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Christopher Marlowe
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The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
by Christopher Marlowe
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the Rocks,
Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow Rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing Madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of Roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty Lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and Ivy buds,
With Coral clasps and Amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.
The Shepherds’ Swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me, and be my love.
from https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/christopher-marlowe/the-passionate-shepherd-to-his-love
"The Passionate Shepherd" is a poem written by the English poet Christopher Marlowe, likely in the early 1590s. It was one of the most popular and widely read poems of the English Renaissance; many poets, such as Sir Walter Ralegh, wrote responses praising, criticizing, and poking fun at it. In the poem, the speaker tries to seduce someone whom he refers to simply as his "love." In order to seduce this person, he describes a rural life full of intense sensual pleasure—but unpolluted by sin or sorrow. The resulting tableau is both beautiful and idealized: in his attempt to seduce his "love," the shepherd leaves out much of the complication and sorrow that mark real relationships.
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” Summary
Why don’t you come live with me and be my lover? We will enjoy all the pleasures that can be found in valleys, groves, hills, fields, woods, and steep mountains. And we’ll lounge on the rocks and watch the shepherds feed their sheep near shallow rivers—and we'll listen to birds sing sweet songs to the waterfalls of those rivers. And I will make you a bed made out of roses and thousands of sweet-smelling flowers. I will make you a cap of flowers, and a dress with myrtle leaves sewn through it. I will also make you a gown from the finest wool, which we will shear from our beautiful lambs. I will make slippers with linings to keep out the cold; their buckles will be made of pure gold. And I will make a belt made out of straw and ivy buds, its clasps made from coral and its studs made from amber. So if these pleasures sound good to you, why don’t you come live with me and be my lover? The shepherd boys will dance and sing for you every morning in May. If these pleasures convince you, then come live with me and be my lover.
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” Themes
Theme Love and Pleasure
Love and Pleasure
"The Passionate Shepherd" is a poem of seduction. In it, the speaker tries to convince his listener to come to the country and be his lover. The speaker makes his case on the basis of the luxuries they will enjoy together in the countryside, describing it as a place of pleasure that is at once sensual and innocent. He wants his "love" to simply sit on the rocks for a while and appreciate the scene, without worrying about their responsibilities. Although the joys the speaker describes may be fleeting, they are still rich and seductive. Listing them, the speaker makes a case for embracing the pure pleasure of love and rejects the idea that doing so might have negative consequences.
For the speaker, the countryside is a very sensual place. He is attentive to the materials and objects one finds in rural life: “straw,” “ivy-buds,” “beds of roses,” and “fragrant posies.” In his fantasy, he brings these objects into contact with the body of his “love”—making them into garments and beds. The fact that the speaker uses these objects in a suggestive fashion implies his underlying desire: he seems to want to take their place and caress his “love,” to pay close and sensual attention to the lover's body.
As its title suggests, “The Passionate Shepherd” is thus a passionate poem, full of sexual tension. But, diverging from traditions that associate sexuality with sin and death, the poem portrays this sexuality as an innocent. There seem to be no costs associated with the pleasures the speaker describes in his seduction. Instead, the countryside is presented as a place of play and sheer joy, song, and dance. The speaker refuses to admit any problems, troubles, or downsides into the world he imagines occupying with his “love.” Instead, he urges his love to just live in the moment, enjoying the sensual pleasures he lists for their own sake, without worrying about the consequences. Indeed, the speaker offers these delights as an escape from responsibilities and consequences.
Of course, this isn't necessarily a realistic depiction of love, and some readers may feel that the poem is too idealized. In that vein, Sir Walter Ralegh, a contemporary of Marlowe, directly objects to the speaker of “The Passionate Shepherd” in his own poem “The Nymph’s Reply.” It's arguable that because the speaker of Marlowe's poem does not acknowledge any costs or problems associated with love, he fails to seduce the reader; this love is too perfect to be real or meaningful. Even so, the poem's speaker is steadfast in his argument: love, essentially, is pleasure, and is meant to be enjoyed without guilt.
