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The politics of eros: writing under the auspices of Ovid's Cupid in early modern English literature

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THE POLITICS OF EROS:
WRITING UNDER THE AUSPICES OF OVID’S CUPID
IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE

by

Alison Tymoczko

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

May 2010

Copyright 2010 Alison Tymoczko

ii
Dedication
For Patrick and Daniel

iii
Acknowledgements
I could not have completed this dissertation without the consistent support and
encouragement of numerous family members, friends, and colleagues. First, I would like
to thank my family, especially my husband, Patrick Jeffries, who took over the care of
our infant son Daniel during the summer and on weekends to allow me to write
uninterrupted, and who answered any and all questions I had related to European history
with a smile. I would also like to thank my sister Valerie Tymoczko and my in-laws,
Raymond and Wai-Jen Jeffries, who gave Patrick a much-needed break and Daniel some
quality family time. As a new mother, they gave me the invaluable gift of time. Finally, I
thank my parents who lovingly encouraged my literary pursuits.
I would also like to thank all of my professors and colleagues at USC. I had the
distinct pleasure of working with a group of exemplary scholars whose academic passion
and scholarship was a constant source of inspiration. In particular, I would like to thank
my dissertation chair, Heather James, for sharing her extraordinary intellect and passion
for Ovid, Shakespeare, and political philosophy with me. She challenged me to become a
more confident writer and a more complex thinker. I also want to thank Bruce R. Smith,
who not only shared his infectious enthusiasm for my ideas, but also offered his
unwavering support and guidance throughout the project. To Rebecca Lemon, I am
thankful for her close, critical attention to my central arguments and for first introducing
me to the poetry of Lady Mary Wroth. I would like to thank Leo Braudy for his
discerning readings of my dissertation drafts and his suggestions, which almost always,

iv
helped to improve the logic of my argument. Finally, I would like to thank my outside
member, Tita Rosenthal, for her warmth and encouragement.
My fellow early modernist and peer, Amy Braden, deserves many heartfelt thanks
for her consistent support, encouragement, and friendship. As a patient reader of
countless drafts, she has the special honor of being the only other person who knows this
dissertation as well as I know it. I am grateful for Amy’s critical insights, organizational
suggestions, and unbridled enthusiasm for my ideas.
I would also like to thank USC for their generous financial support of my work.
The English Department supported my academic work with a 1-year Dissertation
Fellowship. The USC-Huntington Library Early Modern Studies Institute (EMSI)
provided a 1-year Fellowship during which I was able to complete my dissertation
research using the extensive collections of early modern literature at The Henry E.
Huntington Library. EMSI Director Peter Mancall also deserves thanks for his continued
support of early modern scholarship in English literature.

v
Table of Contents

Dedication ii
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract vi
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: “Confess him a conqueror”: 28
Cupid and the Cult of Elizabeth in John Lyly’s Gallathea
and Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage
Chapter 2: “The dreaded Impe:” 88
Cupid, Ovid, and Poetic Authority in Spenser’s Faerie Queene
Chapter 3: “Languishing twixt hope and fear:” 143
Cupid and the Politics of Emblem in Spenser’s Faerie Queene
Chapter 4: “Must we be servile, doing what he list?”: 201
Cupid and the Rhetorical Structures of Roman Love Elegy
in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Bibliography 238

vi
Abstract
My study locates an unexpected early modern interest in the political potential of
the rhetorical structures of Ovidian love elegy. In sixteenth- and early seventeenth-
century English drama and poetry, many writers self-consciously attempted to delineate
the individual’s relationship to existing structures of authority through recourse to figures
from classical mythology. In particular, the Roman figure of Cupid, as represented in the
love elegies of Ovid, helped early modern writers to amplify the relationship between
desire, persuasion, and coercion that was central to the courtly mode of encomia. Many
early modern writers chose to draw upon the more subtle political strains in Ovid’s
amorous rhetoric, capitalizing on Cupid’s ability to represent a spectrum of modes of
affective authority, from benevolent king to willful tyrant.
The plays of John Lyly and Christopher Marlowe, and the poetry of Edmund
Spenser take up the figure of Cupid from Ovidian elegy in response to the coercive
rhetoric of Elizabethan encomia. As a genre, encomia directed at the Queen demanded
the praise of female authority through the idealization of chaste virtue. In Chapters one,
two, and three, I analyze how these writers adopt Ovid’s critical stance toward the
insistent and excessive force wielded by Cupid against yielding lovers and use it to
underscore the implicit threat of erotic tyranny at the core of Elizabethan panegyric.
In Chapter four, I argue that while the political shift from Elizabeth I to James I
was accompanied by a decline in the popularity of courtly love poetry that thrived under
the Queen, the mode itself did not lose its usefulness, especially for women writers. By
reactivating the persuasive force of Elizabethan encomiastic poetry, Lady Mary Wroth

vii
challenges the inequalities that characterized James’s view of women and the newly
feminized political subject. By taking the Ovidian amator’s claim that Cupid is the
impetus behind his submission and will to love seriously, Wroth’s poetry takes the
affective discourses of which the figure is central to task. As a cross-dressing, genre-
crossing trope of erotic desire, a classical figure for poetic authority and political parody,
Ovid’s Cupid possesses the unique ability to both participate in and undermine the
affective discourses and literary genres of which he is central.

1
Introduction

Blanditias elegosque leves, mea tela, resumpsi.
Once again I took up flatteries and light elegies, my weapons.
Ovid, Amores 2.2.21
1

This dissertation examines how the language of love and desire that characterizes
the private affections and grievances of the suffering elegiac lover in classical literature is
often a primary rhetorical vehicle for the literary expression of political discontent in
early modern literature. In sixteenth and early seventeenth century drama and poetry,
writers self-consciously attempted to delineate the individual’s relationship to existing
structures of authority through recourse to figures from classical mythology. In particular,
the figure of Ovid’s Cupid amplified the relationship between desire, persuasion, and
coercion that was central to the Elizabethan mode of encomia,
2
as represented in courtly
drama and poetry, and to the Jacobean lyric. While the political shift from Elizabeth I to
James I was accompanied by a decline in the popularity of courtly love poetry that
thrived under the Queen, the mode itself did not lose its usefulness, especially for women
writers. Elizabeth’s rhetoric of sacred virginity and self-proclaimed status as the
privileged mother of the English nation was replaced by James’s rhetoric of divine

1
This translation of Ovid’s Amores belongs to Sharon L. James in Learned Girls and Male Persuasion:
Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 12.

2
In his 1589 treatise on English poetry (I.XX), George Puttenham defines the historical purpose of
encomia: “The immortall gods were praised by hymnes, the great princes and heroick personages by
ballades of praise called Encomia.” See Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie (London: 1589), Early
English Books Online. Henry E. Huntington Art Gallery and Library.
http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99846086.

2
sovereignty and patriarchal authority as father and husband to the English people. By
reactivating the persuasive force of Elizabethan encomiastic poetry, the Jacobean woman
writer could challenge the inequalities that characterized James’s view of women and the
newly feminized political subject. Many early modern writers chose to draw upon the
more subtle political strains in Ovid’s amorous rhetoric, capitalizing on the figure’s
ability to represent a spectrum of modes of affective authority, from benevolent king to
willful tyrant.
Indeed, Cupid is such a pervasive figure across literary genres and philosophical
traditions that it would seem futile, or as Thomas Hyde so eloquently puts it in his
foundational study of Cupid in Renaissance Literature, “a mad endeavour,” to assume
that a single literary study could address all of the figure’s interpretive possibilities.
3
The
figure of Cupid’s pervasive presence in early modern emblem books, poems, progress
entertainments, pageants, dramas, and literary criticism make it similarly challenging to
examine the figure’s functions even when the historical time period is sufficiently
narrowed. With that said, however, there is a striking political subtext that accompanies

3
Thomas Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love: Cupid in Renaissance Literature (London, England:
Associated University Presses, 1986). Early modern writers inherited diverse classical representations of
the Greek representation of Cupid or Eros as central vehicles for the exploration of human passions and
inquiries into the formation of human knowledge. The association between Eros and disorder derives from
Hesiod’s Theogony, where Eros arises independently, alongside Chaos, to signify the forceful beginnings
of the universe. In Plotinus, Love is the child of Poverty (Penia) and Possession (Poros) and initiates an
ontological examination of the nature of love – is love a human experience - a “passion of mind”? Or does
love have a divine cause? Plato takes up Plotinus’s account of Love’s origins in the Symposium where
Diotima describes the god’s intermediary status as a figure existing between states of desperate need and
clever acquisition. In Plato, love is a favored metaphor for the intellectual wandering that characterizes the
philosophical search for truth.

3
many early modern uses of the figure of Cupid, particularly in Elizabethan progress
entertainments, courtly drama, and Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry.
Early modern England inherited a controversial classical model for exploiting
perceived inequalities in relationships between men and women through the figure of
Cupid in the love elegies of Ovid. On one level, the elegies stage the rhetorical struggles
of the male speaker (the amator, or male lover), who attempts to persuade the resistant
female love object (the docta puella, or “learned girl”) to fulfill his desires for sexual
satisfaction.
4
The amator’s persistent pursuit of sexual fulfillment reflects his faithful
service as a dedicated member of Cupid’s army. Ovid’s reliance on metaphors of warfare
to speak about love as a battle depend upon the use of force and violence to secure
victory, which often reinforces the subjection of the female love object to the desires of
the amator.
On another level, the poet invokes the figure of Cupid to authorize and justify his
shift from the nationalistic, public concerns of epic to the personal, private concerns of
elegy. Yet the explicit attention Ovid gives to this shift in genre does not result in a clear,
distinct separation of the generic interests of each genre. Instead, Ovid’s shift from epic
to elegy brings together the political and nationalistic concerns of epic with elegy’s
preoccupation with erotic persuasion and sexual coercion. The figure of Cupid is
particularly important in opening up space within these two seemingly disparate modes of

4
For a thorough and engaging discussion of the relationship between the amator and docta puella in Roman
love elegy, see James, Learned Girls, 3-34.

4
expression. Cupid, the all-powerful god of Love, is used by Ovid to critique the
oppressive political rhetoric associated with Augustan moral reforms: the overt eroticism
of Ovid’s verses and explicit focus on adultery counters Augustan programs aimed at
legislating morality by encouraging marriage and children and punishing adultery.
5
The
poet’s substitution of Cupid for a Roman conqueror in the representation of the Roman
triumphal procession parodies the state celebrations used by Augustus to reinforce his
military and imperial authority.
Cupid’s absolute authority extends to the poet’s control over his own lines;
consequently, the poet’s elegiac “excuse of Divine compulsion” spares the poet from
assuming responsibility for any unflattering representations of the Emperor or Rome.
6

Similarly, the poet’s fraught relationship to his poetic figure - the poet both appeals to
Cupid’s authority to justify the content of his verse and laments the god’s absolute
authority over his poetry and his desires – allows Ovid license to depict the god’s
duplicitous actions against authority with little consequence. Many early modern writers
took up Ovid’s poetry as a model for the integration of politics and amor and shaped
Ovid’s model to suit their political and poetic prerogatives – in particular, to speak to the
inequality that characterizes the relationship between subject and sovereign.

5
For a thorough discussion of the origins and punishments associated with Augustus’s moral reforms,
which targeted “the upper classes,” see James, Learned Girls, 228-231. The “lex Iulia de adulteriis
coercendis” transformed adultery into a punishable offense while the “lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus”
encouraged marriage and procreation (229). While the scholarly debate over the intended purpose of
Augustus’s “marital legislation” and an earlier version he might have failed to pass are beyond the
immediate scope of this project, James offers a useful introduction to the history and controversy
surrounding the leges Iuliae (229).

6
Ibid.,1-34, 155-211.

5
The Roman poet Ovid not only provided a rich source of material for poets
seeking knowledge about classical poetics and the gods of antiquity, but also offered
early modern poets a model for the integration of political and amorous themes. Indeed,
Ovid’s applicability to genres and time periods quite different from his own is a testament
to the endurance of the poet’s central concerns with language, the poetic voice, and
varieties of erotic desire and love. These concerns were especially relevant to female
writers who encountered representations of women and desire in classical texts. They
were also relevant to the framing of female agency, desire, and creative expression in
English translations of Ovid, which became extremely influential in the representation of
women as speaking subjects, silent objects, or some combination of both in poetry and
prose by male and female writers.
English Translations of Ovid and Protestant Restraint
For an English schoolboy, the reading and imitation of selections of Ovid’s poetry
(particularly passages from the Metamorphoses, Fasti, Heroides, and Tristia) was part of
the required course of a grammar school education. Women read Ovid, too, despite the
condemnation of the poet by moralists and educational theorists, who feared that Ovid
posed a moral threat to female virtue. Calvinist Arthur Golding’s translation moralized
Ovid’s Metamorphoses and made the entire fifteen books available to an English
audience as early as 1567 and sealed its popularity. The same year saw George
Tuberville’s translation of Ovid’s Heroides, a work that “went through four editions
before the end of the century.” A few years later, Thomas Churchyard translated Ovid’s

6
Tristia (1572).
7
Readers were fascinated by Ovid’s ability to ventriloquize the amorous
sufferings of betrayed mythological women in the Heroides, and they could identify
“echoes of a fallen Christian state” in the tale of Ovid’s exile.
8

The Amores, however, were not translated into English until Christopher Marlowe
took on the task in the 1580’s and published All Ovid’s Elegies between 1595 and 1600.
9

The circumstances surrounding the printing and circulation of Marlowe’s translation of
Ovid continues to be a subject of fascination for early modern scholars. Marlowe’s
translation of only ten of Ovid’s elegies in the 1590s, which was appended to John
Davies’ Epigrams, was followed in the early seventeenth century with a complete
translation of Ovid’s elegies. Both editions were published, as Ian Frederick Moulton
notes, “surreptitiously … at Middleburgh in the Low Countries.”
10
Although the
Marlowe/Davies volume was named in the Bishops Ban of 1599, and “while many copies
of Davies’ epigrams are found in manuscript, surviving manuscript copies of Marlowe’s
elegies are extremely rare.”
11
Marlowe’s translation of Ovid was also accompanied by
anxieties that the book would fall into the wrong hands – especially women. The 1590s
edition was quite “thin and small;” more problematically, as Moulton observes, “it could

7
See Introduction to Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Arthur Golding, ed. Madeline Forey (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002), xii.

8
Forey, Ovid’s Metamoprhoses, xv.

9
See M.L. Stapleton, Harmful Eloquence: Ovid’s Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1996), 134.

10
See Ian Frederick Moulton, Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004), 105.

11
Moulton, Before Pornography, 104.

7
easily have been concealed on one’s person” to be removed from its hidden location and
read aloud at the opportune moment.
12
Following Marlowe’s lead, Thomas Heywood
translated Ovid’s Ars amatoria into English between 1600-1613. For many literary
scholars, Shakespeare’s pointed use and misuse of Ovid throughout his body of work
exemplifies the poet’s foremost influence despite the often disjointed and fragmentary
introduction students received to Ovid’s work. The overt eroticism of Ovid’s earliest
work, the Amores, and his later Ars Amatoria were not as easily transformed into moral
exempla for imitation and the thought of asking students to exceed the model Ovid’s
erotic poetry offered was most likely unthinkable.
For early modern writers like Shakespeare and Spenser, the Protestant restraint
and careful moralizing of many English translations of Ovid did not go far enough in
illuminating the political potential of Ovid’s rhetoric.
13
The writers studied in this
dissertation – Lyly, Marlowe, Spenser, and Wroth – share a common Ovidian project:
each writer suggestively exploits the bold potential of Ovid’s rhetoric and English
translations of Ovid for political purposes. In his Preface to the Reader, Golding offers
the following moral imperative to readers: “Now when thou readst of god or man, in
stone, in beast or tree, / it is a mirror for thyself thine own estate to see / For under

12
Ibid., 104. Scholars have also debated the narrative significance of the ten elegies selected for
publication. While Fredson Bowers observes that the poems do not appear to follow a particular
organization or order, other critics like Moulton see “a narrative of effeminacy and masculine sexual
failure.”

13
I use the term “Protestant restraint” to refer broadly to Christian moralizations of Ovid’s poetry that, as
Forey observes, demonstrate a “concern for the moral improvement and repentance of … Protestant readers
[and]… is at times charged with a strong anti-Catholic apocalyptic awareness” (xxii). Certainly, Golding’s
translation of Ovid demonstrates a “Protestant restraint” that is influenced by the stern morality encouraged
by his Calvinist beliefs.

8
feign’d names of gods it was the poet’s guise / The vice and faults of all estates to taunt
in covert wise, / And likewise to extol with praise such things as do deserve.”
14
The
familiar expectation that readers would see their own private moral failings and attempt
to reform was also accompanied by anxieties that Ovid could be misread: “Some
naughtie person seeing vyce shewd lyvely in his hew might take occasion by and by like
vices too ensew” (Pref 143-44). The possibility that a reader could misconstrue even
Golding’s moralization of Ovid’s tales of erotic transformation invoked both anxiety and
excitement. The possibility that Ovid’s poetry could be read against the moral grain
extended to accommodate the idea that literature could also function as a tool for political
reformation.
15

Ovid’s poetry provided a poetic model for the exploration of the relationship of
literary expression and genre to political philosophy. Ovid’s work implicitly invokes the
politically inflected concept of eros derived from Greek political discourse in which
“erotic passion was a causal factor in the emergence and maintenance, as well as the
decline, of the Greek polis.”
16
As a “bridge” term between the public and private spheres,

14
Forey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 25.

15
While it is not within the scope of this project to extensively examine the various methods for reading
Ovid in early modern England, it is notable, as A.B. Taylor, has argued that “Ovid’s status as a political
fabulist was clearly as firmly established as his reputation for moral philosophy” (18). Taylor cites the
traditions of reading Ovid in grammar schools where English schoolboys learned to read Ovid’s fables “as
disguised commentaries on controversial topics” and “In their themes school boys were taught to transform
the simplest narratives into sophisticated moral and political disquisitions” (18). Shakespeare’s Ovid: The
Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 16-18.

16
Paul Walter Ludwig, Eros and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1. See also Introduction, 1-19.

9
the concept of eros came to represent a broad range of both personal passions and civic
ambitions:
Much of classical thought, explicitly and implicitly, based its notions of
eros on purely formal resemblances among sexual desire, love, and ambition as
well as higher aspirations such as patriotism and cosmopolitanism. Common
features in the psychological responses to each of these passions led orators,
poets, and philosophers to conclude that said passions were differing
manifestations of a single, underlying eros, They were then able to place the
apparently diverse passions on a continuum with one another so that the logical
progression from sexual license to tyranny or from citizen lovers to loving the
city, could seem unproblematic to them. Eros therefore provided them with a
bridge, missing in modern thought, between private and public spheres.
17

By seizing upon the connection between eros, political power, and rhetoric, Ovid
demonstrates that the amorous subject matter of elegy is inextricably linked to the literary
expression of political critique. While the political tenor of Ovid’s criticisms of Augustus
are more overt in the Metamorphoses, where he stresses the instability and mutability of
empire and provocatively questions Rome’s claim to greatness, his love poetry also
responds to the political world of Augustan Rome. In the Ars Amatoria, his handbook to
erotic seduction, Ovid takes issue with Augustus’s moral reforms that rewarded marriage
and punished adultery (punishment was especially harsh for female adulterers). At times,
Ovid even seems to be advocating adultery in the Ars Amatoria as he advises his readers
that Augustus’s newly erected public monuments are ideal places to meet potential
lovers.

17
Ludwig, Eros and Polis, 1-2.

10
Cupid in Protestant England
Within the context of Elizabethan Protestantism and iconoclasm, it might seem
curious that the figure of Cupid would hold such iconic weight for early modern writers.
Stephen Hamrick has argued that literary references to “Cupid worship” could be linked
to an explicit rejection of Catholic rituals by staunchly Protestant writers and readers.
18

Taking Sir Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia as her prime example, Jane Kingsley- Smith has
argued that Sidney’s Cupid depicted the grave and violent consequences of such
“blasphemy and iconoclasm” against the god of Love, particularly on female characters.
19

Cupid’s appeal, no doubt, could be linked to the ease with which writers could tie the
figure’s pagan origins (and the worship of Cupid to the practice of idolatry) to broader
religious concerns about Catholicism and its idolatrous religious rituals. In the first three
chapters, I attribute Cupid’s popularity, in part, to the conditions of literary patronage in
Elizabeth’s court, which encouraged male poet-courtiers to adopt an eroticized ethos of
servitium amoris in their poetic appeals to the Queen. This ethos became more and more
challenging for poet-courtiers to employ in encomia that were directed to an aging and
less easily eroticized image of the Queen. Adapted from Roman love elegy, the figure of
Cupid provided a convenient justification for the poet’s erotic appeal to a highly desired
but resistant female authority. Used as the poet’s “excuse of divine compulsion,”
20
Cupid

18
See Stephen Hamrick, The Catholic Imaginary and the Cults of Elizabeth, 1558-1582 (Burlington,
Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Co., 2009).

19
See Jane Kingsley-Smith, “Cupid, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Sidney’s Arcadia,” SEL 48, no. 1 (Winter
2008): 77.

20
See James, Learned Girls, 23, 79.

11
helped to justify not only the poet’s choice of genre and elegy over epic, but could also
become a source for the expression of poetic discontent and political anxiety in relation to
restrictions placed on poetic expression and female sexuality. On the level of the
narrative, early modern writers exploited Cupid’s ability to create narrative unrest and
disorder in order to highlight their political and personal discontent with Elizabethan
policies and dominant conventions of royal patronage.
By encouraging affective discourse in the form of encomia, the Queen advocated
a relationship between poet-courtier and sovereign that reinforced ideologies of political
dominance – the relationship of servility and submission that characterized the poet’s
relation as subject to the sovereign. Early modern writers exploit the erotic dynamics of
the elegiac chase in which the poet-lover offers his poetry (with its promise of poetic
immortality) to a resistant female love object, who in turn, desires a gift with more
political or economic use. Although the poet’s gift of poetry might not have sufficient
political or economic value, the figure of Cupid, in particular, could be used to resist and
to critique the form’s paradoxical reliance on relationships of inequality. Strikingly,
Elizabeth and her advisors established an atmosphere at court that seemed devoid of the
erotic passion that she demanded from public professions of amorous praise. In
particular, Elizabeth was notorious for her intolerance of erotic dalliance at her court.
She delivered swift and severe punishment once she discovered secret amorous liaisons
between her male and female favorites.
Not surprisingly, the shift from a female sovereign to James I was accompanied
by a striking change in gender ideologies. The shift was also marked by a decline in the

12
popularity of the encomiastic love poetry encouraged by Queen Elizabeth. Instead of
being cast as the idealized unobtainable love object in poetry, King James was often
addressed with explicit recognition of his Scottish reputation as a well-established poet
and patron of the arts. Jonathan Goldberg cites Ben Jonson’s first epigram to the King as
an example of how closely the King’s identity as sovereign was linked to his authority as
a poet:
How, best of Kings, do’st thou a scepter bear!
How best of Poets, do’st thou laurel weare!
But two things, rare, the Fates had in their store,
And gave thee to both, to shew they could no more.
For such a Poet, while thy dayes were greene,
Thou wert, as chiefe of them are said t’have beene.
And such a Prince thou art, wee daily see,
A chiefe of those still promise they will bee.
Whom should my Muse then flie to, but the best
Of Kings for grace; of Poets for my test?
21

Curtis Perry has argued that James’s practice of “styling” himself as a monarch-poet, a
tactic reinforced by Jonson’s poem, contributed to a notable increase in literary
dedications to the monarch following the King’s accession. Perry suggests that writers of
royal panegyrics hoped to make themselves useful to the new King, who as an
“apprentice” poet, might value their creative efforts. Yet as Perry notes, the discourse of
the divine poet-king posed new challenges for poets seeking royal favor and a poetic
voice:
As in James’s own poetry the voice of authority tends to undermine or unravel a
given poem’s adopted poetic stance, so in panegyrics addressed to James the
king’s ‘trueth’ becomes doubly problematic: the court poet has no such authority,

21
Ben Jonson, Epigrammes 4, quoted in Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson,
Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contemporaries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 17-18.

13
and to claim it is either redundant (to repeat the king) or presumptuous (to set
oneself up as an alternative source of ‘trueth’).
22

As some poets attempted to accommodate the rhetoric of “James’s authorial self-
representation,” the political uncertainty of England’s future after Elizabeth’s death was
also met with a keen nostalgia for the poetic forms that dominated Elizabethan poetry.
23

Chapter four considers the poetry of Lady Mary Wroth as exemplary of this nostalgic
turn to Elizabethan literary models. Wroth looked back to earlier poetic models, like the
sonnet, and its adaptation of the structures of Ovidian elegy in order to lay claim to poetic
authority and to offer opposition to the rhetoric of divine sovereignty that accompanied
representations of the King.
The Political Uses of Ovid’s Love Poetry
While my dissertation acknowledges the undeniable influence of Ovid’s
Metamorphoses on early modern representations of Cupid, female desire, and poetic
authority, I argue that the Amores and Ars amatoria offered the Elizabethan and Jacobean
writer a more strategic poetic model that effectively combined the rhetorical structures of

22
See Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan
Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 24-25.

23
See Sarah M. Dunnigan, Eros and Poetry at the Courts of Mary Queen of Scots and James VI
(Basingstroke and New York: Palgrave, 2002). See also Jane Tylus “Jacobean Poetry and Lyric
Disappointment,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth Century English Poetry.
eds. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katherine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990),
174- 176. Tylus notes that James’s rhetoric of absolute sovereignty posed serious threats to those who held
fast to the principles of English Common Law. She argues that many Jacobean poets took refuge in
Elizabethan pastoral: “George Wither would flee the ‘Chambers of Kings’ for the open ‘Fieldes’ where
false intimacy might give way to public voices, and Drayton derided ‘this ‘lunatique Age’ when nothing is
‘esteem’d … but what is kept in Cabinets’ and ‘wholly deduc’t to Chambers’ (4:v*). Poets such as Donne
or Jonson, to be sure, were quite as cynical as Drayton and Wither about courtly politics, and frequently
turned to ‘lyric sites’ notable for their remoteness from earlier centers of poetic production such as the
court” (175).

14
love elegy with its subtext of implicit political critique. My extended focus on Ovid’s
Amores, in particular, is aimed at renewing the focus in critical scholarship on the
relationship of Roman love elegy to early modern conceptions of the poet, gender, and
the political uses of Ovid’s love poetry.
My work on Ovid grows out of the exceptional scholarship done on politics and
classical transmission in the early modern period by Patrick Cheney, Heather James, and
David Norbrook. Cheney argues that along with Shakespeare’s “intertextual rivalry”
with Ovid, the aspiring poet and playwright located an ambitious model for the creation
of authorial identity in Ovid’s poetry. Shakespeare not only inherited ideas about poetic
identity and the progression of a literary career from Ovid, but also took from the Roman
poet a model for the relationship between poetry and politics. I am equally indebted to
James’s work on Ovid, Shakespeare, and the politics of classical imitation in constructing
early modern notions of empire, which has contributed immeasurably to this project’s
conceptions of literary expressions of Ovid’s political rhetoric in Elizabethan and
Jacobean England. Norbrook’s conception of the early modern author, as less of an
individual and more of a central part of a broad and “shared political project” has
influenced this dissertation’s argument about the close relationship between poetry,
rhetoric, and politics.
24

24
This project adopts the rationale behind Norbrook’s argument, which explains that finding “intention” or
evidence for these political readings in early modern literature is a process of “situating a text in relation to
a sequence of interventions in [political] debates” (Poetry and Politics, 285). I argue that the figure of
Cupid is central to many of these literary “interventions” into the political.

15
As a consequence of this dissertation’s interest in Ovidian poetics and classical
rhetoric, this project considers the influence of the rhetorical tradition in the classical
period as well as the early modern. The early modern practice of rhetoric that was
instituted in grammar schools valued the ideal of oratorical eloquence derived from
classical models and encouraged the imitation of classical writers like Ovid and Virgil.
Rhetorical training and the reading and writing of classical poetry shared a common
project. In The Defence of Poesy (1595), Sir Philip Sidney declares that the goal of fiction
is to “teach, to delight, to move” (“docere, delectare, movere”), a classical ideal derived
from Cicero and adapted by Horace.
25
In the third book of The Art of English Poesy
(1589), George Puttenham speaks about poetic figures as important rhetorical tools -
figures that can be “used to a purpose, either of beauty or efficacy.”
26
Both Sidney and
Puttenham espouse the classical idea that poetry and oratory share a common function:
the use of a familiar set of recognizable rhetorical figures and tropes and the aim of
skillful persuasion.

25
Gavin Alexander, Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy ‘ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (New
York: Penguin Classics, 2004), xxxv.

26
George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy (London: 1589), 169, quoted in Alexander, Sidney’s ‘The
Defence’ (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), 169.

16
Classical ideas about the ability of rhetoric to influence private relationships and
public matters influenced the persuasive purposes to which rhetoric was put in early
modern literature. In De inventione, Cicero outlined the “topics of argument” required by
the classical orator and attributed to rhetorical language the “power to calm the passions
and institute conventional social and political relations.”
27
In De oratore, Cicero claimed
that rhetoric had the power to “shape laws.”
28
These diverse functions reflect the
traditional division of rhetoric into three types:
(i) the deliberative rhetoric of political debate, a matter of recommending or
dissuading from a particular policy or course of action; (ii) the judicial or forensic
rhetoric of the law courts, speeches either for the prosecution or the defence; and
(iii) ceremonial or demonstrative rhetoric (known as epideictic), the rhetoric of
praise or blame.
29

While this project takes up the third type of rhetoric most explicitly, the literature studied
in this dissertation is also concerned with “representations of rhetorical occasions” that
employ the language of politics and the law to persuade.
30

27
Victoria Kahn, “Rhetoric, Rights, and Contract Theory,” in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical
Criticism, eds. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 130-131.

28
Ibid., 131.

29
Alexander, Sidney’s ‘Defense,’ xxxviii.

30
Ibid., xxvi.

17
Finally, my project also builds on the scholarship done on elegy and gender by
Sharon L. James and Ellen Greene, who firmly position Ovid in the role of “social
critic.”
31
James draws attention to the importance of attending to the social and political
contexts of Ovid’s elegies and the erotic and economic inequalities that characterize the
relationship between the male amator and docta puella, or learned female reader, in the
Amores. Similarly, Greene argues that Ovid’s choice of myths demonstrate the poet’s
preoccupation with the “ideologies of erotic conquest and domination, “ particularly the
domination of male desire over the desires of the docta puella. The scholarship of
Alison R. Sharrock and Maria Wyke on the politics of reading Ovid, and its account of
gender (the female body in particular), along with the political meanings conveyed by
Ovid’s work has also been influential in appraising Ovid’s rhetorical approach to his
female reader.
32

As Efrossini Spentzou rightly notes, gender studies has undoubtedly contributed
to such shifts in reading Ovid’s amorous rhetoric for its political and social overtones:
Seeing literary figures as metaphorical bearers of extensive critiques of the social
and political structures, gender studies shifted critical attention from the search for
explicit alliances with and oppositions from the powers-that-be to a more nuanced
explorations of the ideologies of Roman politics. As the personal came to be

31
See James, Learned Girls, and Ellen Greene, The Erotics of Domination: Male Desire and the Mistress
in Latin Love Poetry (Baltimore: 1998), 113. Other useful studies of Ovid’s poetry include: J.T. Davis,
Fictus Adulter: The Poet as Actor in the Amores (Amsterdam: 1989); Paul Veyne, Roman Erotic Elegy:
Love, Poetry, and the West trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Barbara
Weiden Boyd, Ovid’s Literary Loves: Influence and Imitation in the Amores (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan 1997), 40-41; and Sara Mack, Ovid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).

32
See Alison R. Sharrock, “Ovid and the Politics of Reading” and Maria Wyke, “Reading Female Flesh:
Amores 3.1,” in Oxford Readings in Classical Studies: Ovid, ed. Peter E. Knox (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 238-264 and 169-204.

18
increasingly recognized as doubling as the political, attention shifted firmly and
consciously to the individual.
33

Growing out of an interest in representations of female desire and the desiring woman in
early modern English literature, this study considers early modern writers who were
drawn to the figure of Cupid for the purpose of exploring the gender and political
ideologies of Elizabethan and Jacobean politics. The affective discourses encouraged by
both Elizabeth I and James I provided occasions for the literary expression of personal
desires that could also “double” as political wishes.
34

In particular, Ovid’s focus on the elegiac poet’s skillful manipulation of rhetoric
with the intention of persuading a resistant female love object provides a context that
readily suits the expected role of the Elizabethan courtier-poet, whose goal is to gain the
rapt attention of a distant female sovereign. The Ovidian amator’s self-conscious wit and
awareness that his amorous claims are those required by the conventions of genre not
only throw doubt onto the poetic persona’s sincerity but also suggest that he may be
appropriating and subverting the conventions for purposes other than flattery. A more

33
Peter E. Knox, A Companion to Ovid (Chichester, West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2009), 384.

34
See also Paul Allen Miller, Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real
(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), 175, 183 on Ovid’s engagement with structures
of Roman society and morality he wishes to critique. . Miller argues that elegy is a transgressive genre
because “The amator … is making a claim to legitimacy based precisely on the fact that he has no
proprietary claim to Corinna’s love … This inversion aligns law, violence, and the vir on one side of the
equation and places transgression, legitimacy, and the amator on the other” (175). Miller concludes, “Thus
the amator and the vir, Amor and Augustus, law and its infraction are revealed by the Amores to be two
sides of the same coin” (183). Drawing from Miller, Effrosini Spentzou argues that Ovid engages these
structures in order to reveal the arbitrary nature of “Augustus’s symbolic order that Ovid takes so much
pleasure in transgressing, mocking, and exposing, but from which he cannot escape” (391). See Spentzou,
“Theorizing Ovid,” in A Companion to Ovid, ed. Peter E. Knox (Chichester, West Sussex: Blackwell
Publishing Ltd., 2009), 391.

19
political reading of Ovid’s Amores suggests that the text’s focus on female adultery and
extramarital sex offer an explicit critique of Augustus’s programs of moral reform, which
aim to curtail female adultery and encourage heterosexual marriage. The Amores offers
both early modern writers and critics of these writers a bifurcated poetic narrative that is
both about love and politics. At times, the political tenor is activated, for example, in
readings that focus on erotic tyranny; at other times, the poems purport to be about the
erotic dynamics of love.
An often-cited example of Ovid’s playful critique of authority is exemplified in
the Amores 1.2 where Ovid replaces Augustus’s public celebration of military victory in
the roman triumphus with the triumph of Cupid. As a truant and playful rogue, Cupid’s
presence in a serious and solemn celebration of Rome’s imperial might alerts the reader
to the poem’s sense of its own lack of seriousness and distance from the convention in
which it participates. Ovid mocks this civic ritual and registers a subtle critique of
Augustus’s claims of divine origin by pointing out the humor in the emperor’s
genealogical relationship to cousin Cupid.
35

Since Ovid’s poetry provided a model for how the political could relate to the
erotic figure, early modern writers could locate in their engagement with Cupid an
opportunity to exploit the movement between Cupid as vehicle and Cupid as tenor.

35
Mack, Ovid, 63-64, James, Learned Girls, 320 fn. 13, Miller, Subjecting Verses, 168, and other scholars
have argued about the political significance of Ovid’s symbolic inversion of the Augustan triumph.

