'Mishapen Stuffe’: Pleasure and Restraint in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander

This chapter offers a kinky reading of restraint in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Using kink as an analytic for thinking the pleasures of the poem opens up new ways to understand the poem’s numerous scenes of clinging, locked arms and immobilizing embraces. In previous critical accounts of the poem, I argue, binaristic frameworks of active/passive and penetrator/penetrated have tended to collapse or undervalue certain dimensions of the poem’s erotic play. This paper builds on Jeffrey Masten’s recent philological study of the poem’s language of passion, in which Masten argues that Leander simultaneously takes up positions ofactive, desiring subject and passive erotic object. The chapter is interested in the ways in which a kinky methodology may enliven critical conversations about social hierarchy and sexual normativity in the early modern period, particularly around Marlowe, an author whose work has played such a significant role in the development of queer early modern studies. I bring the work of Margot Weiss and Ariane Cruz to bear on the poem to argue that the poem’s scenes of restraint,capitulation, and yielding perform, as Cruz puts it, “rituals of domination and subordination [that] reveal such positions as not necessarily unstable but rather as unnatural, socially constructed, continually (re)produced, and hence possibly deconstructed and reconstructed.” I have updated the date of acceptance to reflect the date on which revision after peer review was accepted.