Theme Country vs. City
Country vs. City
It's important that the speaker locates the pleasures he describes in a specific landscape of "valleys, groves, hills and fields, woods or steepy mountain." Though this landscape is described in great detail and with considerable feeling, it is located at an implicit distance from the speaker’s “love.” The poem implies that this "love" lives in the city, with all its political entanglements, pollution, and grit. The poem thus draws an implicit contrast between the city and country, making the former dirty, busy, and unpleasant, and the latter peaceful, harmonious, and filled with pleasure.
The speaker begins the poem with an invitation: "Come live with me." The word "come" suggests that his love must cross some distance before being able to enjoy the pleasures the poem describes—which means that this "love" must live somewhere else. In keeping with the poem's general refusal to describe anything negative or unpleasant, the speaker doesn’t name this other place. Yet the implication is clearly that the beloved lives in an urban environment that contrasts with the speaker’s idealized depiction of rural life. This urban place must not be particularly pleasant; if it were, the speaker probably wouldn’t be so adamant that he and this "love" go live elsewhere!
Indeed, given that the speaker lists specific things about life in the country in order to entice the lover to leave the city behind, readers can assume that the city doesn’t share any of these positive attributes. For example, where the countryside is filled with "melodious birds," the city likely screeches with cacophonous noise. While in the country the lovers can sit idly and watch shepherds tending to their flocks, in the city they’d probably have to toil away at work. In the country the "love" could wear a gown of fine wool, gold-buckled slippers, and a belt woven from straw. None of these lovely, delicate clothes would hold up in the dirty city streets.
In the tradition that Marlowe was working in—called the pastoral—poets pose the innocence and pleasures of country life against city life, where they locate all the politics and problems that usually affect people. The speaker's presentation of the countryside here follows the ideals of the pastoral tradition: it is an innocent and pleasure-filled space that acts an implicit critique of the city. The poem thus argues for a return to a simpler, purer way of life embodied by the countryside.
Of course, rural life was certainly not as easy as the speaker makes it out to be, and the poem notably lacks any mention of, say, what happens when winter comes. In this sense, its depiction of rural life is as innocent and (perhaps purposefully) naïve as its vision of love.
Theme The Nobility of Pastoral Work
The Nobility of Pastoral Work
One of the rural pleasures that the speaker lists stands out from the rest: in the poem’s second stanza he describes the pleasure of watching “the shepherds feed their flocks.” Indeed, the title implies that the speaker himself is also a shepherd. This reference locates the poem within a long tradition of European poetry: the pastoral. Pastoral poems usually focus on shepherds, presenting their work as innocent and joyful—though, in reality, herding sheep is difficult and dirty work. Like the poets who came before him, then, the speaker suppresses much of the reality of rural life and agricultural labor. Instead, he presents an idealized, uncomplicated view of a complicated place. That he focuses specifically on shepherds suggests not only that the countryside is a more pleasant place to live than the city, but also that there is a unique nobility to the kind of work that brings people closer to nature.
After its first stanza, the poem consists of a long list of rural pleasures. This list opens and closes with shepherds, the traditional central figures in pastoral poetry. In lines 5-6, the speaker notes that he and his love will watch “the shepherds feed their flocks.” This is a strange way to seduce his “love,” and one might wonder why watching other people work would be particularly enjoyable. The answer to this question, the speaker implies, is that shepherding is different from other kinds of work. It is not particularly painful or unpleasant; instead, it is enjoyable to do and watch. In lines 13-14, the speaker even suggests that he and his "love" own sheep themselves, since he refers to gathering wool from "our pretty Lambs." It seems, then, that this idyllic scene brings the speaker and his "love" directly into this noble, joyful work.
After listing the many rural pleasures that he and his beloved will enjoy, the speaker returns to the image of shepherds, now describing them as being in a happy, celebratory mood: they are singing and dancing. They seem in no way wearied or worn down by their work; instead, they participate with gusto in all the rural pleasures that the speaker describes. Pastoral work, then, seems to be something energizing and fulfilling. The implication is that the shepherds aren’t exhausted after their days because they find some sort of satisfaction and meaning in their labor—which, the poem implies, is largely absent from the ignoble toil of those living far from nature.
Even as the speaker celebrates the beauty and nobility of working in a natural setting, he overlooks the fact that that work is actually difficult and exhausting. To seduce this “love,” the speaker keeps glossing over the truth—though whether the speaker does so purposefully is up for debate.
Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Lines 1-4
The first four lines of “The Passionate Shepherd” establish the poem’s broad subject and its approach to this subject. The speaker begins by directly addressing someone, whom he refers to simply as his “love,” without specifying the person's gender. The entire poem will be addressed to this "love." This is an instance of apostrophe. It makes the poem feel intimate and direct: the speaker is not addressing a broad, general audience. Rather, he is trying to convince someone of something specific: he is trying to seduce the person he addresses, to convince his "love" to follow him to the countryside. The speaker’s language here subtly suggests some differences between himself and his “love.” While the speaker is, as the poem’s title suggests, a “shepherd,” someone who works with sheep and lives in the country, his “love” is not. This person has to be convinced to "come" to the country—which implies that they do not live there already.
The poem’s second line suggests how the speaker will try to seduce his “love.” Once they are in the country together, they will try “all the pleasures”—every delight and joy offered in rural settings (the speaker goes on to list those many settings in lines 3-4). Right away, the speaker depicts the countryside as a pleasurable space: he does not mention the downsides of living in the country, or the difficulty of working on a farm or with livestock. It's clear from line 2 that his portrayal of life in the country will be idyllic and idealized—perhaps too much so.
As if to underline this focus on pleasure, the writing itself—here and throughout the poem—is unusually musical and rich in sound. The poem begins with a strong alliteration on the /l/ sound in the first line: “Come live with me and be my love.” (This line will eventually become a kind of refrain for the poem, recurring in lines 20 and 24). This /l/ sound is carried through the next several lines, becoming consonance as it continues: “And we will all the pleasures prove…” Although these lines are wide-ranging in content (particularly lines 3-4), they are knitted together by this unifying sound.
These lines are further organized formally: each line is in an easy iambic tetrameter; the quatrain is divided into two rhyming couplets, with strong end-rhymes. Later in the poem a clear pattern of enjambment and end-stop will develop, alternating line by line between the two. But here that pattern has not yet developed; while lines 1 and 4 are end-stopped, lines 2 and 3 enjambed. There is thus a tension between the rhyming couplets, which serve as sonic units, and the grammar of the quatrain, which crosses the boundaries of those couplets. This gives the poem, right from the start, a sense of looseness: though it has underlying formal architecture, it is not fussy or overly precise. Instead, in its informality, it imitates the easy-going country life it describes.
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” Symbols
Symbol Shepherds
Shepherds
Shepherds are, literally speaking, people who tend sheep, monitoring the flocks as they graze. They are charged with protecting the sheep from wolves and bringing them in from the pasture at night. In the pastoral, a genre of poetry that stretches back to ancient Greece, shepherds are often invoked as key figures. Pastoral poems describe the lives of shepherds and their work, and they are (like this poem) often written in shepherds’ voices.
These poems generally treat shepherds as symbols. The shepherds often stand in as symbols for all kinds of work: most broadly, they represent labor itself, the work that human beings to do feed and clothe themselves. Additionally, because of their close connection to animals and nature, shepherds also symbolize the natural world and humans' connection to it.
Finally, because the shepherds in pastoral poems often engage in song and dance, they also serve as symbols for poets themselves. (Indeed, in many pastoral poems, the shepherds seem to do far more singing and dancing than they do sheep-herding). In this sense, the shepherds present a kind of convenient screen: the poets can articulate their desires and their political complaints in someone else’s mouth, someone distant from the political complications of city life.
Symbol Myrtle
Myrtle
Myrtle is a flowering plant. It is native to the Mediterranean, where the pastoral genre of poetry originated. It does not naturally grow in England, the country where Marlowe wrote "The Passionate Shepherd." Invoking it in this poem thus signals the speaker's allegiances: he wants his "love" to imagine Greek and Roman—not English— landscapes, and moreover, he makes it clear that he intends those landscapes to be the idealized ones of pastoral poetry.
Indeed, myrtle is often invoked in Greek and Roman poetry and ritual. In Greek mythology, for instance, the plant is sacred to Aphrodite, the goddess of desire and love. The plant thus serves as a double symbol in "The Passionate Shepherd." On the one hand, it symbolizes desire and love itself, serving as a subtle reminder that this is a poem of seduction. On the other, it captures in a symbol the poem's cultural and poetic allegiances: this is a poem which owes a lot to Greek and Roman poetry and, with its invocation of myrtle, acknowledges those debts.
Symbol Lambs
Lambs
Lambs are young sheep. In western literature, lambs often serve as symbols for innocence and purity. For instance, Jesus Christ is often referred to in the Bible as the “Lamb of God:” he is not only God’s child, he is also innocent and pure. After his resurrection, Christ becomes the "Good Shepherd," with the Christian Church as his flock. In this way, the congregation takes on—if only aspirationally—Christ's innocence and purity. The lambs likely function in a similar way here: the speaker invokes them in part as a way to emphasize the innocence and purity of rural life. (Indeed, one would generally shear wool from a full-grown sheep, not a lamb, which makes the speakers mention of lambs all the more significant.)
Symbol Ivy
Ivy
In the Renaissance, many poets used ivy as a symbol for marriage between a man and a woman. In this symbol, the ivy symbolizes the female partner in the marriage; she is paired with an oak tree, which represents the male partner. The ivy grows up the trunk of the oak tree; the oak tree provides support for it. The traditional symbol thus makes certain assumptions about the gender roles of each partner in the marriage: the male partner provides a sturdy support; the female partner depends on that support. (Indeed, the ivy would die without the oak tree.)
“The Passionate Shepherd” does not make explicit reference to this tradition, but its early readers would’ve likely heard its echoes: the ivy and the oak were almost proverbial in Marlowe's culture. The speaker invokes that tradition in a potentially subversive way. If his “love” is a woman—as many readers assume—then she has taken on the traditionally male role of the oak tree, supporting the “ivy buds” by wearing them on her body. If, on the other hand, his "love" is a man, then the speaker and his love are mimicking the symbols of heterosexual love and infusing them with homoerotic energy.
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
Hyperbole
Over the course of “The Passionate Shepherd,” the speaker lists an astonishing number of gifts he plans to “make” for his love: caps, kirtles, gowns, slippers, etc. In isolation, none of these gifts are particularly extraordinary; the speaker seems sincere in his desire to give them to his “love.” But as the gifts gradually accumulate (and as the poem dissolves into a loose, disorganized list of such gifts), the speaker’s promises become hyperbolic; they seem to go beyond what anyone could reasonably give to another person.
In fact, the speaker is so eager to please and seduce that he ends up undercutting his own argument: the reader may feel that he is less than sincere because his extravagant generosity exceeds the boundaries of credibility. Similarly, the use of hyperbole may undermine his account of the natural world. As his list of gifts builds, some readers may find themselves wondering if there isn’t something—anything—unpleasant about the world where he wants to live with his “love.” The use of hyperbole thus complicates the speaker’s presentation of rural life and pleasure: the speaker is so idealizing that he calls attention to the fact that he is not being entirely honest; it becomes clear that important (and unpleasant) aspects of rural life have likely been left out of his account.
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” Vocabulary
Prove Steepy Madrigals Kirtle Pull Coral Amber Studs Swains
To test or try.
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Form
“The Passionate Shepherd” is not in a specific form, though it does employ meter and rhyme in a consistent fashion. The poem consists of six quatrain stanzas, and each quatrain contains two rhyming couplets. The poem does not use rhyme in a highly structured way: with the exception of the poem’s refrain—which repeats in lines 1, 20, and 24—each couplet introduces a new rhyme. Finally, each line of the poem is in iambic tetrameter, a consistent but light and playful meter.
The poem thus has an underlying formal architecture. But this formal architecture is not imposing or overwhelming; it does not dominate the reader’s experience of the poem. Instead, readers will likely find the poem to be loose and light, almost unstructured. After the poem’s initial stanza, where the speaker issues an invitation to his “love,” each of the next five stanzas lists the pleasures they will find in the countryside. These stanzas do not have a narrative or logical order; they could easily be reversed or reorganized without changing the content or the argument of the poem. As a result the poem feels less like an elegant and seductive argument (like some other poems of seduction, such as Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”) and more like an overflow of passion and enthusiasm. The poem’s loose form contributes to this sense of energy and disorganization: since it does not place strenuous structural demands on the speaker, he can let his passion run free in a way that reflects the easygoing country life he describes.