20
When does Cupid, for instance, represent love as the general subject of the poet’s lines?
Alternately, when is Cupid the vehicle that carries the force of the poet’s comparison or
analogy of love to politics to a different figurative end? The possibility of reversing and
manipulating the relationship between vehicle and tenor opens up opportunities for the
poet’s expression of political critique. However, with the opportunity for political speech
also comes the often unwanted burden of moral responsibility as early modern poets and
literary critics soon realized when they attempted to “put eros into discourse.”
36

Cupid in Early Modern Theories of Literature
Early modern considerations of eros often included writerly attempts to “put eros
into discourse”

by personifying experiences of love and desire using the classical figures
of Greek and Roman mythology. Consequently, defenses of poetry addressed accusations
decrying the pervasiveness of mythological figures like Cupid in poetry, highlighting
anxieties about this “wanton” figure’s transgressive movements across and over literary
genres—from the amorous toyings of romance to the heroic wanderings of epic. In
Sidney’s An Apologie for Poetry, written and circulated between 1582-1585 and

36
Efforts to “put eros into discourse,” in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as Bruce R. Smith
observes, reflect localized attempts to talk about “time-and culture-specific formulation[s]” of sexuality
(319). To understand early modern representations of erotic desire, variously posited as Love and/or the
figure of Cupid, it is helpful to recall Smith’s assertion in his discussion of premodern sexualities: “A
fictional text represents things; it is not the things themselves. But sexuality presents an extreme instance
of this general fact about mimesis. Biologically, psychologically, politically, sexuality is a state of being in
the body; representations of sexuality in the body of a verbal text are something else again” (319). From
Hesiod’s conception of eros in Theogony as a “feeling that has become a god that has become an idea,” that
is opposed to reason, to “Plato’s attempt in the Symposium to ally eros with ideas,” Smith emphasizes the
foremost origins of eros as first “a feeling,” then “a god,” and finally, “a subject of philosophical inquiry”
(319). See Smith, “Premodern Sexualities,” PMLA 115, no. 3 (May 2000): 318-329.

21
published in 1595, Sidney addresses the claim, made by detractors of poetry, that poetry
trains men to act sinfully and out of lust:
Their third [criticism of poetry] is, howe much it abuseth mens wit, training it to
wanton sinfulness, and lustfull love: for indeed that is the principall, if not the
onely abuse I can heare alledged. They say, the comedies rather teach, then
reprehend, amourous conceits. They say, the Lirick, is larded with passionate
sonnets. The Elegiack, weepes the want of his Mistresse. And that even to the
Heroicall, Cupid hath ambitiously climed. Alas Love, I would, thou couldest as
well defende thy selfe, as thou canst offende others. I would those, on whom thou
doest attend, could eyther put thee away, or yee’lde good reason; why they keepe
thee. But grant love of beautie, to be a beastlee fault, (although it be very hard,
sith onely man, and no beast, hath that gift, to discerne beauty.)

While claiming that licentious, ill-wrought poetic themes deserve criticism (themes that
do not claim love of beauty as their highest aim), Sidney simultaneously cites evidence
supporting the poets’ use of amorous motifs, by pointing to the frequency with which
ancient philosophers devoted pages of writing to the topic:
Grant, that lovely name of Love, to deserve all hatefull reproches: (although even
some of my Maisters the Phylosophers, spent a good deale of theyre Lamp-oyle,
in setting foorth the excellence of it). Grant, I say, what so ever they will have
granted; that not onely love, but lust, but vanitie, but, (if they lift) scurilitie,
possesseth many leaves of Poets bookes: yet thinke I, when this is granted, they
will finde, theyr sentence may with good manners, put the last words formost: and
not say, that Poetrie abuseth mans wit, but mans wit abuseth Poetrie.”
37

Defending love from censure, Sidney concludes that the individual poet’s skill and “wit”
determine the moral value and social utility of the poet’s use of amorous themes and
mythological figures. Poetry is merely the vehicle for the expression of the poet’s ideas
about the highest aims and basest ends of love.

37
Sir Phillip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetry (London: 1595), Early English Books Online. Henry E.
Huntington Art Gallery and Library.
http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99846470.

22
Sir John Harrington addresses similar accusations leveled against poetry in An
Apologie of Poetrie, the prologue to his translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1591):
The last reproofe [against poetry] is lightness and wantones, this is indeed an
Objection of some importaunce, sith as Sir Philip Sidney confesseth, Cupido is
crept even into the Heroicall Poemes, and consequently, makes that also, subject
to this reproofe: I promised in the beginning not partially to praise Poetrie, but
plainly and honestly to confesse that that might truly be objected against it, and
if any thing may be, sure it is this lasciviousnesse; yet this I will say, that of
all kinde of Poetrie, the Heroicall is least infected there with. The other kindes
I will rather excuse then defende, though of all kindes of Poetrie is beesayd where
any scurrilitie and lewdnesse is found, there Poetry doth not abuse us, but writers
have abused Poetrie.
38

Harington’s alteration of Sidney’s “Cupid” to Cupido conflates the ambitious god of
love, as genre-crossing trope of love and desire, with the qualities of cupidity—inordinate
lust and excessive desire, which were forms of potential spiritual idleness that were often
viewed in Biblical terms as gateways to idolatry.
39
Harington’s and Sidney’s references
to Cupid belie the anxieties surrounding the moral and cultural value of writing poetry
and in particular, poetry with amorous themes. Harington defends “Heroicall” poetry as
least contaminated by “lasciviousnesse” and “excuses” other varieties of poetry from
fault by placing moral responsibility for vulgar themes on the poet’s abuse of poetry.

38
John Harington, Orlando Furioso in ‘English’ Heroical Verse (London: 1591), Early English Books
Online. Henry E. Huntington Art Gallery and Library.
http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99842350.

39
In her essay “Protestant Erotics: Idolatry and Interpretation in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” ELH 58, no. 1
(Spring 1991): 1-34, Linda Gregerson notes early Christian philosophers often defined ideas of “Christian
Love or charity” (14), through oppositions to “‘cupidity,’” which for Augustine “is a motion of / The soul
toward the enjoyment of one’s self, one’s neighbor, or / Any corporeal thing for the sake of something
other than God” (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 3.44 quoted in Gregerson, 14).

23
Ultimately, Sidney and Harington conclude that the primary moral fault and culpability
for “scurrilitie and lewdnesse” in especially licentious verse lies in the poet’s use and
abuse of tropes not in the poetic figures themselves. Thus, using Cupid to talk about love
and desire was not only a popular and often-criticized convention in lyric poetry, but was
also repeatedly employed in defenses of poetry’s social value and moral utility.
However, the adoption of amorous themes and use of pagan figures in the writing of lyric
poetry proved to be harder to justify for women writers in early modern England who
were often subject to moral censure for writing that was not imitative or religious in
nature.
The figure of Cupid, variously referred to as Eros or Amor, was also long used as
a dramatic device in prologues in early pastoral tragicomedies such as Tasso’s pastoral
tragicomedy Aminta and by successive English playwrights like Samuel Daniel and
others, who imitated Tasso’s use of mythological figures to introduce dramatic themes.
40

In fact, as Josephine Roberts notes, although Ben Jonson used the figure of Cupid as a
dramatic commentator in Cynthia’s Revels (1600) and in various masques, he wryly
commented on the figure’s tendency to be definitively overused in the induction to
Cynthia’s Revels: “Take anie of our play-bookes without a CUPID, or a MERCURY in it,
and burne it for a heretique in Poetrie.”
41
Indeed, so common was the use of mythological
figures as commentators in early modern drama and poetry, that Jonson sardonically

40
Josephine Roberts, The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1992), 54.

41
Ben Jonson, Cynthia’s Revels (1600), quoted in Roberts 54.

24
characterizes works that do not employ such figures as heretical in their deviation from
this literary convention. While the familiarity of the figure of Cupid is reinforced by the
repetition of the figure across different literary genres, each repeated appearance of Cupid
suggests the figure’s distance and difference from the genres in which he participates. It
is this productive difference that opens up space for the literary expression of political
and social critique.
Ovid’s Cupid in Early Modern Literature
Chapter one argues that early modern playwrights take up the figure of Cupid
from Ovidian elegy in response to the coercive rhetoric of Elizabethan encomia. As a
genre, encomia directed at the Queen demanded the praise of chaste virtue and female
authority. Lyly adopts Ovid’s critical stance toward the insistent and excessive force
wielded by Cupid against yielding lovers and uses it to underscore the implicit threat of
erotic tyranny at the core of Elizabethan panegyric. Lyly’s Gallathea recasts Elizabethan
affective discourse of idealized chaste love into a political mode used to coerce obedience
from willful subjects. Figures of Elizabeth’s chaste authority like Diana become aligned
with the same tendency toward excessive force and tyranny as Ovid’s Cupid. The second
half of Chapter One examines the ways in which the expectations and conventions of
praise associated with encomia are often upended by the transgressive figure of Cupid
who does not always serve the literary mode of which he is a part. In Marlowe’s Dido,
challenges to the conventions of encomia come in the form of Cupid’s challenges to
female virtue, particularly the chaste virtue that exists within the more sexually
experienced context of marriage and widowhood.

25
Influenced by the guiding ideologies of Neoplatonism, Spenser’s Faerie Queene
is marked by attempts to present its subject matter within an orderly and orthodox
narrative frame that reflects generic Neoplatonic themes. Spenser, however, borrows
from Ovid, the figure of Cupid, a figure that works to destabilize patterns already
established by the dominant principles of Neoplatonism: hierarchy, order, autonomy of
individual will. Chapter two looks at Spenser’s adaptation of Ovidian elegiac structures
in response to the demands of Elizabethan encomiastic poetry in The Faerie Queene. For
Spenser, the genre of encomia contains possibilities for political expression and he adapts
the structures of affective discourse to voice nuanced political discontent. Like Lyly and
Marlowe, the terms of Spenser’s encomium to the Queen are conditional. As a
representative of chaste and base discourses of love and desire, Spenser’s Cupid is at
once a figure of interpretive ambiguity and a figure that in its most tyrannical
incarnations highlights the inherent violence and subjection at the center of erotic
addresses aimed at the queen. Conversely, Cupid’s tyranny threatens to expose the
queen’s own cultivation of an eroticized political regime. Addressing itself to female
readers of allegorical romance, Spenser’s poetry also participates in broader cultural
debates about the merits and methods of female educational and interpretive practices,
which were part of a larger discussion about the civic utility of poetry in Elizabethan
England.
In Chapter three, my argument moves from Spenser’s critical response to the
coercive structures of Elizabethan panegyric to focus on the visual representation of
affective and political discourse in the genre of emblem in Book III. In joining pictura

26
with poesis in the emblem, artists and writers could recast classical images, conceits, and
commonplaces about Cupid into a modern context. Hyde has argued that as a mode, the
emblem “works against iconoclastic exposure of Cupid as only an image, a product of
human art or illusion.”
42
Thus the persistence of Cupid’s divine status conferred a
strategic usefulness for poets interested in registering a political critique of structures of
authority. Drawing on emblems as narrative intertexts, Spenser capitalizes on the
Ovidian parody of the Roman triumphus in the Amores in the emblematic depiction of
Cupid’s Masque. By temporarily arresting the forward movement of the epic narrative,
the emblem intertexts highlight more closely the consequences of absolute authority on
the individual – loss of will and liberty – that become personified in the figure of tyrant
Cupid. Cupid’s subjection of lovers to his yoke in Spenser’s invocation of a series of
allegorical emblems highlights how erotic passions can be literally and figuratively
harnessed for political use.
Spenser’s invocation of the iconographical tradition of moralizing emblems draws
more focused attention to the idea that reading Spenser’s poem requires the ability to
interpret multiple levels of meaning. The discipline required of Spenser’s female readers
manifests itself on the level of narrative in the rigorous spiritual and physical testing of
female virtue in the “Book of Chastity.” Spenser’s exemplary female characters undergo

42
Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love, 73. Hyde argues that Alciati’s “In Statuam Amoris” is the only
emblem “among those hundreds of emblems” he studies that “debunks Cupid’s ontological status” and
notes that “it was imitated far less than most of Alciati’s emblems.” Thus the idea that Cupid was
frequently perceived as more than simply “ an image” reinforces this dissertation’s argument that Cupid
was an important poetic figure for the literary expression of political discontent.

27
these challenges in Book III, where the most diverse and frequent incarnations of Cupid
occur, and where Busirane’s most overtly allegorical work materializes in the figure of a
tyrannical and oppressive Cupid.
Chapter four considers the female poet’s adaptation of Ovid’s Cupid and
response to the masculine structures of elegy. Like Ovid and Spenser, Wroth was acutely
aware of the consequences of rhetorical failure; for Ovid’s amator, rhetorical failure
meant sexual failure; for Spenser and his narrator, rhetorical failure meant political
impotency. For Wroth, rhetorical failure could also mean the loss of virtue. By taking the
Ovidian amator’s claim that Cupid is the impetus behind his submission and will to love
seriously, Wroth takes the affective discourses of which the figure is central to task.
Cupid’s insistent and excessive force against the yielding female lover is made parallel to
the erotic force of an unfaithful and deceptive lover. By making the unequal relationship
between male and female lovers akin to the relationship between subject and sovereign,
Wroth broadens the scope of her interrogation to include a critique of Jacobean structures
of authority, which envision sovereign authority as absolute and demand complete
obedience of subjects, even to the most tyrannical of kings. In so doing, Wroth revalues
the position of the female love object in elegiac discourse for the female reader,
demonstrating how the imitative posture of the modest woman and the rhetorical
forwardness of an Ovidian amator can be employed as self-aware modes of bold personal
expression and political critique.

28
Chapter One
“Confess him a conqueror”:
Cupid and the Cult of Elizabeth in John Lyly’s Gallathea
and Christopher Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage

Aeneides by Chiron was instructed,
And by my art Love himselfe conducted,
Both goddess sonnes, Venus and Thetis joyes,
Both shrewd, both waggish, and & unhappy boyes:
Yet the stiffe Bulls necke by the yoake is worne,
The proud steede chewes the bit which he doth scorn
And though Loves dart my own heart cleaves asunder,
Yet by my art the wag shall be kept under.
43

In the introduction to his Ars Amatoria, Ovid announces that he is the master of
the amorous arts and has received the blessing of Venus to exercise his craft and to teach
readers “the art of Love” (1.2): “And me hath Venus her Arts master made:” (1.9). The
poet also announces his control of Venus’s wayward son Cupid: “Love in himself is apish
& untoward, / Yet being a childe, Ile whip him when he’s frorward:” (1.13-14). The
poet’s temporary mastery over the figures of love is central to the poet’s authority in
matters of love. Ovid likens himself to the centaur Chiron, whom he memorializes in the
Fasti (5.379-414). Although Chiron is often associated with healing, he is unable to cure
his own wounds. After admiring Hercules’ weapons, Chiron accidentally drops one of the
god’s poisoned arrows on his foot, dies, and is transformed into the constellation

43
Ovid, Loves schoole Publii Ovidii Nasonis de arte amandi, or, The Art of Love, trans. Thomas Heywood,
(1625). Folger Shakespeare Library. Early English Books Online. 2009.
http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:5909:2. Although Thomas Heywood’s translation of Ovid’s
Ars Amatoria did not appear until the beginning of the seventeenth century, after John Lyly’s drama
Gallathea, it is this Ovidian spirit that compels Cupid in Lyly’s play, when the god “plays truant” from his
mother Venus and flies to Diana’s woods to discover the status of virtue among the nymphs in the chaste
goddess’s train.

29
Centaurus. Before this tragic error, Chiron is also charged with the education of Achilles,
who is given to the centaur by Peleus after Achilles’s mother Thetis returns to the
Nereids. Charged by Love with the erotic education of his readers, Ovid warns that he
will not be modest and will shamelessly investigate the affections that “pierse” the
thoughts of lovers (1.47).
44

In Ovid’s Amores, Ars Amatoria, and the Remedia Amoris, Cupid exists in a
parallel relationship with the poet—both are sources of love’s wound and its remedy. Yet
Ovid’s relationship to his figure is fraught with tension. In the Ars Amatoria, the poet
boldly announces mastery of his poetic figure—“Yet by my art the wag shall be kept
under”—while in the Amores, the poet cedes control, lamenting Cupid’s relentless hold
over him and revealing that “loue hath my bones left naked” (2.9). However, earlier, in
the first elegy of the Amores, Cupid is the god who “wills” Ovid, after he steals a foot
from the poet’s line, to write “Toyes; and light Elegies” (2.1) and provides the impetus
behind the poet’s boldness in entreating his mistress (1.6). In the Remedia Amoris, the
figure that once provided the rationale behind Ovid’s form and meter becomes a source
of staunch resistance. Love instructs the poet to end his work: “Thus having said, Loue

44
Mack, Ovid, 148-149. In her chronological study of Ovid’s poetry, Sara Mack also notes this striking
parallel between Ovid, Cupid, Chiron, and Achilles in Ars 1.18: Venus hands over charge of Cupid to Ovid
just like Peleus gives over the education of Achilles to Chiron. Mack argues that these parallels even extend
to the structure of Ovid’s Latin line: “sas erus / uterque / puer // natus / uterque / dea,” which she translates
to “savage / each one / boy // born / each one / from-goddess” (Ars 1.18 qtd in Mack 149). Each line is
“symmetrical” with “each half consisting in the Latin of three words:” “The first half-line contains a
masculine adjective, a pronoun, and a masculine noun; the second a masculine participial adjective, the
same pronoun, and the word for each goddess in the ablative case, giving the parentage of each boy.” By
making Cupid and Achilles similar in line and theme, Ovid is able to draw attention to the shared
characteristics of the genres of epic and elegy. Both boys wage wars that involve “victory and defeat”
(149).

30
shooke his golden wings, / And bid me end the worke my pen begins” (Stanza 10).
Ultimately, the poet’s troubled relationship with Cupid seems to have only the most
ambivalent of solutions. While the poet is at once master of love and love’s prey, Cupid’s
unavoidable force provides the justification for the poet’s decision to yield to love:
Were loue the cause, it’s like I should descry him,
Or lyes he close, and shootes where none can spie him,
‘Twas so; he stroke mee with a slender dart,
‘Tis cruell loue turmoyles my captive heart.
Yeelding or struggling do we give him might,
Lets yeeld, a burthen easily borne is light …
Unwilling lovers, love doth more torment
Then such as in their bondage feele content. (1.2)
45

The poet’s acceptance of this unavoidable scenario of subjection, however, does not go
unqualified. In fact, the poet’s questioning of the insistent and excessive nature of
Cupid’s force against him once he has yielded is an Ovidian theme that is taken up by
many early modern writers.
These Ovidian themes are directly indebted to popular Virgilian devices
employed in Elizabethan progress entertainments, which initiated the thematic use of
dramatic encounters between Cupid, female characters, and Queen Elizabeth. These
Virgilian incarnations of Cupid from Book I and Book IV of the Aeneid feature a Cupid
who obeys his mother’s will and is complicit in the extension of her authority over the

45
Ovid. All Ovid’s elegies 3 bookes in C.M. Epigrams and Elegies, trans. Christopher Marlowe. (London,
1603). Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Early English Books Online. 2008.
http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99848940.

31
erotic desires of Carthage’s queen.
46
By emphasizing Ovidian themes that insist upon the
moral ambivalence, doubt, and error that accompany erotic experience, the playwright
offers a subtle critique of the oppressive dynamics of Elizabethan representations of love
and idealizations of chaste virtue. The model of Ovid’s Cupid gives the playwright
license to challenge and at times, threaten one of the most culturally accepted sources of
Elizabeth’s female authority – her chastity and virtue – while remaining a dutiful servant
of the queen and defender of her virtue.
As writers seeking courtly preferment to support their literary efforts, Elizabethan
playwrights John Lyly and Christopher Marlowe experienced firsthand the
unpredictability of Elizabeth’s court, where both men were subject to the Court’s
vacillating judgments. Two distinctly Ovidian voices of their age, Lyly and Marlowe took
up the eroticized language of Elizabethan political address and the conventions of
encomium and recognized opportunity in the generic language of love and desire, which
could be manipulated for purposes of political expression and critique. Lyly’s
relationship to the court, though filled with considerably less intrigue than Marlowe’s
infamous run-ins with English authority, was equally strained. As secretary to the Earl of

46
In Book I of the Aeneid, Venus calls Cupid “My son, My strength, my greatest power, my one and only
… I must turn to you / And beg the force of your divinity … What I propose is to ensnare the queen / By
guile beforehand, pin her down in passion, / So she cannot be changed by any power / But will be kept on
my side by profound / Love of Aeneas” (1.906-925). In response, Cupid or “Amor / Agreed with his fond
mother’s plan of action, / Put off his wings and gaily walked as Iulus” (1.941-943). After embracing “the
deluded father” Aeneas, Cupid “sought the queen; / And she with all her eyes and heart embraced him,
/Fondling him at times upon her breast, / Oblivious of how great a god sat there / To her undoing. Mindful
of his mother, / He had begun to make Sychaeus fade / From Dido’s memory bit by bit, and tried / To
waken with new love, a living love, / Her long settled mind and dormant heart” (1.977-985). Virgil, The
Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald. (New York: Random House, 1990), 27-29.

32
Oxford (Edward de Vere), one of Elizabeth’s courtier-poet favorites. Lyly was intimately
familiar with the intrigue at Court; the earl’s father-in-law, Lord Cecil Burleigh, may
have encouraged Lyly to spy on the emboldened young man. Unfortunately, the earl’s
“wayward” antics – his flirtation with Catholicism and affair with Anne Vavasour, which
resulted in an illegitimate child – brought the Queen immense displeasure. The earl was
placed under house arrest and imprisoned in the Tower of London. The earl’s
imprisonment was an unexpected boon to Lyly who received the earl’s lease to
Blackfriar’s Theater in London (perhaps a strategic attempt to regain the queen’s favor
for the earl), but by 1584, he had lost the lease and was imprisoned for outstanding debt.
The Queen comes to Lyly’s aid and bails him out of prison. His service to the earl is
financially rewarded with emoluments from the earl’s lands in Essex, which Lyly later
sells. Although Elizabeth makes him Esquire of the Body, Lyly’s ambition to be
appointed to the more lucrative position of Master of Revels is disappointed. Lyly’s role
in the Marprelate Scandal in 1589, for which he writes the pamphlet Pap with an Hachet,
comes back to haunt him in 1590, when the Children of St. Paul’s is closed down, and
Lyly’s access to the queen is severely restricted. Lyly’s letters and petitions to the queen
throughout 1593 do not bring him the wished for revival of his former fortunes.
47

47
Michael Pincombe observes that the Queen’s effort to bail Lyly out of gaol suggests that she might have
found his plays entertaining (xiii). The Plays of John Lyly: Eros and Eliza (Manchester and New York:
Manchester University Press, 1996), xii-xv. For further reading on Lyly’s relationship to Elizabeth’s court,
see G.K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1962).

33
Marlowe’s relationship with the queen and her court is marked by similar though
more sensational instability. In 1587, the same year that Tamburlaine is performed, the
Privy Council intervenes on Marlowe’s behalf when Cambridge University refuses to
grant his M.A. degree because of excessive absences. Many Marlowe scholars speculate
that these suspicious absences were caused by his secret work for the queen among the
Jesuits. Throughout his life, Marlowe is faced with various charges of atheism and
counterfeiting; he is arrested multiple times and always released. Marlowe’s experiences
with Elizabeth’s court suggest that he was intimately aware of how quickly the queen’s
favor could transform into indifference and disdain.
48

Lyly’s Gallathea, initially performed before Queen Elizabeth by the Children of
St. Paul’s between 1583 and 1585, and Sappho and Phao, performed by Her Majesty’s
Children and the Boys of St. Paul’s, 1584, strategically play upon Cupid’s traditional role
as authoritative god and vulnerable boy, subject to his mother’s commands. Both plays
investigate the cultural status of female virtue, erotic desire, and the extent of the
playwright’s creative license in the context of a powerful female monarch. Lyly’s
dramatic narrative draws on multiple classical sources: the pastoral back story featured in
the first of Virgil’s Bucolics and the theme of arbitrary virgin sacrifice and punishment
from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (the sacrifice of Hesione, Book XI.194-228 and the myth of

48
For biographical information on Marlowe, see J.B. Steane, introduction to Christopher Marlowe: The
Complete Plays (New York, Penguin Books, 1969), 9-37. See also, Patrick Cheney, introduction to
Introduction: Marlowe in the twenty-first century, in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), xvi-xix, 1-23. David Riggs. “Marlowe’s Life, in The
Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 24-40.

34
Andromeda). Yet it is Lyly’s choice of Diana’s woods for Cupid’s erotic transgressions
that is most suitably Ovidian. Any skilled reader of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria would recognize
Diana’s woods as an ideal location for the pursuit of chaste hearts. Ovid tells his readers:
Sometimes unto those places taske thy feete,
Where the faire forrest hantresses do meete,
In number more then sea sands, else prepare,
To warme bathes, where many a female are:
There some or other hurt by Cupids strike,
Where troubled waters with warme brimstone smoke
Mistake the wounds, cause and exclaiming raues,
Not blaming Loue, but those unwholesome waves.
See where Dianes grouie Temple stands,
Where kingdoms haue bin won by slaughtering hands
Because he Cupid loathes and liues chaste still.
Much people he hath slaine, and much shall kill.
49

In Ovid, the “faire forrest” where Diana makes her home is characterized by the overt
eroticism of its natural elements, which are conflated with the desires evoked by erotic
passions– “warme bathes,” “troubled waters,” and “unwholesome waves.” In this
eroticized pastoral landscape, Diana and her chaste huntresses are not immune to “Cupids
strike.” The presence of Cupid in chaste Diana’s woods suggests not only the
impossibility of resisting experience of amorous desires but also highlights the violence
engendered by rigid allegiance to Diana’s brand of tyrannical chastity. It is “where
Dianes grouie Temple stands / Where kingdoms have bin won by slaughtering hands.”
Lyly’s interest in scenarios of erotic courtship at Elizabeth’s court and the extent
to which the cult of virginity extended (almost tyrannically) to her ladies-in-waiting and

49
Ovid. Loves schoole Publii Ovidii Nasonis de arte amandi, or, The Art of Love, trans by Thomas
Heywood (London: 1625).

35
male favorites converge in Lyly’s use of an especially Ovidian Cupid. As an
uncontainable erotic element in Ovid’s erotic elegies – at times obedient to authority, at
others tyrannical in his will to power – Cupid exemplifies the uncontainable erotic
energies Elizabeth endeavors to restrain at court.
50
By adopting Ovid’s critical stance
toward the insistent and excessive nature of Cupid’s force against yielding lovers, Lyly
underscores the implicit threat of erotic tyranny at the core of Elizabethan panegyric.
In Gallathea, Cupid’s filial obedience to his mother Venus is made problematic
by his insistence upon assaulting the chaste nymphs of Diana’s train without her
knowledge or consent. Cupid’s separation from his mother initiates the nymphs’
experience with erotic desire, yet strikingly, it is the alienated condition of female virtue
itself – the nymphs’ “exercise in foolish love” that the play directly implicates as the
rationale for Cupid’s truancy.
51

The play’s two virgins and Diana offer a point of resistance to Cupid’s dramatic
artifice and underscore the Ovidian violence that often accompanies the adoption of

50
Characterizing Elizabeth’s exertion of control over the amorous affairs of her court as the “royal ban on
dalliance,” Michael Pincombe argues that “Lyly’s pastoral exposes the cult of virginity as a tyrannical
erotic regime, in which natural affections are perverted to the point where loves becomes hate: rape is the
monster – Agar – that devastates the sexual domain of this fallen world” (136). For a thorough
consideration of the relationship between Diana and the nymphs of Lyly’s Gallathea and Elizabeth and the
ladies of her court, see Michael Pincombe’s chapter “Galatea: we may all love” in The Plays of John Lyly:
Eros and Eliza, ed. Michael Pincombe (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996),
136, 129-145.

51
This theme is later taken up by Edmund Spenser in Book III of The Faerie Queene. In Spenser, the
“frowardnes” of Venus’s “dearest sonne Cupido” (III.vi.20) who flees from his mother’s “blissful bowre of
joy above”(III.vi.11), temporarily brings together the aims of chaste Diana and the goddess of love. The
unarmed Cupid is eventually discovered, “Sporting himself in safe felicity” in the Garden of Adonis
(III.vi.49). Reconciled with Psyche, Venus brings the infant Amoretta (who assumes the place of Cupid
and is ‘th’ensample of true love alone’ (III.vi.52.4)), to be raised by Psyche and Cupid alongside their
daughter Pleasure (III.vi.50). Paradoxically, the search for the wayward Cupid takes Venus to the Garden
of Adonis, where Cupid is unarmed. See discussions of this theme in Chapters 2 and 3 of this dissertation.

36
disguise. Although it would seem that puritanical Diana has triumphed over tyrant
Cupid, the goddess of chastity over the god of love, the god of love’s assault upon female
virtue remains essentially unanswered for in the play. Lyly’s Cupid de-centers the play’s
narrative of praise aimed at the queen, and replaces it with a narrative that privileges
Cupid’s erotic authority over Diana and her nymphs. Diana’s tyrannical administration of
Cupid’s punishment actually exposes the limits of the chaste goddess’s authority over
female sexuality.
Marlowe takes the threat of Lyly’s Cupid to chaste love to its humorous and
perverse extreme in his play Dido, Queen of Carthage. Dido’s date of composition is
uncertain, but the play, published in 1594, was most likely composed in 1585. This was
the year that Marlowe was admitted to candidacy for the M.A. at Cambridge and may
have coincided with his popular translation of Ovid’s elegies. In contrast to the chaste
love represented by Lyly’s Diana and her nymphs, which is threatened by the experience
of erotic desire represented by Cupid, Marlowe examines the effects of Cupid’s authority
on women who are experienced in amorous matters. Both Queen Dido and her Nurse
are widows who are experienced in matters of love and can recall the force and authority
of desire. Dido’s nurse gives bold voice to the erotic desire that Dido is intent on
denying. Cupid’s ability to draw out erotic passions in resistant female characters who
are experienced in love suggests even more forcefully, the figure’s affective authority.
Marlowe’s adaptation of Lyly’s Cupid, who “plays truant” from his mother, reinforces
not only the playwright’s insistence on the liberties of the playwright within the often

37
politicized genre of courtly drama but also emphasizes to a more extreme degree than
Lyly, the alienated condition of female virtue itself.
By privileging Cupid’s erotic authority over Dido and her nurse, Marlowe’s play
enacts the violent consequences of turning the erotic tyranny of Lyly’s Diana inward. In
place of punishing Cupid, Marlowe’s Dido exercises cruel punishment on her nurse (who
voices the desires she represses) for losing Aeneas’s son, who is really Cupid in disguise.
Most severely, this inward turn compels Dido to sacrifice her own life as she is
overwhelmed by the shame she experiences for the injury done to her virtue.
If as Jove proclaims to Venus, Aeneas fate is to wander, then Marlowe’s play
examines how brief interludes of pleasure and erotic experience motivate such epic
wanderings. Strikingly, flight, wandering, and disguise are dominant tropes in both
Lyly’s and Marlowe’s dramas. The insistence of these tropes suggests an instability and
ambivalence about the goals of empire building and Virgilian ideas about epic destiny
and erotic containment. The plays also investigate the consequences of unrequited erotic
passions and desires, which in their most destructive form turn inward and become the
impetus for self-annihilation. Lyly’s and Marlowe’s interest in the coercive nature of love
and desire is most evident in their deployment of Ovidian themes that highlight the
relationship between erotic and political subjection.
The Pursuit of Chaste Hearts
In Lyly’s plays Sappho and Phao and Gallathea, Cupid becomes a paradoxical
figure of entrapment that can make female bodies on stage vulnerable and open to

38
interpretation.
52
Indeed rhetorical entrapment by Lyly’s Cupid often initiates
transformation of female characters from chaste women to figures of amorous
transgression. Broadly, Cupid’s ability to read female bodies for signs of base and lusty
desires and improper thoughts is suggestive of the cultural anxieties surrounding the
status of female virtue and dramatic representations of autonomous female desire, which
could threaten to become female agency. These are especially crucial concerns for
courtly playwrights who had to strike a balance between flattery of the queen in the form
of Elizabethan panegyric and more traditional mythologies that drew upon Virgil and
Ovid, which depicted female authority figures in conflict with competing sources of epic
or divine authority.
Lyly’s plays take up themes from early Elizabethan progress entertainments,
which easily adapted Virgil’s icon of “Dido and Cupid” from Book I of the Aeneid to the
figure of an English female sovereign in the icon of “Elizabeth and Cupid.”
53
Lyly drew
from such politically inflected entertainments as Thomas Churchyard’s “Show of
Chastity,” the first of the Norwich entertainments, which was printed in The Queen
Majesty’s Entertainments in Suffolk and Norfolk (1578). After being humiliated by
Chastity and her Ladies, Cupid relinquishes his bows and arrows to the Queen in an act

52
In this way, Lyly’s Cupid prefigures Spenser’s “vile enchanter” Busirane.

53
I am deeply indebted to Michael Pincombe’s essay “Cupid and Eliza: Variations on a Virgilian Icon in
Plays by Gager, Marlowe, and Lyly” on the influence of Virgil’s Dido and Cupid on early modern tradition
of panegyrical devices presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1578 and on John Lyly’s adaptation of these
devices in Sappho and Phao. In The Iconography of Power: Ideas and Images of Rulership on the English
Renaissance Stage, eds. Gyorgy Szonyi and Rowlie Wymer (Szeged: JATE, 2000), 33-52.

39
of deference to her authority. Michael Pincombe suggests that Cupid’s gesture of
surrender marks an explicit acknowledgement by the playwright of the queen’s liberty to
choose whom she wanted to marry and signifies the Queen’s newfound ability to wound
in a broader cultural and political context.
54
The choice was not to be left to the chance of
Cupid’s high-flying arrows or to the preferences of Elizabeth’s political advisors.
From the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth insisted on maintaining a degree of
liberty in her marriage negotiations. In Elizabeth’s First Speech before Parliament in
1559, in response to petitions by the Lower House regarding questions of marriage, she
reminded Parliament of her primary obligation as a female sovereign. These obligations
were not the human duties of a wife to a husband but of a female servant to God. “I first
had consideration of myself to be born of a servitor of Almighty God, I happily chose this
kind of life in which I yet live, which I assure your for mine owne part hath neither to
best contented myself and I trust hath been most acceptable to God.”
55
Early in her reign,
Elizabeth’s rhetoric of choice establishes the idea that as a female sovereign, she answers
to the ultimate authority of God, not Parliament. The queen lightly scolds Parliament for
their presumptions while she asserts the primacy of her will, even as she strategically

54
Pincombe, “Cupid and Eliza,” 35.

55
My italics. “First Speech Before Parliament (1559),” in Elizabeth I and Her Age, eds. Donald Stump and
Susan M. Felch (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009), 126. For further reading, see Allison
Heisch. “Queen Elizabeth I: Parliamentary Rhetoric and the Exercise of Power.” Signs 1.1. (1975): 31-55;
Allison Heisch. Queen Elizabeth I: Political Speeches and Parliamentary Addresses, 1558-1601. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1994; Leah Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose, eds. Elizabeth I,
Collected Works (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Frances Teague, “Queen Elizabeth in Her
Speeches,” in Gloriana’s Face, eds. S.P. Cerasano and Marion Wynn-Davies (Detroit: Wayne State
University, 1992), 67-69.

