The poem, "Hero and Leander" by Christopher Marlowe, describes the fate of ‘star-crossed lovers’, as Shakespeare might refer to them. The poem describes their beauty, their passion, and their fate, in the most beautiful and elaborate language you can imagine. Professor Arthur J. Harris reads this 48 minute-long epic poem to you with a voice that would rival most Shakespearian actors and with the in site of an experienced professor of Renaissance Literature. Note that this recording was made sometime in the 1990s on a cassette tape recorder.
Click here to listen to Professor Harris' reading of Hero and Leander (48 minutes)
A very handsome young man named Leander and a lovely young virgin named Hero fall in love. They are both so beautiful they are described by Christopher Marlowe as possessing more than human beauty. In fact, he describes Leander as so attractive that even men find him beautiful.
The major problem they face is that the two lovers are separated by a strait of water which keeps them apart. Hero lives in the village of Sestos and is a priestess or nun to Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love. (Aphrodite is the Greek equivalent to Venus, the Roman goddess of love.) As a priestess of Aphrodite, Hero lives in a tower overlooking the straits. Leander lives across the straits in the village of Abydos.
They desperately want to see each other, so they decide that Leander should swim across the straits at night so they can be together. Each night, at the top of the tower, Hero mounts a lamp, which serves as Leander's beacon and guiding light. This method works beautifully throughout the summer.
However, during one stormy winter's night, the winds blow out the lamp, and Leander loses his way. When he has not arrived by morning, Hero knows that something is terribly wrong. From the tower, she looks and searches the shore-line for him, and to her shock she sees that he is dead, torn apart on the rocks. When Hero sees her lover's dead body, she sinks into despair and throws herself off the tower to join Leander in death. Their bodies wash up on shore together, locked in embrace, and are then subsequently buried in a lover's tomb.
