Translating Gender, Power and Fate in The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage

Dido, Queen of Carthage, is a female figure from an exotic afar who has never ceased to offer, in different languages and literary contexts, reflections on intermingling issues such as gender, pow- er and fate within the broader framework of the moral opposition between individual behaviour and social codes. The medieval re- tellings of the myth – with the sole exception of Dante2 – already presented an ever more complex character than the classical figure portrayed by Ennius, Naevius, and above all by Virgil in books 1, 2, and 4 of his Aeneid, which is the principal source for all the rewritings of the story. Afterwards, when it began to be re- thought by the Elizabethan age, as in Marlowe’s translation from epic to drama, this myth was not only deeply affected by the sixteenth-century self-fashioning of Britain as a second Troy, but also reshaped by the impact of the Reformation and the increasing secularization and scepticism permeating many aspects of Western culture. More than this, Marlowe’s Dido was probably influenced by the wide circulation of the touching representation of the Queen offered by Ovid’s VII heroic epistle “Dido to Aeneas” in the Heroides. Here, as in Marlowe's play, the female point of view prevails, while Aeneas’ engagement with fate and with the founding myth of Rome is completely omitted or ignored. Aeneas does not represent the virtuous predecessor of the Roman Empire but a cowardly man who, together with Antenor, betrays Troy and thus decrees its definitive fall in return for a guarantee of his own safety. Whether juvenile or not, this work shares with others by Marlowe the use of theatre as the place where fiction and truth, possible and impossible converge through the lens of excess, in this case allowing the play to go beyond the limits of translation, transforming a mere translation into a complex rewriting. The play surpasses the limits of gender, insinuating the shifting nature of cultural stereotypes; the limits of tragedy, showing how ancient tragedy can preserve its powerful effect only by dancing on the edge of melodramatic expression. Partly adopting patterns typical of Elizabethan theatre and taste, Marlowe inserts inversions, parallelisms, and paroxysms that ultimately distort much of the Christian moral reception of the story in favour of a complete detonation of its tragic dramatic tension. In this play, the main characteristic of Queen Dido is not lust, nor the mere destructive power of desire, but rather her ability to invert the hierarchical order like most of Marlowe’s characters. Thanks to a close reading of this rewriting we discover that the story of Queen Dido and her falling victim to fate/the logic of imperialism offer an opportunity to represent early modern men and women as mere puppets living at the mercy of supernatural but irrational agencies, but still fighting to affirm their independence. They have definitely lost their faith in the providential framework and its moral values, and thus they seek alternative, provisional truths to subvert hierarchical gender, political and ethical bonds.