“Mishapen Stuffe”: Pleasure and Restraint in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander

[print edition page number: 39]

Recent critical conversations in early modern sexuality studies, trans studies, and new philology offer significant methodological shifts in how we read sexual language in the literature of the period.^[1] In particular, these conversations are changing how we think of the construction of the physical, material body in early modern texts and, by extension, what sexual positions are available or legible in these texts. In what follows, I extend these overlapping conversations about early modern bodies and sexualities to a close reading of Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, a poem in which sex is at once obvious and obscured; it is both surprisingly detailed and at the same time metaphorically and narratively perplexing. Using kink as an analytic for thinking the pleasures of the poem opens up new ways to understand its numerous scenes of clinging, locked arms, and immobilizing embraces. This chapter builds [40] on developing methodologies in queer philology that are attuned to the ways that queer sexual practices and positions are encoded at the level of language. A kinky methodology can enliven critical conversations about social hierarchy and sexual normativity in the early modern period, particularly around Marlowe, an author whose work has played such a significant role in the development of queer early modern studies. Marlowe holds a prominent place in the canon of early modern queerness both as a political figure and as a poet and playwright. Famously, accusations of sodomy and atheism were leveled at Marlowe near the time of his mysterious and violent death; as a result, the fragmentary historical record of Marlowe’s life offers insights into the juridical contexts in which non-reproductive pleasures were collocated with other forms of social disorder. Further, sensual and tender relationships between men in his literary work are often thought to exemplify non-heterosexual imaginaries in the early modern period.

Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is one such queer text. The poem retells the Greek myth of the ill-fated Hero and Leander, though it ends abruptly after the sexual consummation of their relationship, prior to the lovers’ tragic deaths. Hero and Leander was first published in 1598 with an editorial dedication identifying it as an unfinished fragment, though whether or not Marlowe intended to extend it before his own untimely death is unknown. The bulk of the poem depicts Leander’s repeatedly foiled pursuit of Hero, which notably includes a detour into the arms of an amorous Neptune, who mistakes Leander for Ganymede. Because the poem so insistently displaces the (hetero)sexual narrative at its heart, it is hardly surprising that there is no small amount of critical debate about how to read Hero and Leander’s bodies and, furthermore, where, when, and how they experience pleasure. In the poem, Hero and Leander’s inexperience with love and sex makes their interactions stilted, often funny, and rarely straightforward. Critics have variously read their sexual encounter(s) as comic failures, genuine acts of mutual pleasure, [41] or violent scenes of trauma. Even as Hero and Leander finally fall into bed together, determining what happens sexually between them requires some amount of decoding: as Gordon Braden puts it, the “key actions are routed through similes.”^[2] For Braden, however, the similes’ “import is clear enough”; that is, they lead “ultimately to the physical back and forth of genital copulation.”^[3] In contrast, Judith Haber finds that the poem frustrates and interrupts Hero and Leander’s progression toward copulation, “effectively … making nonsense” out of the “illusion of inevitability, naturalness, and unity” created by consummation-oriented sexual narratives.^[4] These critics, though they offer significantly different conclusions about erotic pleasure and frustration in the poem, do nevertheless orient their readings of the sexual encounter(s) between Hero and Leander in relation to the goal of genital penetration. Like Haber, I am interested in the ways that the poem confounds conventional expectations regarding sex, but the kinky reading I propose in this chapter deprioritizes both penetration and genital contact in order to offer new understandings of which sexual acts register as such in the poem. This chapter’s first section elaborates how and why the practices of BDSM and kink enable significant re-evaluation of where erotic pleasure is located in the poem and on the body.^[5] Further, as I explore later in this chapter, kinking sex in Hero and Leander precipitates necessary questions about how the erotics of the poem operate alongside and through the language of racial difference. [42]

