Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture
Jane Kingsley-Smith
Language: English
Pages: 276
ISBN: 1107654823
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Cupid became a popular figure in the literary and visual culture of post-Reformation England. He served to articulate and debate the new Protestant theory of desire, inspiring a dark version of love tragedy in which Cupid kills. But he was also implicated in other controversies, as the object of idolatrous, Catholic worship and as an adversary to female rule: Elizabeth I's encounters with Cupid were a crucial feature of her image-construction and changed subtly throughout her reign. Covering a wide variety of material such as paintings, emblems and jewellery, but focusing mainly on poetry and drama, including works by Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser, Kingsley-Smith illuminates the Protestant struggle to categorise and control desire and the ways in which Cupid disrupted this process. An original perspective on early modern desire, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the literature, drama, gender politics and art history of the English Renaissance.
Guiscard’s grisly execution but insists that ‘the end of wicked love is blood’ (..) and that only a chaste lover could have escaped such a fate: Part two: Cupidean tragedy [For] he that doeth in vertue his lady serve, Ne willes but what unto her honor longes, He never standes in cruel point to sterve: He feleth not the panges, ne raging thronges Of blind Cupide: he lives not in despeir. (Lines –) Similarly, in the Epilogue, chaste English women are differentiated from the dead
tyranny of Calvinism in early modern England may well have been the fact that there was no ‘ideological outlet’ by which the feelings of resentment it produced could be relieved. Cupidean tragedy may have provided just such a space, allowing audiences (both Catholic and Protestant) to indulge their hostility towards a Calvinist deity who is surprisingly hateful and wantonly destructive. To conclude, we might set ‘Cupidean tragedy’ against the definition of love tragedy offered by Catherine
Greek antecedent) and it is the Ovidian Amor that would represent the most sustained Roman influence on medieval and Renaissance Cupid. In the Metamorphoses, we find new narratives describing Cupid’s persecution of Apollo and Venus, as well as an account of the two kinds of arrows by which he imposes and withdraws desire (Book , lines –). But equally influential was the attitude adopted by the narrator of Ovid’s erotic treatises who urges the reader to take Love less seriously. In the Remedia
it behaves it selfe, I warrant yee, and speakes, and lookes, and pearts up the head?’ (..–). The neutral pronoun ‘it’ was generally applied to children under the age of seven and it is this, as much as her astonishment at the child’s ability to hold up its head, that infantilizes the boy actor. Even so, it may have been necessary to the fantasy I am proposing that the child was not an infant and that, as Cupid, he indulged in maternal nurturance whilst armed against its dangers.
this most absurd? (..–) The reference to Cupid as ‘a little ape-faced boy’ not only refers to the discrepancy between his divinity and his boyhood but also to the absurdity of his being performed by a boy actor (‘ape’ being a common term for such a player). Midas’ illegitimate son, Corydon (..), subsequently extends this mockery of Cupid through terms derived from the Elizabethan popular stage. For example, in mocking Cupid’s immaturity through his arrows, which are mere ‘bird