'Hero and Leander' was published in 1598, and anyone who came across it in a stationer’s shop in Elizabethan London would have known that its author was dead, killed in a brawl in Deptford in 1593. Christopher Marlowe’s sensational life as playwright and spy is matched by the wit, sophistication and eroticism of his eccentric retelling of Ovid’s myth, based on a 6th-century version by Musaeus. Seamus and Mark begin their new series by looking at the playful but often troubling treatment of desire in a poem that contains one of the most explicit depictions of sex in English poetry.

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Further reading in the LRB:

Michael Dobson on the life of Marlowe https://lrb.me/np1marlowe1

Hilary Mantel on the murder of Marlowe: https://lrb.me/np1marlowe2

Charles Nicholl on Faustus: https://lrb.me/np1marlowe3