Negotiating A Scene

One aspect of the poem that animates critical conversations around its erotics is what Georgia Brown terms a fetishistic relation to desire.^[6] For Brown, “the epyllion puts all forms of desire … in a context that is at odds with dominant social and cultural ideologies, largely because desire, in these poems, resists categorization and remains radically polymorphic.”^[7] The poem, Rachel Eisendrath argues, creates an erotic tableau laden with “a confetti of buskins, baubles, trinkets, and toys” and, further, extends its fetishistic gaze to the material bodies of its protagonists.^[8] Indeed, Hero and Leander variously appear as though their flesh recalls pearlescent surfaces, the play of light as it is refracted by jewels, and the gleam of silver and gold in a dimly lit room. The rich “thingliness” of the poem,^[9] for some critics, seems to displace the pleasures of the body in favor of using aestheticized objects as “sexual energy conductors and go-betweens.”^[10] There is something delightfully kinky about the “sparrowes … of hollow pearle and gold” that perch on Hero’s knee like decorative little automata and messengers of Hero’s erotic appeal (33).^[11] The logic of the fetish does not, however, capture the full breadth of the kinky potentialities in Hero and Leander. Here, I shift my focus from the aestheticization and objectification of the bodies in this poem to the affects and sensations that cling [43] to and circulate between bodies. Amid the overflow of rough, gauzy, pliant, slippery textures, sweet scents, and soft sounds amplified against the stillness of night, Hero and Leander fairly bursts with sensory stimuli that demand a more capacious theory of kinky desire and pleasure.

Kink provides a flexible analytic framework for approaching questions of sexuality in the poem. A kinky approach to thinking sex demands that we think pleasure in terms of sensations, affects, and power; furthermore, kink insists on the way in which sex acts are embedded in discourse. Among the most well-known aspects of kink and BDSM is that they enable sexual partners to “play” with power by staging scenes of dominance and submission through roleplay, physical restraints, pain play, impact play, and myriad other practices. Due in part to the common use of the terms top/bottom and Dom/sub within BDSM and kink communities, it is unsurprising that kinky sex is often thought to work through codifying or exaggerating the same active/passive power differential that organizes (hetero)normative vanilla sex. However, kink, as scholars like Ariane Cruz point out, embodies the critique of how differential relations of power are experienced in a sexual scene. Cruz argues that BDSM’s “rituals of domination and subordination reveal such positions as not necessarily unstable but rather as unnatural, socially constructed, continually (re)produced, and hence possibly deconstructed and reconstructed.”^[12] I propose, further, that theorizing kink requires thinking sex radically otherwise than in the binarizing terms of power, domination, and subordination. My hope is that the conceptual framework of kink, broadly speaking, has the analytic potential to complicate the frameworks of active/passive and subject/object that structure the discourse of sexual positionality.

Kink provides innumerable scenes in which sexual positions do not map neatly onto binaristic conceptualizations of power. In BDSM, a frequently [44] cited dictum is that the bottom or sub is the one who “has the power,” despite their position of submission to the stimuli provided by the top or Dom. In practice, this principle takes many different forms, but generally the idea is that the top or Dom’s job is to pay attention to, repeatedly ask for, read carefully, and/or follow the bottom or sub’s physical and vocal cues; in short, the top is responsible for understanding what the bottom needs or wants. Another related principle holds that the bottom gives control over to the top but only within the parameters determined by the bottom. Methods for determining how these scenes take shape are creative and varied. These may be linguistic (as when one uses the words red, yellow, and green to adjust the intensity of a given act); embodied (as when one taps a partner’s body or manipulates an object to communicate); or a combination of both (as when a Dom gives a conditional command to laugh, moan, move, or remain still if one wants more of a specific sensation).

I adumbrate these practices to emphasize that kinky sexual practices are not delimited by a catalog of discrete bodily acts; rather, kinky sex relies on multiple layered practices of communication about and attunement to the shifting parameters of a sexual encounter. Two people may get off on spanking, for instance, but perhaps one enjoys it as tender foreplay, while another prefers it to be framed as an act of discipline for a transgression of some kind. The sheer volume of strategies for communicating levels of interest in specific activities beforehand as well as calibrating tonal shifts within a scene is immense. In such a context, there are multiple answers to the question of who is in the position of power and, furthermore, who directs whose behavior, pleasure, and bodily position. Indeed, though kink involves the pleasures of playing with power, imagining kink to be defined by the mere repetition or re-citation of top and bottom rather misses the point. Furthermore, a kink scene may indeed be negotiated using a list or catalog of acts that all parties agree upon, but enumerating the acts as such does not mark the end of [45] the conversation. As scholars like Jonathan Goldberg and Valerie Traub point out, acts of sex are as determined by linguistic, social, and juridical pressures as they are by any given physical act as such.^[13] Traub’s Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns identifies a tendency among scholars to make sense of vagueness and indeterminacy in early modern literary representations of sex by “attempting to fill in the blanks … to pass or paper over — or attempt to pin down — what is enigmatic or inconclusive.”^[14] Taxonomizing sex in this way attempts to define sex as such — to account for, as Lee Edelman puts it, “the problem of defining an encounter — of determining whether or not it takes place and of knowing precisely in what it consists.”^[15] Kink, I argue, gives us tools for thinking sex otherwise by placing us in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes as the “irreducibly phenomenological” register of sensation, texture, and affect.^[16]