40
subsumes her will beneath the will of God in deciding matters that touch upon her
marriage.
While she compliments the “manner” of Parliament’s petition, praising its
“simplicity” and its broadness, her tone suggests that Elizabeth is deeply irritated at the
forwardness of the petition.
For the other part, the manner of your petition I do well like of and take in good
part, because that it is simple and containeth no limitation of place or person. If it
had been otherwise, I must needs have misliked it very much and thought it in you
a very great presumption, being unfitting and altogether unmeet for you to require
them that may command, or those to appoint whose parts are to desire, or such
to bind and limit whose duties are to obey, or to take upon you to draw my love to
your liking or frame my will to your fantasies. For a guerdon constrained and a
gift freely given can never agree together.
56

As anxieties over Elizabeth’s unmarried state surfaced, she found herself in the position
of reminding an over eager Parliament of their transgressions against her sovereign
authority and of the strength of her individual will, which belonged to no one except God.
The Queen’s early insistence on maintaining a degree of liberty in her marriage
negotiations did not prevent her political advisors from attempting to exert their political
will. Courtly Playwrights like Lyly were most likely aware of less deferential and more
oppositional Ovidian treatments of the nature of Elizabeth’s personal and political
authority than the model offered in Churchyard’s “Show of Chastity.” In his
entertainment Joyful Receiving of the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty into Her
Highness’ City of Norwich (1578), Henry Goldingham adopts an Ovidian subtext for
Cupid’s posture of deference and veers away from the traditional emphasis on “the

56
My italics. “First Speech to Parliament (1559),” 126.

41
Queen’s virginity and her goddess-like immunity to desire.”
57
Waiting until his “mother
[is] out of sight,” Cupid gives his golden arrow to the queen and commands: “Shoote but
this shafte at King or Caesar: He, / And he is thine, and if thou wilte allowe.”
58
While
Cupid’s gesture explicitly returns amorous authority to Elizabeth, the act is also
complicated by its ironic Ovidian subtext. By giving the queen the golden arrow, a divine
instrument that in Ovid suggests lust and sensual passion as opposed to chaste love,
Goldingham’s Cupid affirms the idea that Elizabeth’s self-determination of a marriage
partner is vulnerable to motivations characterized by passion and lustful desire. In Ovid’s
Apollo and Daphne (Book I, Metamorphosis) Cupid’s golden arrow strikes Apollo and
incites the erotic chase that leads to Daphne’s furious flight away from the god of poetry.
Apollo’s “possession” of the golden arrow leads not to his union with the object of his
desires but to Daphne’s violent metamorphoses into a laurel tree – a position that
memorializes his rhetorical failure to persuade Daphne to Goldingham’s Cupid also

57
Stump and Felch, Elizabeth I, 239.

58
Garter, Bernard. Joyful Receiving of the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty into Her Highness’s City of
Norwich (London: 1578). Early English Books Online. Cambridge University Library. 1 December 2008.
http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99841430.

42
acknowledges this implicit Ovidian subtext of rhetorical and erotic failure, which
suggests uneasiness in supporting the queen’s marital choice.
59

Lyly’s dramas skillfully expand upon the oppositional models of political critique
derived from Churchyard and Goldingham in order to imagine more intimate and
transgressive possibilities for the encounter between Cupid and a powerful female
monarch. As a playful figure that could reveal concealed erotic desires without shame,
especially when these desires were tied to the presence or absence of female virtue,
Cupid also functioned as a figure for the playwright’s dramatic craft and skill. Lyly’s
ability to balance the demands of Elizabethan panegyric while maintaining narrative
authority in his dramas is most explicitly enacted in his play Gallathea.
While Lyly’s Sappho and Phao adapts Cupid in a Virgilian context and considers
William Gager’s reworking of Virgil’s Cupid, I argue that Lyly’s Gallathea is more
acutely representative of the influence of Ovidian myths on Elizabethan panegyric. As a
playful figure for the playwright’s affective abilities, Cupid’s power is never entirely

59
Stump and Felch note the political character of the Queen’s summer progress to Norwich in 1578, which
was “the second most populous city in England and one of the most strongly anti-Catholic” (239). Because
the Queen was beginning marriage negotiations with the French-Catholic Duke of Anjou, the Queen invited
a group of French emissaries to travel with her through the English countryside. Consequently, writers and
speakers had to maintain a delicate balance between the overt expression of anti-Catholic sentiments that
might offend Elizabeth and her French guests and the articulation of Pro-Protestant ideas, which the
staunchly Protestant population in Norwich would expect. “The Queen, French Ambassadors, and Visit to
Norwich,” in Elizabeth I and Her Age (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009), 238-239. C.E.
McGee also comments on the incongruous character of Goldingham’s entertainment: “With its array of
classical devices, Goldingham’s masque seems out of place in the context of Norwich, a sturdily Protestant
city where one would expect biblical, legendary, and allegorical characters representing the city, as they did
in the pageants Bernard Garter prepared for the Queen’s reception” (120). See “Mysteries, Musters, and
Masque: The Import(s) of Elizabethan Civic Entertainments,” in The Progresses, Pageants, and
Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I. eds. Jane Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Golding, and Sarah Knight
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 120.

43
diminished and while the Cupid of Lyly’s Gallathea does not climb into the laps of the
goddess or her nymphs to enflame erotic desire, he does claim that he can ascend, even
more deviously and disruptively into their thoughts. Ovid’s Cupid enables the playwright
the license to challenge and at times, threaten one of the most culturally accepted sources
of Elizabeth’s female authority—her chastity and virtue—without explicitly abandoning
the use of flattery or panegyric. Cupid emerges as a traditional mythological figure whose
Ovidian character is amplified by the playwright’s insistence that Cupid can act
separately, distinct from his mother Venus and can insinuate himself into Diana’s chaste
band without her knowledge. The penalty for such transgression against the goddess of
chastity and her nymphs turns out to be quite small in the drama. While Cupid’s physical
punishments are the most overt, and his disfiguring scars are evidence of his guilt and
wrongdoing, the ambivalence associated with the consequences of his actions against
Diana and her chaste band, mark his indictment as more ceremonial than condemnatory
of his transgressions against virtuous female characters. Cupid’s punishments are an
ambivalent gesture aimed at reinforcing the queen’s transcendent virtue and reaffirming
mode of Elizabethan panegyric. In adapting Ovid’s Cupid, Lyly offers a subtle critique
of the queen’s tyrannical enforcement of chastity at her court and uses the poetic figure to
highlight the erotic coercion at the center of narratives of praise.
Lyly’s Ovid
Like many early modern playwrights, Lyly could not avoid the influence of
Renaissance humanism nor could they escape the heavy emphasis on classical learning in
English grammar schools and at universities. Ovid’s works provided both novice and

44
experienced writers with models for literary imitation and sources for moral exempla.
Early modern writers also had to confront the popular moralizations of Ovid they
inherited through the medieval tradition of the Ovide moralise, a tradition that included
the earliest translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into the French vernacular.
60
The
Ovidius moralizatus (1362), the fourteenth century translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
by Pierre Bersuire consisted predominantly of exegetical commentary and moralizing as
opposed to direct narration. Bersuire’s translations of Ovid influenced English writers
like Geoffrey Chaucer and the tradition was later picked up by writers like George
Sandys, whose seventeenth century translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses was
accompanied by moralizations adapted to suit the moral sensibilities of an early modern
audience. In the spirit of Petrarch, Lyly adapted the Ovide moralise tradition with a more
pointed focus on the Metamorphoses’s “erotic and profane” themes.
61
More than a
relationship of strict imitation, however, Lyly’s engagement with his classical source
translated Ovid’s political and poetic interests to an Elizabethan context, and in doing so,
emphasized a relationship of intertextuality. The question of Ovid’s influence on Lyly is

60
For a study of feminine discourse in classical representations of Ovid, see Kathyrn L. McKinley, Reading
the Ovidian Heroine: “Metamorphoses” Commentaries 1100-1618 (Boston: Brill, 2001), 89-95, 106-112.

61
Carla Freccero notes that “for lyric poets such as Petrarch, the Ovidian legacy is primarily and erotic and
profane one” (24). Gina Bloom characterizes Bersuire’s translation of Ovid as an essentially “ideological
project” (135). Lyly’s adaptation of Ovid can also be described as ideologically driven; however, instead
of looking to exploit the ways in which “Ovidian myth lent itself to rationalizations of social and economic
problems” (24), as Carla Freccero, citing Leonard Barkan, asserts, Lyly looked to expose opportunities for
political critique contained within Ovid’s myths. See Freccero. “Ovidian Subjectivities in Early Modern
Lyric: Identification and Desire in Petrarch and Louise Labe” and Gina Bloom. “Localizing Disembodied
Voice in Sandys’ Englished ‘Narccisus and Echo’” in Ovid and the Renaissance Body, ed. Goran V.
Stanivukovic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).

45
part of the more critically demanding question of how Ovid allows Lyly “to explore such
crucial areas of human experience as love, politics, ethics, and history.”
62
Lyly’s choice
of Ovid illuminates Lyly’s own relationship to the classics as well as amplifies the more
subtle political inclinations of his work.
Following the lead of earlier writers of royal entertainments like Churchyard and
Goldingham and more contemporary playwrights like Gager and Marlowe, Lyly drew
heavily from Virgil, using his image of Dido and Cupid—playing on Virgil’s reference to
Dido’s Tyrian name Elissa—in order to draw a closer relationship to Queen Elizabeth
and the figure of Cupid. Although Virgil’s influence is unmistakable in Lyly’s Sappho
and Phao, Ovid’s influence on Lyly is even more striking for its exertion of a subtle
pressure on the boundaries of Elizabethan panegyric and its insistence on the liberties of
the playwright within the often politicized genre of courtly drama.
63
Heather James
locates Renaissance writers’ acute fascination with Ovid in one of the central questions
posited throughout his poetry: what is the value of learning through experience when it is

62
Charles Martindale and A.B. Taylor, eds., Shakespeare and the Classics (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 1-8.

63
Indeed, it is the specter of Ovid’s Cupid, whose powers are only temporarily checked, that poses the
most insidious challenge to Elizabeth’s authority in matters of love.

46
often violently accompanied by moral ambivalence, doubt, and error?
64
The value of
learning through amorous experience becomes especially important in cases where the
would-be lover is a woman and the status of female virtue is at stake.
Lyly was one of the many early modern writers who was drawn to Ovid despite
the Roman poet’s many detractors who claimed that Ovidian verse was devoid of moral
and educational value. While in most academic curricula Virgil was still dominant,
Ovid’s work continued to be consulted for fitting examples of rhetoric and to be imitated
for its skillfully drawn characters. Concerns about the pagan influence of traditional
myths, especially when derived from Ovid’s verse, on Elizabethan letters spurred many
critics like Stephen Gosson to rail against his influence. In Gosson’s School of Abuse
(1579), an invective against poetry, he particularly laments the pagan origins of poetry
and counsels English readers to steer clear of Ovid’s poetic “Seas of wantonnesse.” In the

64
For more on Ovid’s influence in Lyly, particularly on Lyly’s ambivalent depiction of Euphues’ moral
tale and the link between Ovid’s biography and Lyly’s interest in the mutability of rhetoric, see Heather
James’s “Ovid in English Renaissance Literature” in the Blackwell Companion to Ovid, ed. Peter E. Knox,
(Chichester, West Sussex: Blackwell Publishing, 2009), 423-41. Most notably, James points out that it is
the “morally questionable” Euphues who “initiates” Lucilla’s “transformation into an Ovidian creature
through the love games he takes from the Amores and the Ars Amatoria. Yet she alone bears the burden of
moral frailty” (5-6). While Euphues appears to have converted - he rejects “the pagan gods he once cited
approvingly” —Lucilla is thoroughly transformed into one of Ovid’s transgressive female figures “such as
Ovid’s Pasiphae or Myrrha, who also assumed control over their love lives and met with disaster” (5-6).
As Lyly’s prologue to Gallathea insists, it is the queen herself who is responsible for the moral quality of
the play, not the playwright or his players. Because the queen’s mind is perfect and virtuous (“where
nothing doth harbor but vertue, nothing can enter but vertue”), the burden for any of the play’s frailties or
offenses falls upon the queen. More broadly, the Ovidian idea that learning by experience comes with
certain unavoidable ethical consequences can be extended to the queen: by asserting control over her love
life and matrimonial matters, Elizabeth may also risk becoming one of Ovid’s transgressive females.

47
An Apologie (1579), Gosson argues against the blasphemous effects of amorous poetry
on the reader:
Whilest they make Cupide triumphe in heaven, and all the gods to marche bounde
like miserable captives, before his chariot, they belie God, and bewitch the reader
with bawdie charmes … Thus making gods of them that were brute beastes, in the
likeness of men, divine goddesses of common harlots; they robbe God of his
honour, diminshe his authoritie, weaken his might, and turne his seate to a
stewes.
65

The fact that Cupid figures prominently in attacks against Ovid’s erotic elegies and love
poetry in general makes Lyly’s adaptation of this much-maligned but potent figure of the
affective powers of poetry even more compelling.
66
In particular, Gosson’s explicit
mention of Cupid’s presence in relation to women attending the theater in his treatise “To
Gentlewomen Citizens of London, flourishing days with regard of credit” casts Cupid as
a threatening dramatic figure that exists beyond the confines of a play’s narrative and can
incite amorous desires in female viewers:
Blazing marks are most shot at; glistering faces chiefly marked; and what
followeth? Looking eyes have liking hearts; liking hearts may burn in lust. We
walk in the sun many times for pleasure, but our faces are tanned before we
return; though you go to theaters to see sport, Cupid may catch you ere you

65
Stephen Gosson, The ephemerides of Phialo deuided into three bookes … And a short apologie of the
Schoole of abuse, against poets, pipers, players, [et] their excusers (London: 1579)
http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99841410. Image 91.

66
Preacher Thomas Brice’s anti-pagan disdain for love poetry is evident in his verse, “Against filthy
writing and such like delighting” (1562), where he explicitly cites Cupid’s presence as a dominant figure of
divinity as troubling: “What meane the rimes that run thus large in euery shop to sell? / With wanton sound,
and filthie sense, me thinkes it grees not well, / Tel me is Christ, or Cupid Lord? doth God or Uenus
reigne?”

48
depart. The littleth god hover about you, and fanneth you with his wings to kindle
fire; when you are set as fixed whites, desire draweth his arrow to the head, and
sticketh it up to the feathers, and fancy bestirreth him to shed his poison through
every vein. If you do but listen to the voice of the fouler, or join looks with an
amorous gazer, you have already made yourselves assualtable, and yielded your
cities to be sacked. A wanton eye is the dart of Cephalus; where it leveleth,
there it lighteth, and where it hits it woundeth deep.
67

Gosson’s warning to women theatergoers characterizes Cupid as a force that can
insinuate itself into the female senses, and more problematically, can threaten female
virtue. Invoking the myth of Cephalus from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Gosson compares a
woman’s “wanton eye” with the deadly error committed by Cephalus’s fatal dart.
Mistaking his curious wife Procris for a wild animal while hunting, Cephalus accidentally
pierces the breast of his wife with a spear she gave him as a gift, killing her. However,
while Gosson glosses Ovid’s tale as an indictment of the theater for its provocation of
female wantonness, Ovid’s narrative relates the story of Cephalus and Procris in order to
highlight the dangers of the mistrustful female mind, which, by not trusting a potential
lover, may find itself wandering dangerously in the realm of self-deception and error.
68

67
Stephen Gosson, “To Gentlewomen Citizens of London, flourishing days with regard of credit,” in
Shakespeare’s Theater, ed. Tanya Pollard (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2004), 29-30.

68
It is from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria that Gosson adapts his conservative view of the theater as a dangerous
place for men and women, highlighting its erotic nature: “From that first age the Theater hath bin, / Even
like a trap to take faire wenches in.” Ovid advises potential suitors to “Beware that none behind her rudely
crush her, / Or with his hard knees or his elbowes brush her: / Small favours womens light thoughts
captivate, / And many in their loues make fortunate, / Beating the dust or fanning the fiesh aire, / Or to her
wearie soote but adde a staire, / Such diligence and dutie often proues, / Great furtherance to many in their
loues. / Within these lists hath Cupid battaile sounded: / And he that makes men wounds, himselfe bin
wounded. / As carelesse of himselfe he pries about, / To know which conquerors of the Champions stout, /
He feeles himselfe pierst with a flying dart, / And wounded sore, companies him of his heart.” See Gosson,
The ephemerides of Phialo deuided into three bookes … And a short apologie of the Schoole of abuse,
against poets, pipers, players, [et] their excusers, London: 1579.

49
John Lyly’s Gallathea
Adapted from Book XI of Ovid’s Metamorpshoses and the story of Hesione,
69

Lyly’s Gallathea centers on a pastoral world in which constant foreign invasions, most
recently an invasion by the Danes, has left the rustic shepherd inhabitants in a precarious
position. Although the Danish invaders are responsible for defacing one of Neptune’s
sacred Temples, the shepherds must pay the severe penalty for their violent transgression
against the god’s powerful authority. Once every five years, the shepherds must sacrifice
one of their virgin daughters to Neptune’s insatiable monster Agar. With each sacrifice,
the god and his monster are appeased. At the beginning of the play, the shepherd Tityrus
and a boy (who we later find out is his disguised virgin daughter Gallathea) appear on
stage together. Phillida, is the second virgin in this plot, who also assumes disguise on
the order of her father Melebeus in order to evade Neptune’s demands. In response to
these daring deceptions, Neptune disguises himself as shepherd in an attempt to enforce
the virgin sacrifice he requires. The play’s second plot, which will be the focus of the
following analysis, involves Venus, Cupid, Diana, and her nymphs. Cupid disguises
himself as a nymph in order to discover the status of virtue among the nymphs

69
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses XI, Hesione’s tale makes up part of the story of Troy. Laomedon, Hesione’s
father, is aided in his construction of the city by the gods Apollo and Neptune. When the king refuses to
reward their efforts, Neptune punishes the entire city; he unleashes a flood and demands that Laomedon
sacrifice his daughter to a sea monster. Hercules intervenes and rescues Hesione from a terrible death.
194-228.

50
of Diana’s train. In an interesting turn, the aims of rivals Venus and Diana are
temporarily aligned when Cupid’s rogue behavior threatens to disrupt the divine status
quo.
An alternate voice for the playwright and dramatic prerogatives emerges in the
play’s third plot through the three sons of a miller and an escaped servant boy. The
character of Peter, the “black boy,” articulates the failure of language itself and identifies
some arts as impossible. Raffe’s interest is peaked in the alchemical arts even though the
Peter reveals that his craft has failed. The three plots are brought together in the final
scene of the play as the characters travel together to a church where Gallathea and
Phillida will be married after one of the virgins is transformed into a boy. Ultimately, the
women of the play escape by disguise, absent themselves, and wander into safety of
Groves. As an audience, we are left with the potential of a metamorphosis that does not
occur on stage; one of the women will be transformed into a boy (it seems not to matter
which), enabling erotic desires to be channeled into a heterosexual coupling.
The narrative opener of one of Gallathea’s three main plots begins, like Virgil’s
Aeneid, in media res. In 5.3 of Lyly’s Gallathea, the play’s two virgins overhear
Neptune, Diana, and Venus arguing about the status of the rogue god Cupid. Diana
reveals that she is holding Cupid captive: “I have Cupid, and will keep him, not to dandle
him in my lap, that hath made in my virgins’ hearts such deep scars” (5.3.45-47).
70
This
passage is key to my argument: Lyly’s Cupid is not the god of Virgil’s “Dido and

70
John Lyly, Gallathea in John Lyly: Selected Prose and Dramatic Work, ed. Leah Scragg. (Manchester:
Carcanet Press Limited, 1997), 131-189.

51
Cupid,” nor the Virgilian god that is adapted by Gager or Marlowe, who climbs into
Dido’s lap and enflames her passions with his arrows and touch. The transgressive and
transformative potential of erotic desire and its effects on female virtue in Ovid are held
in tension with the competing drive of Virgil’s epic where female virtue explicitly serves
the ends of empire-building. Venus entreats Neptune for either Diana to “bring her
virgins to a continual massacre or release Cupid of his martyrdom” (5.3.56-57). Diana
responds by pointing out that Venus’s “tongue is as unruly as your thoughts, and your
thoughts as unstayed as your eyes. Diana cannot chatter, Venus cannot choose” (5.3.59-
60). Neptune settles the dispute by concluding that he must honor Diana because of her
virtue and he must love Venus. He orders Diana to restore Cupid to Venus and he will in
turn release the sacrifice of virgins. Diana responds, “I account not the choice hard, for
had I twenty Cupids I would deliver them all to save one virgin, knowing love to be a
thing of all the vainest, virginity to be a virtue of all the noblest. I yield. Larissa, bring out
Cupid [exit Larissa]. And now shall it be said that Cupid saved those he thought to spoil”
(5.3.78-83 my italics). Thus, Cupid’s earlier prediction that “Diana shall yield; she cannot
conquer destiny” (4.2.92), proves true by the drama’s end.
Once truant tyrant, Cupid is transformed into the savior of Diana’s virgins by
play’s end. Ironically, the rogue god is given credit for restoring the lives of Gallathea
and Phillida, who no longer have to fear Neptune’s sacrifice of virgins. Venus agrees
because she does not want Cupid to continue his wanderings but ends with this caveat:
“But Diana cannot forbid him to wound” (5.3.85). Diana agrees, citing the fact that
“chastity is not within the level of his bow” (5.3.86). Agreeing with Diana, Venus admits,

52
“beauty is a fair mark to hit” (5.3.87). Even after Cupid is returned to Venus, she seems
unaware that he left her company on his own and was then taken captive by Diana. In an
allusion to Lyly’s earlier play Sappho and Phao, Venus comments on her inability to
retain control over her son, characterizing him as “always taken, first by Sappho, now by
Diana” (5.3.92-94).
71
In Sappho and Phao, Cupid renounces Venus and pledges
allegiance to Sappho. The rationale behind Cupid’s desire to leave Venus and serve
Sappho is to attain equal status with his mother. “I could be even with my mother: and so
I will, if I shall call you my mother” (4.2). Lyly takes up the struggle for power between
mother and son in Sappho and Phao and makes good on Venus’s threats to Cupid in
Gallathea: “I will teach you how to run away: you shall be stript from toppe to toe, and
whipt with nettles, not roses. I will set you to blowe Vulcanes coales, not to beare Venus
quiver” (2.2.1597-1601).
Lyly adapts classical depictions of Cupid scorned and punished by long suffering
women as featured in the poem “Cupid Crucified” by the fourth century Roman poet
Ausonius.
72
In Ausonius’s imagining of a dream of fair women, Cupid is punished by a
multitude of mythological women (many from Ovid’s Metamorphoses) who recognize
the god’s trespasses against them and who act to remedy the pain, suffering, and death
that have resulted from loving. In a striking reversal of roles, the “amorous women”

71
John Lyly, Sappho and Phao, in John Lyly: Campaspe; Sappho and Phao. The Revels Plays, eds. G.K.
Hunter and David M. Bevington. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991): 197-300.

72
Ausonius Decimus Magnus. Ausonius Book VIII, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White. 2 vols. Loeb Classical
Library. (London: William Heinemann, 1919), 207-216.

53
punish Cupid with the very instruments he has used to bring about their deaths. Instead of
protecting her son from the angry women’s cruelty, Venus joins them and “whips the
crying Boy” “with a wreath of Roses.” However, her punishment is too severe and not
only draws blood – “many stripes the twisted roses drew” – but also pity from the
women. “The Heroines themselves thus for him plead; / Willing their funerals and
hapless state / Rather to attribute to cruel Fate. / The pious Mother gives them thanks;
they quit / Their griefs, and freely the Boys faults remit.” Venus’s excessive cruelty
toward her son and the pity it elicits from the women who initiate the violence against
Cupid in Ausonius becomes Diana’s tyrannical punishment of Cupid in Lyly. Yet in both
narratives, Cupid is absolved of his “faults” and escapes responsibility for the effects of
his erotic authority. This may, however, be Ausonius’s point: the “amorous women” of
his poem are only too quick to blame the gods for their faults and to evade individual
responsibility for their ruinous fates.
After effectively running away from his mother, Cupid travels “through Diana’s
woods and seeing so many fair faces with fond hearts, I thought, for my sport, to make
them smart” (5.3.94-95). Cupid’s physical punishment for this transgression is severe:
Venus notes that Cupid’s wings are clipped, his brands are quenched, and his bows are
burnt and broken. Yet despite the physical marks of his punishment, Cupid is unaffected
by the transformation. His affective force remains the same: “I bear now mine arrows in
mine eyes, my wings on my thoughts, my brands in mine ears, my bow in my mouth, so
as I can wound with looking, fly with thinking, burn with hearing, shoot with speaking”
(5.3.101-105). In fact, these changes seem to give Cupid far more power than before;

54
though Cupid is physically marred and disfigured—Diana’s punishments have stripped
him of his traditional mythological attributes—he maintains an even more insidious form
of affective power and can continue to influence through the senses, thought, and speech.
In Lyly’s Gallathea, Cupid is cast as the rogue element of authority that not only
extends outside of the authority of his mother Venus, but whose power also extends
beyond the direct knowledge of Venus’s rival, Diana (a common dramatic persona for
Queen Elizabeth), and the mighty god Neptune. Cupid stands in as a figure of authority
that challenges the mandates of the play’s two goddesses, Diana and Venus. As a figure
for the poet, Lyly’s Cupid acts much like the poet in Sidney’s Defense of Poesy who
“disdaining to be tied to any such subjection,” exercises a creative authority akin to that
of the gods, which exceeds nature’s generative abilities and raises the poet to the level of
the divine.
73

We can see Lyly’s adherence to Elizabethan panegyric in his depiction of the
figure of Diana, who remains, in the dramatic narrative, immune to Cupid’s amorous
assaults. Diana is also not the Elissa or Dido of Virgil, Gager, or Marlowe—she remains
unaffected by Cupid’s craft; the mischievous, deceptive god will not ascend to her lap,
render her powerless, or enflame her passions for some external love object and threaten

73
According to Sir Philip Sidney, “All philosophers (natural and moral) follow nature, but only the poet,
disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, does grow in
effect into another nature, in making things either better than nature brings forth, or, quite anew, forms such
as never were in nature … Nature never set forth the earth in so rich a tapestry as different poets have done,
neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees.” See Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie. London: 1595.
Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Early English Books Online. 2008.
http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:23131215.

55
the destruction of her authority. Yet the affective influence of Lyly’s Cupid remains
consistent and even strengthens by the play’s conclusion. Lyly’s Gallathea is more
acutely representative of the influence of traditional Ovidian myths on the status of the
cult of Elizabeth and Elizabethan panegyric. Cupid’s overt acknowledgement of
obedience to his mother Venus, however, is made problematic by his insistence upon
acting without her knowledge or consent. The model of Ovid’s Cupid gives the
playwright license to challenge and at times, threaten one of the most culturally accepted
sources of Elizabeth’s female authority—her chastity and virtue—without explicitly
usurping or threatening to usurp her political authority. Like Ovid’s Cupid, Lyly can
enact playful and subtle challenges to the queen’s claims that her authority is self-
determined while remaining a dutiful and obedient servant of the queen and a staunch
defender of her virtue.
Cupid’s role is crucial in Lyly’s Gallathea but is often overlooked or dismissed in
literary criticism of the play. Most often, Cupid is viewed as an ineffectual oppressor
whose authority and its effects are fleeting and temporary, especially when compared to
the more overt tyranny of Diana and Neptune. Especially significant to my argument is
that Cupid assaults the nymphs in Diana’s traine once he is “truant” from his mother; he
plays the truant by separating himself from her authority and striking out on his own
without her knowledge or command. “Whilst I truant from my mother I will use some
tyranny in these woods, and so shall their exercise in foolish love be my excuse for
running away” (2.2.10-12). While Cupid plays the truant, straying from his mother
without her knowledge or consent and separating himself from her authority, he is not the

56
idle truant who neglects his duties and obligations. Instead, rogue Cupid wanders from
his mother to exercise his authority and to test the limits of female virtue and chastity
among the nymphs of Diana’s traine. Cupid’s claim of independence from his mother and
his subsequent “running away” is based on the condition of female virtue itself—the
nymphs’ “exercise in foolish love” provide the rationale for Cupid’s truancy.
The autonomous Cupid in Lyly’s Gallathea stands in stark contrast to the
demonstratively obedient Cupid in Virgil’s Aeneid, who aids Venus in bringing Aeneas
and Dido together and the Cupid in Gager’s Tragedy of Dido, who demonstrates his filial
piety even as he expresses doubts about his mother’s plan and Dido’s loyalty to his
mother’s rival Juno. And unlike the Cupid of Lyly’s earlier drama Sappho and Phao, who
respectfully expresses doubt about his mother’s ability to temper Sappho’s affective
influence,
74
the Cupid of Gallathea is motivated by his status as a god who can act
separately from his mother’s commands. Cupid’s ability to act independently from his
mother is based on the assumption that female virtue is inherently vulnerable to acts of
foolishness in love. Cupid usurps the authority of his mother by explicitly adopting
Venus’s oppositional stance toward Diana and her chaste nymphs. In Act 1.2, Cupid asks
one of Diana’s nymphs to identify the goddess and to explain how she differs from his
mother Venus. After the nymph identifies Diana as a chaste huntress who is amiable and

74
I am indebted here to Michael Pincombe’s work on Virgilian manifestations of Cupid in Gager’s Tragedy
of Dido and Lyly’s Sappho and Phao.

57
wise in contrast to Venus, who is “amorous” and “too kind for her sex,”
75
adopting the
role of divine praeceptor amoris, Cupid exclaims that Diana and her nymphs will know
that he is a “great god” and that “they shall be wounded themselves with their own eyes”
(1.2.36-37). The nymphs’ encounter with the god of love will provide experience with
amorous desire, but this experience does not come without a cost. Once constant and self-
possessed figures of chastity, Diana and her nymphs are disoriented and alienated from
themselves as a consequence of their encounter with the god of love.
While Cupid’s arrows are responsible for striking Diana’s nymphs, it is the
nymphs who are chastised by Diana for succumbing to love. After Cupid is taken captive
by the love struck nymphs in Act 3.2, Diana blames Venus for the change in their
affective state: “Are Diana’s nymphs become Venus’ wantons?” Diana is unaware that
Cupid has singlehandedly instigated all of the amorous transformations that leave the
nymphs lost and confused, not his mother Venus. In fact, Cupid only momentarily
wonders what his mother Venus would think of his exploits—would she want revenge or
laugh at his “disport”? The nymphs’ experience of amorous desire, which is directed
outward, leaves them alienated from themselves and Diana uncertain about the origin of

75
In “Nature’s Bias: Renaissance Homonormativity and Elizabethan Comic Likeness,” Laurie Shannon
argues that this scene establishes an opposition between the nymphs’ “theory of love and sex or kind
against Cupid’s”: “Diana’s votaries are wise because they remain ‘in theyr kinde’; Venus’s followers stray
from their sex by being ‘too kinde’ to the other sex as the sentence plays out in the multivalence of the term
‘kind’” (202). While I agree with Shannon’s assertion that the play ultimately values “bonds ‘within kind’
above cross-gender erotic mixing” (202), Cupid’s theory of love is not entirely made obsolete by the play’s
end. In fact, though the god of love is physically disciplined for his amorous transgressions against the
nymphs (for making them “stray from their sex”), he does not lose any of his potency and it is the
goddesses who yield. Modern Philology: Religion, Gender, and the Writing of Women: Historicist Essays
in Honor of Janel Mueller 98, no. 2, (Nov. 2000): 183-210.

58
the transgressions against her chaste band.
76
As a consequence of Cupid’s arrows, the
nymphs no longer patiently stitch points in samplers, but instead pen sonnets to improper
objects of desire. Diana reads the nymphs’ blushes as signs of their shame, which mark
their idle wantonness and unchaste hearts. The chaste goddess urges the nymphs to be
aware of how their countenances can be “stained” by “loving thoughts” and how the
power of thoughts can be read on their blushing faces. Here Cupid’s arrows initiate a
transformation in which “loving thoughts” become legible sources for reading the state of
female virtue. Knowledge about female sexuality—that is, whether the nymphs’ thoughts
are chaste—falls, in this instance, under the authority of Cupid.
Diana, Disguise, and Tests of Female Virtue
Although issues of disguise in drama and its denouncement by anti-theatricalists
are not the main focus of my argument, it is important to note that in the play, disguise
becomes one of Cupid’s central mechanisms for discovering and testing the strength of
female virtue. Yet the adoption of disguise is not unproblematic, as the virgin Gallathea
reminds her father when he urges her to dress as a boy in order to avoid sacrifice to
Neptune. Gallathea reminds her father of the base nature of disguise, citing how the gods,
who are reminiscent of the gods of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, are motivated to disguise
themselves in order to seduce women and violate chaste female bodies. It is also the
virgins Gallathea and Phillida who expound on the craft, skill, and dissembling involved
in disguise and feigning what one is not and who question the efficacy of disguise to

76
See Shannon, Nature’s Bias, 201.

59
conceal their sex. Cupid’s adoption of disguise in order to deceive and violate the chaste
bodies of the nymphs in Diana’s train reminds us of any number of Ovid’s shape-shifting
gods in the Metamorphosis whose transformations are often driven by lust and followed
by the violation and rape of chaste female bodies. While Cupid’s arrows effectively
wound Diana’s nymphs and can discover the status of virtue among women in Diana’s
train, the goddess is more difficult to deceive and persuade. Neptune establishes the
stakes of conflict between Cupid and Diana: the god reveals that Cupid dons “a woman’s
apparel” “to make sport and deceive,” and he concludes that “if Diana can be overtaken
by craft, Cupid is wise” (2.2.27). As a figure for the playwright, Cupid’s craft (his
adoption of disguise to deceive Diana) also carries a more negative denotation—the use
of one’s skill to deceive or overreach through artifice—and stands in for Lyly’s ability to
gain the queen’s attention through the exercise of his poetic art and rhetorical skill.
As a dramatic representation of Queen Elizabeth, Diana displays consistent virtue
in not being seduced by the magic of disguise. It is not surprising, then, that this
constancy enables her to escape Cupid’s trickery. Diana is a consistent figure of her own
tyrannical authority and cannot be taken in by Cupid’s disguise. While Diana’s
steadfastness reinforces the queen’s constancy of virtue and authority, there is also a
darker side to Lyly’s representation of the goddess. Lyly’s Diana describes Venus as a
“goddesse of hate” - one, who “under a name, or a word, constancy, entertaineth all kind
of cruelty” (5.3.34, 38). Diana is certainly one of the play’s foremost villains, tyrannical
in her enforcement of chaste virtue among the nymphs in her train and puritanical in her
violent punishment of Cupid, which makes her a problematic figure for the Elizabeth.

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However, I argue that it is Lyly’s Cupid, whose acts and presumptions to tyranny are
more easily dismissed as benign “pranckes” and deceptive “sport” that pose a more direct
challenge to female virtue and the queen’s authority. Like Ovid’s close but contentious
relationship with Cupid, Lyly’s relationship to his poetic figure establishes both the
playwright and Cupid as parallel figures that can both tie and untie love knots.
Since Diana is safely protected from Cupid’s ability to affect and discover the
status of female virtue, he can be safely reintroduced as a powerful figure of authority
(who seems to have lost none of his affective powers) by the play’s end. At its
conclusion, the play returns to Gallathea, who affirms Venus’s transformative powers and
urges the ladies in the audience to yield to love and to confess that Cupid is conqueror
and impossible to resist:
Yield ladies, yield to love, ladies, which lurketh under your eyelids whilst you
sleep, and playeth with your heartstrings whilst you wake, whose sweetness never
breedeth satiety, labour weariness, nor grief bitterness. Cupid was begotten in a
mist, nursed in clouds, and sucking only upon conceits. Confess him a conqueror,
whom ye ought to regard, sith it is unpossible to resist; for this is infallible, that
love conquereth all things but itself, and ladies all hearts but their own.
(Epilogue 189)

In the Amores, as discussed earlier, Ovid urges his readers to yield to love: “Yeelding or
struggling do we give him might, / lets yeeld, a burthen easily borne is light … /
Unwilling lovers, love doth more torment / Then such as in their bondage feele content”
(1.2). Yet despite what appears to be an unavoidable scenario of subjection for lovers, the
poet also questions the excessive nature of Cupid’s force against him throughout the
Amores. How could one so faithful to love’s precepts be so mercilessly subjected to such
assaults by love?

