Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage is based primarily on Book Four Virgil’s The Aeneid and is an exploration of the dangers of female rule and gender identities. Marlowe’s interpretation of Dido’s character is focused on Dido’s struggle to maintain both her ‘masculine’ nature as a ruler and her ‘feminine’ nature as an individual. Marlowe views female rule bearing too many weaknesses, such as a female ruler requiring a marriage to produce a legitimate heir could place the nation under the control of a foreign power, or that female rulers would allow their passions to dominate their reigns and therefore make the business of state subservient to the whims of women’s desires.
Throughout Marlowe’s play Dido shifts between her natural …show more content…
Though it must be not mistaken while figures such as Dido are venerated, the suicide of exemplary women is legitimised only in relation to the context of a male definition of Roman female heroism and that female suicide is only respected if it supports patriarchal orders and values.
Virgil describes Dido as having virtus a characteristic usually reserved for men, women normally having pudicitia. Dido is further described by her as ‘dux femina facti’, ‘a woman was the leader of the deed’ by Virgil. Ascribing the word ‘dux’ with Dido is to connect Dido’s position with that of Roman military leader, and therefore all the common ideological attributes that go with such a position. This use of ‘dux’ is to make a clear demarcation between Dido’s natural role as a woman and her ‘masculine’ role a position of public service. Furthering her connection to honourable Roman men is to have her die by the noblest method of suicide of the Roman hero is to fall upon his sword, the archetypical Roman act of
Throughout Marlowe’s play Dido shifts between her natural …show more content…
Though it must be not mistaken while figures such as Dido are venerated, the suicide of exemplary women is legitimised only in relation to the context of a male definition of Roman female heroism and that female suicide is only respected if it supports patriarchal orders and values.
Virgil describes Dido as having virtus a characteristic usually reserved for men, women normally having pudicitia. Dido is further described by her as ‘dux femina facti’, ‘a woman was the leader of the deed’ by Virgil. Ascribing the word ‘dux’ with Dido is to connect Dido’s position with that of Roman military leader, and therefore all the common ideological attributes that go with such a position. This use of ‘dux’ is to make a clear demarcation between Dido’s natural role as a woman and her ‘masculine’ role a position of public service. Furthering her connection to honourable Roman men is to have her die by the noblest method of suicide of the Roman hero is to fall upon his sword, the archetypical Roman act of