How might a kinky reading practice shift, warp, or stretch what we think is happening in Hero and Leander’s scenes of sex? Restraint, capture, pulling, and grasping are particular acts that seem salient to a kinky reading of the poem. John Leonard describes Leander’s pursuit of Hero as “militaristic,” noting that that while “conceits likening love to a siege were commonplace[,] … Marlowe employs the conceit in an unusual way …. Leander uses real force.”^[17] Rather than besieging Hero with his rhetoric, Leander’s approach takes the form of physical binding or holding. This is true not only of Leander but of Mercury too. In a brief digression [46] from the central narrative of Hero and Leander, Mercury is said to have been so “enamoured” with a woman that he

Did charme her nimble feet, and made her stay,
The while upon a hillocke downe he lay
And sweetly on his pipe began to play,
And with smooth speech, her fancie to assay,
Till in his twining armes he lockt her fast[.]
(399–403)

Elsewhere, images of restraint recur in Hero and Leander’s encounters: we see them

like Mars and Ericine displayd
Both in each others armes chaind as they layd.
(789–90)

We also see Leander “cling” to Hero (798), “inclos[e] her in his armes” (776), and use “his hands … upon her like a snare” (743). In one image, Leander,

like Thebian Hercules,
Entred the orchard of Th’esperides,
Whose fruit none rightly can describe, but hee
That puls or shakes it from the golden tree.
(769–72)

This last image is generally seen as metaphorizing the couple’s much-anticipated moment of consummation, the moment in which Hero and Leander finally lose their respective virginities and experience the pleasure of penetrative sex for the first time.

Such a reading, of course, rests on the use of the verb enter to signify genital penetration. The other verbs in the passage are easily overshadowed [47] by the prominence of the penetrative enter. For readings that treat this scene as an obvious reference to Leander’s penis entering Hero’s vagina, pull and shake are thought merely to extend the central metaphor and to elaborate on the act of vaginal penetration. Leonard, for example, indicates that “it matters whether Leander ‘puls or shakes’ Hero’s fruit … Had the narrator simply likened Leander to one who ‘puls’ fruit from a tree, there would be no awkward question about consent.”^[18] In other words, for Leonard, enter describes the bodily act itself, while pull and shake operate at a further remove from the literal: they offer two potentially conflicting metaphors to depict how Leander enters Hero. On this point, we might recall Traub’s work on the “constitutive role of vagueness, imprecision, and illegibility” in early modern sexual language.^[19] Traub focuses on “those moments when words fail. Not fail to be erotic … but fail in their indexical function to denote the gender of particular bodies, the specificity of particular body parts, and the actual uses to which those parts are put.”^[20] At the level of language, I propose, there is no necessary reason that pull and shake should be understood as any less material to the question of what kind of sex act Leander and Hero are engaged in. Though there may be a seemingly obvious bodily referent of enter, I would argue that there are equally clear ways in which Leander could pull and shake Hero’s body, though these acts may or may not be primarily genital. I do not mean to deny the plausibility of a penetrative reading, but I do want to register the overpowering gravitational pull that the act of penetration exerts upon our sexual vocabularies. I think it worth noting how easily and thoroughly a penetrative verb overwrites the extent [48] to which the other verbs in the lines might register as forms of sexual contact in their own right — particularly since physical restraints play such a significant part in erotic scenes throughout the poem.

In fact, the location of the penetrative act within the scene has drawn the focus of critics and editors dating from the early nineteenth century; most modern texts actually print the lines in a different sequence than they appear in the poem’s original 1598 printing. Arguments for re-ordering the scene rest on a few key actions that are thought to be unnecessarily confusing in the original sequence,^[21] though, as Haber points out, the feeling of confusion arises precisely because the original sequence of lines interrupts a sense of “linear progress to consummation.”^[22] Put differently, the emended lines resolve physical, affective, and even grammatical elements of the scene that remain illegible or nonsensical until they are reoriented toward a central act of penetration. I want to revisit the sequence of these lines, then, within the context of the affective complexity of kink.

The scene begins as Leander appears in Hero’s bedroom, which startles her. Hero, “seeking refuge” (728), flees from him and barricades herself in bed:

And as her silver body downeward went,
With both her hands she made the bed a tent,
And in her owne mind thought her selfe secure,
O’recast with dim and darksome coverture.
(747–50)

She “defend[s] the fort” of bedclothes as Leander strives “in vaine, / Till gentle parlie [does] the truce obtaine” (756, 761–62). This truce is grounds for some critical uncertainty, as critics and editors struggle to [49] make sense of its relation to what happens next. In the original printing, Hero is then said “cunningly to yeeld her selfe” (766), after which we see Leander pull and shake the fruit of the garden of the Hesperides, which I discuss above. Following this,

Leander on her quivering brest,

Breathlesse spoke some thing, and sigh’d out the rest;

Which so prevail’d, as he with small ado,

Inclos’d her in his armes and kist her to.

And everie kisse to her was as a charme,

And to Leander as a fresh alarme.

So that the truce was broke, and she alas,

(Poor sillie maiden) at his mercie was.

(773–80)

In this sequence of events, Braden explains, the truce “lasts for 17 lines and astonishingly covers the triumphant penetration” described in the garden of the Hesperides.^[23] Emended texts therefore restructure the scene so that the breaking of the truce leads directly to Leander’s entry into the garden. This is thought to clarify its role in the scene. Yet if we decouple the truce from the question of who does or does not get to penetrate whom, the truce instead modulates the affective tone of the encounter. The lovers wrestle on opposite sides of the tent of bedding until gentle parlie gives way to breathlesse moments in which Leander lies whispering on Hero’s breast. Kissing heightens the affect of the scene again; the truce is broken and a more forceful or combative form of contact ensues. Hero and Leander physically embody familiar rhetorical conceits that figure love as a siege; their roleplay includes a brief respite within the context of a larger scene of retreat and capture. [50]

To the further perplexity of critics and editors, the 1598 text concludes the scene with a half-finished simile. The poem narrates,

Love is not full of pittie (as men say)
But deaffe and cruell, where he means to pray.
Even as a bird, which in our hands we wring,
Foorth plungeth, and oft flutters with her wing.
And now she wisht this night were never done[.]
(781–85)

The grammatically unfinished comparison to a bird straining against a wringing hand implies that Hero has been overpowered, though in the line that follows, Hero expresses enjoyment; she does not want the night to end. There is both a grammatical and a temporal suspension in these lines that cannot be sutured to a single bodily act; I would argue rather that the 1598 text offers snaring, circling, pulling, shaking, wrestling, quivering, wringing, and fluttering among the multiple “pleasure[s] of this blessed night” (788).

In the spirit of BDSM, of course, we must acknowledge that Hero does not at any point depicted in the poem engage in a clear and consensual negotiation of the scene prior to being ensnared, held, tangled up, captured, and perhaps even wrung. I am reading here in the vein of speculative philology, a term I am borrowing from Marjorie Rubright,^[24] to track how the text might open up alternate, kinky ways to read Hero’s pleasure and the bodily sensations of restraint. Such a project aims to articulate new sexual potentialities within the text while acknowledging the ways in which, seen from another angle, Leander’s use of physical force can buttress dominant and often violent gendered scripts regarding consent. I do not want to diminish the genuine discomfort we might reasonably [51] feel at reading scenes of Hero’s capture as pleasurable because indeed she cannot offer us a fully realized scene of negotiation regarding the specific kinds of bondage and consent play she might be interested in experiencing in a sexual scene. A kinky reading of the poem, however, makes space for the pleasure of restraint and provides apertures through which we can glimpse new sensations, inconsistencies, and illegibilities in the poem’s erotic scenes. Rather than orienting us toward, to borrow a phrase from Braden, “a sequence both physically and psychologically intelligible,”^[25] a kinky reading practice attunes us to the potentiality of the unintelligible.

The Pleasures of Formlessness

In this section, I consider how the poem’s figurations of bodily malleability kink differential relations of power between desiring subject and desired object. The poem’s figures of form and formlessness, I argue, reveal how the poem’s erotic scenes complicate and confound binaristic sexual positions like active/passive, masculine/feminine, and top/bottom.^[26] At the same time, I want to emphasize here that kink is an analytical framework that rewards and invites consideration of its own limitations. Even as a kinky reading unfolds a multiplicity of sensations and acts that produce the capacious pleasures of the poem, such a reading also provides important and necessary opportunities to grapple with how this poem’s construction of desire is imbricated with constructions of whiteness that delimit its pleasures in specific racialized ways.

Prior to the climactic scene of sex, the bulk of the text is devoted to tracing a circuitous and comedic narrative path as Leander strives, often clumsily, to persuade Hero to abandon chastity. Meanwhile, Hero strives, also clumsily, sometimes to rebuff and sometimes to encourage [52] his advances. Leander is “like to a bold sharpe Sophister” as he begins his pursuit (197), mounting an elaborate argument against virginity. He reasons,

Base boullion for the stampes sake we allow,
Even so for mens impression do we you.
By which alone, our reverend fathers say,
Women receave perfection everie way.
This idoll which you terme Virginitie,
Is neither essence subject to the eie,
No, nor to any one exterior sence,
Nor hath it any place of residence,
Nor is’t of earth or mold celestiall,
Or capable of any forme at all.
(265–74)

Virginity, Leander proposes, is formless. It lacks substance and cannot be perceived by any one exterior sence. Hero herself is metaphorized as base material in need of the perfection or completion that requires the impression of a man. Robert F. Darcy connects this passage to the poem’s themes of reading: he argues that

the metaphor also draws a relationship between the process of making something readable by means of a stamp or a printing press and the exertion of ideological influence and control over another person. Leander lets Hero know that his process of amorously reading her body has the capacity to alter her or to bind her through the “impression” that reading enacts.^[27] [53]

In other words, Leander attempts to inscribe heteronormative scripts of desire onto Hero’s body in order to give it a legible form. By the poem’s end, as I argue above, Leander and Hero will go on to enjoy the polymorphic pleasures of playing with power, but at this early point in the narrative, Leander voices a resolutely binaristic understanding of desire, power, and sex.

Despite his stated desires for Hero to allow him to reshape her, Leander is also subject to the shaping influence of being desired. When Leander is first introduced, the poem offers the following description of his body:

Even as delicious meat is to the tast,
So was his necke in touching, and surpast
The white of Pelops shoulder, I could tell ye,
How smooth his brest was, & how white his bellie,
And whose immortall fingars did imprint,
That heavenly path, with many a curious dint,
That runs along his backe, but my rude pen,
Can hardly blazon foorth the loves of men.
Much lesse of powerfull gods[.]
(63–71)

The poet admits that his rude pen can only fail to capture Leander’s beauty. Instead of visual detail, then, the poem offers a tactile account of that body. The passage equates touching Leander with tasting him; it then extends the metaphor of consuming his flesh as Leander’s surpassing beauty is expressed with reference to Pelops, whose shoulder was mistakenly consumed by Demeter and replaced with a piece of ivory. This metaphor, followed by the image of immortall fingars molding the surface of his back, suggests that touching and taking pleasure in Leander’s body have a material effect on the shape of that body. [54]

The evident homoeroticism in this poem — first in this passage, where the poem lingers on the taste of Leander’s flesh, and then in a later scene, when Neptune attempts to seduce Leander while he swims across the Hellespont — is frequently linked to a transposition of gender. For Sujata Iyengar, the description of Leander as “ready for consumption … reverses the expected association of femininity with matter and impressionability and masculinity with the imposition of firm form.”^[28] Abdulhamit Arvas argues that Leander is not characterized as a man but rather as “a boy whose body is in a fluid, in-between phase and space between the man and woman.”^[29] The role played by gender reversal and/or gender fluidity in establishing Leander’s desirability is explicit: he is said to be so beautiful that

[s]ome swore he was a maid in mans attire,
For in his lookes were all that men desire.
(83–84)