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O Cupid that doest neuer cease my smart,
O boy that lyest so slothfull in my heart.
Why me that always was thy soldiour found,
Doest harme, and in thy tents why doest me wound?
Why burnes thy brand, why strikes thy bow thy friends?
More glory by thy vanquisht foes ascends.
77

Lyly adopts Ovid’s ambivalence toward love and its figures. Since both “yielding” to
love and “struggling” against it result in subjection, Gallathea’s final urging of the ladies
of the court to “yield to love,” is also a call to yield to the authority of the poet. Echoing
Sir Philip Sidney’s praise of the poet’s powers of invention —“The Poet onely, onely
bringeth his owne stuffe, and doth not learn a Conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter
for a Conceit”
78
—Lyly draws explicit attention to the analogous relationship between
Cupid’s affective abilities and the influence of poetic conceits, which reflect the poet’s
creative authority and persuasive skill. Lyly’s Cupid is ultimately a figure for the poet’s
liberty to offer criticism as well as praise within the courtly genre of encomia.
Strangely though, by the play’s end, Cupid and the ladies of Lyly’s courtly
audience are brought together in a relationship in which Cupid is divested of much of his
recognizable authority and potency. Cupid is at once a conqueror of ladies’ hearts and an
ineffective ruler of his own erotic impulses. Similarly, the ladies of Lyly’s courtly
audience can conquer the hearts of others but cannot rule their own desires. Tyrant Cupid
and the virtuous ladies are brought together in a relationship of ambivalent likeness at the

77
Ovid, Amores 2.9.

78
Sidney, Defence of Poesie.

62
conclusion of the play.
79
Lyly does not adopt Churchyard’s device in which Cupid
dutifully surrenders his weapons to Queen Elizabeth, signifying her superior ability to
rule over her own erotic desires. Instead, Lyly’s Cupid underscores the play’s uneasiness
with women who maintain control over their own amorous prerogatives.
Thus, Lyly’s ambivalence in using the figure of Cupid as an all-conquering tyrant
at the end of Gallathea can be explained as a mark of the poet’s ambivalence toward a
more straightforward adoption of Elizabethan panegyric and its celebration of the virginal
cult of Elizabeth.
80
In particular, Gallathea draws attention to the tyrannical nature of
Elizabeth’s attempts to maintain authority over the representation of her chastity and the
virtue of women at her court. Although it would seem that Diana has triumphed over

79
For a thorough examination of the connection between early modern treatises on relationships in the
natural world and Lyly’s use of tropes of likeness and analogical relationships in Gallathea, see Shannon.
She argues that “likeness” provided the “basis of affect and equality, not difference as the ground for
superiority” (189). Shannon cites Elizabeth’s motto of self-sameness—semper eadem —as evidence that
likeness was a pervasive and important structure for thinking about relationships in nature and between
humans. Shannon argues that Elizabeth’s refusal to marry may have been based, in part, on the idea that a
marriage based on likenesses and balance—a common or shared nature between husband and wife—(as
cited in Edmund Tilney’s A briefe and pleasant discourse in marriage, called the Flower of Friendship
presented directly to Elizabeth in 1573) could ultimately threaten her political authority (188).

80
Lyly’s ambivalence in adopting a straightforward panegyrical form is also noted by Leah Scraggs in John
Lyly: Selected Prose and Dramatic Work: “Though superficially deferential they deftly resist … yielding
up a single ‘meaning,’ their ambivalences admitting a rather more skeptical interrogation of ideological
issues that is frequently assumed … similarly, Gallathea does not move towards unequivocal celebration of
Diana and her nymphs. Their treatment of Cupid, although justifiable on one level, evokes sympathy on
another, while it is the potency of Love rather than the virtue of chastity that is affirmed in the closing lines.
Above all the emphasis upon change, and upon the inherent ambivalence of all human experience, works
against the over celebration of an immutable, peerless authority–inviting the audience to delight with the
dramatist in the endless possibilities of an unstable world” (xxii).

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Cupid, the goddess of chastity over the god of love, the god of love’s assaults upon
female virtue remain essentially unanswered for in the play.
81
It is Cupid’s seemingly
more playful tyranny that is most troubling. He seeks not only to challenge Diana’s
imposing restrictions on the expression of female desire, but he also seeks more
insidiously to know which of Diana’s nymphs secretly harbor amorous thoughts and
desires. This impulse to uncover hidden affections and desires among the most chaste and
virtuous of ladies is intimately tied to a desire to control female sexuality—whether it is
the playwright’s desire or the queen’s. Less explicitly, Queen Elizabeth is also
implicated in this desire to control female sexuality; she often acted swiftly and
vigorously to punish secret liaisons between the gentlewomen that served her and her
male favorites as her execution of punishment in multiple cases of indiscretion – the
clandestine affairs of the Earl of Hertford, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Leicester, and
Sir Walter Raleigh - attest.
82

81
Pincombe admits that it is difficult to know what to do with Diana, who is told by Cupid and Gallathea to
yield to love: “Yet the very fact that Cupid and Galathea speak directly to the ladies at court seems to
implicate Elizabeth herself in the figure of Diana—and this is not, I think what Lyly either wanted or
intended. Diana’s tyranny is obviously an overstated response to Cupid’s playful ‘tyranny’ or, rather,
‘pranckes,’ or ‘sport’ (V.iii.88). But it also more darkly reflects Neptune’s tyranny” (my italics 138).
Pincombe’s analysis of the relationship between Cupid and Diana is revealing here; Diana’s exercise of
excessive authority over her nymphs is an exaggerated response to Cupid’s actions against her chaste band.
Since Cupid is responsible for initiating Diana’s tyranny, his role as chief prankster in Gallathea and his
influence over female virtue cannot be so easily dismissed. While I agree with Pincombe’s characterization
of Diana as one of the play’s foremost tyrants, I argue that Cupid is not so “easily brought to heel” by
Diana as she is made to yield to love (despite her nymph Telusa’s earlier protestations), by the drama’s end.

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An early example from the 1560s illustrates the tactical approach Elizabeth would take toward secret
marriages throughout her reign. When Edward Seymour, the First Earl of Hertford did not seek the Queen’s
consent to marry Lady Katherine Grey, Elizabeth was enraged. “For ignoring protocol and placing her in
that position without consultation, she sent Hertford and his bride to prison, where they languished for the
better part of the decade, first in the Tower of London and then in private households. Only after Katherine
died in 1568, was Hertford released. In 1571, Elizabeth remitted some of his fines and allowed him to
return to Court, where her performed minor duties over the years. But she never entrusted him with a major

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“it worketh effect contrarie to what wee wishe”: Disciplining Cupid
Mirroring the disciplinary actions Queen Elizabeth took against the amorous
transgressions of her ladies and male favorites, Diana’s punishment of Cupid in
Gallathea is swift as he is indicted for his actions against the nymphs who characterize
him as a leering betrayer, a thief, and the cause of their love-sickness (4.2). In his own
defense, Cupid asserts the primacy of thoughts and senses in determining love and is
divested of responsibility for the affective changes he has caused in Diana’s nymphs.
When the nymph Telusa asks Cupid to undo the love knots he has tied, Cupid states that
he cannot undo knots if they are “true love knots” and if they are “false,” then he is not
the one who tied them: “Love knots are tied with eyes, and cannot be undone with hands;
made fast with thoughts, and cannot be unloosed with fingers. Had Diana no task to set
Cupid to but things impossible?” (4.2.26-30). Consequently, while Cupid is freed from
responsibility for the erotic transformation of Diana’s resistant nymphs, the play assigns
responsibility for these amorous changes to the nymphs themselves.
The resistance of Diana and her nymphs to love establishes the grounds for
Cupid’s work: chaste love is transformed into its monstrous “other” - perverse and
shameful desire for one’s “own sexe.” The implied idleness in the consequences of
Cupid’s actions – “they shall dote in impossibilities” – suggests that the analogue to the
unproductiveness of chaste desire is same-sex desire. Cupid’s adversarial relationship to

post” (415). Elizabeth had another reason to be suspicious of clandestine marriages: the strategic political
alliances that were formed threatened her authority. In fact, since Katherine’s older sibling was Lady Jane
Grey, “Many speculated that Katherine was next in line to the English throne after Elizabeth. By marrying
her, the earl placed himself in a powerful position as the next King of England” (415). Donald Stump and
Susan M. Felch, eds., Elizabeth I and Her Age. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009), 415.

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Diana and her nymphs make his declaration that he will “confound their loves in their
own sexe” (my italics) even more insidious. Despite Diana’s opposition, Cupid still
insinuates himself into the goddesses’ chaste band. Cupid boldly announces his plan: “I
will make their paines my pastimes…& so confound their loves in their owne sexe, that
they shall dote in impossibilities” (2.2.6-9). Cupid will not only confound in the
conventional sense of the verb, meaning to “overthrow” or “destroy,” ideas of chaste love
by throwing the nymphs’ desires into confusion, but he will also make explicit the
consequences of their strict adherence to chaste love above other forms. Here I activate
the more obsolete meanings of confound: by confounding the nymphs’ love, Cupid has
effectively “destroy[ed] the purity, beauty, or usefulness of” ideas of chaste love in the
play, which lend themselves to wasteful idleness and inactivity – the unproductive doting
“in impossibilities.”
83

In Gallathea, the traditional rivalry between Diana and Venus is transformed into
a contest between Diana and Cupid. Lyly pits the competing authority of the goddess of

83
For an opposing view, see The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England in which Valerie
Traub traces the roles of the amor impossibilis and the “language of erotic similitude” Lyly inherits from
Ovid. Focusing on the OED definition of confound, meaning “To mix up or mingle,” Traub concludes that
“treating identical that which ostensibly is separate is not only the aim of Cupid’s antics, but of the play as
well” (328). Comparing Lyly’s Gallathea to other Renaissance cross-dressing comedies, Traub argues that
the play’s plot is more overtly homoerotic in its focus on practicing impossibilities. “Rather than seek to
confirm the inappropriate nature of female-female desire through differences of status or state (think
Rosalind and Phebe in As You Like It, for instance), Lyly makes clear that to practice impossibilities is a
first, possible, and second, a matter of loving another who looks, behaves, and feels amazingly, if
perplexingly, like the self. To practice impossibilities means to experience and confront the attraction of a
love caused and defined by similarity rather than difference” (328-239). My reading posits the idea that
Lyly’s use of what Traub terms the “language of erotic similitude,” does not work to define female
homoerotic desire in the play but instead concentrates particular attention on the negative consequences of
chaste love, where sameness refers to the limits imposed by a self-referential form of desire that only leads
to unproductive idleness. In the Amores, Ovid advocates love as a remedy: “He who does not want to
become idle, let him love” (1.9.46). “Therefore whoever called love idleness may he stop; Love has an
active nature” (1.9.31-32).

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chastity against the authority of the god of love. While Diana articulates the ethical
consequences of loving as the loss of chaste virtue, Cupid articulates the ethical
consequences of not loving: being restricted by principles of chastity and to activities
involving the one’s own sex. Cupid demonstrates that not yielding to love has
considerable consequences. Diana’s nymphs, whose energies are focused on practicing
“impossibilities,” engage in a kind of idleness that prevents productive action. The threat
of inaction, underscores a very Ovidian idea that idleness can lead to the corruption of
virtue. In fact, in Amores 1.9, Ovid’s amator advises loving as a solution to the problem
of idleness (“If you want a cure for slackness, fall in love!”)
As critics have noted, Diana is a problematically tyrannical figure who ultimately
overrules Neptune, puritanically disciplines the wanton nymphs in her train, and
vigorously punishes the overreaching Cupid. Diana is described by Hebe, a devotee of
the goddess and the first virgin to be offered as a sacrifice to the monster Agar, as
“sovereign of all virtue, and goddess of all virgins, Diana, whose perfections are
impossible to be numbered, and therefore infinite, never to be matched, and therefore
immortal” (5.2.42-45). The play’s description of Diana’s perfect virtue mirrors the
prologue’s description of Elizabeth’s virtuous mind and perfect judgment. Lyly’s
insistence that Diana’s virtues cannot be accurately described both affirm a traditional
element of classical panegyric—the “inexpressibility topos”—and reaffirm the idea that it

67
was difficult for writers to openly speak about or oppose the queen’s personal or political
decisions.
84

In a political environment in which overt criticism of the queen was often met
with severe consequences, it makes sense that Lyly’s rogue Cupid—a capricious truant—
is ceremonially punished for his transgressions against female virtue. Ultimately, Cupid
is punished and forced to labor for Diana—to weave samplers, to be her lackey during the
day, to shoot beasts, to wait on ladies, and to pick out love stories from Diana’s arras and
sew Vesta with her nuns and Diana with her nymphs in their place. Yet this change of job
description and instruments does not influence Cupid’s affective authority; the god boldly
claims: “I say I will prick as well with my needle as ever I did with mine arrows” (4.2.89-
90). While the nymphs have succumbed to the force of Cupid’s amorous assaults, they
are adamant that Diana will not yield to Cupid or love. Telusa says, “Diana cannot yield;
she conquers affection” (4.2.91). Cupid responds, “Diana shall yield; she cannot conquer
destiny” (4.2.92). In doing so, Cupid delineates the scope of Diana’s authority: like him,
she is a tyrant, but instead of conquering the hearts and minds of chaste virgins, she lords
over affection itself.
Yet strikingly Cupid points to Diana’s inability to hold sway over her destiny—
her lack of control over the epic narrative of which Virgil’s Cupid is an integral part.
Cupid’s affective influence extends beyond the realm of the heart and can insinuate itself

84
In his 1570 pamphlet The Gaping Gulf, John Stubbes boldly opposed Elizabeth’s consideration of
marriage to the French Catholic Duke Alcenon. The queen’s swift and severe execution of Stubbes’
punishment (he lost his hand) is often cited as evidence of the exacting penalties imposed against those who
chose to write openly against the queen’s policies.

68
more powerfully into the minds and thoughts of his female victims. When the nymph
Larissa tells Cupid to get on with his business, the god responds, “You shall find me so
busy in your heads that you shall wish I had been idle with your hearts” (4.2.94-95).
Here Cupid’s affective force can be aligned with the playwright’s ability to extend the
influence of his dramatic narrative into the hearts and minds of the queen and her courtly
female audience. Like Spenser’s Cupid in The Faerie Queene, Lyly’s Cupid does not
participate fully in the encomiastic structure of his dramatic narrative. Far from being a
source of conciliatory union and Neoplatonic harmony, Lyly’s Cupid de-centers the
narrative of praise aimed at the queen. In its place is a narrative in which Diana’s chaste
nymphs are left in a temporary state of aporia and the play’s virgins are forced to don
disguises in order to escape Neptune’s punishment, which leave them alienated from their
sex.
Diana’s tyrannical behavior leads not to the permanent exile of Cupid but to the
continuation of his theories of love. To protect her cult of virginity, the chaste goddess
disciplines her nymphs and becomes the perpetrator of excessive violence against Cupid.
At the play’s conclusion, the virgins Gallathea and Phillida echo Cupid’s Petrarchan
sentiments about where love, fond affections, and faith lie (in eyes, thoughts, and words)
even as Diana insists that they must “leave” their fond affections for each other because
of nature and necessity; they are, after all, both women and both virgins. While Neptune
finds their choices “idle,” “strange,” and “foolish,” Venus favors their arrangement and
grants them their wishes. Despite the fact that they are both women, their love is
unspotted, begun with truth, and continued with constancy. As a result of these

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conditions, Venus decides to turn one of them into a man and cites an earlier instance
from Ovid’s Metamorphosis where she transformed Iphis and Ianthe. All agree to the
change, including Cupid, and a dramatic transformation, which includes the promise of a
heterosexual union, along the lines of Ovid, is validated by play’s end.
Lyly’s virgin Gallathea best characterizes Cupid’s insidious authority over female
desire in the play when she laments her inability to “put on the mind” of a boy after she
has disguised her body in boy’s apparel: “Had it not been better for thee to have been a
sacrifice to Neptune than a slave to Cupid; to die for thy country than to live in thy fancy;
to be a sacrifice than a lover?” (2.4.4-7). Gallathea parodies the connection between love
and death by acknowledging that it would be preferable die in Neptune’s virgin sacrifice
(with the possible consequence of losing her virginity to rape) than to be Cupid’s slave.
While the play suggests that Diana’s return of Cupid to Venus and Neptune’s acceptance
of the two virgins, one of which is transformed into a boy, have diffused Cupid’s
authority, he has made the goddess of chastity yield and his affective influence over the
hearts and thoughts of Diana’s nymphs and the chaste ladies of Elizabeth’s courtly
audience is reinforced by Gallathea’s final speech: “Confess him a conqueror, whom ye
ought to regard, sith it is unpossible to resist; for this is infallible, that love conquereth all
things but itself, and ladies all hearts but their own” (Epilogue).
Lyly’s preoccupation with Ovid’s Cupid throughout Gallathea makes the last
lines of Lyly’s epilogue, taken from Virgil’s Tenth Eclogue (X.69): “Amor vincit Omnia
et nos cedamus amori” (“Love conquers all; let us all yield to love”), quite arresting.
Concluding his drama with a Virgilian commonplace about the final authority of love

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over the demands of nation or politics, however, puts Virgil to good use affirming a very
Ovidian idea. Christine Perkell’s reading of these lines moves away from interpreting this
final affirmation “as a song of defeat, expressing the impotence of poetry” and instead
suggests that Virgil’s “use of the language of defeat” is ironic; in Eclogue X, Gallus
seduces Lycoris, and “expresses his passion for [his beloved] Lycoris and thus continues
to court her. Because Gallus’s passion for Lycoris is so compelling, he prefers it even to
such glory as Daphnis’s immortal death could confer upon him.”
85
Perkell argues that
Virgil’s allusion to Theocritus’s resistant lover Daphnis actually highlights the
differences between Virgil’s Gallus and the “dying Daphnis” from the first Idyll, who
refuses to yield to Aphrodite. Daphnis dies, saying, “For now defeated by Eros, I go
down to the stream [of Hades].”
86
Virgil’s Gallus acknowledges the supremacy of love
even when it comes at the cost of a heroic ideal.
In Lyly’s Gallathea, Diana forwards the heroic ideal of chaste love, which often
verges on the tyrannical in her advancement of a militant program of resistance to the
erotic desire represented by the figure of Cupid. Diana and her nymphs are more
fortunate than Theocritus’s Daphnis because their initial resistance to love, unlike
Theocritus’s opposition to Aphrodite, does not lead to their annihilation but to their
Ovidian transformation. Diana and her nymphs are compelled by a passion that is
invoked by Cupid and are ultimately, “defeated” by the force of love. Yet this defeat is

85
Christine Perkell, “Pastoral Value in Vergil: Some Instances,” in Poets and Critics Read Vergil, ed.
Sarah Spence. 36. 26-43.

86
Lines quoted in Perkell, “Pastoral Value in Vergil,” 37.

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much less an overthrow of chaste love than an affirmation of the affective authority of the
poet. This final representation of love itself as “an external power,” unavoidable and
undefeatable, liberates Lyly’s female characters and the play’s female audience members
from being held “morally responsible for the consequences of their erotic passions,”
87

and frees erotic possibility from political censure.
Marlowe’s Dido
Lyly’s Cupid, this chapter has argued, capitalizes upon the uncontainable erotic
energies and tyrannical disposition exemplified by the Cupid of Ovid’s Amores, Ars
Amatoria, and the Remedia Amoris. Lyly draws an implicit analogy between the almost
tyrannical extension of Queen Elizabeth’s cult of virginity to her ladies in waiting and the
erotic tyranny at the core of Elizabethan panegyric. Ovid’s Cupid is both the creative
force that compels the poet’s boldness in entreating his mistress and a figure whose
authority represents the lover’s unavoidable subjection to love. Yet alternately, Cupid’s
frequent disobedience to his mother’s commands and truancy highlight a perceptible
discontent about the individual’s unwilling subjection to forms of political coercion that
manifest themselves in the restriction of poetic voice and the control of female sexuality.
One of the early modern period’s most avid Ovidians was Christopher Marlowe,
who found a sympathetic resonance with the Roman poet’s fearless celebration of earthly
pleasures and lamentations about the severe political consequences of bold poetic speech.
Marlowe’s identification with Ovid represented a concerted effort to distinguish the

87
See Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love, 40.

72
dramatic themes of his writing from the dominant tradition of classical writers that
included Virgil. More importantly, as Georgia E. Brown notes, Marlowe’s Ovidianism
had political and cultural implications: “Marlowe chose to identify himself with writers,
who in various ways, resisted the political, moral, gender, and aesthetic ideals epitomized
by Virgil’s Aeneid.”
88
Marlowe’s translation of the first three books of Ovid’s Amores
entitled Ovid’s Elegies, which appeared with Sir John Davies’ satirical Epigrams, was
published in 1594/95. Brown suggestively argues that this first publication is striking
because of the absence of a specific date on the title page; for Brown, this absence
provides compelling evidence of “circumspection on the part of the printers [which] is
usually a sign of that there is something dangerous about the publication. Marlowe’s
decision to translate the Amores was certainly a scandalous one, given that Ovid’s texts
was widely held to be pornographic, and Marlowe’s Elegies were eventually banned by
the censors in 1599.”
89
The burning of ten of Ovid’s elegies from Marlowe’s translation
of the Amores in the 1599 Bishop’s Ban reflects cultural anxieties surrounding the erotic
subject matter of Ovid’s poetry in early modern England. Earlier, in 1596, Bishop
Whitgift made his intention for his plan of censorship in an order of High Commission
clear: His stated “purpose … was to censor books of ‘Ribaldry … superstition … and flat
heresie’ by which English subjects are allured ‘to wantonness, corrupted in doctrine,’ and

88
Georgia E. Brown, “Marlowe’s Classicism, “ in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed.
Patrick Gerard Cheney (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 106. 106-126.

89
Brown, “Marlowe’s Classicism,” 110-111.

73
provoked into civil disobedience.”
90
Thus Marlowe’s translation of the erotic subject
matter of Ovid’s Amores without the conventional Christian moralizations was a
politically inflected choice that set Marlowe apart from contemporary interpretations of
his classical predecessors.
91

In an eroticized scene of Ovidian proportions, Marlowe’s Dido opens with the
god Jupiter suing for the amorous affections of the boy Ganymede. Adapted from
Virgil’s Aeneid (Books 1, 2, and 4), the drama follows the epic wanderings of Aeneas,
who is nearly thwarted by an unexpected (though divinely encouraged) romance with the
Queen of Carthage. The city of Carthage is the site of three unrequited romances – Iarbas
pines for Dido, Dido’s sister Anna pursues Iarbas, and Dido laments the loss of her love
Aeneas. The goddesses Venus and Juno temporarily reconcile their hostilities in order to
bring Dido and Aeneas together. Despite their divinely sanctioned encounter in a cave,
Aeneas is plagued by doubt and dreams that order him to found his new homeland and
sail for Italy. With the help of Iarbas, his rival for Dido’s affections, Aeneas prepares to
sail to Italy. Dido catches wind of the plot and attempts to persuade Aeneas to stay out of
love for her and out of concern for her virtue and the political stability of her city. Dido’s
eloquence fails and Aeneas decides to sail for Italy. In one last rousing attempt to force
Aeneas to stay, Dido orders her nurse to take Aeneas’s son Ascanius into the country.
However, Venus has already taken Ascanius to her bower, leaving Cupid in his place.

90
Paul Whitfield White, “Marlowe and the Politics of Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Gerard Cheney (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 83. 70-89.

91
White, “Marlowe and the Politics of Religion,” 83.

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Ultimately, Aeneas is successful and departs from Carthage with his son in tow.
Aeneas’s triumphant departure, however, is marred by the violence that follows:
Carthage’s Queen Dido commits suicide, quickly followed by her sister Anna and her
former suitor Iarbas.
Marlowe’s Cupid’s highlights not only the alienated condition of female desire,
but also its objectifying and destructive force. On one level in the play, Dido’s desire for
Aeneas is depicted as effeminizing and destructive – an obstacle which impedes the
fulfillment of his epic prerogatives. Dido’s anxiety that she will be remembered as a
“second Helen” if Carthage is sacked because she has brought on the ire of her neighbors
for “being entangl’d by a stranger’s looks,” is borne out of this reading of female desire.
The quick work of Venus and Cupid transform Aeneas into a source of unavoidable
passion for Dido as she is seduced away from the work of empire building. Yet
conversely, Aeneas’s desire and submission to the force of Dido’s desire, at the expense
of the possible destruction of the future Troy, temporarily render him a Helen figure.
However, Marlowe’s treatment of the love relationship between Dido and Aeneas is
unique not only in its inversion of conventional gender roles but also in its emphasis on
how Aeneas’s ready acceptance of his subjection as the desired object of a powerful
female authority figure is met with both divine and popular resistance.
It is through Dido’s objectification of Aeneas that the play registers a powerful
strain of political discontent with the submissive, feminized status of the Elizabethan
subject when Dido is reminded of the potential limits to her popular authority. Marlowe’s
alteration of Dido’s lines from Ovid’s Heroides explicitly emphasizes the coercive and

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objectifying force of female desire. In Ovid, Dido attempts to persuade Aeneas to remain
in Carthage by highlighting the authority he will wield over her people: “How do you
hope to found another city / like this so that you in a tower / can observe a people that
belongs to you?”
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In Marlowe, the objectifying quality of Dido’s desire is magnified
when she imagines herself in a turret where she can “behold my love” as Aeneas, subject
to her gaze and the unpredictable judgment of the masses, is paraded through the streets.
Marlowe’s emphasis on this change in Aeneas’s subject position exposes the darker and
more tyrannical side of Dido’s rhetoric of desire, which objectifies and subjects. Most
problematically, as Timothy Crowley argues, is that in Marlowe’s play, Dido is driven by
the epic ambition Aeneas seems to lack. Dido seeks to possess Aeneas’ Virgilian
destiny; she is attracted not to his masculine virtue but to his “arma,” his epic prowess.
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In this way, as Crowley suggests, “Dido’s hold on Aeneas has less to do with erotic
attraction than with rhetorical persuasion.”
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Conversely, Aeneas’s rhetorical ineptitude
heightens the oppressive effects of a discourse of female desire that is coercive and
objectifying. Dido’s desire to parade Aeneas through the streets of Carthage as her
husband is met with concern by her sister Anna, who suggests that there are political
consequences to Dido’s choice of a lover and husband. Revealingly, Anna asks, “What if
the citizens repine thereat?” (4.4.70). Anna implies that Dido’s amorous choice may not

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Ovid, “Letter VII: Dido to Aeneas,” in the Heroides, trans. Harold Isbell (London: Penguin Books,
1990), 58.

93
Timothy Crowley, “Arms and the Boy: Marlowe’s Aeneas and the Parody of Imitation in Dido, Queen of
Carthage,” ELR 38, no. 3 (21 October 2008): 427. 408-438.

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Crowley, “Arms and the Boy,” 428.

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create civic concord but instead incite the people to rebel against the queen’s authority.
Dido’s response to Anna’s question is absolute and tyrannical: “Those that dislike what
Dido gives in charge, / Command my guard to slay for their offence. / Shall vulgar
peasants storm at what I do? / The ground is mine that gives them sustenance, / The air
wherein they breathe, the water, fire, / All that they have, their lands, their goods, their
lives, / And I, the goddess of all these, command / Aeneas to ride as Carthaginian king”
(4.4.71-78). Asserting her divine right to rule with absolute authority over her people,
Dido refuses to curry their favor. Yet the suggestion that her choice may not be approved
by the people and may unleash unthinkable violence highlights the importance of popular
consent in Dido’s choice of a spouse. Thus, Marlowe’s Anna posits a question that had
striking relevance for Queen Elizabeth, whose authority was often challenged by the
serious and unavoidable consequences of popular dissent, especially in her consideration
of a politically advantageous marriage match.
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Marlowe’s play capitalizes on the popular anxiety regarding Elizabeth’s
unfavorable marriage choices and recasts Virgil’s Dido as a compelling representation of
female authority and Aeneas as a figure of Ovidian romance. The forceful intervention
of the gods, who were previously indifferent to Aeneas’s unmotivated wanderings, at the
very point when Aeneas is transforming into Dido’s Ganymede, underscores anxiety

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This scene recalls Aenea’s bloody account of the Troy’s fall in Act 2.1.190-99, where he witnesses the
grotesque bloodshed and violence from a turret. Marlowe capitalizes on this implicit connection, which
suggests a close relationship between eros and violence. This scene initiates Aeneas’s emasculation – the
“emptying out of Aeneas’s manliness” as Crowley argues (422), as he becomes a “hollowed out performer
of the epic role” (423).

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about the subjection of a heroic male figure to a commanding female authority. Dido
delivers the most significant insult to epic when she tells Aeneas that she wants him to
stay in Carthage, so she can gaze upon him: “O keep them still, and let me gaze my fill! /
Now looks Aeneas like immortal Jove: / O where is Ganymede, to hold his cup, / And
Mercury, to fly for what he calls? / Ten thousand Cupids hover in the air, / And fan it in
Aeneas’ lovely face!” (4.4.44-49). Dido’s gaze effeminizes Aeneas, however, it is her
comparison of Aeneas to Jove and her reference to Ganymede that suggests his
adulterous nature and transforms Aeneas into a feminized figure of Ovidian romance who
is motivated by erotic pleasure.
Cupid and Ascanius
In the course of Marlowe’s dramatic narrative, Aeneas’s son Ascanius, the future
of the new Trojan empire, is removed from the main action of the plot. The play
relegates this important epic figure to a secondary position in the narrative as Ascanius is
transformed into a Ganymede figure who becomes the passive object of Venus’s desire.
Ascanius is replaced by Cupid, who is driven by the joint plots of his mother and Juno to
toy with Carthage’s unsuspecting Queen and to ignite her latent passions for Aeneas.
Metamorphosed into a boy, Cupid wounds Dido and later evokes the passions of Dido’s
aging nurse. While these significant actions occur, Ascanius is taken to Venus’s bower
and is conspicuously missing from the narrative action. As one of the central figures of
Virgilian epic, Ascanius is literally relocated to the space of Ovidian romance.
By placing Ascanius in Venus’s bower, he is located more centrally within an
eroticized space, subject to the amorous attention of a female authority figure, which

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more acutely reflects the erotic dynamics of Queen Elizabeth’s court. Replacing
Ascanius with Cupid, a figure that for Ovid confers poetic authority and authorizes the
poet’s choice of elegy over epic, may have also been a dramatic gesture aimed at
validating Marlowe’s implicit critique of England’s investment in the Troy narrative of
empire.
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Marlowe’s Dido investigates, with perverse relish, the ethical and political
consequences of grafting the “Troy legacy” onto the Elizabethan present and Virgil onto
Ovid.
Marlowe’s Dido is less concerned with reinforcing the epic tale of Troy’s tragic
fall than with underscoring the erotic and Ovidian exchanges that underlie such imperial
narratives. Once Dido realizes that Aeneas will not leave Carthage without his son, the
boy figured as the future of empire, becomes indispensable to securing Aeneas’s love and
devotion. Strikingly, before this point, Ascanius is less important to the epic trajectory of
the plot than Cupid. Despite his future importance, even the gods are noticeably
unmoved by Ascanius’s absence and are rather irritated by Aeneas’s filial concern for his
son’s safety. In the midst of Hermes’ urgent reminders of his epic destiny, Aeneas
welcomes his son, who has been “eating sweet comfits with Queen Dido’s maid” (5.1.47-
48) and interrupts Hermes’s pronouncements by telling Sergestus to safeguard Ascanius
from Dido. Annoyed, Hermes chastises Aeneas: “Spends’t thou thy time about this little
boy, / And giv’st not ear unto the charge I bring? / I tell thee, thou must straight to Italy, /
Or else abide the wrath of frowning Jove” (5.1.49-54). Hermes’s disparaging remarks

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See Crowley, “Arms and the Boy,” 410-411.

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reinforce Aeneas’s inability to give his epic destiny serious attention and attest to his
son’s relative insignificance to the plot of Marlowe’s Dido.
Rendered temporarily inactive in the plot’s action, Ascanius is placed outside the
political activities of the court, in the realm of the eroticized pastoral while Cupid acts as
his wanton surrogate. Once Ascanius is lulled to sleep, Venus places him in a lush grove
and scatters his bower with “sweet-smelling violets, / Blushing roses, purple hyacinth,”
and she places “milk-white doves” as his sentinels (2.2.316-320). Venus then commands
Cupid to transform himself into “Ascanius’ shape:” “Now, Cupid, turn thee to Ascanius’
shape, / And go to Dido, who instead of him, / Will set thee on her lap, and play with
thee. / Then touch her white breast with this arrow head, / That she may dote upon
Aeneas’ love, / And by that means repair his broken ships, / Victual his soldiers, give him
wealthy gifts, / And he, at last, depart to Italy, / Or else in Carthage make his kingly
throne.” (2.1. 323-330 my italics). Similar to Jupiter’s earlier ambivalent pronouncement
of Aeneas’s fate, Venus’s orders suggest that Aeneas has a choice in the outcome of his
epic journey. This passage underscores the idea that the completion of epic deeds and
destiny is dependent, in part, on the choice to love. Dido’s desire for Aeneas and
Aeneas’s indulgence of these desires are the means through which his ships are repaired,
his soldiers are fed, and he is restored to his Virgilian character. The insinuation that
Aeneas also has a choice – Venus presents both options as equally valid here – throws
doubt onto the idea that he has only one single destiny, which is to abandon Dido for a
new future and love in Italy. Marlowe casts uncertainty on Virgil’s epic ideal by

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highlighting the random nature of the gods’ commands. In the world of Marlowe’s Dido,
divine authority does not preclude the operation of free will and the exercise of choice.
Like Lyly’s Cupid who endeavors to discover the status of virtue among the
nymphs of Diana’s train, Marlowe’s Cupid is given the task to draw out wanton thoughts
from Dido’s breast. Tellingly, Dido regrets “being too familiar with Iarbas” who boldly
woos her. Despite her anxiety over this familiarity, she claims that “the gods do know, no
wanton thought / Had ever residence in Dido’s breast.” (2.3.15-17). Dido’s statement is,
of course, ironic because it is precisely the existence of wanton thoughts that compels
Venus to transform the queen into Cupid’s target. Cupid’s role is not to incite desire in
Dido’s breast but to bring to the surface desires from which she has been alienated.
While Dido’s invitation to Cupid to “Sit in my lap, and let me hear thee sing” (3.1.25) is
initially motivated by maternal affection, the queen has unknowingly granted “son”
Cupid the liberty he requires to discover the status of her thoughts and desires.
After Cupid begins his song, Dido orders him to stop and asks him where he
learned “this pretty song.” Cupid responds, “My cousin Helen taught it to me in Troy”
(3.1.28). Blamed for starting the Trojan War, the mention of Helen in Cupid’s response
merits close attention. Book XII of Ovid’s Metamorphosis suggests that Helen was
seduced by Paris while Ovid’s Heroides is more ambiguous about the nature of Helen’s
departure from Troy – was she taken away from Menelaus as a virtuous wife against her
will or did she willingly go? In spite of this ambiguity, the Heroides reinforces the idea
that it is her devotion to love that arouses Dido’s passion for Aeneas. In her letter to
Aeneas, Dido writes: “It is true, your letter proffers gifts so fine / the goddesses

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themselves might be moved / but if I cross the boundaries of honour / I will instead have
done it for you. / Either I keep my unstained name or / I go with you rather than your
gifts. / I do not reject them; gifts are welcome when / their donor makes them precious. I
prize / more your love, the love that has caused your labour, / the hope that led you over
the seas.”
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Although Dido pauses after hearing Cupid’s song, she does not inquire
further about its origins; instead Dido is distracted by Cupid’s smile and allows the “wag”
to “hang about her neck” and “to kiss her.” Yet Cupid is unsatisfied by these amorous
gestures and asks what else she will give him. “What will you give me now? I’ll have this
fan” (3.1.32). Calling Cupid “Ascanius,” Dido acquiesces to Cupid’s request for another
gift and tells him to take the fan for “thy father’s sake.” Dido partakes in this exchange of
material trifles in order to secure Aeneas’s devotion, echoing Helen’s sentiments about
reserving the giving and accepting of gifts for occasions of love. Yet there is a darker
side to these erotic exchanges that can, as Cupid demonstrates, give rise to insatiable and
destructive desires. Like Ovid, Marlowe parallels epic and erotic confusion; love and war
are not distinct and separate spheres of activity but are conjoined and subject to the same
self-sacrifice, disorder, and chaos.
Cupid and Dido’s Nurse
Marlowe amplifies Lyly’s Ovidian Cupid, who ventures into the eroticized spaces
of Diana’s woods to ensnare her chaste nymphs, with an Ovidian Cupid who is equally
successful in entrapping female characters with amorous experience - the Queen of

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Ovid, “Helen to Paris,” 169.