Meter
“The Passionate Shepherd” is written in iambic tetrameter—a relatively relaxed, playful meter. In this way, it's different from its close cousin, iambic pentameter, which is usually used for stately, heroic, and serious topics. (Indeed, Christopher Marlowe is one of the poets who pioneered the use of iambic pentameter in his tragedies, paving the way for poets like Shakespeare and Milton to take it up as the form for their grand meditations). Marlowe’s decision to use iambic tetrameter instead of pentameter thus shows what he thinks of the subject matter of “The Passionate Shepherd:” it does not quite deserve a grand, dignified treatment. Instead, this poem and its subject deserve a more relaxed and humble meter.
In keeping with the poem’s playful tone and relaxed meter, “The Passionate Shepherd” contains a number of metrical substitutions. These metrical substitutions are rarely thematically significant, but they do suggest that the speaker feels relaxed and informal as he makes his invitation to his “love.” For instance, there are a number of lines that include first foot trochees, like line 6:
Seeing | the Shep- | -herds feed | their flocks,
This is a relatively common metrical substitution in iambic verse. Similarly, the poem often uses feminine endings; the third stanza contains three such endings in lines 9, 11, and 12:
And I | will make | thee beds | of Roses
And a | thousand | fragrant | posies,
A cap | of flow- | -ers, and | a kirtle
Embroi- | -dered all | with leaves | of Myrtle;
Notice also that line 10 in that same stanza is actually trochaic tetrameter rather than iambic tetrameter.
These substitutions do not substantially upset the rhythm of the lines, but they do suggest that the speaker is not particularly concerned with metrical precision; he feels no need to show off his poetic skill. Indeed, doing so might undermine his image as a “shepherd,” a country person impatient with the polished sophistication of the city.
Rhyme Scheme
“The Passionate Shepherd” is written in rhyming couplets, with two couplets to a stanza. Its rhymes are serial. In general, each couplet introduces a new rhyme, so the poem is rhymed:
AABBCCDD
… and so on.
There is one exception to this general rule: because the poem has a refrain—which repeats inlines 1, 20, and 24—the poem repeatedly uses rhymes with the word “love.” In each case, these rhymes sound like slant rhymes to modern ears. However, to Marlowe and his early readers, they would’ve been perfect rhymes: there has been a shift in English pronunciation in the intervening centuries, which has changed the way the “o” in words like “love” is pronounced. The poem’s rhymes are thus strong, direct, and unforced, and in only three cases does the speaker use a two-syllable word in the rhymes. The rhymes thus reflect the speaker’s confidence and his unpretentious approach; he does not bother with fancy rhymes.
However, there are some places in the poem where the speaker’s unfussy approach to meter and rhyme cause some complications. For example, line 21 is a strong line of iambic tetrameter, and it ends with a single-syllable rhyme word, “sing.” That rhyme word bears the stress in the line’s final foot. But the next line, line 22, has a feminine ending. Here the rhyme sound falls in the unstressed final syllable of the line:
The Shepherds’ Swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning
This is called an apocopated rhyme. It is a very rare kind of rhyme; normally, poets rhyme stressed syllables with stressed syllables, and one can see why. The result is awkward and strange: rhyming a stressed syllable with an unstressed one creates an unexpected and perhaps unwanted feeling of interruption in an otherwise smooth poem. Here, the speaker seems to lose control of the poem momentarily, its polish coming off in a moment of passion.
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” Speaker
As its title specifies, the speaker of “The Passionate Shepherd” is a shepherd: someone who works with sheep, supervising them as they graze. There is a whole genre of poetry written in the voices of shepherds—a genre called the pastoral.
The poets who work in this genre are rarely much interested in the work that shepherds actually do or the reality of their lives; instead, they use the shepherd as a cipher or a mask, behind which they can express their desires or their political complaints. “The Passionate Shepherd” follows in that tradition. The shepherd of its title does not say much about his life or work; instead, he spends much of the poem articulating erotic desire, using euphemism and metaphor to disguise it. The speaker of the poem is thus only ostensibly a shepherd: more likely, the speaker is a lover who takes on a shepherd’s disguise to create some distance between himself and his desire.
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” Setting
“The Passionate Shepherd” has two settings, one explicit and one implicit. The speaker spends much of the poem describing life in the countryside, focusing on its simple pleasures and humble luxuries. Since the speaker of the poem is, according to the poem's title, a “shepherd,” it seems reasonable to assume that he lives in the countryside, and that the world he describes is the setting of the poem.
