers. To be considered chaste, then, Hero may privately break her vow of perpetual virginity, but she must, as Susan Frye has written of Elizabeth, remain publicly “remote, self-sufficient, and desirable.”72 Within ancient Sestos, where she performs her devotional identity, Hero’s chastity is a sign of her social positioning rather than her bodily purity. She is, in this sense, somewhat like Elizabeth, and Patrick Cheney has argued that, through Hero, Marlowe assails “the sanctity of the Queen’s palisade of chastity” in his critique of “Spenser’s Elizabethan cult.”73 Cheney reads Marlowe reading Spenser, and, as a result, he offers a nearly allegorical interpretation of the first sestiads of Hero and Leander that does not account for the fact that the meanings of virginity and chastity remain contested through the end of Marlowe’s poem.74 While Cheney recognizes the cultural power of chastity in the late sixteenth century, his focus on “the merits of Spenser and his writing of England, especially with respect to England’s queen and her erotic cult of chastity” obscures other political contexts in which the ideological conflicts associated with chastity were relevant.75 Hero, like the many virgins of The Faerie Queene, reveals that chastity could be a flexible tool for literary representation—one that might glance at Elizabeth’s conceptual dominance while also invoking the social and religious positioning of women other than the Virgin Queen. Chapman’s poem goes further, not by restoring “a Spenserian vision of love and marriage within the epic context of English nationhood”—for, as we have seen, this vision was always deferred in The Faerie Queene itself—but by critiquing Hero’s religious position and explicitly positioning the lovers outside a Protestant ideological framework.76
Chapman allegorizes doctrinal conflict in his continuation of Hero and Leander, thereby making the subtext of Marlowe’s poem explicit: while Marlowe encoded various interpretations of chastity in Leander’s clumsy seduction rhetoric, Chapman ventriloquizes a Protestant position through the goddess Ceremony, who advocates state-sanctioned matrimony. Ceremony interrupts Leander’s postcoital reverie when she arrives in his chamber leading Religion, with “Devotion, Order, State, and Reverence” as her shadows (3.120). She “sharply did reprove / Leanders bluntness in his violent love; / Told him how poor was substance without rites” (3.145–47). The “amorous rites” Leander worried over in Hero’s bedroom were in fact neglected, and Ceremony envisions a society overrun with “rank corn” and “meats unseasoned” should such “civil forms” be abandoned (3.149–51). Chapman’s poem celebrates marriage as a communal activity rather than a private handfast ceremony and positions individual relationships within a network of mutual responsibility.77 Leander easily decides to marry after his visit from Ceremony, but Hero remains torn between her religious duties and her love for Leander. She decides that she “was singular too much before: / But she would please the world with fair pretext” and “still proceed in works divine” while continuing a sexual relationship with Leander (4.193–94, 204). Hero, in other words, chooses hypocrisy and dissembling: she hides her broken vow from the people of Sestos and continues to perform the religious duties associated with her position as Venus’s nun. But her devotion is no longer primarily directed toward Venus; instead, “her religion should be policy, / To follow love with zeal her piety; / Her chamber her cathedral church should be, / And her Leander her chief deity” (4.178–81). Love makes Hero into the idolatrous nun that Leander accused her of being in Marlowe’s poem, but he has taken the place of virginity as her “idol,” and religion has become her coverture (1.269).78 Protestants argued that the pretext of religious devotion served a similar function for recusant women such as Clitherow, who faced the accusation that “it is not for religion that thou harbourest priests, but for harlotry” (Mush 414). Under the cover of religion, Hero hides a relationship that threatens the ideological system that Ceremony urges Leander to uphold. Chapman’s allegory thus literalizes the religious and political issues to which Marlowe alluded in his more flexible and ambiguous depiction of Hero.
Chapman’s Hero is more fully incorporated into her society, and her priest-like office provides her with the authority to openly defy Venus and undermine the religious and social system of which she is a part. She officiates at a marriage ceremony for “her consort vowed / In her maid’s state”—Hero’s fellow votaress, Mya—that elides distinctions between vowed virginity and married sexuality (5.35). The wedding of Alcmane and Mya allows Hero to “covertly … celebrate / With secret joy her own estate” (5.9–10). She continues to perform the role of Venus’s nun but uses that position to support an understanding of virginity that positions it along a continuum that eventually results in marriage, just as Spenser did in The Faerie Queene. Here, too, the transition from virgin to wife prompts formal disruptions: