Quote #49321
My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,
Shall with their goat feet dance the antic hay.
Shall with their goat feet dance the antic hay.
Christopher Marlowe
About This Quote
This quote needs no introduction—at least for now. We're working on adding more context soon.
Interpretation
The speaker imagines his followers as satyrs—mythic half-goat revelers associated with Dionysian excess—spilling onto cultivated “lawns” and turning orderly space into a scene of rustic, eroticized festivity. “Goat feet” stresses animality and instinct, while “dance the antic hay” evokes a wild, comic dance (an “antic” caper) that mocks decorum. The lines suggest a fantasy of power expressed not through civic order but through carnivalesque disruption: the speaker’s “men” will embody untamed appetite and theatrical spectacle. In Marlowe’s idiom, classical imagery becomes a vehicle for transgression, showing how desire and domination can be staged as pastoral play that nonetheless threatens social boundaries.