But the speaker’s “love” does not live in the countryside—he or she lives somewhere else. This person does not know much about the country and thus needs the speaker to describe it at length. Most likely, the speaker’s “love” is a city person. The city is thus an implicit second setting for the poem; it's almost as if the speaker is talking about the country from somewhere far away. Indeed, one might imagine that the speaker has traveled to the city to beg his “love” to return to the countryside.
Literary and Historical Context of “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Literary Context
“The Passionate Shepherd” is a pastoral poem. The pastoral is one of the oldest and most prestigious genres of western poetry—ironically enough, since it usually describes humble and unpretentious scenes. Most pastoral poems take place in rural settings and their speakers are shepherds, people who work with sheep. The shepherds reflect on political conflict, express sexual desire, and meditate on the nature of work—all at a safe distance from urban life, with its complicated political demands and its powerful figures, who might take offense at a more direct poem.
The first pastoral poems were written by Greek poets like Theocritus in the third century B.C.E. Theocritus and his peers often seem self-conscious of their place in the history of Greek literature: they know that they will not equal the achievement of poets like Homer or playwrights like Sophocles, so they do not dare take on the epic and mythological themes that occupied those writers. Instead, they present their work as humble reworkings of the themes and tropes of their predecessors’ writings. For example, where Homer dedicates a long passage of the Iliad to describing the hero Achilles's shield—made by the god Hephaestus and inscribed with elaborate scenes representing human life—Theocritus in his first Idyll spends a long time describing the engravings on a wooden cup. In the pastoral form, there is a palpable sense of having fallen from an epic grandeur to something much less impressive.
Pastoral poems were widely written in the ancient world, with poets like Virgil taking up the genre. However, after about 300 C.E. they fell out of style. Until the Italian poet Sannazaro revived the genre nearly a thousand years later, almost no one wrote pastorals. The revival of interest in pastoral poetry emerged from a broader interest, during the European Renaissance, in reviving classical language, texts, and modes of thinking.
In English poetry, the pastoral became one of the most important modes, with key figures like Spenser and Sidney writing and publishing pastoral poems in the 1580s and early 1590s—just as “The Passionate Shepherd” was being written. The poem thus participates in a broader set of experiments designed to revive a classical genre and make it clear that poetry written in English could equal classical poetry.
Historical Context
“The Passionate Shepherd” was likely written in the early 1590s, toward the end of Christopher Marlowe’s life. Marlowe was a playwright and poet—perhaps the most famous playwright of his day. (He was murdered in a bar-room brawl in 1593, just as Shakespeare was beginning to surpass him in popularity).
Marlowe’s life was marked by considerable political turmoil. Though Elizabeth I was Queen of England, she was beset by foreign adversaries—she barely escaped being swept off the throne when the Spanish Armada attacked in 1589—and she had no heir to take her throne when she died. (She died some ten years after Marlowe, in 1603).
Though the 1590s were a period of relative peace and prosperity in English life, they were nonetheless bracketed on both ends by political uncertainty—uncertainty that the English state tried to control by closely monitoring its citizens. Marlowe himself was the object of persistent surveillance and was tried at one point for blasphemy. (He was accused of being an atheist, in part because of his play Doctor Faustus. This was a serious crime in Elizabethan England). There are even rumors—unsubstantiated ones—that Marlowe’s murder was not an accident, but rather an assassination, ordered by Elizabeth I or one of her lieutenants. Given all of this political controversy and uncertainty, it is easy to imagine why Marlowe might imagine escaping from London to a pure and uncomplicated life of rural pleasure.
Marlowe was also one of the most openly homoerotic writers of the Elizabethan period. His play Edward II describes in loving and often erotic detail the relationship between Edward and his liegeman Piers Gaveston; his poem Hero and Leander also contains long homoerotic passages. This undercurrent of homoerotic desire may also be present in “The Passionate Shepherd.” Some of Marlowe’s readers assume that the shepherd’s “love” is female. Sir Walter Ralegh, for example, wrote a poem in response to Marlowe’s called “The Nymph’s Reply,” which assumes that the shepherd is speaking to a nymph, a female deity. But Marlowe’s poem does not provide any information about the gender of the speaker’s “love.” Though the poem is not openly homoerotic, it allows, even invites, the possibility that the male speaker might be writing to another man.
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