Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture

by Jane Kingsley-Smith

• ISBN13: 9780521767613
• ISBN10: 052176761X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-10-18
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. x
Introduction	p. 1
Cupid, art and idolatry	p. 24
The Cupid-idol: medieval to Renaissance	p. 26
Tottel's Miscellany and Cupid-worship	p. 32
Sidney and Cupid-art	p. 35
Condemning iconoclasm: the Arcadia and Cupid's Revenge	p. 44
Cupid and iconoclasm in The Faerie Queene	p. 50
Cupid and the art of Busirane	p. 54
Cupid, death and tragedy	p. 60
love and death come closer together	p. 61
Here love dies: the putto and the skull	p. 62
Cupid and Death: 'De Morte & Amore'	p. 64
The Cupidean plague-angel	p. 71
Cupidean tragedy	p. 74
Cambyses, King of Persia	p. 76
Gismond of Salerne and Tancred and Gismund	p. 77
Cupid's Revenge	p. 84
Cupid, chastity and rebellious women	p. 94
Producing female desire: Cupid and Mary Stuart	p. 96
Cupid, Chastity and Time	p. 98
Succumbing to Cupid	p. 103
Threatening female chastity: Cupid and Elizabeth I	p. 105
Churchyard's Shew of Chastity	p. 106
Sappho and Phao	p. 110
A Midsummer Nights Dream	p. 112
The Faerie Queene: Belphoebe and Amoret	p. 116
Displacing male desire: Cupid and Lady Mary Wroth	p. 121
Pamphilia to Amphilanthus	p. 123
Love's Victory	p. 128
Cupid and the boy - the pleasure and pain of boy-love	p. 133
Cupid as beautiful boy	p. 135
Desiring Cupid in Italian Renaissance art: Pontormo, Bronzino, Caravaggio	p. 136
Dido, Queen of Carthage and Cupid as boy actor	p. 142
Cupid and effeminacy: Middleton's The Nice Valour	p. 146
Cupid, sodomy and castration: Soliman and Perseda and Cupid's Whirligig	p. 149
The pleasures of infantilism: Sidney vs. Greville	p. 153
Cupid and maternal nurturance on the early modern stage	p. 157
'Cupid and Psyche': the return of the sacred?	p. 163
Cupid and Psyche: Apuleius, Fulgentius and Boccaccio	p. 163
Reading Adlington's Cupid	p. 166
Heywood's Love's Mistress	p. 170
Cupid in the Caroline masque: Love's Triumph Through Callipolis and the Temple of Love	p. 177
Conclusion: Cupid in the English Civil Wars	p. 183
Notes	p. 186
Bibliography	p. 231
Index	p. 260
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