If Edward II ultimately forces its audience to submit, painfully, to history, Hero and Leander provides us with a very different experience. Marlowe is able here more completely to suspend his relation to his society's dominant fiction – which depends, as ours does, on the equation of conventional masculinity and coherence, of the penis and the phallus – partially because Hero and Leander is not a drama, but a less “pointed” form of play, and (what is the same thing in Marlowe's terms) because it is theoretically incomplete. The aesthetic of pure pointlessness that underlies “The Passionate Shepherd” is developed more fully here, enabling the poem radically to question the sexual and textual order upon which conventional sense depends.

The text is structured around a series of what Patricia Parker has termed “preposterous events” – “arsie-versie” inversions of “natural” sequence. It begins, preposterously, with its foregone conclusion:

Marlowe's inverted opening implicitly equates end and origin, locating the ending of a traditional narrative as the point (the Hellespont) that, to quote Slavoj Žižek, “retroactively confers the consistency of an organic whole on preceding events.