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Carthage and her aging Nurse. In Lyly, Cupid dresses in nymph’s apparel to discover the
secret thoughts of Diana’s chaste nymphs once he is truant from his mother Venus. In
Dido, Cupid adopts his disguise on the directive of his mother Venus when he is
commanded to transform himself into Aeneas’s son Ascanius. When this metamorphosis
is complete, Marlowe’s Cupid functions as an exterior force that effectively enables
Queen Dido’s desires for Aeneas. In this instance, Cupid acts as both an instrument of
his mother’s authority and Cupid also acts as a figure of his own authority as exemplified
in his erotic interaction with Dido’s aging Nurse.
In exchange for the Nurse’s service, Cupid agrees to follow her into the country.
Marlowe’s Cupid, who is not preoccupied with serving a particular mistress, – he will
call anyone, including Dido’s Nurse, “mother” if the conditions of exchange are
agreeable enough - highlights the rhetorical nature of amorous transactions. A weary
Cupid asks the Nurse to carry him to the house, and she responds, “Ay so you’ll dwell
with me, and call me mother” (4.5.16-17). Cupid replies, “So you’ll love me, I care not if
I do” (4.5.17). The recognition that “wishing will not serve” her purpose of keeping
Aeneas in Carthage compels Dido to order her nurse to take “young Ascanius” to the
country while she requests his oars, tackling, and sails. Ascanius is moved out of the city
and into a protected and pastoral wonderland that recalls the abundant landscape – the
“shallow rivers,” “beds of roses,” and “thousand fragrant posies” - described in
Marlowe’s pastoral poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (lines 7,9,10). To
entice the boy, the Nurse promises him an orchard filled with a “store of plums, / Brown
almonds, services, ripe figs, and dates, / Dewberries, apples, yellow oranges,” and a

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garden filled with “Musk-roses, and a thousand sort of flowers; / And in the midst doth
run a silver stream, / Where thou shalt see the red-gill’d fishes leap, / White swans, and
many lovely water fowls” (4.5.4-11). The Nurse’s description of this prelapserian
paradise, which resembles Venus’s bower, entices the truant boy to follow her out of
Carthage.
Marlowe’s activation of the language of pastoral in the Nurse’s description
signifies a temporary shift in the play’s concerns: the active, political life of the court has
been abandoned for a life of quiet pleasures and contemplation in the country. Yet
instead of shepherds and shepherdesses singing of love and loss, Marlowe gives us a
perverse version of pastoral with Dido’s aging Nurse and boy Cupid dressed as Aeneas’s
son Ascanius. Mikhail Bakhtin, Annabel M. Patterson, and Louis A. Montrose
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have all
argued that the pastoral’s evocation of prelapserian ideals, its emphasis on the return of a
“golden age,” and its depiction of power relations are deeply tied to its immediate
concern with political and ideological critique. In Dido, Marlowe introduces a perverse
erotic element to the rhetoric of amorous persuasion exemplified in “The Passionate
Shepherd to His Love.”
In the play, the conditions of the Nurse’s exchange with Cupid are characterized
by erotic confusion and unrest. In his possession of erotic knowledge, Marlowe’s
modified version of the popular anacreontic Cupid is less a child and more an adult. The

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See Annabel M. Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in
Early Modern England. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Louis A. Montrose, “Eliza,
Queene of Shepheardes and the Pastoral of Power,” in Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English
Literary Renaissance, eds. Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. Collins (English Literary Renaissance, 1980-
1987), 34-65.

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Nurse, however, confirms that Cupid/Ascanius is a boy when she expresses the wish that
she “might live to see this boy a man!” (4.5.18). Cupid’s sexual potential is not lost on
the experienced nurse and she predicts that “wag” Cupid will be a “twigger” when he
“come[s] to age” (4.5.20). In Marlowe’s re-conception of a pastoral golden world, Dido’s
erotic desires go unchecked. The Nurse even gives voice to erotic desires that Queen
Dido has previously denounced: “Say Dido what she will, I am not old; / I’ll be no more
a widow; I am young; / I’ll have a husband, I, or else a lover” (4.5.21-23). This is the
same reasoning employed by Virgil’s Anna when she attempts to persuade Dido to
accommodate Aeneas: Dido is too young to be a widow in “solitary mourning” (5.43-75).
In the rustic world outside of Carthage, Dido’s desires for Aeneas are given a voice and a
convincing justification by her Nurse.
Resembling the troubling lena figure of Roman elegy, Dido’s Nurse is an aged
and experienced woman who is inappropriately preoccupied with obtaining a lover.
Recognizing that her thoughts are “foolish,” the Nurse comments: “Foolish is love, a toy
– O sacred love! / If there by any heaven in earth, ‘tis love, / Especially in women of your
years. - / Blush, blush for shame! Why shouldst thou think of love? / A grave, and not a
lover, fits they age. - … / Fourscore is but a girl’s age: love is sweet. - / My veins are
wither’d, and my sinews dry: / Why do I think of love, now I should die?” (4.5.30-34).
Cupid’s mockery of the nurse’s desires (“A husband, and no teeth!”) reflect perhaps the
most revealing aspect of this scene in which a woman of advanced years desires a boy.
Yet Cupid’s role as the impetus behind the Nurse’s rekindled desires is equally
significant. Cupid enables the Nurse to imagine an Ovidian transformation in which she

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is like the snake and hart of the Ars, who shed their old skins for new forms. Unlike the
unlucky aging women of Ovid’s Ars, the Nurse’s advanced years and withering beauty do
not prohibit her from experiencing a revival of erotic desire. Thus in reversing this erotic
prohibition in Ovid, Marlowe outdoes himself and his source.
Strikingly, despite the play’s indulgence of this Ovidian renewal, Dido’s
punishments of the Nurse are excessive and tyrannical in nature. Reappearing in Carthage
after Dido is unsuccessful in persuading Aeneas to stay, the Nurse admits that Ascanius
“was stoln” from her and that she was “beguiled” by fairies. Dido calls the nurse a
“cursed hag and false dissembling wretch” and accuses her of letting the boy go “for
some petty gift” (5.1.218). To complete the insult, Dido calls the nurse a “traitress to
kind, and cursed sorceress” (5.1.221). The nurse denies such “treason” but is sent to
prison nonetheless. Although Dido’s nurse is not Ovid’s “old bawd” Dispas from the
Amores (1.8), Dido’s severe punishment of her Nurse for losing Cupid-Ascanius suggests
that she has mistaken her for this despised Ovidian figure. In the 1603 version of All
Ovids Elegies, Ovid’s Dipsas is described as “a bawde” and “an old Trot,” who “drawes
chaste women to incontinence, / Nor doth her tongue want harmfull eloquence.” The
poet imagines tearing her apart for giving the poet’s love interest such advice as “to take
many lovers,” “make a small price, while thou thy nets doest lay, / least they should fly,
being tane, the tyrant play” and “To beggars shut, to bringers ope thy gate.” For Ovid,
the Nurse’s beguiling eloquence is often the cause of the poet’s rejection and thus she is a
figure who is both necessary to his erotic success and hated for her almost magical
rhetorical influence over the object of his desire.

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Marlowe’s Dido extends both a cautious sympathy for Dido’s fate and a
calculated, though subtle, critique of her imperious ambitions. Amidst the epic and erotic
confusion that characterize the play’s narrative, Aeneas and son Ascanius are transformed
into figures, more Ovidian than Virgilian. By substituting Cupid for Aeneas’s son
Ascanius, Marlowe privileges the dramatic force of erotic elegy over epic. Marlowe
capitalizes on the truant Cupid of Lyly’s Gallathea and charges him with drawing out the
wanton thoughts and desires that have long settled in the hearts and minds of the
widowed queen and her nurse. Cupid’s ability to draw out hidden desires in female
characters who are experienced in love highlights the alienated condition of female
desire. While Ovid’s Cupid is multifaceted – at times, tyrannical and other times,
beneficent - Marlowe’s Cupid is a cruel tormentor who incites desire only to see his
victims consumed by the impossibility of satisfying their newly awakened passions.
The truancy of Lyly’s Cupid and the cruelty of Marlowe’s Cupid become qualities
that are both intensely magnified and judiciously restrained in Spenser’s diverse and
often ambiguous representations of Cupid. Chapter Two examines how Spenser’s Faerie
Queene deploys the mythological figure of Cupid in the service of playfully addressing
weighty issues regarding the civic utility of poetry and the role of the poet in Elizabethan
politics. At the same time, the extreme tyranny exercised by Spenser’s incarnation of
Cupid speaks to the poet-subject’s discontent with the Queen’s cultivation of an
eroticized political regime that relied upon an encomiastic tradition of erotic address and
male subjection. The poem’s staging of direct encounters between Cupid and female
exemplars of virtue and chastity allowed Spenser to more broadly address the interpretive

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practices of female readers of allegorical romance while more pointedly advising the
Queen on her political choices.

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Chapter Two
“The dreaded Impe”:
Cupid, Ovid, and Poetic Authority in Spenser’s Faerie Queene

And thou most dreaded impe of highest Jove,
Faire Venus sonne, that with thy cruell dart
At that good knight so cunningly didst roué,
That glorious fire it kindled in his hart,
Lay now thy deadly Heben bowe apart,
And with thy mother milde come to mind ayde:
Come both, and with you bring triumphant Mart,
In loves gentle iollities arraid,
After his murderous spoyles and bloudie rage allayd.
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(The Faerie Queene,
Proem 1.3)

Chapter two examines the influence of Ovid’s Cupid on the mythological
tradition that Spenser inherits from the Roman poet, as well as Spenser’s adaptation of
Ovidian form and matter within his own poetics. In this chapter, I reassess Cupid’s
allegorical function in The Faerie Queene by rereading select scenes in which the
figure’s ambiguous and often irreconcilable meanings challenge the reader, especially the
female reader.
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Specifically, in asserting the idea that Britomart exemplifies the high
ethical stakes of the female encounter with Cupid, I argue that this figure’s willful display
of power threatens to undermine Protestant virtues that demand female chastity and

99
Throughout Chapters Two and Three, references to The Faerie Queene and the Letter to Raleigh (LR)
refer to Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London and New York: Longman,
1997). Quotations from the poem will specify book, canto, and line number, and appear parenthetically in
the text.

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By employing the term “rereading,” I hope to suggest a necessary return to critically contested scenes in
The Faerie Queene in which Spenser uses the figure of Cupid relationally, both to examine how exemplary
female characters negotiate classical representations and early modern discourses of love and desire, and
how the poet challenges the boundaries of genre.

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confine female desire. Framed as a kind of spoiler figure throughout The Faerie Queene,
Cupid registers the poem’s discontent about its encomiastic structure and discourses of
courtly courtesy by drawing attention to Spenser’s role as a poet whose desire to speak
directly to the queen and exercise a degree of political liberty in his speech, exerts a
critical pressure on the conventions of the encomium. These underlying threats of
political and social unrest find their primary expression in the ways in which female
characters respond to Ovidian representations of love and desire.
Spenser establishes the initial Neoplatonic narrative framework that assigns Cupid
the ability to create concord, only to slowly dismantle it, throughout the first three books
of The Faerie Queene. In the Proem to Book 1, Spenser establishes the mythological
Cupid, disarmed and in union with Venus, as a discursive figure of narrative that
represents poetic harmony and civic order. The poet’s conciliatory integration of Venus,
Mars, and “the dreaded Impe” Cupid is constantly under threat, however, as the god of
love does not always work to reconcile the opposing impulses of love and war but instead
seeks to undermine the poem’s attempts at narrative order.
Appealing to the Queen—Spenser’s Courtly Female Audience
More than a figure for the poetic imagination or of errant human desire, Spenser’s
Cupid acts to underscore the narrative modes that underlie discourses of female desire in
Book III of The Faerie Queene, “The Legend of Britomartis or Of Chastity.”
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The New

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Cupid is by far the most persistent mythological character in Spenser’s poem; references to Cupid
appear throughout The Faerie Queene: in the Proem to Book I and in various incarnations in Books II, III,
IV, and VI.

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Historicist claim that gender formation is a result of social and discursive processes is
particularly useful in examining the distinct political and literary discourses that
converged in the queen’s ubiquitous presence in early modern English culture.
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Within
the cultural context of a powerful and visible female monarch, Spenser recruits the pagan
figure of Cupid to represent both chaste and base discourses of love and to construct
discourses of female desire in a literary context in which the dynastic ambitions of epic
are frequently thwarted by the prerogatives of romance.
Although Spenser may not have defined himself as a courtier, he was a struggling
poet in a culture in which erotic addresses to the queen were commonplace, appearing in
formal dedications, love sonnets, popular ballads, and progress entertainments. Despite
her age (she was in her mid-50s when The Faerie Queene was published in 1590), the
queen’s timeless youth was commemorated in circulating images and portraits that
depicted the queen’s idealized eternal beauty.
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Spenser wrote in a culture in which
Queen Elizabeth herself, with the support of her Privy Council, went to great lengths to
perpetuate her own cultural status as idealized love object for male subjects (especially
poets and courtiers) who were desirous of political and personal favor. By presenting the
queen as the ideal reader of The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s poetry conforms to the

102
In Louis A. Montrose’s memorable formulation, these processes ultimately culminate in what he
identifies as “the collective discourse of Elizabethan power that we call ‘Queen Elizabeth’” (317). “The
Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, eds. Patricia Parker
and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).

103
See David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance: Revised Edition (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 193-194.

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encomiastic and highly eroticized discourse that characterized the relationship between
sovereign and subject at Elizabeth’s court. Spenser’s poetic discourse interpellates the
Queen as its primary subject – a subject who features prominently in the development of
the poet’s principal themes. However, the terms of Spenser’s encomium are conditional;
as the subject of the poem’s address and as a female reader, the Queen is alternately
subjected to the poet’s models of female virtue and readerly discipline.
While Spenser constructs Queen Elizabeth as an exemplar of chaste virtue and
steadfast authority, he also aligns the queen with the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of
her female subjects. Spenser’s explicit addressing of a courtly female audience allowed
him to diffuse anxieties about the queen’s political machinations within a broader cultural
discourse that debated the merits and methods of female education, and, in particular, the
deleterious effects of reading amorous poetry on the female imagination. In their didactic
treatises, Thomas Salter (A Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens,
intituled the Mirrhor of Modestie 1579) and Sir John Harrington (Orlando Furioso,
translation 1590) advised women what to read and how to appropriately interpret texts.
Salter contends that since it is unnatural for women to make laws for men or to instruct
men in the sciences, it follows “also that in suche studies, as yieldeth pleasure, there is no
lesse daunger, that they will learne to be subtile and shameless Lovers.”
104
Thus,

104
Thomas Salter. A Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, intituled the Mirrhor of
Modestie. London: 1579. British Library. Early English Books Online. 2008. Image 18.
http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99837455.

92
“studies” that could yield to experiences of pleasure, like the reading of romance, could
actually incite female readers to act as “subtile and shamelesse lovers.”
105
Harrington’s
1590 translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso advises female readers how to properly
interpret allegory by urging women to eschew literal identification with the martial
virtues of fictional heroines and to align themselves instead with the natural virtues
ascribed to women in early modern culture.
106

Other early modern writers like satirist Thomas Nashe amplified concerns about
the effects of reading on the female imagination to anxieties about the poet’s use of
deceptive poetic precepts, which threatened to endanger female virtue. In The Anatomie
of Absurditie, Nashe explicitly connects writers of romance with conjurers and the
reading of romance with the experience of erotic desire:
Are they not ashamed in their preffred posies, to adoren a pretence of profit mixt
with pleasure, when in their bookes there is scarce to be found one precept
pertaining to vertue, but whole quires fraught with amorous discourses, kindling
Venus flame in Vulcans forge, carrying Cupid in triumph, alluring even vowed
Vestals to treade awry, inchaunting chaset mindes, and corrupting the continenst.
Henceforth, let them alter their posies of profit with intermingled pleasure,
inserting that of Ovid instead.
107

105
Thomas Salter, A Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens, Image 18.

106
Clare McManus offers an eloquent analysis of Harrington’s reading directives aimed at women; the
acceptable way to read allegory was, as McManus observes, to “seek allegorical meanings for the heroines’
martial virtues, meanings consistent with what the dominant culture has identified as a woman’s ‘naturall’
perfections rather than constructing aggressively literal meanings (those ‘grosse imitations’) that would
threaten established gender paradigms” (105). Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Reading of Women
(Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2002).

107
Thomas Nashe. Anatomie of Absurditie, London: 1589. Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery.
Early English Books Online. 2008. Image 5.
http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99845700.Asserting unbridled antagonism toward inept
poets who only poorly imitate classical sources, Nashe instructs such rogue poets to simply insert the lines

93

Although Nashe’s tone can be read as satirical, he nonetheless gives voice to a common
cultural anxiety regarding the poet’s ability to deceive readers through false pretenses,
that is, by claiming to employ Horatian modes but instead acting “to adoren a pretence [s]
of profit mixt with pleasure.” Nashe is especially critical of unskilled poets who claim to
include “precepts” but in fact do not include examples that correspond neatly to obvious
and recognizable female virtues.
108
Yet Nashe, like the young Christopher Marlowe,
eagerly engaged with erotic Ovidian themes in his writing; Nashe’s most notorious poem,
entitled “Nashe his Dildo” or “The Choice of Valentines,” addresses erotic themes of
masculine failure and female pleasure. Ian Frederick Moulton cites Nashe’s use of Pietro
Aretino, “the most notorious figure of Italianate eroticism in Tudor-Stuart London,” who
was also “emblematic of erotic corruption” as evidence that Nashe was interested in
adapting a similarly satirical tone toward erotic themes.
109
Nashe’s claim that the
substitution of the “amorous discourses” of allegorical romance that carry “Cupid in
triumph” for more transparent didactic literary forms is complicated by Nashe’s own

of the original poet to avoid such degradation of English poesy. Nashe’s reference to Ovid, however, is
ironic since it ignores the relationship between Ovid’s poetry and its primary goal of erotic persuasion.

108
Anne Lake Prescott notes that as a writer, Nashe was well known for “push[ing] hyperbole and
metaphor into drama and caricature. How people are deluded laments Nashe: hence our ‘new found songs
and sonnets which every rednose fiddler hath at his fingers end, and every ignorant ale knight will breathe
forth over the pot, as soon as his brain waxeth hot’” (Nashe qtd in Prescott 235). “The Evolution of Tudor
Satire,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600, ed. Arthur Kinney (Cambridge
U.K.,: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 220-240.

109
Ian Frederick Moulton. Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 31,190.

94
explicit use of erotic themes. While Nashe’s claim may exemplify his satirical attitude
toward the abuse of poetry by unskilled poets, underlying this assertion is a genuine
anxiety about placing the burden of literary interpretation upon another subset of the
amateurs Nashe disdains - the vulnerable female reader.
In contrast, Spenser exploits the anxieties surrounding female reading and
interpretive practices; for instance, Salter’s contention that reading could incite women to
act as lovers lends Spenser’s narrative an affective force to influence the formation of
virtue in the female reader and to shape a woman’s responses to The Faerie Queene’s
diverse scenarios of love and desire. Similarly, Harrington’s directives regarding how
women should properly read and interpret allegorical narratives actually work to
emphasize the existence of an alternate interpretive practice for the female reader. It is
this alternate interpretive possibility that Spenser seizes upon in his articulation of
multiple subject positions for the female reader. Nashe’s concerns about the deleterious
consequences of women reading romances and his focus on the fallibilities of the female
imagination extend to a disdain for poets who fail to include transparent precepts that
conform to identifiable female virtues.
Spenser’s insistent employment of amorous allegorical discourses including
classical figures like Cupid in The Faerie Queene, however, explicitly counters Nashe’s
opposition to the use of romance and allegory, which directly threatens the virtue of
female readers. While Spenser shares Nashe’s view of the vulnerability of the female
imagination and his contention that allegory should function didactically, he diverges
from Nashe’s diatribe against women and bad poets, which excludes the queen, and

95
instead builds a female audience, which includes the queen, into the narrative frame of
The Faerie Queene.
By building a “representative” female audience into the narrative frame of The
Faerie Queene, Spenser explicitly addresses his female patrons and a broader female
readership throughout the poem.
110
Indeed Spenser’s narrator repeatedly breaks from
relating the action of the plot in order to directly address the “Ladies” of his female
audience.
111
The publication history of The Faerie Queene and authorial revisions of
Book III in particular provide suggestive evidence of Spenser’s acute interest in
appealing to the needs, desires, and values of a female audience. This is especially true

110
The first three books of The Faerie Queene were published in 1590, accompanied by the Letter to
Raleigh (1589). Books I-III were published to “coincide with the publication of its prose companion,
Sidney’s Arcadia” while “the publication of the 1596 poem … was planned to coincide with Elizabeth’s
Grand Climacteric” (A.C. Hamilton 19). The plan to publish the 1590 poem to correspond to Elizabeth’s
sixty-third year “in which she entered the final stage of life” (19), suggests that Spenser’s attention was
very much focused on soliciting the most important member of his female audience, the queen herself.
Books I-III were republished in a second edition in 1596 along with the first edition of Books IV-VI. See
A.C. Hamilton. Chronological Table of Spenser’s Life and Works, xv-xvi in Spenser: The Faerie Queene.
Whether Spenser is “patronizing” his female readership as David Miller asserts or composing his poem
with an “aristocratic female readership” in mind as Caroline McManus argues, or “an eye to women
readers,” as Linda Woodbridge claims, early modern readers of The Faerie Queene could not deny the
poem’s preoccupation with both courtly and non royal women within the dedications and narrative itself
See Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 ‘Faerie Queene’ (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1988); Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of
Womankind (University of Illinois Press, 1986); McManus, Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Reading of
Women (Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2002), 16-18.

111
The narrator’s repeated exhortations to the “Ladies” of his audience to behold the example of chastity in
both their Queen and his “ensamples,” occur, for example, in the Proem to Book III, III.i.49, 54, and III.v-
vi. Maureen Quilligan observes “Spenser’s direct addresses to female readers are far more numerous in
Book III than elsewhere throughout the poem” (135). One reason for this, Quilligan suggests, is “because
Britomart is presented as the founder of Elizabeth’s line, the one in whom she is to see the warlike
puissance of antique women, while Spenser tells her directly, ‘of all wisdome be thou precedent’” (135
“The Gender of the Reader and the Problem of Sexuality [in Books 3 and 4]” in Critical Essays on Edmund
Spenser, ed. Mihoko Suzuki (New York: G.K. Hall and Co., 1996), 135.

96
in Spenser’s response to criticism of the 1590 poem in his revised 1596 work.
112
In the
1596 version of the poem, Spenser omits the Letter to Raleigh, and the entire body of
Commendatory Verses, except for three, and the Dedicatory Sonnets.
113
Spenser’s major
revisions occur in Book III (1596), where three revised stanzas replace the last five
stanzas (21).
114
Spenser’s removal of the hermaphroditic embrace of Amoret and
Scudamour from the 1596 ending, for instance, was a direct response to criticism from
the queen’s closest advisor, Lord Burleigh. These revisions suggest that Spenser was not
only aware of a strain of courtly disdain for poetry, but that he also aimed to position his
work squarely within debates about the civic value of poetry in late Elizabethan England.
Spenser and Burleigh: The Poet and the Court
Examining the relationship between Burleigh and Spenser situates Spenser’s
poetry within a more overtly political dialogue between poet and court, subject and
sovereign. Even though Burleigh’s political writings do not explicitly articulate his view
on the role of poetry at court, his position as one of the queen’s closest advisors and the
subject of panegyrics and dedications by Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, George Puttenham,

112
Spenser’s reordering of the Dedicatory Sonnets, which were written to Mary Sidney, Countess of
Pembroke, Elizabeth Carey, and “To all the gratious and beautifull Ladies in the Court” (A.C. Hamilton
734-35), in the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene, likewise attest to Spenser’s acute awareness of “social
protocol.” In particular, Spenser made sure that Lady Mary Sidney, a countess, was moved to a more
socially acceptable position, placing her before Lady Carey, a viscountess (McManus, Spenser’s Faerie
Queen and the Reading of Women, 19). Consequently, Lady Mary Sidney and Lady Carey, along with the
other courtly women to whom Spenser dedicated work formed the “representative” community of female
readers to whom the poet self-consciously addresses the poem. These authorial alterations suggest that
Spenser took the influence of his female audience seriously, even altering the order of his dedications to
courtly women, so that they conformed to the proper order prescribed by social protocol.
113
A.C. Hamilton, Chronological table of Spenser’s Life and Works, xv-xvi.

114
A.C. Hamilton, Chronological table of Spenser’s Life and Works, xv-xvi.

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and others suggests that he held substantial influence over whether a poet’s work gained
the queen’s attention at court. Spenser’s poetic and political ideologies are a response, in
part, to the attitude of the court toward poetry in general. Most likely, Spenser associated
Burleigh with his political position at court: Burleigh’s direct influence on the queen and
her national and foreign policy made him a politically powerful figure for literary
patronage. Sir Robert Sidney’s secretary duly noted the serious and solemn atmosphere
Burleigh encouraged at court, when he referred to Burleigh as “Saturn,” the god of
melancholy.
In addition, Burleigh seems to have given poets like Spenser and Harvey a
lukewarm response to their panegyrics and dedications, perhaps viewing poetry itself as
an unnecessary distraction from the real business of political decision-making.
Burleigh’s own political ideology was directly determined by the most immediate needs
of the state; indeed the sacrifice of individual conscience for the state was not only
encouraged, but also expected of the individual English subject. For a poet like Spenser,
we can imagine that Burleigh’s grave presence at court contributed to more general ideas
that regarded the atmosphere at court as devoid of passion or pleasure; the court in which
Burleigh held sway privileged the political needs of the state over the private desires of
the individual subject, desires that frequently found expression in the encomiastic poetry
encouraged by the Queen’s court.
115

115
While it is not my purpose to present an exhaustive account of the political differences between
Burleigh and Spenser, it is important to keep in mind the disjunction between their views. The following
example from David Norbrook’s Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, illustrates the root cause
of their differences: in the 1590s Spenser aligned himself with the Earl of Essex whom he viewed “as the
heir of the political traditions of Sidney and Leicester (117). Like Sidney and Leicester, Spenser favored a

98
Spenser’s view of poetry as espoused in Book III of The Faerie Queene aims to
bridge this gap between Burleigh’s intense focus on securing political advantages for the
English nation, and Queen Elizabeth’s equally intense encouragement of her courtiers to
adopt a personal and eroticized ethic of courtly love and desire for the sovereign in the
form of encomiastic poetry. Somewhere in between these two extremes Spenser seeks to
locate an entirely revised ethic that is both epic in its aim to further the political authority
of the Protestant English nation, and addresses the private troubles and travails of the
individual subject, as experienced through the conventions of romance. Thus Spenser
increasingly employs the “intermeddling”
116
of romance within the broader framework of
epic to highlight the inconsistencies within both genres and the need for a carefully
wrought revision of the two literary modes that form the foundation of Burleigh’s and the
Queen’s political ideologies. Specifically, Spenser sets up an opposition between
Burleigh’s conception of civic love and the poet’s view of amorous love. Burleigh’s

more aggressive foreign policy, especially in subduing Catholic rebels in Ireland and abroad. Burleigh, in
contrast, favored a more restrained approach to rebellions abroad. Consequently, Spenser’s alignment, as
Norbrook points out, “put him on controversial ground” (117). Indeed, “Spenser’s public image in the
1590s was of a poet sympathetic to the cause of the Earl of Essex, an increasingly controversial figure who
eventually rebelled against the queen. Already by the early seventeenth century, admirers of Essex were
propagating the myth of Spenser not as a court panegyrist but as an exile from court, championed in his
poverty by Essex alone” (112). Spenser also writes in “Teares of the Muses” where “he lamented the loss
to learning caused by the deaths of so many of Leicester’s circle” which was also a “political loss” and “In
1591, his satire Mother Hubberds Tale, which contained spirited attacks on Burghley and Cecil, was called
in by the authorities. In 1593 George Peele described Spenser as one of many victims of ‘Court disdaine,
the enemie to Arte’” (117).

116
Spenser attempts to explain the seeping in of romance by couching these episodes in terms of narrative
inconsistency: “But by occasion hereof, many other adventures are intermeddled, but rather as Accidents,
then intendments. As the love of Britomart, the overthrow of Marinell, the misery of Florimell, the
vertuousness of Belphoebe, the lasciviousness of Hellenora, and manu the like” (718). A.C. Hamilton
glosses the word “intermeddle” as “referring to the interlacing of stories in a romance. Those listed include
the chief matter of the first ten cantos of Book III in their narrative order as Accidents – earlier called
‘particular purposes or by-accidents’ – as distinct from its intendments, namely, the fashioning of the virtue
of chastity seen in Britomart’s freeing of Amoret from Busirane after Scudamour has failed” (718).

99
conception of civic love equated love of the state with love for the queen and demanded
complete loyalty to the state, even if this obedience required the sacrifice of one’s own
conscience. By redefining Burleigh’s conception of civic love and the oppressive ethic of
courtly love encouraged by the queen and her council, Spenser champions a revised view
of civic love, in which poetic representations of love and desire have political and
cultural value and can, in fact, help to fashion the virtues of the monarch and her court.
117

In order to redefine Burleigh’s conception of civic love, Spenser directly
addresses the statesman’s more general criticisms of poetry with amorous themes and
fashions Burleigh into an unworthy opponent of his poetic prerogatives. In the Proem to
Book IV, Spenser responds directly to Burleigh’s criticisms by suggesting that Burleigh’s
rigid focus on “affaires of state” may secure him a position as a successful statesman, but
it does not make him a successful lover or a capable judge of poetry: “Such ones ill iudge
of love, that cannot love, / Ne in their frosen hearts feele kindly flame: / For thy they
ought not thing unknowne reproue” (Pr. IV.2). Burleigh’s is the critical voice that derides

117
Harvey C. Manfield’s characterization of fourteenth century Florentine humanist Leonardi Bruni’s
theories of civic humanism are helpful in characterizing Spenser’s attempt to redefine Burleigh’s
conception of civic love within a humanist context. In particular, Bruni “praises the non-political aspects
of Florence that adorn it but do not contribute directly to its civic life” (chk). In the History of the
Florentine People, Bruni’s “praise of the beauty of Florence shows how civic pride can arise from a desire
or love that is uncivic in origin,” where the former refers to public activity and the latter refers to private
experience (242). While I do not completely agree that public and private spheres of activity were clearly
delineated in the early modern period, I think Mansfield’s assessment of Bruni’s valuing of art,
architecture, and literature as arising from a person or “uncivic” experience of an abstract concept like
beauty effectively demonstrates how a personal desire or love can form the foundation of civic pride or the
kind of civic love advocated by Burleigh. Spenser’s conception of civic love, then, aims to demonstrate
how a personal or “uncivic” experience of abstract concepts like love and desire (by female readers, female
characters) can become the foundation of a highly evolved form of civic love that acknowledges the role of
poetry in the civic life of the English nation. “Bruni and Machiavelli” in Renaissance Civic Humanism:
Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 223-247.

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the poet’s work, calling it “a vaine endeavour” and “false allurement” that only feeds
young lovers’ “fancies” (Pr. IV.1). Spenser addresses these accusations by appealing to
past literary precedents in which the “braue exploits of which great Heroes wonne, / In
love were either ended or begunne” (Pr. IV.3). To further justify his choice of amorous
themes, Spenser cites “the father of Philosophie,” Socrates, who made love the subject of
“manie lessons” of his philosophical discourse (Pr. IV.3). Thus by aligning Burleigh’s
critical voice with the “Stoike censours” of classical Rome, the poet effectively
differentiates his work from the disapproval of his critics—those who seek to deprive the
poet liberty of speech and those who work to repress the expression of passions
associated with love —from the intended audience of his poetic song, his “soveraigne
Queene” (Pr. IV.4).
The Female Monarch and Ovid
A female monarch presented specific challenges to Ovid’s model, especially
considering the politically unstable climate of Elizabeth’s England.
118
In order to
maintain authority at home and abroad, the head of the English nation had to continue to
represent and signify the absolute and steadfast authority of the monarchy, regardless of
the weaknesses attributed to the female gender. In that sense, Ovid’s model of female

118
Louis A. Montrose makes this point exactly in “Idols of the Queen: Policy, Gender, and the Picturing of
Elizabeth I,” Representations 68 (Autumn 1999): 108-161: “An unmarried queen regnant, ruling a country
that was of increasing strategic consequence in a world racked by religious and geopolitical strife,
Elizabeth herself was frequently made the expressive medium in which religious polemic and xenophobic
diatribe were conducted. In such cases, the discourse was almost invariably gender-coded, and it
proceeded by means of symbolic manipulations of the royal body. It was apropos of Elizabeth Tudor that
Catherine de’Medici observed, ‘It is all the hurt that evil men can do to Noble Women and Princes, to
spread abroad lies and dishonourable tales of them, and … we of all Princes that be women, are subject to
be slandered wrongfully of them that be our adversaries’” (117-118).

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vulnerability and masculine sexual authority would have to be altered so that perceived
female weaknesses could be re-construed as political strengths. Male authority, which in
Ovid was often based on physical force and violence, would have to be tempered—
however not so much that the primacy of masculine/male values would be subsumed
absolutely to feminine/female prerogatives.
Ovid’s preoccupation with violent physical transformations that often resulted in
the problematic silencing of the female voice resonated with the early modern insistence
upon maintaining the primacy and privilege of the male voice and body over the female
voice and body. This insistence upon maintaining a split between male and female bodies
developed out of the medieval political theory of the King’s Two Bodies. Derived, as
argued by Ernst Kantorowicz, from medieval law and theology, the theory of the King’s
Two Bodies sought to establish “corporate perpetuity before the development of the state
as an independent entity.”
119
The challenge for theorists and theologians existed in
making the state and monarch distinct entities. Mary Beth Rose cites Marie Axton’s
identification of the “paradox” that sixteenth-century lawyers could not avoid: “men died
and the land endured; kings died; the crown survived; individual subjects died but

119
See Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in English Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2002. 35-36. In The King’s Two Bodies, 7
th
ed. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997),
Ernst Kantorowicz is credited with contextualizing the theory of the king’s two bodies by placing it within
the context of “medieval political theory.” Plowden’s Reports (1571) provide the evidence for his
argument that English absolutism derived from the theory of the king’s two bodies. In “The Queen’s Two
Bodies: Drama and Elizbethan Succession.” London: Royal Historical Society, 1977, Marie Axton expands
upon Kantorowicz’s argument by looking at unpublished works by Plowden and others. Albert Rolls’s
argument in The Theory of the King’s Two Bodies in the Age of Shakespeare, Studies in Renaissance
Literature 19, (2000), acts to counter the critical tendency to equate the theory of the kings’s two bodies
with absolutism. Rolls cites “The Duchy of Lancaster Case (1561)” and “Willion vs Berkley (1561?1562)”
as instances in which the law acted as a “curb” to sovereign authority.