Being the object of desire, for Leander, is therefore firmly associated with the rumored perception of him as a maid in mans attire. This is evident when Neptune plies him with kisses and “gawdie toies” (671) as Leander protests, “You are deceav’d, I am no woman I” (676). For his part, Neptune seems to be fully aware that Leander is not a woman since Neptune responds with a parable about a dalliance between a shepherd and a

boy so faire and kind,
As for his love, both earth and heaven pyn’d.
(679–80) [55]

Even so, Leander’s refusal focuses on correcting what he assumes to be a misreading of his gender. The fact that Leander experiences the desire of others as imposing a gender upon him reflects his embeddedness in the discourse of receptive femininity and desiring masculinity, though it also puts him in what we might think of as a trans position with regard to that discourse: Leander, though his attire and self-presentation is that of a man, feels he is nevertheless interpellated as a maid by virtue of being desired by men.

Leander’s desire to make an impression on Hero recurs when he complains:

I would my rude words had the influence,
To lead thy thoughts, as thy faire lookes doe mine,
Then shouldst thou bee his prisoner who is thine.
Be not unkind and faire, mishapen stuffe
Are of behaviour boisterous and ruffe.
(200–204)

In other words, though Hero’s fair appearance seems to invite his desire, she nevertheless resists the shaping influence of his desire. Despite Leander’s efforts to impress or influence Hero, she remains stubbornly mishapen. Here, again, Hero’s body and her virginity frustrate Leander’s desire to press them into the form he wants. At the center of this disagreement is what Leander calls the “faire jem” of Hero’s virginity (247), a phrase that echoes his description of Hero’s faire lookes. The repetition drives home an association between the desirability of fair complexion and a sort of unformed materiality, as when Leander’s white back invites us to imagine the imprint of immortall fingars. The figuration of both Hero’s and Leander’s bodies as impressionable, malleable white material thus becomes a significant piece of the poem’s erotic landscape. Recall that in the blazon, Leander’s body is said to “surpas[s] / The white of Pelops shoulder.” The figurative mutability of whiteness thus defines [56] Leander’s desirability and his availability for consumption. At the same time, Leander’s whiteness is likened to Pelops’s shoulder, which is attached to Pelops’s body only after it is eaten. Whiteness is at once the condition of desire in the first place and, paradoxically, a transplanted property that renders whole the body that is (mis)shaped by desire.^[30]

The poem’s construction of whiteness also inscribes a bodily language of blushing onto Hero and Leander’s skin. Iyengar, in an attentive analysis of the poem’s metaphors of color, argues that the poem constructs “red and white beauty in opposition to the mysterious, inchoate darkness of black skin or clothes,”^[31] as when Hero flees “into the darke her selfe to hide” only to find that Leander is “rather drawne, / By those white limmes, which sparckled through the lawne” (723–26). In early modern English bodily discourse, the ability to blush was thought to be a capacity solely of the light-skinned and, furthermore, a bodily sign that was distinctly English.^[32] For Iyengar, the poem elaborates an “erotic comedy of hermeneutics” in which Hero and Leander’s blushing “reveals that the language of passion is uncalculated and corporeal” even as reading the body also produces the literary possibility of (mis)interpretation.^[33] Blushing, in short, marks places where the body holds meaning, even and especially as the bodily sign produced by the blush is also a site of hermeneutic “collapse.”^[34] Importantly, this system of bodily signs relies on the imagined mutability of the white body, in contrast to what Patricia Akhimie describes as the “seeming immutability of meaning” [57] attached to blackness in the period.^[35] Whiteness, in other words, becomes the unmarked property of the body that means — the body that is figured as the basis of literary production. As Brown puts it, “Hero and Leander, in their total desirability, are both the motivation for discourse, the reason for writing and speaking in the poem, and the product of that discourse. They represent the desire aroused by language, and the desired object fashioned by language. As such, they are synecdoches for literature as a whole.”^[36] The capacity for literariness, then, is not only incidentally metaphorized by whiteness; rather, whiteness appears to be the condition of literary meaning.

