The Second Part of Hero and Leander

The minor poet Henry Petowe (1575/6–1636?) does not seem to have been aware of George Chapman’s plan to continue Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. He seized upon the first printing Blount’s edition and the same year produced and published his own continuation. Whereas Chapman was more faithful in his adaptation to Musaeus’ work (and vastly diverged from Marlowe in tone), Petowe affirms, in his epistle “To the Quick-Sighted Reader”, that he has found the story’s long-lost source, an Italian book which he obviously made up to present his own invention. Petowe was evidently capitalising on the widespread interest in the posthumous publication of Marlowe’s poem. Both in the paratexts (there is also a dedication to Sir Henry Guilford) and in the text, Petowe lavishes praise on Marlowe’s lost genius and portrays himself as a humble imitator in a manner that goes beyond usual authorial protestations of modesty.

  Everything Petowe writes is basically absent in Musaeus. Hero becomes a princess of Sestos so beautiful that Venus as well as Juno envy her and Jupiter must intervene to rescue her from distress. But distress reaches her: the duke of Sestos, Archilaus, falls head over heels for her. She resists his advances and he banishes her lover, Leander. Archilaus grows so desperate that when Hero rejects him again, he dies apparently because he could not satisfy his lust. Euristippus, his brother, imprisons Hero blaming her for Archilaus’ death, and she must die unless a champion arrives to defend her honour. The oracle of Delphos reveals to Leander the danger and comes to rescue her in the disguise of a mysterious knight (who tests Hero’s chastity). Inevitably, Euristippus is killed and the two can enjoy a happy ending. At the end of their lives, the god transform them into two pine trees.

  As one gathers from this summary, we are miles away from the world evoked by Musaeus and Marlowe but haunts this text which has set the story quite firmly in the world of chivalrous romance and occasionally borrows phrases from Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (see Taylor 1977). The poem is written in couplets of iambic pentameter but also features three ‘mini-poems’ within it: Hero’s lamentation while in prison; Leander’s lament while in exile; the Oracle. This was Petowe’s first publication: he was made free of the Company of Clothworkers on 13 August 1600 and went on working as a scrivener and a clothworker (see Sokol 2008), as well as writing romances and occasional poetry.

Works Cited

Sokol, B.J. 2008. “Petowe, Henry (1575/6-1636?)”. ODNB https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/22044 (Accessed 14 August 2024).

Taylor, A. B. 1977. “‘Shakespeare’s Ovid’: Golding’s Metamorphoses and Two Minor Elizabethan Writers”. Notes and Queries 222: 133-4.

Braden, Gordon. 1978. “The Divine Poem of Musaeus”. In Id., The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies, 55-153, 263-69. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Crathern, A.T. 1931. “A Romanticized Version of Hero and Leander”. Modern Language Notes 46: 382-5.

Shannon, G. P. 1929. “Petowe’s Continuation of Hero and Leander”. Modern Language Notes 44: 383.

Sokol, B.J. 2008. “Petowe, Henry (1575/6-1636?)”. ODNB https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/22044 (Accessed 14 August 2024).

Taylor, A. B. 1977. “‘Shakespeare’s Ovid’: Golding’s Metamorphoses and Two Minor Elizabethan Writers”. Notes and Queries 222: 133-4.

Only one witness survives of this text (USTC no. 513753), which is preserved at the Bodleian Library and has been digitised here: https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1475-1640_the-second-part-of-hero-_petowe-henry_1598. The copy used to belong to Thomas Tanner, Bishop of St Asaph (1674-1735). The book is in quarto format and consists of 30 pages (signatures: A-D4 (-A1)). It does not seem to contain any particular misprints, although occasionally the inking makes certain characters hard to read. A few ornaments are present to embellish capitalised initials and separate sections.