Hero and Leander: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Hero and Leander, credited to Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Hero and Leander, by Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman. Read by Martin Geeson. “Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?” The wonder-decade of the English drama was suddenly interrupted in 1592, when serious plague broke out in London, forcing the closure of the theatres. Leading playwrights took to penning languorously erotic poetry to make ends meet: so we have Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece - and Marlowe’s blazing masterpiece, Hero and Leander. Marlowe’s poem became more notorious than either of Shakespeare’s, due not only to its homophile provocations but also to the scandal attaching to every aspect of Marlowe’s brief life, violently ended in a mysterious brawl, leaving the poem in an unfinished state. The edition read here includes the wonderful continuation by George Chapman, a versatile playwright: tragedian as well as author of Jonsonian metropolitan comedies: in short, an all-round literary craftsman, whose Homer translation was famously admired by Keats. Chapman excels in extended allegory, but also in pithiest epigram – “Love is a golden bubble, full of dreams, That waking breaks, and fills us with extremes.” All these playwrights come from the generation of grammar-school alumni raised on the secular curriculum of Latin poetry: above all, Ovid – the source of the story of Hero and Leander, and their “love-death” in the Hellespont. (Summary by Martin Geeson)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Hero and Leander
• Author credits: Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 16
• Listed recording duration: 3:37:07

Catalogue topics

• poetry
• Elizabethan poetry
• Marlowe
• Chapman
• Hero
• Leander

Track guide

1. 00 - Printer's Dedication — 3:40
2. 01 - First Sestiad, part one — 15:37
3. 02 - First Sestiad, part two — 18:25
4. 03 - First Sestiad, part three — 8:57
5. 04 - Second Sestiad, part one — 17:33
6. 05 - Second Sestiad, part two — 12:47
7. 06 - Third Sestiad, part one — 17:59
8. 07 - Third Sestiad, part two — 19:21
9. 08 - Fourth Sestiad, part one — 19:33
10. 09 - Fourth Sestiad, part two — 12:08
11. 10 - Fifth Sestiad, part one — 11:15
12. 11 - Fifth Sestiad, part two — 12:45
13. 12 - Fifth Sestiad, part three — 6:58
14. 13 - Fifth Sestiad, part four — 12:28
15. 14 - Sixth Sestiad, part one — 14:20
16. 15 - Sixth Sestiad, part two — 13:32

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.