The Gods, what Gods be those that seeke my death?
Wherein have I offended Jupiter,
That he should take Aeneas from mine armes?
Oh no, the Gods wey not what Lovers doe,
It is Aeneas calles Aeneas hence,
– Dido, V, 128
A well-executed cover song with a singular focus on one instrument. Marlowe retells the story of Aeneas and Dido from Virgil’s Aeneid but with a sad spotlight on Dido. One imagines Marlowe’s sympathies with her as he wrestles with the meaning of a tragic episode within the epic. The complete ruin of a formidable queen and the ascension of a spoiled child.
Marlowe begins the play with an image of Jupiter doting on Ganymede; a bombastic parent-child scene. It mirrors Venus’ affections for Aeneas, but without the innocence as Aeneas suffers towards a grand fate. The audience immediately understands not only the gods’ love for their chosen mortals and offspring, but the lengths to which they will go, like parents, to ensure their successes and comforts. In this comparison, at first, I sympathized with Venus and Aeneas, a mother who must guide her son through perilous journeys while Ganymede bounces on Jupiter’s knee and suffers only the boxing of his ears from another god.
However, Marlowe creates an underlying subtext. Gods control the lives of their children and save those children from suffering the consequences of their actions. Yet by saving them, they also prevent them from enjoying their own agency.
But what of those not favored by the gods; or those who serve no other purpose than to ensure the success of the favored? If they save the children from suffering consequences, who then must suffer them?
Marlowe introduces Dido as an elegant and honorable ruler who the audience surely respects. She selflessly harbors Aeneas’ crew, sympathizes with their plight, honors their fallen city, and dignifies them in her own court. Like a mother herself, she says to Aeneas, “Thy fortune may be greater than thy birth” (II, 90) and “Remember who thou art, speake like thyselfe” (II, 100). I immediately wonder if she would have repaired Aeneas’ ships and helped him without the intervention of Venus and Cupid, whose anxiety-ridden decision to ensure this outcome leads to Cupid infecting Dido with an obsessive love for Aeneas.
And what of Aeneas? Marlowe gives him no more depth of character than a child afraid to defy his parents. He does not differ so much from Ganymede in that initial image of the play. He shows the appropriate etiquette to Dido but, like a child, has no power over his own choices and suffers no consequences from them. But Dido suffers greatly. Marlowe pens jarring speeches wherein Dido inflicts the most vile and violent curses on Aeneas for wanting to leave and, in the next breath, begs him to stay.
A once sturdy and noble queen unravels with one exit, which has a chain reaction beyond her own person. Due to the whims of gods who relieve Aeneas from the consequences of his choices, an entire civilization falls crippled. Perhaps Marlowe finds a certain nihilism in this story. The valerous, honorable, and noble of us – those “raised right” – can still fall victim to the inaffectual, short-sighted whims of the powerful who save their children from responsibility.
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