Beyond contested influence: disentangling Marlowe's Dido from the Virgil versus Ovid debate

Abstract

In this essay, we hope to begin a new chapter of Dido criticism that is disentangled from the Virgil versus Ovid debate that has stalled discussions of Marlowe’s play. We apply the modes of imitation that Thomas Greene develops in The Light in Troy to three fire episodes in Dido as the focal point for Marlowe’s imitative practice. We suggest that Marlowe rivals Virgil in Dido by metaphorically burning the Aeneid so that his play can arise from its precursor’s ashes, enacting the ‘shad[ing] off’ into the dialectical mode of imitation that in Greene’s formulation denotes heuristic imitation (43). We begin with Dido and the impasse produced by criticism that uses Ovid and/ or the Ovidian tradition to explain the play’s treatment of the Aeneid. We then enlist so-called pessimistic readings of the Aeneid as another context in which to examine Dido. By applying the flexibility of Greene’s framework to the three fire episodes, we extend Sheldon Brammall’s recent argument that Dido ‘should be regarded as the one, and only, extensive example of a pessimistic reading of Virgil’s epic from the English Renaissance’.