Passionate Queens and Incandescent Pyres. Unmasking Dido, Reading Virgil's Aeneid and Reclaiming Female Passion through Christopher Marlowe's Dido Queen of Carthage

What happens when myth becomes a medium through which passion acts as a language of excess, danger and ruin? In Christopher Marlowe’s rewriting of Virgil’s Aeneid, Dido not only suffers myth; she deconstructs it. This paper will examine how Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage rewrites Virgil’s Aeneid, transmuting it into a narrative of female defiance. Drawing on a literary analysis of Virgilian narrative, this paper explores affective mythology to analyse Dido’s passion as a force that exceeds boundaries and becomes politically destructive. Under the prism of Affect Theory and feminist approaches to mythopoesis, it shows that Marlowe delves into Dido’s emotional affectivity to the point of dramatic excess, transforming her into a queen of liminal spaces, oscillating between woman and monster. Thus, this paper focuses on an intertextual reading of both Virgil’s Aeneid and Marlowe’s tragedy to showcase how the myth of Dido is reconfigured into a narrative of female obsession and self-undoing. In Marlowe’s hands, mythology becomes a weapon through which female passion is not only staged, but ablaze. On its ashes, not only ruin but the unsettlingly perverse possibility that evil may be a name given to what humanity is afraid to see: an excess they cannot control nor restrain.