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Rich Willis deposited I suggest my emendation of Leander’s response to Hero’s on Humanities Commons 2 years, 5 months ago
I should like to take this opportunity to suggest something Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” tells us. The question of why Shakespeare cites Marlowe in “As You Like It” becomes who are “you” and what is “it” in “As You Like It” breathed abroad. I suggest you are Henry Wriothesley patron to both Shakespeare and Marlowe. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 83 we may over hear Shakespeare saying unto Henry inter alia: “There lives more life in one of your fair eyes Than both your poets can in praise devise.” Marlowe’s praise of Leander’s eyes includes a force in his eyes that he shoots at Hero in his waken’d hate upon revelation of her “false morne”. But as Touchstone tells Audrey, “When a man’s verses cannot be understood”, or when Marlowe’s denouement cannot be understood, because omitted when Marlowe’s “Hero and Leander” is published in 1598 as Walsingham’s “foster child”, “nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child” of invention of Leander as from a Ganymede in “Dido Queen of Carthage” turned, “understanding” feigned by Chapman in “Hero and Leander, An Amorous Poem”, The Six Sestiads by Marlowe and Chapman dedicated to Lady Audrey, “it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room” what with a great reckoning in a little room being a reference to Marlowe’s denouement omitted in verses that becomes Walsingham’s foster child, and replaced in verses dedication to Walsingham’s wife, Lady Audrey.