Marlowe’s Dido: Virgilian or Ovidian?

CRITICS agree that Aeneid 1, 2, and 4 are the principal source for Marlowe’s Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and that the playwright was an accomplished translator of Latin.¹ And yet there is much about Dido that seems un-Virgilian, for it often embellishes the Aeneid in ways that appear to flout the high seriousness of the epic. A strong critical strand has formed around Dido’s treatment of the Aeneid that looks to Ovid for an explanation of Marlowe’s embellishments; as Patrick Cheney puts it, there is critical agreement that ‘Marlowe relies on Ovid as his most recurrent strategy for rewriting Virgil’.² This strand of criticism, which began in 1962, has constructed a Virgil/Ovid binary that currently dominates criticism of Dido and has become increasingly influential in studies of...