Dido, Queen of Carthage

Dido, Queen of Carthage is a short play written by the English playwright Christopher Marlowe, with possible contributions by Thomas Nashe. The story of the play focuses on the classical figure of Dido, the Queen of Carthage. It tells an intense dramatic tale of Dido and her fanatical love for Aeneas (induced by Cupid), Aeneas' betrayal of her and her eventual suicide on his departure for Italy. The playwrights depended upon Books 1, 2, and 4 of the Aeneid of Virgil as their main source.

Publication

The play was first published in 1594 by the bookseller Thomas Woodcock. The title page attributes the play to Marlowe and Nashe, and also states that the play was acted by the Children of the Chapel. That company of boy actors stopped regular dramatic performance in 1584, but appears to have engaged in at least sporadic performances in the late 1580s and early 1590s, so that scholars give a range of 1587-93 for the first performance of Dido.^[1]

Authorship

The nineteenth-century scholar Frederick Gard Fleay attempted to delineate the collaborators' respective shares in the text, and assigned these portions of the play to Nashe:

Act I, scene i (second part, after line 122); Act III, scenes i, ii, and iv; Act IV, scenes i, ii, and v;

— and the rest to Marlowe. Yet few other critics have agreed with this assessment, and Nashe's share remains an open question.^[2] Some critics have virtually ignored the participation of Nashe — yet the presence of a collaborator may help to explain the play's divergences from Marlowe's standard dramaturgy. No other play by Marlowe has such a strong female lead character, and in no other "is heteroerotic passion the centripetal force of the drama's momentum."^[3]

Adaptation

The English composer Stephen Storace wrote an opera titled Dido, Queen Of Carthage (1794) — alleged, by his sister Anna (Nancy) Storace, for whom the title role was written, to have been his greatest work — which largely set Marlowe's play to music. It was also the only one of Storace's works to have been completely sung throughout, with no spoken dialogue. However, the jealous suspicions of Storace's impresario Richard Brinsley Sheridan led to the opera being kept in a single copy at the Drury Lane Theatre, to prevent pirated versions appearing elsewhere — and the opera is presumed to have been lost in the 1809 Drury Lane Theatre fire, since nothing of it has survived.

Characters

• Dido - Queen of Carthage
• Aeneas - a Trojan royal hero, son of Anchises and the goddess Venus
• Ascanius - son of Aeneas

• Iarbas - King of Gaetulia who is in love with Dido
• Achates - friend of Aeneas
• Ilioneus
• Cloanthus
• Sergestus
• Anna - Dido's sister in Roman mythology
• Jupiter
• Ganymede
• Cupid
• Mercury
• Venus
• Juno
• A Lord
• A Nurse
• various attendants

Modern productions

• American Repertory Theater, Boston, March 2005
• Royal National Theatre, London, March–June 2009

Notes

1. ^ Logan and Smith, pp. 24-6.
2. ^ Chambers, Vol. 3, p. 426.
3. ^ Sara Munson Deats, in Cheney, p. 194.

References

• Chambers, E. K. The Elizabethan Stage. 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923.
• Cheney, Patrick Gerard, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. The Predecessors of Shakespeare: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1973.

External links

• The Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage at Project Gutenberg
• Dido Queen of Carthage
• Dido Queen of Carthage (All on one page)
• Marlowe Society overview of Dido Queen of Carthage