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subjects always remained to be governed … For the purposes of law it was found
necessary by 1561 to endow the Queen with two bodies: a body natural and a body politic
… The body politic was supposed to be contained within the natural body of
the Queen.”
120
On the one hand, the Queen’s mortal body was vulnerable to illness,
“error,” and death; on the other, the body politic was an immortal entity that loved on in
perpetuity beyond an individual sovereign.
In addressing this gendered division, Louis A. Montrose highlights a second
unavoidable paradox that arose when the position of England’s monarch was filled by a
woman: “If dominant structures of thought and belief privilege the male body in relation
to the female body, they also privilege the anointed body of the monarch in relation to the
profane body of the subject. The anomalous circumstance of a queen regnant threatened
to bring those privileges into conflict.”
121
Queen Elizabeth occupied two incompatible
positions: as “the anointed body of the monarch,” she surpassed the authority and
political status of her “profane” subjects. However, as a woman, Elizabeth was subject to
prevailing patriarchal ideologies that characterized women as inferior, subsuming the
female voice and body to the higher authority of men. The queen and her councilors,
nonetheless, were able to strategically transform traits perceived as particularly female

120
Rose, Gender and Heroism, 35-36.

121
See Montrose, “Idols of the Queen,” 145. For instance, Montrose notes that “Penetrating but silent
observation can indeed be construed as an epitome of the paradoxical condition of the Queen’s two bodies
– her melding of the kingly power of her body politic with the womanly restraint of her body natural.
However, in the special case of a woman who was also a queen regnant, silence might well be indicative of
a prudential reservation of judgment, a strategic keeping of one’s own counsel” (145).

103
weaknesses into political strengths.
122
The perception that the queen maintained her own
judgments and kept her own counsel conformed to cultural assumptions about the
appropriateness of silence in a woman, while simultaneously reinforcing the political
necessity of controlled judgment in an effective monarch.
Spenser’s Classical Inheritance: Ovid, Cupid, & Poetic Authority
Spenser distances the themes of his poetry from the disapproval of courtly critics
like Burleigh by strategically aligning the form of his verse with the shape of Ovid’s
poetic lines. For Ovid, the choice of meter was a defining factor in the expression of the
subject matter of the Amores. In the first line of the Amores, Ovid invokes Virgil’s
opening lines—“arms and the man I sing” (arma virumque cano) in the conventional
dactylic hexameter expected of a poet singing of epic themes. Yet this initial expectation
is destabilized when the poet loses a foot to Cupid, and the meter shifts to dactylic
pentameter, the conventional meter of Greek and Roman love elegy.
We which were Ovid’s five books, now are three
For these before the rest preferreth he:
If reading five thou plainst of tediousnesse,
Two ta’en away thy labour will be lesse,
With muse upreared I meane to sing of armes,
Choosing a subject fit for fierce alarmes.
Both verses were alike till love (men say)

122
In addition to emphasizing the necessity of silence as a quality appropriate to a woman and monarch,
Montrose argues that the queen’s chastity was also appropriated “not merely [as] a conventional sign of
female obedience to patriarchal power but was also the source of a mystical feminine power. In other
words, it was a strategy for the enhancement of Elizabeth’s personal authority and a means to secure her
subjects’ loyalty and obedience to her regime” (145). For more on the integration of Elizabeth’s female
virtue into dominant conceptions of political authority and tenets of ragione di stato through emblematic
representation, specifically the “Rainbow” portrait, see Montrose, “Idols of the Queen,” 145.

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Began to smile and take one foote away.
Rash boy, who gave thee power to change a line?
123
(Amores 1.1)

Using the “excuse of divine compulsion,” the poet claims that he is forced by Cupid to
alter his mode of writing from epic to elegy because of an unexpected shift in meter.
Thus Cupid authorizes the poet’s shift away from weighty political and philosophical
concerns to lighter issues of love.
Similarly, Spenser’s choice to add a foot, extending his metrical line out in space
and beyond the poetic mode of iambic pentameter, suggests that like Ovid, Spenser was
interested in establishing a mutually defining relationship between the poetic form of The
Faerie Queene and its main themes. By alternating eight lines of iambic pentameter with
one line of iambic hexameter, Spenser essentially adds a foot to the most commonly used
metrical form in Elizabethan poetry.
124
Spenser’s movement from pentameter to
hexameter works in much the same way as Ovid’s metrical shift in the Amores. Ovid
begins with hexameter, the conventional meter of epic, and shifts to pentameter, the
conventional meter of classical love elegy, in order to signal a shift in genres, from epic
to elegiac romance. Spenser’s metrical innovation—eight lines of iambic pentameter
followed by a single alexandrine line—reflects how Spenser’s poetic subject matter
(love) is inseparably rooted in the formal structure of love elegy itself. It is through the

123
Ovid. Certaine of Ovids Elegies: Amorim lib.I.Elegia I. Trans. Christopher Marlowe in Sir John Davies
Epigrammes and Elegies. London: 1599. Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Early English
Books Online. 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:6714:17.

124
Spenser’s use of iambic pentameter was certainly influenced by his familiarity with the work of Chaucer
and Shakespeare. Spenser also displays his knowledge of French poetic conventions by employing the less
popular alexandrine, the twelve-syllable verse, favored by French poets

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structure of romance (rooted in the conventional meter of classical love elegy) that
Spenser must confront the very principles and values of romance that he wishes to
critique in order to assert the primacy of his epic prerogatives. Thus Spenser’s poetry
simultaneously acknowledges that romance provides the necessary, generative material
for the movements of dynastic epic while signaling the breakdown of romance as it must
inevitably give way to epic.
Domesticating Cupid
Like Ovid before him, Spenser recruits Cupid in order to introduce the form and
matter of his poetry.
125
The association between poetic form, matter, and individual
liberties of expression is explicitly linked to Ovid’s selection of Cupid as a poetic figure
that can alter the form and substance of epic itself—a figure that can disrupt the cultural
expectation that a respected poet should write only of “iron wars.”
126
The poet’s
invocation of Cupid as creative muse serves a dual purpose: to define Spenser’s choice of
genre in The Faerie Queene and to delineate the substantive matter of his poem. In
Spenser’s formulation of Ovid’s move from epic to amor, it is made explicit early on that

125
In The Poetic Theology of Love, Hyde explains, “In the first of the Amores, Ovid prepares to sing of
‘arms and violent wars’ in epic hexameters, but Cupid condemns the poet to elegiacs by stealing one foot
from the second line. At first Ovid disputes Cupid’s authority over poetry and then complains of a lack of
fit matter for elegiacs” (145).

126
Spenser takes up Ovid’s interest in re-conceiving liberties of poetic expression through the Ovidian
discourse of the elegiac lover. Heather James sees Ovid as deeply invested in the “bold reinvention of
poetic license” rooted in law, liberty of speech, and republican civic virtue. See James, “The Poet’s Toys:
Christopher Marlowe and the liberties of erotic elegy,” MLQ 67, no. 1 103 (March 2006): 105, 103-127 and
“Ovid and the Question of Politics in Early Modern England,” in Images of Matter: Essays on British
Literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Yvonne Bruce (Newark, DE: University of Delaware
Press, 2005), 92-124.

106
his poem aims to bring together genres that include “Fierce warres and faithfull loves” (1
Pr. 1).
127

For Ovid, Cupid is initially a questionable figure of narrative authority whose
ambition threatens not only to alter the poet’s line but also to disturb the order of the
cosmos. “What will happen,” Ovid’s narrator asks, if Venus “take[s] Diana’s bow?” Will
Diana begin to “fan, when love begins to glow?” Will Ceres, the goddess of grain,
“reign” over “quiver-bearing Dian” while Diana “till[s] the plain?” (1.1) Ovid rehearses
common anxieties over which themes and forms constitute the proper subject matter for
the Roman poet and the unexpected changes that can occur when the poet swerves away
from epic ambitions to matters of love. The poet’s stated intention to write an epic poem
with epic subject matter in the tradition of Virgil’s Aeneid is completely altered when the
“Rash boy,” Cupid, softens Ovid’s poetic lines, transforming the Roman poet into Love’s
prophet. Ovid’s Cupid is an unwanted interloper who steals a foot from the poet’s line,
imposes form (meter) upon his verses, and gives the poet the amorous “matter” for his
poetry, along with the poetic license to write about love.
Spenser recruits Ovid’s Cupid after he has announced his purpose for writing The
Faerie Queene: to abandon pastoral tropes for epic ambitions in imitation of Virgil—to
trade in his “Oaten reeds” for “trumpets sterne” (1.4). After this proclamation, Spenser
appeals to Cupid directly, as “the most dreaded impe of heavenly Jove, / Faire Venus
sonne, that with thy cruell dart” takes aim at the Knight of Holiness, Redcrosse, kindling

127
For a complementary view of Ovid’s influence on Spenser’s deployment of Cupid “to define both the
genre and matter” of his poem, see Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love, 145.

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“that glorious fire … in his hart” (1.2-4). Subjecting Cupid to the poet’s directives,
Spenser commands the armed “impe” to “lay now thy deadly Heben bowe

apart, / and
with thy mother mylde come to mine ayde” (I.5-6).
128
In doing so, a newly domesticated
Cupid assumes a central role in the creation of Spenser’s poetic narrative. Spenser
describes a coming together of Venus, Cupid, and “triumphant Mars” “After his [Mars’s]
murderous spoyles and bloudie rage allayd” (I.7-9 my italics). By emphasizing his
recruitment of Mars after the god’s furor has been spent, Spenser suggests that Mars is
most poetically useful to his project once the god has been effectively evacuated of
associations with uncontrolled rage and unmitigated violence. Thus, initially, Spenser
favors the principle of Concordia oppositorium (the union of opposites) in joining
together the figure of unarmed Love, a divine form of Eros, and his mother, “celestial
Venus,” who privileges “principles of order and harmony” over principles of chaos and
disorder.
129

In traditional allegorical interpretations of the integration of Venus and Mars,
Edgar Wind and Don Cameron Allen have read the union of the gods as offering the
possibility of harmony, because together, Mars and Venus engender the figure of

128
The blackness of the god of Love’s “Heben bowe” suggests “sinister properties” as it is “the bow carried
by the god of love’s friend in Le Roman de la Rose 914,” which is derived from “the bitter-fruited tree, plus
noirs que meure.” The word Heben also connotes a “substance having a poisonous juice (OED) or a state
of sadness” (footnote 5-7 to Proem, Book 1, stanza 3 in A.C. Hamilton 30). The poet’s ordering of the god
of Love to lay down his “Heben bowe” is a move to domesticate the pagan god as a sign of the destructive
force of eros. Evacuating the figure of its malevolent properties transforms a once unruly figure of the
ever-changing cosmos into a figure of strategic poetic uses for the poet.

129
A.C. Hamilton, Proem to Book 1,The Faerie Queene, footnotes 5-7, 30.

108
harmony.
130
As Allen explains, early modern classical commentators like George Sandys
tended to offer moralized readings of the congress of Venus and Mars.
131
Drawing on
early modern theories of the body, Sandys interprets the union of Mars and Venus as
generative and life producing, offering a moralistic reading of the union of Mars and
Venus, by adding that such an adulterous and sinful coupling would most certainly be
discovered.
132
Thus the union of Venus and Mars whether it was read as an allegory of
sinful generation or redemptive harmony came, in the sixteenth century, to symbolize a
generative, coming together of opposing elements that resulted in concord.
Although the conciliatory union of Mars and Venus was conventional in
mythologies and classical commentaries on the pagan gods, Spenser’s addition of Cupid
to this classical pairing is unique. To offset the ethical dangers arising from the
subjection of female virtue to direct assault by Cupid, Spenser domesticates the
unpredictable figure of Cupid by integrating him into the conciliatory union of Mars and
Venus. Spenser thus presents the female reader with a less threatening model for reading

130
A.C. Hamilton, Proem to Book 1,The Faerie Queene, footnotes 5-7, 30.

131
For more on Galenic and classical interpretations of the union of Mars and Venus, see Don Cameron
Allen. Mysteriously Meant: the Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the
Renaissance (John Hopkins University Press, 1970), 193. Allen notes that although Sandys considers “the
coupling of Venus and Mars” as “both astrological and physical because Mars is hot and Venus is moist,
“whereof generation consists,” he emphasizes the fact that “adulteries committed by even the greatest, are
discovered in the long run by the eyes of the sun” (193).

132
Philosophers also found source material for their theories in the coming together of Mars and Venus.
Read “as an allegory of Harmony,” Allen notes that union of Mars and Venus was often seen as the source
of Empedocle’s philosophical theories” (Footnote 10 qtd. in Allen, Mysteriously Meant, 86-87). Like his
predecessors, “Heraclitus uncovers the Empedoclean doctrine of harmony in Demodocus’s ballad of the
adultery of Venus and Mars” (69). However, Allen also remarks on a secondary physical interpretation of
Democratus’s ballad: “the story may also be an emblematic veiling of the nature of ironworking. Ares, or
iron, can be softened by Hephaestus, or fire, with the aid of Aphrodite, or artisan grace” (69).

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and interpreting Book I. Spenser activates the celestial and maternal register of meaning
for Venus, evacuates Mars of his martial furor, and adds Cupid. In Spenser, the
integration of Venus, Mars, and “the dreaded impe” Cupid becomes a poetic strategy that
allows the poet to integrate opposing principles of love, war, and erotic desire and to
bring the imperatives of epic closer to the narrative impulses of romance. At the same
time, this integration of opposing means and ends provides a fictional template for the
integration of personal desires in love with broader political ambition for Spenser’s
privileged female reader, the Queen.
Along with the possibility of harmony, Spenser’s appeal to Cupid can also be read
as an extension of Burleigh’s conception of civic love, which can be equated with love
for the Queen herself.
133
In the Proem to Book IV, Spenser explicitly marks his rejection
of the criticism of “Stoicke censors” like Burleigh, who judge the poet harshly for
making love his poetic theme by “praising loue” and “magnifying louers deare debate”
(IV proem 1-2). Spenser’s rejection of one of his most prominent critics sets the stage for
his address to “that sacred Saint my sovereign Queene,” Spenser’s most prized female
reader and the primary subject of his encomium:
The Queene of loue, and Prince of peace from heauen blest.

133
Hyde’s comments on the political and rhetorical function of Cupid in Spenser’s Faerie Queene in The
Poetic Theology of Love have helped me to see Cupid as a poetic figure that is essential to the poet’s
theorization of poetic voice, and appreciate an extended conception of civic love, which includes amorous
love without sublimating the political prerogatives of the poet. Hyde writes, “If Cupid makes the Queen
‘the better deigne to heare,’ the Queen shows that Cupid’s significance extends to the civic love [that
includes amorous love] that Spenser opposes as a principle of social order to Burleigh’s ‘grave foresight.’
The Queen is the paragon of civic love because she ‘loveth best, / And best is lov’d of all alive I weene’”
(410).

110
Which that she may the better deigne to heare,
Do thy dread infant, Venus dearling doue,
From her high spirit chase imperious feare,
And use of awfull Majestie remoue:
In sted therof with drops of ambrosiall kisses, by thee gotten
From thy sweet smyling mother from aboue,
Sprinckle her heart, and haughtie courage soften,
That she may hearke to loue, and reade this lesson often. (IV proem 4-5)

Spenser uses the domesticated figure of Cupid, whom he characterizes as both “the dread
infant” and “Venus dearling dove,” to domesticate the queen—to “chase” away her
“imperious feare” “And use of awfull Majestie” (IV proem). The Queen’s “feare,” “And
use of awfull Majestie” are to be “remoue[d]” by Cupid and replaced with the
“ambrosiall kisses” and “sweet” smiles of celestial, maternal Venus (IV proem 4).
Although Spenser describes how “all bountie natural, / And treasures of true loue” have
been “enlocked” within the Queen’s “chaste breast” (IV proem 4), it is the poet, with the
aid of Cupid, who can unlock these “treasures.” Thus Spenser suggests a revised model
of civic love in which poetry and the poet play a crucial role. Spenser’s address to the
queen aims to both teach and delight the female reader by offering a revised position for
the queen-as-reader that is based on qualities of temperance as opposed to a position
defined by the queen’s exercise of absolute authority over her subjects. The narrator
hopes, in fact, “That she [the Queen] may hearke to loue, and read this lesson often” (IV
proem). Spenser shifts the dominant terms of the sovereign-subject relationship and
appeals to the queen as a female reader who can acquire experiential knowledge of love,
mimetically, through the act of reading. The Faerie Queene articulates this idea as a
rejection of the existing conception of civic love and duty modeled by Burleigh in which

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obedience to the sovereign’s “awfull majestie” often comes at the cost of individual
desires and conscience.
In his attempt to differentiate his poetic aims from those of the pastoral, Spenser
claims that his epic trajectory will include both heroic feats of men (reinforcing
imperatives of empire) along with the “faithfull loves” upon which the heroic (and its
attendant virtues) are built. In the Proems to Books I and IV, Spenser recruits a
domesticated and disarmed Cupid, invoking the god in the 1590 poem and again in the
1596 work for his poetic purposes, seemingly in support of narrative order and harmony.
But as readers of The Faerie Queene know well, Spenser’s attempts to eschew
elements of fury, chaos, and disorder that are often associated with Virgilian epic, cannot
be entirely suppressed, even through the imposition of precise meaning and purpose upon
the initial appearance of Cupid and Venus in the Proems. Like Ovid, Spenser uses the
figure of Cupid to transform early modern expectations of the epic genre, which allows
him to work within the esteemed genre of epic without completely abandoning the
playful errancy of romance conventions.
Models of Female Virtue in Peril: Spenser’s Cupid meets Faire Chastity
The narrator’s claim to poetic authority using the union of domesticated pagan
figures like Venus, Mars, and Cupid in Book I, is complicated by a competing claim in
Book II, which establishes another source that can effectively disarm Eros—the gaze of a
chaste and beautiful woman—whose power can “heale the sicke” and “revive the dead”
(II.iii.22.1-9). Separated from the maternal influence of celestial Venus in Book I, Cupid
transforms from a figure of poetic order aligned with civic values of harmony and order

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to a potential threat to female chastity, a highly praised Elizabethan virtue. As a wanton
figure of “base desire,” Cupid targets Belphoebe, The Faerie Queene’s exemplar of
“Faire Chasity.”
134
Belphoebe effectively resists Cupid’s advances and quenches his
“base desire” (III.iii.23.6-9) by destroying the instruments of his wanton work and
effectively disarming the pagan god.
Belphoebe’s chaste beauty is so intensely powerful that “In them [her “faire
eyes”] the blinded god his lustfull fyre / To kindle oft assay’d, but had not might; / For
with dredd Majestie, and awfull yre, / She broke his wanton dartes, and quenched base
desire” (II.iii.23.6-9). The poet’s disarming of Eros for the purposes of genre (the
privileging of epic over romance) is made parallel to the power of a chaste woman’s
gaze, which can also disarm Cupid. The poet’s ability to effectively transform classical
tropes and figures of love for purposes of genre and theme, puts pressure on the Neo-
platonic ideals of beauty that constitute part of Spenser’s encomiastic frame. Initially
Belphoebe’s chaste beauty and gaze can transform and disarm Cupid of his affective
power by destroying his “wanton” instruments and extinguishing his “base desire.”
Belphoebe’s display of “dredd Majestie” disarms a male figure of “base desire”
and destroys his instruments of authority. This scene previews the consequences of the
Queen’s “awfull majestie” (IV proem 4), if the poet’s appeals go unheard. As the impetus
behind the poet-courtier’s desire for favor and privilege, the female monarch looms large

134
Spenser explicitly refers to Gloriana and Belphoebe as “mirrours” or female exemplars in which the
queen could “chuse” to see her authority and virtue “fashioned to bee: / In th’one her rule, in th’other her
rare chastitee” (III proem 288).

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as a dual figure of both sympathy and censure over Spenser’s poetic project. As final
arbiters of judgment, the Queen and her councilors possess the authority to censor the
poet’s “wanton” verse and to silence expressions of “base desire.” Thus like the cruel
mistress of Petrarchan poetry, the Queen can reject the poet’s expressions of “base
desire” and disarm the poet by censuring his poetic lines. In light of the possibility of
critical censure, Spenser’s attraction to the ambiguous figure of Cupid is not surprising.
As an obedient and willing subject, Cupid enables the poet to adopt a posture of
deference to the Queen’s authority. At the same time, Cupid’s tendency to act as a willful
tyrant provides occasion for the poet’s subtle critique of the consequences of absolute
authority. In Book I, Cupid’s erotic force can be assimilated—as symbolized by the
union of Venus and Mars—to serve the narrative purpose of the poet, that is, to impose
meaning and direction on the narrative. In Book II, however, Cupid is no longer
restricted to this meaning and becomes an embodiment of the furor associated with
Virgilian epic and the disorder associated with illicit desire.
Once banished by Belphoebe’s “dredd Majestie, and awfull yre,” Cupid, “the
blinded god,” makes his triumphant return as “Love.” The ability to recognize and diffuse
the affective power of “base desire” is not enough to protect Faire Chastity or to enable
Belphoebe, who is subsequently transformed into a mode of expressing desire by the
poet’s pen,

to sustain her assault on eros.
Her iuorie forhead, full of bountie braue,
Like a broad table did it selfe dispred,
For Loue his loftie triumphs to engraue,
And write the battles of his great godhed:
All good and honour might therein be red:
For there their dwelling was. (II.iii.24.1-6 my italics)

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No longer a forceful character who can disarm the lusty figure of Cupid, Belphoebe is
transformed from a Neoplatonic philosophical ideal into a poetic ideal – a blazon of
Petrarchan beauty. Thus, the poet’s/narrator’s anxiety over his ability to represent and
reconcile the idealized virtue and beauty espoused in the proem is met with a temporary
solution when Belphoebe’s body is transformed from a base poetic idol of sensual desire
“oft assayd” by the “lustfull” desires of “the blinded god” to a literary object through
which the male poet can represent his martial achievements. Once usurped for the
purposes of male poetic expression, the chaste female body becomes a mode of poetic
inquiry with a higher spiritual and intellectual “use-value” for the poet.
Spenser models the initial encounter between Cupid and Belphoebe on a popular
episode from Petrarch’s Trionfi; in Petrarch’s Triumph of Chastity, Laura, the poet’s
beloved and exemplar of Chastity, conquers Cupid, the god of Love, after the poet finds
himself conquered.
135
Love’s captives watch the two engage in rigorous physical combat
from afar. Cupid is described as gathering up his “Arrowe[s] sharpe and kene” in one

135
Francesco Petrarch’s Trionfi, composed of a series of six triumphs (Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time,
and Eternity), was one of the most popularly depicted subjects for early modern Continental painters.
Cristelle L. Baskins notes that the visual representations of the Trionfi could be viewed “in manuscript
illuminations, maiolica, tapestries, and paintings,” as well as on wedding furniture. According to Baskins,
for a fifteenth-century Florentine bride, in particular,” scenes from Petrarch’s Trionfi took on special
relevance: in them, she could identify “her own temporary triumph in the form of a bridal procession
[which] prefaced the conquest of her virginity and transformation into a sexually active spouse, Yet the
Petrarchan Trionfi traced a development from physical, sexual love to the renunciation of Cupid, just the
opposite course of the itinerary followed by contemporary brides. For them the state of chastity must be
overcome but only by a chastened and disciplined conjugal love, not by the irresponsible, unpredictable
passion inspired by Cupid” (119). “Il Trionfo della Pudicizia: Menacing Virgins in Italian Domestic
Painting,” in Menacing Virgins: Representing Virginity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, eds. Kathleen
Coyne Kelly and Marina Leslie (London: Associated University Presses, Inc., 1999), 119. 117-131.

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hand and his bow in the other, and drawing the bow “In great hast and anger up to his
eare / And this he dyd in such great violence / That a Leoparde that maketh pretence /
The fugtyfe hart to cache and take / Could not more hasty haste make.”
136
Although the
force of Chastity’s virtues - her “honestie and shamefasteness,” “wyt and soberness,”
“perseuerance” and “honour”- enables her to avert Cupid’s violent assaults, Chastity’s
victory over Love is ultimately short lived as Death overcomes Chastity.
Spenser both reverses the dynamic between Love and Chastity in Petrarch’s
Trionfi - Chastity is only a temporary victor over Love who returns to reassert his erotic
authority – and complicates Petrarch’s tale of Chastity’s Triumph over Love. Petrarch’s
Chastity is eventually defeated by Death. Spenser substitutes Death’s victory over
Chastity with the poet’s victory over an exemplar of chastity. Belphoebe’s transformation
from Neoplatonic philosophical ideal to poetic ideal is a symbolic death that enables the
poet to respond to her as though she had been vanquished by Death. Since Belphoebe is
one of the exemplary female characters Spenser offers to the Queen as a mirror in which
to envision herself, imagining Death’s Petrarchan triumph over Belphoebe might strike
the Queen-as-reader and subject as uncomfortably close to home.
Early in this encounter with Cupid, Belphoebe, Spenser’s female representative of
Faire Chastity, effectively disarms the god of love —a figure that in this instance
represents base desire and lust. Yet, recall that Cupid, Venus’s “dread imp,” has already

136
Francesco Petrarch. “The Excellent Tryumphe of Chastitie” in The Tryumphe of loue. Of chastity. Of
death. Of fame. Of tyme. Of divinitie. Trans. Lord Morley. London: 1555. Henry E. Huntington Library and
Art Gallery. Early English Books Online.
http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99845979.

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been effectively disarmed in the Proem to Book I, where Spenser recruits Cupid to
complete the conciliatory union between Venus and Mars. With the addition of Cupid to
this pairing, the poet has effectively created a triad whose purpose is to impose order and
direction upon Spenser’s narrative. Why, then, in Book II, does the narrative call for the
enactment of a second disarming of Cupid, this time by the force of Faire Chastity? It
appears that although the poet has effectively recruited the figure of Ovid’s Cupid for the
purposes of imposing order upon the narrative (even with its veering from epic to
romance) in Book I, on the level of the story itself, the figure of Cupid retains its initial
associations with base desire and lust. This necessitates a second disarming; but this
time, the disarmer is female and is only temporarily successful in her efforts.
The second disarming of Cupid creates a kind of “doubled narrative,” as Susanne
Wofford might term it, which creates a problem of consistency for the narrative. Wofford
defines the “doubled narrative” as providing “two versions of a single event, two
irreconcilable versions with different ideological, moral, and aesthetic significances.”
137

How can Spenser account for this doubling, which takes its form in repetition? Spenser’s
solution to this scenario of repetition with a difference is to rename the figure of Cupid,
Love, in order to re-invoke the poet’s authority (as established by the narrator’s joining
together of Mars, Venus, and Cupid) to impose order and direction on the narrative. Since
the previous source of base desire and lusty impulse was exemplified by the figure of
Cupid, the poet-narrator distances himself from the pagan god that Belphoebe disarms in

137
See Susanne L.Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Palo Alto, Ca:
Stanford University Press, 1992), 158.

117
Book II, disassociating his poetic aims from the negative values previously assigned to
Cupid. Yet Spenser’s need to re-invoke his poetic authority makes suspect his initial
recruitment of Mars, Venus, and Cupid, figures that are evacuated of their most negative
associations, to impose order upon the narrative. Spenser’s attempt to “banish” the
negative qualities of these gods is ultimately unsuccessful as Cupid’s lustful fury returns
to assault Belphoebe in Book II.
Interpreting Classical Representations of Love and Desire: Britomart & Cupid in the
House of Busirane
Spenser’s focus on representations of love and desire that have their origins in
classical mythologies suggests broader epistemological concerns about the relationship
between desire and the transmission, mediation, and reception of knowledge in the early
modern context of English humanism.
138
For instance, Spenser’s interest in the
relationship between the written word and visual image in canto xi of Book III is
exemplified by Britomart’s encounters with competing representations of eros and
multiple figurations of Cupid. Considered broadly, Britomart’s trials in the House of
Busirane provide literary occasions for the close examination of how humans come to
know the world around them. Whether knowledge formation is a process mediated by
the imagination, the senses, the intellect, or the will, Spenser’s focus on the multivalent
processes of knowledge formation through Britomart’s encounter with Cupid and eros,

138
The Ovidian scenes Britomart encounters, woven into tapestry, in the House of Busirane, not only
appeal to her visual senses but also point back to Ovid’s text. This recursive movement between image and
word reflects the common practice of continental humanist artists who relied almost exclusively on
descriptions in Ovid’s poems as they skillfully adapted classical mythologies to the medium of paint.

118
extends to how women, in particular, come to know and respond to love and desire in a
world fraught with opposing literary, artistic, religious, and philosophical representations
of eros. Britomart’s repeated encounters with Cupid and classical discourses of love in
Book III of The Faerie Queene attests to the poet’s interest in engaging in an early
modern discourse of female desire that includes direct encounters with these diverse
figurations of Cupid, and that is, in part, informed by the recursive movement between
literary and visual representations of love and desire that are mediated—but not wholly
determined—by the senses.
By including the epistemological trials of a bold female reader who encounters
countless Ovidian allusions, Spenser complicates moralistic claims that female readers
should eschew the morally corrupting influence of Ovid’s verse. Indeed, Spenser
recapitulates the prescriptive contents of conduct books but without the rigid moralistic
bent of their authors. This focus materializes in the narrative’s concern over how one can
possess true virtue without the experience of testing in the form of trials and challenges;
indeed the greatest challenge for Spenser’s female characters is the maintenance of
individual virtue through experience. In this way, Spenser is like Milton, who does not
value claims to a blank virtue that has not been rigorously tested. The experience of
labor is crucial to the idea of the fall and this labor includes creative work, which can be
viewed as a productive sign of sin.
Spenser’s insistence that his female readers engage with Ovid suggests that direct
experience with literary representations of desire is crucial for the development of female
virtue. This perspective, however, runs directly counter to the advice of many early

119
modern moralists who advise their female readers to avoid direct contact with Ovid’s
poetry. In Instruction of a Christian Woman (1541), Juan Luis Vives singles out Ovid as
an idolater, appropriately exiled to the isle of Tomis, on the Black Sea, for his morally
corrosive precepts: “In my mynde, no man was ever banished more rightfully, than was
Ovide, at lestwise if he was banished for writing the crafte of love. For others write
wanton and noughty balades, but this worshipfull artificer, must make rules in goddess
name, and precepts of his unthriftynes, a schole maister of baudy, and a common
corrupter of vertue.”
139
Thomas Salter’s The Mirror of Modesty (1578) advises mothers
on the appropriate form of education for their daughters and claims that “in a virtuous
virgin and modest maiden,” “the sacred study of learning … is more dangerous and
hurtful, than necessary or praiseworthy.”
140
Salter argues that even if there is virtue in a
maiden reading and understanding Christian poets, her recognition of this newfound
ability will lead her down a slippery slope of progressive moral depravity that will be
exemplified by the reading of “the lascivious books of Ovid, Catullus, Propertius,
Tibullus, and in Virgil, of Aeneas and Dido and among the Greek poets of the filthy love
(if I may term it love) of the Gods themselves, and of their wicked adulteries and
abominable fornications, as in Homer and suchlike?.”
141
Spenser counters predominant

139
Juan Luis Vives, “Instruction of a Christian woman (1540),” in Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook, ed.
Kate Aughterson (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 168-171.

140
Thomas Salter, A Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens (1578), in Renaissance
Woman: A Sourcebook, ed. Kate Aughterson (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 168-171.

141
Thomas Salter, A Mirrhor mete for all Mothers, Matrones, and Maidens (1578), in Renaissance
Woman: A Sourcebook, ed. Kate Aughterson (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 178.

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opinions condemning Ovid’s value by insisting upon Ovid’s importance in shaping
female virtue and reading practices.
Thus Spenser’s deployment of Ovid in scenes in Busirane’s tapestry, scenes that a
lone Britomart must attempt to interpret, is a fitting literary offering to early modern
debates over the Roman poet’s moral, political, and literary value. To further this point,
Spenser’s placement of Britomart, the exemplar of martial chastity, in direct contact with
Ovid’s text as it is represented in Busirane’s tapestries, is a suggestive statement in
support of women laboring to gain experiential knowledge through the reading of Ovid.
Indeed, Ovid was often cited in debates about morality, female education, and the
cultural value of poetry itself. As Heather James explains, Ovid’s poetry posed as
significant of a challenge to officials in Augustan Rome as it did for moral authorities in
Elizabethan England.
142
Though critics of Ovid’s verse criticized his lack of restraint,
frequently characterizing his choice of poetic themes as licentious and insipid, they
nonetheless had to discover a way to authorize both Ovid’s presence in schools and his
status as a commonly read poet from antiquity. Early modern readers and writers
approached Ovid’s verse with a combination of caution and excitement; Ovid’s poetry
provided readers with a rich source of examples of persuasive speech and historical
information about classical myths and cultural norms.
143
Early modern poets, like
Spenser saw in representations of Ovid’s myths, which repeatedly invoked the destructive

142
For a full discussion of the political aims of Ovid’s poetry, see James, “Ovid in Renaissance Literature,”
in The Blackwell Companion to Ovid, ed. Peter E. Knox (Chichester, West Sussex: Blackwell, Ltd., 2009),
423-441.

143
James, “Ovid in Renaissance Literature,” 423.

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consequences of Jove’s tyranny—particularly in his erotic transgressions against
women—an occasion for drawing attention to the threat of violence underlying erotic
transactions.
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Cupid is most commonly represented as the
provocateur responsible for the incitement of erotic desire in gods and humans alike.
In Book I, Apollo’s self-destructive desire for Daphne is fostered by “Cupid’s cruel
wrath”
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when Apollo dares to challenge the viability of Cupid’s strength. The force of
Love makes Thisbe boldly pursuit Pyramus in Book IV. In Book V, Venus appeals
directly to Cupid, urging him to extend her authority. Obeying his mother’s commands,
Cupid causes Pluto to desire “the goddess-girl Prosperina” whom he finally rapes.
145

Fittingly, Byblis attempts to attribute her unnatural desire for her brother Caunus to
Cupid in Book IX.
146
In a strange turn, Cupid is then explicitly freed from blame for
Myrrha’s incestuous desire for her father in Book X.
147
Whether directly challenged,
recruited, or blamed for the experiences of erotic desire in Ovid, Cupid’s role as the
impetus behind and possible cause of the many erotic assaults in Ovid’s Metamorphosis
is one that Spenser complicates by underscoring how Ovid’s representation of masculine
sexual authority is primarily based on violence and coercion, and, thus, only accounts for
destructive expressions of female desire.

