By Ruth Lunney
A 2,000 year old story. A 400 year old play. An edition for today.
After more than fifty years, there is a new Revels Plays edition of Christopher Marloweâs Dido, Queen of Carthage. This is the first single-text scholarly edition of the play in English. H.J. Oliverâs 1968 Revels shared a volume with The Massacre at Paris. This new Dido also offers the first comprehensive account of the play since M.E. Smithâs monograph in 1977.
The new volume, edited by Ruth Lunney, is an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and theatrical practitioners. It is informed by new research, as well as being accessible, informative, and practical.
Christopher Marlowe wrote the play, and Thomas Nashe was not the co-writer. The 1594 title page got it wrong. These are the conclusions of a joint project with Hugh Craig which analysed both verbal and quantitative evidence. Oliverâs âNasheismsâ cannot be relied upon for proof, despite being largely unchallenged for more than fifty years. On this, see my online glossary http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1416114 . The edition includes a condensed version.
The edition also challenges the recently accepted wisdom about Didoâs place in the repertory. The play responds to the themes and preoccupations of the early 1580s childrenâs court plays of Lyly and Peele rather than to those of the adult plays of the late 1580s like Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. Yet it is probable — because of the fortunes of the childrenâs companies — that Dido was not performed until the late 1580s, a history similar to Lylyâs Galateaâs, which was written by 1585 but not performed at court until 1588.
Challenging, but also challenged. The issue of sources caused a deal of editorial angst. Dido, Queen of Carthage is based on three books of Virgilâs epic poem, the Aeneid, written in the first century BCE. The critical debate is longstanding: what does Dido owe to Virgil or Ovid or medieval texts or sixteenth-century plays? And, to further challenge an editor, there were all those potential readers who havenât studied Latin.
Didoâs relationship with its sources is complex and variable, extending beyond narrative detail to other dimensions of influence: emotional, visual, tonal, and rhetorical. These considerations â and the sheer quantity of relevant material â ruled out relegating the sources to an appendix. Instead, the edition records the connections as they occur in the play text, with detailed line-by-line analysis of similarities and differences. This is supplemented by suggestions for further research and by selective quotation from classical and medieval texts. Readers are thus provided with the information to explore source relationships for themselves. As for the Latin quotations, they are brief and chosen for relevance, but also as interesting in themselves: a striking image, a memorable sentiment, an insight into character or culture. Latin without tears.
The edition is committed to opening up the text to more diverse interpretation and performance. It features an accessible play text, lightly punctuated for ease in reading and speaking. There are no colons or semicolons in the play text for the novice to hesitate over, and spelling has been thoroughly modernised. The play text has benefited: simplifying the quartoâs insistent punctuation has liberated the verse. The rhythms have become more flexible, the tones more variable.
As in its approach to sources, the edition encourages student initiative and research. It does not provide all the answers but is generous with suggestions, with references and reading lists to explore allusions or discover more about the playâs rich cultural contexts. These include the long tradition of rewriting Virgil for new audiences, the playâs awareness of contemporary literary culture, the texts and practices of sixteenth-century education, and the centuries-old debates on sexual behaviour and morality, on royal duties and authority.
Dido is a text worth teaching. The most recent volume of the Journal of Marlowe Studies, on teaching Marlowe, included several essays featuring Dido. These described approaches ranging from political origin stories to rhetorical tropes to different assessment methods.
Dido opens cultural windows. Yet it is also and importantly a play. A significant feature of this new Revels edition is the attention paid to performance, from discussions of 1580s childrenâs drama and early performance to detailed accounts of modern productions and a list of nearly thirty Didos since 1950.
The edition considers the implications of writing for performance, revealing Dido as a play of possibilities, open to varying interpretations and performances. Marloweâs version of the story is erotic, provocative, and potentially transgressive: the gods behave very badly, the hero Aeneas unheroically, and Queen Dido unconventionally. In its own time, Dido was revolutionary, for its experimental blank verse, but also for its refusal to moralise. The exhilarating promises of love are set against the dismal certainties of loss, the horrors of war against the longing for home and identity. The personal and political intersect in an uncertain world subject to forces beyond human control.
A 2,000 year old story. Virgilâs Aeneid has been culturally significant for centuries. In time and retellings, his vision of imperial destiny became sixteenth-century imperial dreaming and then (as in the splendid RSC production in 2017) twenty-first-century imperial consequences. Dido herself has had a continuing cultural presence, whether as the exemplar of chastity or lust or grief, as the monarch and city builder, or Didone abbandonata. Like Helen, that other legendary queen, Dido is always becoming what we want, or need, her to be.
A 400 year old play. Marloweâs Dido, Queen of Carthage is a key text, located at the intersection of several fields of study. Literary scholars and theatrical practitioners need a new scholarly edition that provides reliable evidence about the play. But others will benefit too: researchers in areas such as culture, authorship, pedagogy, rhetoric, translation, and classical reception.
An edition for today. Didoâs time has come, with accelerating interest, critical and theatrical in the play. Indeed, the first twenty years of this century have seen five major productions. All of them, of course, feature in this edition.
Dido, Queen of Carthage
by Christopher Marlowe
Edited by Ruth Lunney