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In book 2 of the Aeneid, its hero, relating the terrible story of Troy's last night, recalls his encounter with a terrified Helen in Vesta's shrine. Convinced that she is primarily responsible for Troy's fall, Aeneas is about to slay her when his hand is stayed by Venus, who announces that Helen is not to blame for his city's ruin: "it is the gods' relentlessness [ldots] that overturns these riches, tumbles Troy." [1] Disclosing to him a nightmare landscape in which terrifying, superhuman figures help the Greeks to destroy the citadel, Venus instructs her mortal son to withdraw from the fray and rescue his family (2.802-39/594-620). As his mother disappears from view, Aeneas sees "[f]erocious forms appear--the fearful powers / of gods that are the enemies of Troy" (2.841-2/622-3).
One might find in this episode an allegory of recent paradigm shifts in literary-historical criticism. Aeneas, the old-style historian, imagines causality in terms that make individuals "loci of consciousness and initiators of action" (Helen has caused Troy to fall); Venus, the newer historicist, lays bare the "social networks and cultural codes, forces of necessity and contingency" to which people and societies are subjected and that "exceed their comprehension or control." [2] One cannot, of course, sustain the comparison very long: in the larger context of the Aeneid, this narrative moment of apparent demystification becomes coterminous with the epic's much larger mystification of historical process--its myth of a manifest destiny, in which Augustan Rome is the triumphant fulfillment of the transcendent workings of fatum. Aeneas must be turned away from enacting his own desire for vengeance so that he and his patrilineage may survive to found a new imperium.
Dido Queen of Carthage strikingly revises the Virgilian representation of the subject of/in history. In the Aeneid, the actions of both Dido and Aeneas are circumscribed by their overdetermined location within the epic of imperial origins. However sympathetically Dido is represented, she is doomed to be a casualty of empire--not only because of the interventions of Virgil's gods, but also because of the teleology of the Augustan master narrative in which she figures simultaneously as a threat to the translation of Aeneas's line to Italy and as genetrix of the Punic Wars. Transforming epic into tragic drama, Marlowe seems to offer a "Dido script" centering upon Dido's subject position, Dido's desires, Dido's will. [3] Marlowe's female prince is no longer simply a victim of Aeneas's manifest destiny and Virgil's epic machinery: her fantasies of absolute agency intermittently threaten to rewrite imperial mythology and literary history.
The fact that he is appropriating and revising a canonical text encourages one to ponder Marlowe's own dramatic agency--to consider what might constrain or inform his (transgressive?) reimagination of the Aeneid as he creates the illusion of a Dido and Aeneas who speak in the first person, who have stepped out of their Virgilian master narrative. Recent work on this play has emphasized Marlowe's entanglement within the colonial discourses of early modern Europe: more than one critic has reappraised the play's representation of the relationship between Dido and Aeneas, its expatriate colonizers, in the larger context of the colonial adventures of Elizabeth I's "New Trojans" and their competitors. [4] My own attempt to historicize Marlowe's rewriting of Virgil will work on a smaller scale, ultimately addressing the material circumstances of Dido's sixteenth-century staging. If Marlowe produces a "Dido script" which threatens to liberate his heroine from Virgil's imperial designs, his most striking modification of Virgil's Olympian machinery is his refraining of Dido's discourses of desire and agency within an entirely uncanonical negotiation of power between his own Jove and Ganymede. I will conclude my reading of Dido's embracing "Ganymede script" by suggesting how it might be fruitfully complicated by some consideration of the play's original performance by a troupe of Ganymedes: the Children of the Chapel Royal at Blackfriars.
THE "DIDO SCRIPT"
Marlowe's drama repeatedly removes the Virgilian subject from history. [5] Virgil's "pius Aeneas" becomes a culture hero through painfully subjecting his will to the larger forces impelling him to the Lavinian landfall, through the gradual suppression of his desires, through the erasure of his agency. Marlowe, however, completely cuts that portion of Aeneas's account of his pre-Carthaginian adventures that describes the steady frustration of his attempts to rebuild a new Troy in territories other than Italy: most of the Aeneid's third book disappears from his hero's autobiographical narrative. The dramatist also suppresses Venus's detailed relation of "Sidonian Dido"'s exile from Phoenicia and acquisition of new territory in Africa, a relation which constructs her, potentially, as a rival colonizer.[6] Other circumscribing foundational narratives, crucial to the framing of Dido's and Aeneas's actions in the Aeneid, are minimalized. On the one hand, the julian/Augustan teleology of Aeneas's adventures vanishe s from Jupiter's prophecy of his eventual success (I.i.89-108); on the other, there are no murals of the Trojan war in Marlowe's Carthage, and Aeneas weeps over a single statue of Priam (II.i.3-15).[7] (It is as if history--and prophecy-- are more narrowly reconfigured on the level of immediate familial relationships.) Even when Venus arranges for Dido to become enamored of her son, she seems oddly indifferent to Aeneas's final destination: once a doting Dido has repaired Aeneas's fleet, she suggests, he may "at last depart to Italy / Or else in Carthage make his kingly throne" (II.i.330-1).
Venus's surprising lack of interest in Rome's manifest destiny has already been anticipated by Marlowe's iconoclastic opening scene, in which Jove courts a pettish Ganymede, unmindful of Aeneas's storm-tossed plight. Marlowe's irreverent treatment of his Olympians (Mercury is first seen on stage asleep, Juno and Venus trade insults like fishwives) offers little sense of the Virgilian numina magni: not surprisingly, Venus's disclosure of the gods' actions during Troy's last night disappears from Marlovian Aeneas's narrative of the sack. The suppression of this episode is...
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