144
Ovid, The Metamorphoses, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), 21

145
Ovid, The Metamorphoses, 161.

146
Ovid, The Metamorphoses, 311.

147
Ovid, The Metamorphoses, 339.

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Spenser’s use of Cupid as the impetus behind Jove’s erotic transgressions and
Britomart’s encounter with the Ovidian tapestries complicate Ovid’s model of masculine
sexuality authority and female vulnerability. The repetition of the “monstrous” couplings
figured in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and re-enacted in the tapestries signify, as Linda
Gregerson aptly notes, the irrepressible return of the “banished figures” of lust, incest,
and bestiality that Glauce, Britomart’s nurse, employs to illustrate the boundaries
between licit and illicit love to Britomart after she has seen Arthegall’s image in Merlin’s
enchanted mirror. These “banished” Ovidian figures determine “the ground and the
spectrum of erotic trespass”
148
that Britomart must attempt to avoid as she journeys
through the house of Busirane.
Shifting the Burden of Epic Responsibility
However, before Britomart encounters the “banished” Ovidian figures in the
tapestries that line the walls of Busriane’s house, she must first pass an initial challenge
and defeat the doubt and despair that plague the languishing knight Scudamour, whose
name, which refers to “shield” and “love,” is mirrored in the emblem of Cupid inscribed
on the shield he carries. Scudamour is in pursuit of Amoret, who first declares her
“faithfull love” for “the noble knight Sir Scudamour” in the Garden of Adonis (III.vi.53).
Shortly thereafter, in the midst of her search for Ollyphant, Britomart finds the knight
Scudamour unarmed, wallowing “Upon the grassy ground” with “his haberieon, his
helmet, and his speare” lying beside him (III.xi.7). Although the narrative champions

148
See Linda Gregerson, "Protestant Erotics: Idolatry and Interpretation in Spenser's Faerie Queene," ELH
58, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 7. 1-34.

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Amoret’s steadfast love for Scudamour, the knight himself remains unaware of her
declaration and even his shield, which depicts Cupid, “the winged boy in colours cleare /
Depeincted was, full euer to be knowne,” cannot assuage his doubts. To symbolically
mark Scudamour’s despair and lack of awareness of his status as “Cupid’s man,” the
shield is “rudely throwne” aside. Ironically, however, while any knight with Cupid on his
shield is marked and subsequently known as “Cupid’s man,” fighting under the
protection of the god of Love for love, Scudamour’s name and heraldic display act to
shield him from love.
Initially, Scudamour is a reluctant representative of chivalric love, unwilling to
endure challenges to his strength or virtue. As a result, Scudamour ultimately fails to
vanquish the flames burning across the threshold of Busirane’s house and to rescue his
beloved from the lusty advances of the vile enchanter. By inverting a conventional topos
of courtly romance in which a duty-bound knight abandons everything to rescue a
threatened maiden, Spenser shifts the burden of epic ambition and responsibility to the
female knight, Britomart. In authorizing this shift, Spenser insists on the idea that virtue,
particularly female virtue, must endure repeated experiences of testing in order to reveal
whether or not this virtue can be maintained through the most challenging of physical and
psychological trials.
In adopting the heroic mantle of chivalric love, Britomart does what Scudamour
cannot; she successfully challenges the god of Love, who is pivotally located at the center
of Busirane’s house, and moves forward, shield and sword in hand, across the threshold
of burning flames and into the House of Busirane. By invoking an eschatological motif

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of divine judgment and final testing, Spenser subjects Britomart to a preemptive “end” in
which she encounters what appears to be a “final” test that turns out to be only the
beginning of her challenges in Busirane’s castle. While Britomart has demonstrated that
a woman can effectively bear the weight of an epic challenge and can carry the epic
narrative forward, she does not seem to have sufficiently proven her virtue. Since for
Spenser, virtue holds no value unless it is thoroughly tested, Britomart’s next challenge
comes in the form of one of the most perceived threats to female virtue and constancy
(yet also one of the most systematically engaged) and to the aims of epic: Ovid and
amorous poetry.
Consequently, Britomart’s victory over the flames is met with an additional
challenge in the form of a puzzling barrage of myths and mythological figures rendered
into tapestries, which hang upon the walls. These tapestries, adapted from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, recount “Cupids warres,” and catalogue the sexual transgressions, rape,
and violence committed by Jove against women and boys.
And in those Tapets weren fashioned
Many faire pourtraicts, and many a faire feate.
And all of loue, and al of lusty-hed,
As seemed by their semblaunt did entreat;
And eke all Cupids warres they did repeate,
And cruell battles, which he whilome fought
Gainst all Gods, to make his empire great;
Besides the huge massacres, which he wrought
On mighty kings and kesars, into thraldome brought.
(III.xi.29.1-9)

The tapestries’ juxtaposition of fair and foul images of love and lust are described as
appearing to “entreat” or implore Britomart to directly occupy herself with the tapestry’s
representations: “Cupids warres” and the god’s “cruell battles” (III.xi.29.5-6). Without

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pause to discuss Britomart’s response to the tapestries’ entreaty, the narrator continues by
describing Cupid’s dart as the impetus behind Jove’s erotic transgressions: “Therein was
writ, how often thundering Iove / Had felt the point of his hart-percing dart, / And leaving
heauens kingdome, here did rove / In straunge disguise, to slake his scalding smart”
(III.xi.30.1-4). The narrator’s description of Jove’s departure from heaven and adoption
of disguise as “writ” within the tapestries explicitly refers to Ovid’s written text, which is
re-presented to Britomart in the form of a visual representation. Britomart is thus
subjected to a repetition of classical poetic images derived from Ovid’s Amores and
Metamorphoses—Ovidian images that have their source in written text. This direct
subjection to Ovid places Britomart in the precarious position of a vulnerable female
reader, a position that stands in stark opposition to the mandates of moralizing conduct
books, which equate the reading of Ovid with the experience of erotic desire.
Spenser’s focus on the narrative and ethical consequences of Britomart’s position
as a vulnerable female reader directly confronted by erotic Ovidian texts, in opposition to
the moralistic prescriptions of conduct books arguing against women reading Ovid
(among others), shifts to an interest in the poetic images that Ovid’s texts engender.
Spenser explores the controversies surrounding the privileged status of the written word
in relation to the visual image and suggests that both are equally problematic. There is a
kind of leveling effect in Spenser because both writing and image produce equally
powerful effects on the female senses and imagination. Since both forms pose
unavoidable challenges to the female reader, Spenser posits a concept of readerly
discipline in Book III that is based on Britomart’s direct experience in the House of

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Busirane. The paradox inherent in Spenser’s model of readerly discipline, however, is
that Britomart must confront idolatrous scenes and images in order to avoid idolatry and
she must subject her senses to incongruous signs in order to avoid subjection. It is
through direct experience with visual and literary representations of desire that she can
maintain her virtue and it is the constant testing of virtue that confers value upon virtue;
otherwise, untested virtue remains merely an empty and idealized conception.
Britomart’s subjection to erotic signs in the House of Busirane, which includes
multiple encounters with the figure of Cupid, points to the high moral stakes for women
whose experiences are mediated by the senses’ apprehension of external objects: the
possibility of idolatry, moral failure, and epistemological stasis. Yet even with these
possibilities revealed, Spenser’s Britomart does not become part of Augustine’s
“subjection to signs” and is not transformed into a slave to the images before her.
149

Britomart is duly tested, passing this test to the steadfastness of her virtue.
Only temporarily dazed by the images she sees in Busirane’s tapestries, Britomart
is prompted forward by a desire to make sense of ambiguous visual and textual signs.
Britomart arrives at Cupid’s “Image all alone, / Of massy gold, which with his owne light
shone” (III.xi.47.4-5), standing upon an altar of “pretious stone” (III.xi.47.2). As idol,
Cupid is a mediating figure that illustrates the dangers of idolatry. The true practitioners

149
Linda Gregerson offers an eloquent and systematic account of the relationship of classical philosophies
of love and desire to a shift in ideas about idolatry; she remarks that “Love’s logic,” from Plato to
Augustine to Lacan, is not ultimately a “denial of its own inception but is the logic of reformed iconophilia,
a prompting by images rather than an imprisonment by them” ("Protestant Erotics” 27).

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of “fowle Idolatree” are the inhabitants of the house of Busirane, who blindly worship at
the feet of Cupid (III.xi.49.3-5). Like a blank screen projecting forth familiar and
blinding images, the idol of Cupid mediates two forms of experience: Britomart’s awe
and wonder represent the subject’s state when confronted with the cause of idolatry and
its immediate effects. By suggesting that Britomart participates in a process of reasoning
in which she can only partially make sense of Cupid’s idol, by appealing to general
propositions regarding the causes and effects of idolatry, Spenser emphasizes the
importance of direct experience in her attempt to make sense of the scene before her. In
this scene, Britomart does not possess innate elements of knowledge prior to her
experience with the idol; it is the act of experience itself that determines her ability to
create meaning from ambiguous signs.
The blind worshipping of Cupid’s idol depicts a mediated experience with signs,
which effectively reduces the inhabitants’ desires for knowledge into idols. In contrast,
Britomart’s experience reading Ovid’s amorous lyric as depicted in the tapestries that line
the walls of Busirane’s house, does not lead her to idolatrous worship; in fact, Britomart
avoids blind subjection through desire—a longing for knowledge derived from exposure
to and experience with classical representations of desire, even in their most “monstrous”
and coercive of forms.

Spenser suggests that it is ultimately Britomart’s recognition of
her desire to know, which includes the joint acts of reading and interpretation that allow
her to effectively avoid becoming enslaved by the dazzling referents before her. Thus in
order to maintain her narrative status as the exemplar of marital chastity, Britomart must
paradoxically avoid idolatry and subjection to signs through tests that involve direct

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experience with visual and literary representations of desire. This direct experience
involves the engagement of the senses but does not rely wholly on the sense’s
apprehension of objects; she must also engage her knowledge of analogues of classical
literature.
Although Britomart’s acts of looking and gazing at the tapestries receive much
attention from the narrator and Britomart is subjected to successive scenes of wonder
throughout the House of Busirane that include the god of Love, her responses are
markedly restrained by the narrator. Spenser’s descriptions of Britomart’s wandering
thoughts in the House of Busirane closely resemble the wonderings of Petrarch’s male
narrator in The Triumph of Love. Spenser adapts the early experiences of Petrarch’s
dreamer to Britomart’s initial encounters with representations of love and desire in
Busirane’s castle. In Book II of The Triumph of Love, Petrarch’s narrator describes his
mental state as he watches a train of forlorn lovers:
All musynge with great admiration,
As one astonnyed to see the fasshyon
Nowe here, nowe there, I loked all aboute
To se the order of this greate huge route
And as my harte from thought to thought past
I sawe twayne together at a caste
Hande in hand they went in the prease
Reasonynge together they dyd not sease
Theyre straunge habyte, and theyr araye
And theyr language more straunge I saye
Was unto me so darke and obscure
That what they ment I know not be ye sure.
150

150
Petrarch. “The second Chapter of the Tryumphe of Loue” in The Tryumphe of loue. Of chastity. Of
death. Of fame. Of tyme. Of divinitie, trans. Lord Morley (London: 1555).

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In contrast, Spenser’s Britomart does not possess a narrative voice to describe her
response to the violent and erotic scenes she witnesses. While Petrarch’s speaker is
compelled to speak and narrate his experiences to ease the grief he feels at the sight of
two forlorn lovers, Britomart remains notably silent until her responses are registered in
the narrative as experiences of awe and wonder. Britomart is unable to “satisfie” her
“wonder” because she has already been inscribed with the “frail sences” of a vulnerable
and chaste female character who is easily overwhelmed by external stimuli.
Once Britomart views the tapestries, the idol of Cupid, and the bas reliefs, she,
like Petrarch’s male narrator who is unable to look away from the lovers passing before
him, appears to be so overwhelmed by the scene before her, that she does not speak.
While Petrarch’s narrator admits to being impeded by his own desires to learn about
desire, Britomart’s gazing and silence are given no clear explanation by Spenser’s
narrator. Yet we can imagine that it is Britomart’s martial discipline and virtue that guide
her desire to learn more about the desires she has witnessed in the scenes before her, and
motivate her to continue the forward movement of epic. However, Britomart’s
movements forward do not begin until she reads the Ovidian phrases above the doorway.
In place of the dialogue that Petrarch’s narrator has with a friend and the satisfaction he
receives when the friend agrees to accommodate the narrator’s desire to know more about
those in whose company he travels, Britomart’s desires must be satisfied in an
interpretive act all her own - without the aid of an explanatory guide. Ovidian
representations of the cruelties of sudden love mediate her experiences in the house of
Busirane. Unlike Petrarch’s male narrator, Britomart cannot conclude that “I know it well

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it cannot be undone / That there is feare, and there is hope also / Who wyll it rede, and
take hede thereto / In my forehead there maye ye se it playne / All my sorowe, my
doloure, and my payne.”
151
In Busirane’s house, Britomart must be guided by her own
counsel.
Although Glauce’s moralistic framework and didactic guide to proper forms of
love may seem to initially conflict with Spenser’s offering of Ovid’s erotic mythology,
both depend upon a moralization of love and desire that engenders cultural prescriptions
about female vulnerability and reinforces the idea that female desire provokes impulses
of self-destruction. Britomart can certainly moralize the tales depicted in Busirane’s
Ovidian tapestries and interpret them as cautionary. From the tapestry’s depiction of
Jove’s attempted rescue of Helle from sacrifice, which drives her unaware into
Hellespont, it becomes evident that there is no safe, protected space for women, even if
male desire acts with heroic intention. Britomart may recognize how the transforming
effects of female desire are construed as frighteningly powerful to the woman wielding
authority in the example of Europa. Europa attempts to flee Jove’s aggressive pursuit by
escaping into the sea, but when she observes how the waters obey her, she trembles,
seemingly more fearful of her own power than of a possible rape. Spenser’s narrator,
improvising on the playful tone of Ovid’s erotic lessons in love, also suggests in the
example of Leda who “smiled” at Jove’s erotic audacity in adopting the form of a swan to

151
Petrarch. “The thirde Chapter of the Tryumphe of Loue” in The Tryumphe of loue. Of chastity. Of
death. Of fame. Of tyme. Of divinitie, trans. Lord Morley (London: 1555).

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violate her that some women may secretly relish and take pleasure in the Ovidian notion
that women welcome the bravado and force of male desire. In the final example, the
female desire to know what authority looks like is framed as a self-destructive impulse in
the representation of the Theban Semele because it seeks to know the origins of an
authority that has no limits.

Taken as a whole, the Ovidian myths represented in Busirane’s tapestry suggest
that Jove’s guises are many and his authority can adopt multiple forms in order to pursue
erotic satisfaction and dominance. Indeed, the Ovidian scenes depicted in Busirane’s
tapestries insist on the idea that there is no limit to the guises Jove and his authority can
take; thus women are depicted as always vulnerable, since male desire always adapts to
overcome female willfulness.
152
Spenser recruits Cupid as the impetus that motivates
Jove’s erotic transgressions; one effect of Spenser’s use of Cupid is the temporary freeing
of men and masculine desire from responsibility for erotic transgressions. However,
Britomart’s encounter with the Ovidian tapestries problematizes Ovid’s model of
masculine sexual authority—with its reliance on physical force and violence—and female
vulnerability, with its apparent openness and transparency. Indeed, Spenser’s main point
here is to expose the threat of tyranny (that takes its form in unmitigated aggression and
violence) that underlies all erotic transactions, whether they are represented in a text or in
a tapestry.

152
Strikingly, women and young boys share the same vulnerability and chaste status in Ovid and in
Spenser’s depiction of Ovid; like women, boys, too are the preferred targets of Jove’s narcissistic and erotic
machinations.

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Epistemological Stasis: Britomart’s Wonder and the Female Reader
How are readers to characterize Britomart’s response of wonder after
encountering the Ovidian tapestries and statue of Cupid in Busirane’s house? Early
modern discourses attempted to describe responses of wonder by reiterating the contrast
between imitatio and admiratio. As an early Roman and humanist pedagogical tool,
imitatio involved didactic exercises in copying, rhetorical analysis, exploration of the
relationship between form and content, and the use of the rhetorical figure of mimesis.
Admiratio, on the other hand, had an affective aim (to create an affective response of
pleasure or other passion in the audience) that could be directly attributed to the skill of
the poet or speaker. Definitions of admiratio were also deeply situated within religious
discourses that involved sermons and hagiographical accounts; the faithful were urged to
have deep reverence and wonder for the miracles of their faith but not to directly imitate
the lives of ascetics or saints. Religious men and women were urged instead to imitate
the virtues of these exemplars, not the miracles. Yet this encounter with heavenly
“others” also pointed to their ontological closeness to those others (this similarity was
often exposed by the religious language of likeness and image).
153
Accordingly,
admiratio was associated with wonder, which entailed experiences with objects and
events that could not be readily assimilated or consumed by the subject.
According to early modern discourses on wonder, objects invoke wonder when
the viewer, though filled with simultaneous curiosity and terror at the astonishing beauty

153
See Caroline Walker Bynum, “Wonder,” American Historical Review 102, no. 1 (February 1997): 1-17.

133
of the poetic representations before him or her, can recognize the distinct otherness and
distance of these images. In recognizing the unique particularity of the objects and their
inimitability, the viewer does not attempt to imitate, but comes to appreciate the images
and is prompted, instead, to create an epistemological frame to contain or make sense of
the experience. As Genevieve Guenther explains, in order for the early modern subject to
act ethically, it is not only necessary that subject experiences desire for these objects and
images in the imagination, but also that he or she effectively “frame(s) those images with
a skeptical ‘discourse of understanding’” (198-99).
154

While Britomart’s ethical action can be seen as initially derived from her
experience of being overwhelmed by the images before her (her experience of wonder—
admiratio as opposed to imitatio), Britomart’s ability to frame these images, using her
imagination along with what Geunther terms, “a skeptical ‘discourse of understanding,’”
is brought into question by two elements of Spenser’s narrative. First, the narrator does
not describe Britomart’s response to any individual event in Busirane’s house. In
addition, when the narrator finally describes Britomart’s response, her reaction is
described as deriving from her “frail sences,” which are rendered inert by the spectacles
before her. Indeed, Britomart’s is “amazd” after seeing the tapestries and image of

154
Specifically, Guenther argues that the experience of wonder “enacts the intellectual habit of Spenser’s
disciplined subject” (200) and consists of the subject’s “recognition of the otherness” of the image’s
beauty, “its singular, and inappropriable character” (212). As a result, “This recognition distances the
reader from the beautiful images produced by the text, yet this distance is not a form of disinterest; rather,
in Descartes’ formulation, it is ‘a sudden surprise of the soul which makes [the mind] tend to consider
attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary’” (212). See Guenther, “Spenser’s Magic,
or Instrumental Aesthetics in the 1590 Faerie Queene, ELR 36, no. 2 (2006): 194-226.

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Cupid; however, while it may seem that her experience of awe leads her to satisfy her
wonder by further looking, these acts of repeated gazing fail to bring her to knowledge of
the origins of the sudden spectacles she has witnessed. This lack of satisfaction results in
a kind of epistemological stasis, which Spenser attempts to explain away by recourse to
gynophobic discourse; despite her exemplary virtue, Britomart possesses the “frail
senses” of a woman, which naturally become “dazd” when confronted by such inimitable
objects of desire. Spenser’s rationale for playing into the same misogynistic cultural
discourses that he so clearly enjoys taking to task when Britomart is exposed to the
perceived moral threats of Ovid’s poetry, is confounding. Britomart’s response of
wonder seems a convenient and ethically appropriate narrative explanation of the
subject’s experience with objects/discourses that appear familiar but mystify the
imagination. However, Britomart’s epistemological stasis is symptomatic of a broader
crisis in Spenser’s narrative. The narrative impulse to represent the necessity of
experience to the development and stability of female virtue is abruptly interrupted when
Spenser slides backward, invoking and authorizing misogynistic discourses that play
upon the dangerous vulnerability of the female senses.
Being both “bewildered” by the tapestries and “dazzled with [the] excess light”
of the image of Cupid, Britomart’s experience of paralytic wonder at both spectacles
suggests not that Britomart is desirous of possessing the images themselves, but instead,
speaks to the inadequacy of her “fraile senses,” which being overwhelmed by poetic
images cannot be spurred to ethical action. Thus relying on the senses, which tend to

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produce responses of wonder, is ineffective.
155
Although Britomart’s experience of
wonder leads her to form only “provisional evaluations” of the poetic images depicting
Ovidian scenes of erotic transgression, idolatry, subjection, and violence, she is prompted
to seek out interpretive clues to help her determine the context in which the images
appear; Britomart desires knowledge of the discourses that underlie the images she sees:
Tho as she backward cast her busie eye,
To search each secrete of that goodly sted,
Ouer the door thus written she did spye
Bee bold: she oft and oft it ouer-red,
Yet could not find what sence it figured:
But what so were therein, or writ or ment,
She was no whit thereby discouraged,
From prosecuting her first intent,
But forward with bold steps into the next roome went”
(III.xi.50.1-9).

While Britomart searches the room for interpretive cues to help place the images in
context, she spies a written phrase and repeatedly reads it, trying to construe its meaning.
The reference to Britomart’s “busie eie,” suggests activity in the busy-ness and the
business of the female imagination at work. For Spenser, Britomart’s act of reading, as a
means to understanding the “sence” behind the phrase, is more important than her
inability to reach a conclusion about the ends of the images. Indeed Britomart’s inability
to interpret the phrase does not impede her desire for understanding, as it is these

155
To this end, Guenther herself observes, “In wonder the faculty of the understanding can produce only
provisional evaluations about imaginative entities, approaching them with a mixture of extreme curiosity
and extreme caution, because the ontological ground of wondrous images is too unstable for them to be
known” (215 my italics).

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impulses toward the attainment of further knowledge (and interpretive work) that
motivate and authorize her movements forward in the narrative.
Britomart is clearly engaged in a process of knowledge formation that depends
upon acts of reading and interpretation, which makes her described responses to the
Ovidian myths depicted in the tapestries even more crucial to understanding the
effects/affects of “Cupids warres” on women and representations of female desire.
Although, as Guenther asserts, the “tyrannical priority of eros over social and political
considerations” make powerful claims on Spenser’s representations of Ovid, the Ovidian
tales of amorous coercion and divine usurpation depicted in the tapestries make implicit
social and political demands beyond the “engender[ing of] erotic inclination in their
consumers.”
156
Indeed, it is from the “quasi-pornographic” and literary tapestries that
Britomart learns that Cupid can effectively usurp Jove’s authority because of a power
vacuum created when Jove leaves to pursue his amorous prey. Cupid becomes Jove’s
aggressive stand-in, demanding obedience from all gods in Jove’s absence. While Cupid,
like Jove, dallies in amorous pursuits, he also uses his authority to punish those who
reveal hidden affairs and debase themselves for love. Cupid punishes Phoebus for
revealing his mother’s affair with Mars by forcing Phoebus to love a woman who refuses
to reciprocate his desires. Cupid later exiles the god because he shames himself by
turning into a vile cowherd for the love of an unwilling shepherdess (St. 35-38), Cupid is
bent on punishing gods who challenge his authority and make themselves idolaters for

156
Guenther, “Spenser’s Magic,” 220-221.

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love. The type of entreaty demanded by the tapestries, of course, depends upon the
viewer’s interpretation of poetic images; yet as we have previously seen, the narrator
does not describe Britomart’s response to the tapestries’ illicit and transgressive subject
matter until after she has seen the image of Cupid with its “fowle” idolaters (III.xi.49.5).
While Britomart is repeatedly subjected to images of illicit desire, she is not
driven to possess the images as objects in and of themselves but to understand the
“sences” that underlie and motivate the particular representations of amorous discourses
she encounters. Spenser does not permit Britomart to attain this understanding; instead
knowledge and knowing are consistently deferred. Moreover, as a female character,
Britomart is inscribed with a female imagination that has already been circumscribed as
vulnerable and weak. The narrative requires that Britomart undergo constant trials and
tests to prove her exemplary status, and to draw attention to her gender and the idea that
she is a female knight. Britomart’s attainment of full or complete understanding is less
important to Spenser than the representation of processes by which Britomart comes to
know the limits of her desires and how these limits are determined, in large part, by
gender.
All are Subject to Love
Against the image of tyrant Cupid, punishing those who challenge his authority
in love in Busirane’s tapestries, is the image of the god Mars gruesomely martyred by the
instruments of Cupid’s power. Describing Cupid’s “amorous assayes,” the narrator
reveals an image of Mars shrieking for the “many other Nymphes” he desired, “With
womanish teares, and with unwarlike smarts, / Privily moistening his horrid cheek. /

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There was he painted full of burning darts, / And many wide woundes launched through
his inner parts” (III.xi.44.5-9). The narrator draws attention to a gruesome representation
of Mars, depicted as victim for Love and sign of Cupid’s authority. Here masculine
authority is represented as present in its violent effects alone. Cupid’s ability to affect
Britomart in this scene derives in part from the representation of Mars as a martyred,
effeminized figure, suggesting Cupid’s ability to both weaken and neutralize masculine
authority. Underlying Spenser’s figure of Love is the insidious threat of tyranny and
subjection.
In the tapestries, Ovid’s Jove uses the instruments of Cupid’s authority to
transform himself and seduce unwilling, chaste victims. The tapestry not only depicts
Cupid as an enabling force for Jove, but also portrays Cupid as a plotting usurper of
Jove’s high authority. Through Cupid’s usurpation of Jove’s authority, Cupid becomes a
tyrant who punishes those who transgress against him and debase themselves for love.
Cupid’s authority extends not only to the god of all gods, but to the god of war and
masculine force—Mars, who is depicted as a victim who is effectively effeminized and
disarmed by the cruel instruments of Cupid’s armory. Cupid’s disarming of Mars
resembles the second disarming of Cupid by Belphoebe in Book II, and the god’s
subsequent reassertion of authority over the forces of faire chastity. Mars is male, yet he
is likewise disarmed for a second time by the figure of Cupid; however this second
disarming is more alarming and violent in its effects than the first occurrence. No longer
a force recruited by the poet to help impose order upon the poetic narrative, Mars is
transformed into yet another representation of Cupid’s all-encompassing authority. The

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successive representation of Cupids in Busirane’s House suggests that underlying
Spenser’s language of love and representation of female encounters with Cupid is anxiety
about the subjection of men to the absolute authority of a tyrant.
The cruel disarming of Mars demands from the female reader and Britomart, the
activation of a reader position aligned with what Hyde aptly terms, “Virgilian logic.”
157

Virgil’s popular commonplace Omnia vincit Amor (“Let us submit to love”) from the
Eclogues X.69 asserts the unavoidability of human subjection to the force of tyrant Love.
The adoption of this precept, however, has ethical consequences that both threaten to
imperil the virtue of the female reader and Britomart and offer to free women from
assuming individual responsibility for submitting themselves and sacrificing their virtue
to Love.
158
The idea of an “external power” akin to Love, which cannot be resisted or
avoided despite moral consequence provides a semi-ethical framework within which
Spenser can formulate political ideas about the building of a stable Protestant nation
based on the dual pursuit of epic and amorous imperatives in poetry. These imperatives
also allow expressive liberty for the poet. The idea of submitting to an external force (as
Love is figured) without recourse and responsibility for the moral consequences of one’s
actions allows Spenser to enact a model of an idealized relationship between a
conquering nation and its subjects, queen and poet. By linking political and amorous
discourses, Spenser redefines Burleigh’s conception of civic love and aligns Love (an

157
Hyde, Poetic Theology of Love, 40.

158
On this point Hyde observes, “If Love is an external power which no mortal, however wise or
courageous, can resist or avoid, then no mortal can be held morally responsible for his passions” (40).

140
external force, passion, poetic figure) and the political (external force, authority),
bringing the two closer together and making them part of a revised conception of civic
love.
In Busirane’s House, the force and authority of Spenser’s Cupid progressively
builds in intensity from the mythological divinity’s erotic transgressions against women
and boys and playful usurpation of Jove’s seat of power in the tapestries to the
emblematic idol of love and the figure’s ability to effect idolatry. Finally, the urgency
with which meanings have furiously accumulated around the figure of Love culminates in
the figure’s ability to engender the violent destruction and conquest of men and
empires—symbolically represented by an empty room, devoid of human life.
These scenarios, devoid of the possibility for human action, invoke classical
discourses about lovers who have no choice but to submit to the force of love. As a
merciless victor, Cupid and his instruments of authority function as signs of a destructive
force that effectively dismantle the tools of empire building and disrupt narrative
movements toward heroic representation in poetry. As we are told earlier, not even
Venus, the mother of Cupid, the goddess of Love herself, is immune to Cupid’s cruelty
(St. 45). And Cupid’s sadism extends to himself and his self-destructive impulse to
experience the “sweet consuming woe” he has inflicted in others. His desire to
experience the effects of his instruments of power is not a desire to create empathy
between himself and his victims but is a sadistic impulse directed at infliction of
narcissistic pleasure.

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The impulse toward a sadistic narcissism undermines Spenser’s initial invocation of the
union of Venus, Mars, and Cupid as figures of narrative harmony and cosmic order in the
proem to Book I. Although “fierce wars” have seemingly begun to give way to “faithful
loves,” in the uncoupling of the traditional chivalric pairing of themes of love and war,
Cupid’s violent disarming of Mars underscores the figure’s more insidious tyranny over
masculine forms of authority. Chapter Three considers Spenser’s failure to contain the
figure of Cupid within the narrative frame of his encomium to the queen, which is
enacted most spectacularly and gruesomely in Cupid’s Masque, as part of his larger
poetic and political project.
Taking his cue from Ovid, Spenser recruits the figure of Cupid, with all of its
Neo-platonic excess, and exploits the figure’s historical and symbolic ambiguity in order
to reveal the insistent threat of tyranny underlying the rhetorical structures of encomium,
which find expression in The Faerie Queene’s many episodes of political and narrative
unrest. Spenser’s furious unfurling of classical, Petrarchan, and early modern literary
modes and Neoplatonic themes in the House of Busirane culminates in the figure of
Busirane, whose frenetic actions, as Harry Berger Jr. has argued, represent “the male
imagination’s attempts at maistrie – the Busy-reign” that initiates disorder and chaos in
the poem.
159
Since Elizabethan traditions of courtly praise poetry did not easily bend to
accommodate political critique nor did they allow a forthcoming commentary on the
vulnerability of female virtue, Spenser had to discover a way, like Ovid, to speak

159
See Harry Berger Jr., Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), 115-116.

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playfully about women and female virtue in an era that demanded cultural adherence to
rigorous ideals of female virtue, represented in and by the highly eroticized cult of Queen
Elizabeth. For Spenser, the figure of Cupid, as depicted in Ovid and in continental
emblem literature, could conveniently invoke classical theories of political eros (the
connection between conceptions of eros and tyranny in classical philosophy). As a
familiar allegorical figure, Spenser’s Cupid could speak less threateningly of the
relationship between eros and tyranny by framing it as a private apolitical relationship
between a lover and the female object of his desire.

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Chapter Three
“Languishing twixt hope and fear:”
Cupid and the Politics of Emblem in Spenser’s Faerie Queene

Next after her, the winged God him selfe
Came riding on a Lion ravenous,
Taught to obay the ménage of that Elfe,
That man and beast with power imperious
Subdeweth to his kingdome tyrannous:
His blindfold eies he bad a while unbinde,
That his proud spoile of that same dolorous
Faire Dame he might behold in perfect kinde,
Which seene, he much rejoiced in his cruell minde.
(The Faerie Queene III.vii.22.1-9)

Following Ovid’s parodic recasting of a victorious Augustan triumph in the
Amores 1.2, Spenser reformulates the Roman triumphal procession by inverting the
cosmic hierarchy; Cupid, a mythological figure that often occupied the bottom level of
the Olympian order replaces the victorious Roman conqueror, becoming the recipient of
the highest of Rome’s citizen honors.
160
Spenser’s transformation of the triumphus into
the triumph of Love suggests that public displays that celebrate and reaffirm political
authority can be reformulated to speak for the private grievances of the poet-lover. By
invoking a tradition of allegorical emblems, Spenser effectively presents the theme of
Love—as personification of the tyranny that irrational human passions have in amorous
affairs in the fictional world of The Faerie Queene—while asserting an additional

160
For a brief discussion of the subversion of the Augustan triumphus (through a parody of Virgil’s “pro-
Augustan” rhetoric in the Aeneid) and the tension between “Augustus the moral reformer” and rogue cousin
Cupid in Amores 1.2, see Paul Allen Miller, Latin Erotic Elegy: An Anthology and Reader (London:
Routledge, 2002), 244

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meaning: the bold displays of blind authority wielded by tyrant Love are more insidious
and threatening when they extend beyond fiction to the civic realm of Elizabethan
politics.
While Cupid’s Masque may superficially appear to deal with private concerns in
the allegorical figuration of opposing states of human passions, particularly as related to
erotic desire and love, Spenser makes his claims for the cultural value of poetry in terms
of a more “public state celebration,” which in Book III is embodied by Cupid’s masque
and its emblem intertexts. Spenser’s attraction to pagan figures was not simply tied to a
revived cultural interest in constructing an English tradition of classical reception. The
idealized hierarchy of Greek and Roman gods, with their ability to embody both virtue
and vice and their constant conflicts to maintain authority profoundly appealed to many
English writers. Gordon Teskey connects this appeal to emerging ideas of governance:
“The revival of the classical gods in Renaissance allegory was a direct consequence of
the emergence of the idea of the sovereign state, centered in the body of the prince, as
cosmos unto itself. That such a system was sustained by the threat of violence was
concealed behind the aesthetic beauty of the allegorized classical gods, who were thus
made to appear to be elements of an impregnable structure.”
161
Thus Spenser’s adoption
of the pagan gods as central players in a foundational narrative of the English nation
allows his poem to operate on multiple—often competing—levels of allegorical meaning.
As a part of a totalizing structure, Spenser’s gods can, on the surface, make universal

161
See Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), 83.

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claims (in support and praise of Queen Elizabeth and her government, for example) while
the central ambiguities that define the gods’ operation are never far from the surface of
Spenser’s poetic narrative, threatening to voice an “other” simultaneous narrative that
speaks to the poet’s political discontent. Exploiting the ambiguity of gods like Cupid
enables Spenser to not only to implicitly speak to the Queen, but also to explicitly
challenge the reader’s interpretive ability to access the various levels of the poetic
narrative.
Spenser depicts the figure of Cupid with an ambiguity that challenges the reader
of The Faerie Queene. At times a neo-pagan figure of amorous desire, Cupid can inspire
love in victims like Arthur and Britomart (I.ix.7-16 and III.ii.26-35). At times a sadistic
and malevolent figure filled with scorn, Cupid can subject humans and gods alike to
violent transformations (III.xi.29-15). This lack of congruity in the representation of
Cupid’s function in Spenser’s poem is even more precisely highlighted through
incongruities in Cupid’s role in the narrative, begun as early as Book II. Thomas Hyde
aptly observes that Guyon’s angel suspiciously resemble an unarmed Cupid, while the
armed Cupid is denied access to Alma’s House and the Garden of Adonis (II.ix.34 and
III.vi.49). Most striking is Spenser’s supplication to both the queen, whom he begs for
divine inspiration and his entreaty to Cupid to abandon his bow in the Proem to Book I (I
Proem 3-4). Hyde explains that Cupid’s “iconographical ambiguities” are evidence of “a
pervasive moral ambivalence rare in Spenser’s mythological figures.”
162
Indeed, the

162
Hyde, “Cupid,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Toronto: Univesrity of Toronto Press,
1997), 201.

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vagaries surrounding Cupid’s origins and purpose along with competing traditions that
variously give him the force of a deity, make him a vehicle for philosophical enquiry, or
assign him the force of a human passion, make it difficult to interpret with consistency,
the figure’s allegorical function.
Yet, it is within Book III, I argue, that we come closest to identifying the central
issues that motivate Spenser’s interest in and exploitation of Cupid’s ambiguity. Within
Cupid’s Masque, Spenser’s interest in linking amorous and political discourse is
exemplified most spectacularly by the masquing Cupid. Spenser’s allusion to and use of
continental and English emblems constitute a set of intertexts for understanding the
relationship between the idealized erotic discourse represented by Cupid’s Neoplatonism
that assigns Cupid the role of a figure of harmony and reconciliation and issues of
political provenance evoked by the emblems themselves. Book III’s allusions to emblems
underscore the connection between levels of narrative and provoke readers to further
questioning, adding to our engagement with the poem itself.
The multiple incarnations of Cupid in the House of Busirane that confront
Britomart, one after the other, in rapid succession, fold up and collapse into the character
of Busirane. One reason for this collapse is that Busirane’s excessive violence toward the
female object of his desire insists upon a previously unacknowledged parallel between
the authority wielded by the god of Love in his aggressive manipulation of erotic desire
in women and gods alike, and the fact that this tyrannical impulse is one that is implicitly
shared by the male poet. It is here that the question of what kind of Cupid Spenser is
interested in creating becomes especially relevant. Although the figure of Cupid, I argue,

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is a precursor to Busirane, Spenser initially keeps the figures separate until the two are
brought together by the striking similarity in their function in the poetic narrative. In the
masque, Cupid is a bold figure of tyrannical authority, relishing in the forced subjection
of his masquing subjects and the steadfast virgin Amoret. In contrast, Busirane is a
desperate magician anxiously trying to “pen” and contain the resistant female object of
his erotic desires through the work of his charms. While, broadly conceived, Busirane’s
acts of magic, which involve reading, writing, and speaking, are cast as problematic
forms of work, the all-encompassing tyranny of Cupid is strikingly represented as natural
to the poet’s aesthetic and necessary to the exercise of his poetic authority. In this
instance, tyranny is conceived as an ordering structure, which imposes necessary and
virtuous stability to an otherwise messy aesthetic proposed by magic.
“Languishing twixt hope and fear:” Poetic Authority, Cupid, and Spenser’s Translation
of Emblem
Images of Cupid in Spenser’s Faerie Queene share in the same allegorical
impulses and purposes of the emblem in early modern emblem literature. In general,
“emblem literature” encompasses and refers to a broad range of texts that share three key
elements: an inscription that marks the title, a visual image or picture, and the
accompanying text, which is often in verse. Emblems are also categorized by their dense
and concise style and dependence upon symbol.
163
Spenser’s poetry and emblems do

163
For further information about how the translation and creation of multilingual editions of emblem books
transported readers and writers beyond local and national traditions to the consideration of shared
principles of culture, see Robert J. Clements,’ Picta Poesis: Literary and Humanistic Theory in
Renaissance Emblem Books (Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1960).

