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2 - Cupid, death and tragedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2010
Summary
Perhaps the most important divergence between the twenty-first century perception of Cupid and that of early modern England is that, where the former is strongly influenced by his French Rococo decorativeness and Victorian infantile charm, the latter believes in Cupid's capacity for murderous sadism. As the Chorus of Euripides' Hippolytos observes:
Your assault waves of crushing delight
Pour into hearts marked by you for destruction.
May the cruel hand of your power
Never touch me, may I escape
Ever bearing too much of you, who
Stampede to distraction our quiet pulse-beats.
Neither the shooting stars nor the slashing lightning
Surpass in terror those shafts of Aphrodite
Aimed and thrown by your own hand:
They set our lives on fire.
(Lines 817–28)This revelation was made available to early modern audiences through the revival of classical Greek and Roman tragedy in the mid-sixteenth century. It was also inscribed within Renaissance mythography, for example, Conti describes Cupid as a ‘God of the insane and the mad … there is nearly no unspeakable act, sacrilege, or arrogant deed that Cupid has not authorized’ (245). Yet, perhaps the most important influence was a Protestant sense of the self-destructive nature of desire and the impossibility of controlling it. This chapter explores the fatal power of Cupid in early modern culture, first as it was imagined visually in a series of artistic conflations of Love and Death, and then as it was manifest on the stage through Cupid's reinvention as a tragic antagonist.
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- Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture , pp. 60 - 93Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010