As the night of Hero and Leander’s climactic sexual encounter proceeds toward dawn, the poem presents another scene of restraint and foiled escape. Hero is spurred to leave the bed because

she [knows] not how to frame her looke,
Or speake to him who in a moment tooke,
That which so long so charily she kept.
(791–93)

In other words, she does not know what form to adopt in the aftermath of their first physical encounter. Hero’s feeling of formlessness counterbalances Leander’s previously stated desire that sex will impose a legible form onto her [59] body. Further, as she attempts to flee, a mishap misshapes her in a rather literal way. The poem narrates,

And faine by stealth away she would have crept,
And to some corner secretly have gone,
Leaving Leander in the bed alone.
But as her naked feet were whipping out, [58]
He on the suddaine cling’d her so about,
That Meremaid-like unto the floore she slid,
One halfe appear’d, the other halfe was hid.
Thus neere the bed she blushing stood upright,
And from her countenance behold ye might,
A kind of twilight breake, which through the heare,
As from an orient cloud, glymse here and there.
(794–804)

Long-standing critical consensus holds that Hero’s blush suffuses the scene with shame or dread that she feels in response to the loss of her virginity.^[37] This particular bodily detail draws so much critical attention, in fact, that the blush is largely treated as the prevailing sign of what Hero is feeling. I would argue, however, that from the perspective of a kinky reading, Hero’s bodily disorganization, rather than the visual sign of the blush alone, gives a more capacious answer to the question of how the sexual encounter affects Hero’s body. After Leander’s sudden attempt to take hold of her, Hero is rendered Meremaid-like, half-exposed in the mess of bedclothes and limbs as she slides to the floor. Rather than receav[ing] perfection from her sexual experience with Leander, the form of Hero’s body is muddled, at least temporarily impossible to discern. Her face, too, is partially hidden by her hair, which permits Leander only to see her expression here and there. Faced with this incomplete glimpse of Hero’s body, Leander takes “more pleasure … [t]han Dis, on heapes of gold fixing his looke” (809–10). The literal and figurative confusion of the scene opens onto pleasure as Leander once again likens Hero to valuable gold. In this instance, however, her shape is decidedly uncertain, a marked departure from the erotic relation in which Leander once imagined impressing a legible form onto her.

The enduring critical focus on the affective meaning of Hero’s blush is symptomatic of an interpretive framework in which the changeability of skin color is conflated with the capacity of the body to mean and, furthermore, in which the act of penetration defines the affective and erotic contours of a sexual encounter. If, however, we consider the capacity of Hero’s body to hold erotic meaning otherwise, the scene is replete with other tactile intimations of pleasure: the exposure of her feet whipping through the air, the pressure of Leander’s clinging grip, the slithering movement of her body to the floor, the slippery yet restraining tangle of fabric. It is replete, in other words, with kinky sensations, which enliven the scene with erotic potentialities beyond the violently racializing discourse that centers the blush as sign.

I have argued that a kinky reading practice enables us to appreciate more capacious erotic vocabularies in Hero and Leander. By focusing on sensation and affect, I aim to bring forward the ways in which a penetrative paradigm exerts a gravitational pull within scholarship on sex in the poem, orienting our readings by conferring a sense of necessary and natural directionality on Hero and Leander’s roundabout erotic trajectory; but heteronormative penetration is not, of course, the only structuring force at work in the erotics of this poem. As Evelynn Hammonds points out, the black hole of racialized bodies and desires constitutively excluded from the scene of sex shapes the scene of sex through its visible absence.^[38] The penetrative paradigm for thinking sex is inseparable from an ideological matrix in which whiteness indexes the capacity for being touched and shaped by erotic and literary desire. If Hero and Leander blur, straddle, or confound the active/passive binaries that organize desire, their mobility within those organizing paradigms is nevertheless [60] inextricable from the construction of their bodies as white.^[39] To the extent that a kinky reading enables us to trace the contours of non-penetrative scenes of pleasure, it must also demand that we confront the ways in which the very discourse of erotic pleasure can rest upon the violent discourse of skin color, racial difference, and bodily meaning. I want to resist, therefore, along with Margot Weiss, constructing “a formal dichotomy between transgression and reification of social hierarchies.”^[40] Centering the pleasures of nonpenetrative sexual acts and nonnormative forms of embodiment animates complex and even politically urgent conversations, but pleasure, even kinky pleasure, is not unproblematically liberatory. As we theorize the kinky pleasures of Hero and Leander, it is crucial to track how race structures the discourse of sex in the poem — and, further, to track how a “semiotically charged interpretation of bodiliness,”^[41] to borrow Ayanna Thompson’s phrase, becomes folded into the implicitly and explicitly racialized epistemological frameworks available for thinking sex in early modern studies.