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similar “work,” that is, they often provide a primary subject or setting that conceals a
more incisive secondary subject. This secondary subject is equally important but cannot
be spoken of directly, and often involves an issue of political urgency or anxiety.
164
As
distinct allegorical forms, Spenser’s poetry and emblems both serve to simplify and
mystify. Spenser’s images of Cupid and their emblem counterparts have a dual purpose:
to present, through poetry and picture, an overt moral or social guideline and to offer the
possibility of an equally significant but more covert meaning. As an emblematic figure in
Spenser, Cupid is described in striking similarity to emblems of which the god of love
plays a central part. While the poem’s reference to emblems is implicit rather than
explicit, the allusions highlight interpretive possibilities that contribute to a better
understanding of how The Faerie Queene’s allegorical intertexts enable Spenser to speak
simultaneously of politics and amor.
In his explication of Spenser’s use of the emblem in The Faerie Queene, John
Manning identifies “the emblem’s minute significant description, self-conscious

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During Cupid’s Masque, Spenser’s political concerns are brought up most strikingly in Busirane’s
pageant. Spenser attempts to raise a structure of meaning via allegory, as invoked by emblem intertexts that
are set into the narrative, which compete with the poem’s epic narrative. In his critical commentary
Syntagma printed with Andrea Alciati’s Emblemata in 1577, Claude Mignault observes, “speech elaborated
with the various colors and charms of rhetorical art can also be said figuratively to be loaded with
emblems.”

Mignault defines the emblem as a form of “loaded” speech or “oratio referta” and distinguishes
between the literal and figurative uses of the term emblem. Mignault’s description of the function of the
emblem is especially significant for my discussion of Spenser’s use of allegory as a form of veiled
speech—a speech act that is aimed at a public audience but relies on the private language of love and desire
to accomplish its end. Mignault,“Syntagma de simbolis” in Andrea Alciati’s Emblemata (Antwerp: Plantin,
1577). See translation by Denis Drysdall, “Claude Mignault of Dijon: Theoretical Writings on the
Emblem,” French Emblems at Glasgow. http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/Mignault_intro.html. Mignault
writes, “Sed et oratio variis verborum rerumque pigmentis et lenociniis rheotricae artis elaborata,
emblematis referta dici figurate potest” (Emblemata 12). (“But speech elaborated with the various colors
and charms of rhetorical art can also be said figuratively to be loaded with emblems”).

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mysteriousness, and teasing obscurity which invites and demands explication” as key
components of Spenser’s adaptation of the emblem in the poem. “Much of the imagery in
The Faerie Queene accords with the contemporary definition of emblem: brilliant
description of tapestries, ‘painted imagery,’ and other objects of curious workmanship
exist ‘for the sake of ornament,’ while the intrusion of apparently perverse, irrelevant
material exemplifies the emblematic ‘something set in.’”
165
An example of this
emblematic “something set in” in Book III of The Faerie Queene is the deferral of
Britomart’s epic narrative and the “intrusion” of Cupid’s Masque, its players, and the
peculiar emblematic intrusion of Cupid riding upon subdued lions, which is physically
and metaphorically or symbolically “set in” from Britomart’s narrative (the masque takes
place in the final, innermost room in a series of three rooms). Britomart’s narrative and
the events of Cupid’s Masque are only chronologically, not causally linked. The emblem
of Cupid’s triumphus enables Spenser to temporarily arrest the movement of The Faerie
Queene’s epic narrative in order to intensify the ethical stakes of Britomart’s encounter
with Cupid – the loss of individual will.
For Spenser, the figure of Cupid has the ability to operate as an emblem of power
in its most coercive and capricious state: Cupid’s “imperious” standing as the most
powerful god of the Roman pantheon and his history of usurpation of other gods’ power,
combined with his tendency to wield authority that is tyrannical, excessive, and
destructive of individual will, is often concealed by the god’s connection to amor.

165
See John Manning, “Emblems,” The Spenser Encyclopedia, 247-248.

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Spenser exploits this double image of Cupid as both a safe and menacing figure. For
instance, as a potent figure of male desire, and the impetus behind expressions of erotic
desire for men and women, Cupid’s power appears less threatening in this form because
he exercises his influence in the limited, private sphere of human relationships. Book
III’s description of the conquering charioteer Cupid, which appears at the masque’s
climax, is not only linked to early modern continental emblems that explicitly depict
tyrant Cupid in the act of taming wild beasts, but also to emblems that depict male tyrants
willfully subjecting untamed beasts and dissenting political subjects to the yoke of
tyranny.
166

Spenser capitalizes on the emblem’s ability to attract diverse groups of readers as
well as the accessibility of the emblem book and the popularity of one of its sub-genres,
the love emblem.
167
By the end of the sixteenth century, continental emblem books were
both readily available in translation and popular with a variety of early modern readers.
Many readers were drawn to the emblem’s visual detail and promise of easily assimilable
moral precepts, while others were attracted to the emblem’s promise of a challenge in the

166
These emblems, originating in Andrea Alciati’s Emblematum Liber (1531, 1534, 1546 continental
publication dates, Latin and French translations) first appeared in English in Geffrey Whitney’s Choice of
Emblemes (1586). Whitney’s English translation of continental emblems played a crucial role in
introducing a broader audience to Alciati’s work. Significantly, Whitney either directly imitated or adapted
87 of Alciati’s emblems—one of the largest borrowings of Alciati—and also used many of the same
woodblocks that created the illustrations for Alciati’s collection. The image of Cupid or Eros either riding
upon or next to a chariot pulled by “beasts” in states of subjection appeared in various forms in early
French emblem books: “Amour du bien publique” from Gilles Corrozet’s Hecatomgraphie, 1540,
“Voluptatis triumphus” from Joannes Sambucus’s Emblemata, 1564, “La puissance de Venus” from
Hadrianus Junius’s Les emblesmes, 1567 (French Emblems at Glasgow).

167
According to Virginia W. Callahan, by 1599, there were more than 100 editions of emblem books in
print; see Callahan, “Andrea Alciati,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 14.

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presentation of esoteric clues that demanded the reader’s full critical attention. Spenser
exploits the shared relationship between the mimetic practice of poets and the
metaphorical relationship between an emblem’s visual image and its accompanying
motto in the tenor and vehicle of his poetic images.
168

For Spenser’s contemporaries, one of the main purposes of the emblem was the
artful extension of a moral precept. Whitney’s use of a moral language to describe the
social function of the emblem gestures to the idea that other, less open and more political
concerns could also be expressed in the mode of the emblem. In the title page of Geffrey
Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586), the first English translation of continental
emblem sources, Whitney establishes the idea that his work is guided by Horatian
principles and is:
A worke adorned with varietie of matter, both pleasant and profitable wherein
those that please, may finde to fit their fancies: Bicause herein, by the office of
the eie, and the eare, the minde maye reape double delighte through holsome
preceptes, shadowed with pleasant devises: both fit for the virtuous, to their
incouraging: and for the wicked, for their admonishing and amendment.
169

Whitney’s purpose in collecting together varied continental emblems is dual: to please
the reader, who, through the senses, will be stimulated by the aesthetic beauty provided
by the emblem’s picture. Once the senses are adequately provoked, the expectation is that

168
Mason Tung speaks to Spenser’s particular practice of imitation, which engenders poetic invention:
“Spenser assimilates meaning of the emblem to meaning of another. He imitates Alciati’s and Whitney’s
emblems and adheres to Aristotle’s ideal practice of imitation, which enables the artist to “‘invent”’ a new
“reality” (246). See Tung, “Emblematics,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 246.

169
Geffrey Whitney. A choice of emblems and other devises (Leyden: 1586). Huntington Library and Art
Gallery. Early English Books Online. 2008.
http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99855134.

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the mind will gather together the two elements of the emblem (picture and motto) and
harvest the “holsome precepts, [that have been] shadowed with pleasant devices.” In his
introductory explanation of the purpose of the collected emblems, Whitney explicitly
links the effectiveness of the emblem to its ability to act allegorically, that is, to invoke
“double delight” as its “pleasant devices” hint at or draw the reader toward the underlying
“other” moral meaning of the emblem.
170

For emblematists, the emblem was also an object of intentional puzzlement and
obfuscation; the emblem’s word or “spirit” and its image or “body” demanded intense
and attentive deliberation on the part of the reader.
171
The reward for solving an
emblem’s riddle was not only the reader’s immediate pleasure and delight but also, more
significantly, the reader’s attainment of virtue. Though categories of emblem were often
slippery and overlapped, popular types of emblems did emerge. One intensely popular
“sub-genre” of emblem was the Love emblem, which often featured the figure of Cupid
as its central character and was frequently directed to women readers. Unlike early
modern conduct books, which discouraged women from being active readers and from

170
Both Whitney and Spenser emphasize the importance of writing that contains a “variety of matter.” Yet
for Whitney, variety is a secondary embellishment to the central moral function of the emblem while for
Spenser, variety is central to both the plausibility of the poem’s narrative subject matter and the reader’s
enjoyment of his invention. Spenser’s stated purpose in writing The Faerie Queene, as expressed in “A
Letter to the Authors,” “is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline: Which I
conceived should be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historicall fiction, the which the
most part men delight to read, rather for variety of matter, then for profite of the ensample” (715).

171
Mignault explicitly outlines how the body-spirit metaphor should function in his theoretical treatise on
the emblem: “The analogy between the spirit and body should be appropriate. (By ‘spirit’ I mean the motto,
contained in one, two, or at most, a few words; by the term ‘body’ I wish to designate the image itself).”
See 1577 Plantin edition of Alciati’s Emblemata, Glasgow University Library SM48,
www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/Mignault.

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reading morally corrupting romances, love emblems required female readers to interpret
by distinguishing between the emblem’s central moral function and its more profane veil.
Whether these emblems were concerned with the human love associated with
profane eros or the divine love associated with sacred agape, Cupid was the central
dramatic player. Emblems featuring Cupid were often unsettling for readers, who
encountered the child Cupid or a childlike putto—appearing innocent, yet actively
engaging in scenarios that required erotic knowledge and adult experience. By
consistently placing female readers on the threshold between innocence and experience,
Spenser emphasizes the idea that the attainment of virtue depends upon moral choice.
Thus it is easy to see why this sub-genre was appealing to Spenser: female readers like
Book III’s Britomart and Amoret, would repeatedly find themselves face-to-face, in both
emblem books and in Spenser, with multiple incarnations of the god of Love, appearing
in all of his contradictions, inciting their desire toward the human object of their base
affections and directing their love toward heaven and the universal purposes of a divine
creator.
The Amorous and Political Discourse of the Emblem in Cupid’s Masque
The performance of Cupid’s Masque in the House of Busirane marks the
climactic narrative moment in canto xii of Book III of The Faerie Queene in which the
progression of tapestries and idols, bas reliefs and spoils of war finally culminates in the
“vile enchanter” Busirane’s most overtly allegorical work—the spectacle of an
oppressive and tyrannical Cupid. In the parade, the masque’s participants personify the
relationships between opposing and ambiguous states of love and desire. Fansy and

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Desire, Fear and Hope, Dissemblaunce and Suspect, Grief and Fury, Displeasure and
Pleasaunce, and Despight and Cruelty dramatize their relationships to one another in the
course of a theatrical spectacle that keeps the reader and Britomart, Spenser’s exemplar
of female chastity, in a suspended state of anticipatory anxiety.
Strikingly, Spenser’s “Book of Chastity” contains the most diverse and frequent
incarnations of the figure of Cupid. The god’s appearance, however, is not entirely
surprising, as Cupid, the impetus behind expressions of base desire and dangerous forms
of love, is one of chastity’s most fearsome and dreaded opponents. Spenser’s interest in
depicting the trials of exemplary female characters who must confront manifestations of
Cupid underscores one of The Faerie Queene’s main themes—the idea that a woman
cannot possess true virtue without the experience of rigorous spiritual and physical
testing. It is how Britomart and Amoret, for instance, maintain their virtue through
experience that confers value upon the virtue assigned by Spenser and is exemplified by
the narrative’s action. Yet the narrative’s early obsession with the various and successive
representations of Cupid that are depicted in Busirane’s Ovidian tapestries, Cupid’s
golden image, and Cupid’s masque give way to a narrative in which Busirane assumes an
elevated position at center stage. Cupid’s masque ends as suddenly as it begins and
without any explanation of its connection to the Book’s previous events. Britomart’s
attempt to inquire after the origins of the masque is effectively barred by the narrative as
her forced waiting gives way to a different kind of dramatic spectacle: the violation and
suffering of Amoret, Spenser’s exemplar of Fair Chastity, who suffers at the hands of the
merciless magician Busirane.

155
In telling Britomart’s story and relating her experiences in the house of Busirane,
Spenser relies on a wide range of cultural, literary, and philosophical traditions in order to
set the stage for Cupid’s final and most spectacular appearance as the main player in his
own masque. The conqueror Cupid, riding triumphantly into the room upon the backs of
subdued lions, invokes an iconographical tradition of moralizing emblems, where visual
images paired with written text attempt to reconcile often opposing philosophies—sacred
and profane—and suggest moral edification. Indeed emblems were often the place where
pagan mythology and Christian doctrine merged. Functioning as allegorical intertexts in
the poem, these emblems supplied Spenser with useful models for the thematic
integration of love and politics.
172
The appearance of Cupid, “the winged God him selfe”
(III.xii.22.1), marks the center of the masque’s narrative action. With unbound eyes,
Cupid surveys his obedient followers who are “taught to obay the ménage of that Elfe, /
That man and beast with power imperious / Subdeweth to his kingdome tyrannous”
(III.xii.22.1-5). The god shakes his fist full of darts so vehemently that the earth beneath
him quakes, his wings are thrust apart, and he blinds himself once more. Cupid rejoices in
the cruelty directed toward Amoret, viewing her as a “Faire Dame … in perfect kinde,”
one of his “proud spoil[es]” (III.xii.22.7-9). As a result of Busirane’s violent and coercive

172
Originating in Andrea Alciati’s Emblematum Liber (1531, 1534, 1546 continental publication dates, in
Latin and French translations), Book III’s description of the conquering charioteer Cupid later appears in
English in Geffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblemes (1586). The visual content of each image of Cupid and
variation in the textual representation of erotic and political themes provided allegorical models for Spenser
to both imitate and adapt in Book III of The Faerie Queene.

156
expressions of desire, Amoret is marked as an exemplar of perfect and willing subjection
that Cupid recognizes as a symbol of his own unyielding authority.
Alciati’s Emblem 106, based on an emblem with a similar theme in the Greek
Anthology (9.221), announces its motto as “Love, the most powerful passion”
(“Potentissimus affectus amor”) and features “the boy Love, unconquered charioteer,”
whose image is described as inscribed “on a gem-stone.”
173
The description of the image
reads:
See how the boy Love, unconquered charioteer, engraved on a gemstone,
overcomes the power of the lion. See how with one hand he holds the whip, with
the other he directs the reins. See how in the face of this boy there is much
beauty. May the dreadful affliction be kept far off. Would he, who overpowers
such a beast, ever restrain his hand with us?

The emblem’s text suggests that on one level its content is about “the boy Love,
unconquered charioteer.” Yet the last few lines of the description suggest that “under the
guise” of an initial discussion about how “boy Love” is a personification of the powerful
human passions that can possess the lover, control the course of their desires, and subdue
the impulses of their irrational passions, is an “other” discussion that is also suggested by
reference to “the boy Love.”
174
Love’s power, as figured by the conquering Cupid in

173
The emblem’s text refers to the image of “the boy Love, unconquered charioteer,” as initially appearing
as a gemstone engraving. This reference to the image’s prior existence explicitly marks Alciati’s
presentation as a representation of something other than, a description of one subject that has been removed
from its original context, a secondary representation, or what I would identify as an allegorical
representation.

174
The early modern interest in the image of a charioteer can be traced to the influence of Plato’s Phaedrus.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates demonstrates the struggle between opposing impulses of love in the image of a
charioteer (a representation of the soul) struggling to control the motions of two winged horses (a
representation of opposing desires). While the one horse moves upward toward a recollection of the
perfect Forms (anamnesis), the other horse travels downward in pursuit of physical pleasure. Plato’s

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Alciati’s emblem, is deified and presented as a god to whom humans unwisely subject
their wills. It is this idea—the unwise subjection of the will to the absolute authority of
Love as tyrant—that Spenser capitalizes on, in the scene in which Cupid appears a
merciless tyrant, subduing humans and beasts alike to his imperious will in order to
politicize his representations of amor.
In Alciati’s Emblem 106, a secondary level of interpretation is suggested by the
command to pay heed to the “beauty” of the boy’s countenance, which is a self-reflexive
reference to the aesthetic beauty of the image itself and its idealization of authority. The
Latin “Est potis, a nobis temperet anne manus?” and “anne,” translated as “Can it be
that?,” suggests the introduction of a question in which a negative answer is expected and
the wish that “the dreadfull affliction be kept far off” and the text’s final rhetorical
question—“Would he, who overpowers such a beast, ever restrain his hand with us?”—
reveals a tension between the literal description of the emblem’s subject in the narrative
(which purports to be about “Love as most powerful passion”) and the conflict to which
the narrative itself alludes. The figure of Cupid “speaks” of one subject while
simultaneously “speaking otherwise,” that is, allegorically, about the underlying threat of
subjection caused by tyrannical force.
Spenser also activates another register of meaning in Alciati’s emblem—the idea
that beauty of form can counteract or veil underlying dissonance or dissent. Though “the

struggling charioteer became an early modern paradigm for the soul’s struggle to maintain control over
conflicting desires. See Plato, Phaedrus, ed. Christopher Rowe (London: Penguin Books, 2005).

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boy Love” is the cause of human captivity and oppression in Alciati’s emblem, the
“beauty” of his form counteracts the ferocity of his desires to subject others to his will.
In Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Cupid is a particularly effective allegorical figure for the
poet. The beauty of poetry and its figures conceal desires to subject the Queen and female
readers to the poet’s will. Susanne Wofford’s characterization of how allegorical figures
work politically, in particular helps to explain Spenser’s invocation of Cupid in Cupid’s
Masque and the god of Love’s relation to the more politicized figure depicted in
continental emblem books. Wofford explains, “The allegorical figuration of The Faerie
Queene thus may be said to aestheticize or naturalize the violence of absolutist power,
apparently reconciling political conflicts in artistic harmony; but this violence returns and
contaminates Spenser’s poetics, providing another level at which the poem interrogates
its allegorical assumptions.”
175
This “violence” returns in the character of Busirane,
whose sadistic actions call into question the poem’s impulse to gloss over the interpretive
significance of the enchanter’s mythological precursor—the “imperious” Cupid, who
occupies a limited space in the narrative but commands a central position at the center of
the masque. The force of Cupid can be aligned, in a Foucauldian sense, with the
idealization of both political and aesthetic power (the idea that power is monolithic and

175
Wofford, The Choice of Achilles, 230-231.

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totalizing in its effects) and the productive force of ideology as it shapes the individual
subject’s actions, thoughts, and beliefs.
176

Cupid appears in a noticeably more English context in Whitney’s A Choice of
Emblemes (1586 HEH), but with the same motto that accompanies Alciati’s emblem 106:
“Potentissimus affectus, amor.” A brief narrative describes the image in Whitney’s
Emblem 63:
The Lions grimme, behoulde, doe not resiste,
But yealde them selves, and Cupiddes chariot drawe,
And with one hande, he guides them where he liste,
With th’other hande, he keepes them still in awe:
They couche, and drawe, and do the whippe abide,
And laie theire fierce and crewel mindes aside.

If Cupid then, bee of such mightie force,
That creatures fierce, and brutishe kinde he tames:
Oh mightie JOVE, vouchsafe to showe remorse,
Helpe feeble man, and pittie tender dames:
Let Africke wilde, this tyrauntes force indure,
If not alas, howe can poore man bee sure.

The pictorial image and setting of Whitney’s emblem remain the same as Alciati’s
allegorical picture: a heavy-handed Cupid, whip in hand, exercises direct control over a
pair of lions that obediently pull his chariot forward. However, there are marked

176
See Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of
California Press, 1988). Greenblatt emphasizes the importance of talking about the totalizing and
monolithic term power in relation to Renaissance literature “not only as object but [also] as the enabling
condition of representation itself” (2). Like Foucault, Greenblatt insists upon the ways in which power
structures are symbolically represented and embodied; to this end, Greenblatt explains how ideas about the
absolute nature of power for both monarch and poet are fictional: “In literary criticism Renaissance artists
function like Renaissance monarchs: at some level we know perfectly well that the power of the prince is
largely a collective invention, the symbolic embodiment of the desire, pleasure, and violence of thousands
of subjects, the instrumental expression of complex networks of dependency and fear, the agent rather than
the maker of the social will” (4). Thus Greenblatt focuses on how power in Shakespeare’s dramas works
contingently to subvert, contain, and enable dominant structures of meaning.

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differences in the text of Whitney’s emblem: first, the emblem does not allude to its prior
existence as an antique engraving on a gemstone. The text of Whitney’s emblem claims
itself as the original utterance, perhaps in an effort to draw attention away from its
classical origins and to draw attention to the uniquely English context of its composition.
In addition to the force of Cupid’s whip and his control over the reins that subdue
“The Lions grimme”—“theye couche, and drawe, and do the whippe abide”—they are
also subdued by Cupid’s ability to keep them in a constant state of awe. Whitney’s lions
possess “mindes,” described as “fierce and crewel,” that avail themselves without
resistance and yield to the “mightie force” of Cupid who “Keepes them still in awe.”
This ability to invoke feelings of obedience and powerlessness combined with reverence
causes the lions to “laie theire fierce and crewel mindes aside.” The text of Whitney’s
emblem expresses a monolithic conception of idealized and absolute power while
simultaneously drawing attention to one of power’s particular mechanisms: its ability to
produce obedient subjects and contain dissent. At the same time, Whitney’s
representation of this power, through the figure of Cupid, is itself a fiction, a symbolic
representation, or allegory of how political power can work.
The stakes of the poem’s conception of an idealized, absolute power that produces
obedient subjects while containing dissent are raised by the insertion of Jove into Cupid’s
emblem. The existence of such an all-encompassing force, which can tame “creatures
fierce, and bruitish kinde,” and is represented by the figure of Cupid in Whitney’s
emblem, is complicated further by the narrative’s plea for the showing of pity and
“remorse” by “mightie JOVE.” Jove’s reputation as the premiere deity in the Greek and

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Roman pantheon, as well as a vulnerable figure of authority overwhelmingly motivated
by his sexual desires as depicted in Ovid, make suspect the narrative’s simple plea for a
display of pity by the fickle god. While we could read the reference to “mightie JOVE”
as a metaphorical substitute for the God of Christian agape—a redemptive figure, who
may in some instances, be more capable of displays of pity and remorse than Jove—we
could also read the text’s plea to Jove as the plea of subjects for pity and leniency from an
absolute and largely ambivalent monarch.
177

Although it seems like Cupid’s force is absolute, the narrative suggests an
alternative to completely submitting to the authority represented in and by the conquering
Cupid. A more equitable authority or power is represented by JOVE, the god who is
assigned the ability to not only display repentance for Cupid’s cruelty toward the lions,
but who can help “feeble man” and “tender dames” to escape Cupid’s force. Unable to
completely reconcile how Jove, framed as a god of lesser authority than Cupid in
Whitney’s text with the human ability to show pity and compassion, can compete with
the opposing all-powerful tyranny of Cupid, the narrative instead removes the threat. The
narrative’s recourse to Jove suggests a discomfort with Cupid’s excessively tyrannical

177
See Jacqueline T. Miller: “Jove figures in Spenser’s poetry, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes
alternately as the highest god, an illegitimate ruler, a vulnerable leader, and a figure of somewhat
indiscriminate lust. He seems to embody the poet’s ambivalent attitude toward authority and order: the
godlike standard-bearer of stability is also a renegade usurper, a figure of power who is open to attack, and
a male predator who, himself ruled by passion, is likely to neglect his position and to violate rather than
protect, maintain, and rule his subjects” (413 “Jove” in The Spenser Encyclopedia). See Tobias
Gregory’s From Many Gods to One for a discussion of Jove’s role in both assuring Venus that Aeneas will
achieve his fate in the Aeneid and his allowing of Juno to postpone the Trojans’ goal (6). “The Homeric
Zeus and Virgilian Jupiter are guarantors of cosmic order, but they offer no guarantees of divine justice or
divine love” (9). Taking the final book of the Aeneid as his example (Aen 12.869-86), Gregory discusses
the gods’ morally ambiguous role and direct hand in human suffering - the “triumph’s mortal cost” (50-51).

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displays of authority. The lines “Let Africke wilde, this tyrauntes force indure, / If not
alas, howe can poore man bee sure,” suggest that the most practical and effective solution
to the contradictions revealed earlier, is to take Cupid and the tyrannical force he
represents and transport the figure to an entirely foreign setting. In this trope of
aversion, the narrative wishes away the oppressive force of Cupid’s tyranny. While the
first parts of the emblem’s narrative, its motto and its image, suggest that love indeed is a
powerful and potent passion that humans would do best to avoid, the second part of the
narrative reveals an implicit counter-narrative or “other” subject of the emblem’s
discourse: the threat of tyranny necessitates entreaties of pity and repentance; the
feebleness of men and tenderness of women make them equally vulnerable to the
boldness of tyrants.
178

178
While early modern political views regarding the “Irish problem” are not the focus of this dissertation,
anxieties about the perceived barbarism of the Irish race and resistance to English rule were certainly issues
that preoccupied early modern poets like Spenser. Although Whitney is less explicit than Spenser in his
invocation of English anxieties surrounding the Irish “barbarians,” implicit textual traces of these anxieties
are evident when the emblem’s text suggests that “Africke wilde” is the proper place for the exercise of a
“tyrauntes force.” Why Africa? Because Elizabethan England was perceived as a civilized and orderly
society, the exercise of tyrannical authority in a commonwealth opposed the reasoned and measured rule of
the Queen and her advisors. Thus, the exercise of tyrannical power was best suited for geographic locales
that were perceived as inherently lacking the reasoned rule of such a governing body; during the early
modern period, these ideas were often centered in and around the geography of Africa and Ireland. Africa
was not only a geographical place that could be located on a map, but it also became a metaphorical marker
of and for its inhabitants, who were viewed in the early modern period as phenotypically different as a
result of environmental variations that were believed to determine both physical appearance, temperament,
and disposition (89). In Whitney’s text, Africa also functions as a stand in for Ireland, an ongoing challenge
to English claims to expansion. Indeed, New English texts posited a racialized image of the Irish, who like
the Africans, were a humorally imbalanced and a distempered national group (93). Spenser’s Irenius in his
View of the Present State of Ireland articulates new English views and sets forth a number of connections
between the Irish and the Africans, noting their shared use of the mantle (50-51) and their similar
“intemperate…wailings of their dead” (56). See Jean Feerick, “Spenser, Race, and Ire-Land,” ELR 32, no.
1 (2002 Winter): 85-117.

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Cupid, Tyranny, and the Triumph of Love
The figure of Cupid thus becomes tied to political themes: English fears of
tyranny and tyrannical rule invoked by Whitney’s emblem. This connection makes Cupid
a poetically and politically useful “in-between” figure for the early modern courtly poet.
Spenser takes advantage of the link between a series of analogous emblems that depict
Cupid, boy Amor as conquering charioteer, subduing all to his will, and emblems that
portray Antony’s victory over opposing political forces (his defeat of Pompey) and the
death of Cicero. The motto of Alciati’s Emblem 29 states, “Even the fiercest are
overcome” (“Etiam ferocissimos domari”) and features a Roman victor, with whip in
hand, sitting atop a chariot pulled forward by a pair of subdued lions. The explanatory
text accompanying the emblem explains that this scene has transpired in the wake of
Cicero’s death:
After the bitter plague of his country had destroyed Roman
Eloquence—for Cicero had been killed- the conqueror
mounted his chariot, harnessed lions to it, and compelled
them to submit their necks to his harsh yoke. By this riddle
Antony wished to show that high-spirited princes had
yielded to his arms.

Alciati’s emblem activates the political force of allegory, using it to register a critique of
tyrannical authority that privileges brute force over the use of rhetorical restraint and
eloquence. This valuing of rhetorical eloquence embodied by Cicero over the operation
of authority that suppresses human will through brute force, represented by Antony, is a
model for the ways in which Spenser’s poem speaks to his interest in eroticizing political
discourses and politicizing erotic discourses. Both Alciati’s and Whitney’s use of Cupid
as tyrannical conqueror and Alciati’s depiction of Antony as victor, in scenes that feature

164
a triumphus, emphasize the moving away from or destruction of eloquence and its socio-
political costs: the rise of brute force as a coercive tool associated with the exercise of
tyranny.
Cupid’s emblematic entrance in Book III atop “a Lion ravenous” not only harkens
back to the emblem of Alciati’s conquering charioteer Cupid, but it anticipates the
narrative appearance of Cambina “in a charet of straunge furniment” drawn by “two grim
lyons, taken from the wood” in Book IV (iii.38-39). In Book III, the “winged God
himselfe” is marked by his “power imperious” and tyrannical ambition. Cupid is
blindfolded but not entirely blind; he unbinds his eyes so he can revel in the sight of “his
proud spoyle,” in particular, the suffering of the “dolorous Faire Dame” Amoret. Cupid’s
show of might—the dreadful shaking of darts and clapping of wings—inspire fear in the
masque’s participants and cause Cupid to become blind once again. In this instance,
Cupid is a figure of the discord and cruelty brought on by the impulse to exercise
tyrannical authority. Spenser seems interested in highlighting the destructive force of eros
at work in the exercise of political ambition and power, particularly upon female
characters like Britomart and Amoret.
Cambina’s appearance in Book IV represents another more conventional model
for the integration of love and civic ambition.
179
Spenser reaches back to pre-Greek and
Roman models by aligning Cambina with the “Phyrgian Great Mother Cybele … an

179
Manning aptly notes “The aggregation of symbolic detail indicates that the subject of Book IV is the
ultimate harmonizing of personal and civic ambition, of love and public good. Cambina acts as love, as
civilization, as composer of family differences, and shows that these impulses need not be mutually
destructive.” See Manning, “emblem,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 247-248.

165
Asiatic fertility goddess often identified with Rhea, who was traditionally depicted as
enthroned in a lion-drawn chariot and as wearing a crown of city towers to recall her gift
of civic fortification.” In Greece and Rome, Cybele’s original characteristics were
integrated with the maternal qualities of existing goddesses, and she was also associated
with both nature and civic fortitude. “The figure inherited by the Renaissance was the
‘mother of the Gods’ (FQ IV xi 28) and men, of nature and civilization, of wilderness,
farmland, and city. She expressed an aggregate of vastly different meanings, of forces,
which pull in opposite directions: the raw, untapped energy of nature as well as the
impulse to tame and civilize it.” In this way, Cupid and Cambina represent and act as
similar narrative forces.
180

Although Cybele can be associated with the founding and ascendancy of empires,
she can also be involved in their inevitable transformations and destruction. Cupid
functions in this same manner—he can invoke erotic change that leads to productive

180
To further this point that both Cupid and Cambina can create concord and foment discord, Peter S.
Hawkins begins with Spenser’s mention of “’Cybele’s franticke rites’” (I.vi.15) in the scenes in which the
narrative describes the “’woodborne people” that transform Una into a deity. Hawkins identifies the
Virgilian simile that describes the marital union between Thames and Medway (IV xi 27-28) as the point at
which Spenser most closely links the myths of the founding of Troy and Rome to the origins of England.
“Here Thames wears a crown ‘In which were many towres and castels set,’ like the crown of ‘Old Cybele’
(see Roche 1964:182).” Hawkins notes “Spenser is here imitating Virgil’s Aeneid 6.784-9, where in the
fields of Elysium a comparable simile advances the myth of Rome’s divine origin and Trojan succession.
The allusion links Spenser’s epic to Virgil’s, the vision of Thames and Medway to Aeneas’ vision in
Elysium, and Thames’ Troynovant (London) to ancient Troy and Rome. The effect of the simile is to
transfer the crown of civilization from the east to Troy’s second rebirth in Troynovant” (202). See
Hawkins, “Cybele” in The Spenser Encyclopedia. 202-203; see also Hawkins, “From Mythography to
Myth-Making: Spenser and the Magna Mater Cybele,” SCI 12, no. 3 (1981): 50-64.

166
forms of desire (marriage, founding of empire, civic concord), but the god can transform
men and women into unwilling subjects through the force of tyrannical violence.
181

Spenser’s use of Cupid as an allegorical figure exploits the god’s ability to
signify both singular and multiple meanings. By invoking iconographical emblems,
Spenser marks Cupid as the larger-than-life mythological precursor to the poet-enchanter
Busirane, dramatically prefiguring the merciless impulses of male desire as the “dreadfull
affliction” associated with the oppressive consequences of exercising brute force—
complete subjection. At the same time, Cupid’s emblematic appearance draws attention
to itself as a representative object of desire—the desire for an idealized poetic
representation of the effective subduing of dissent and willfulness with force. Here
Spenser registers the force of his discontent with the political regime of Elizabeth, giving
voice to his disapproval of the Queen’s policies of tolerance at home and abroad.
Through the exercise of persuasive eloquence, he can effectively subdue the queen’s
dissent and willfulness through the force of his poetry.
In his poetry, Spenser favors the figure of Allegoria precisely because of its
ability to perform ideological work; in his statement of poetic purpose Spenser identifies
The Faerie Queene as “a continued Allegory, or darke conceit,” claiming that the goal of
poetry is to delight and stir minds, not simply teach through straightforward precept or

181
Spenser is skeptical about the idea that England can become a new Rome without consequences/change.
Hawkins notes, “Spenser pursues this idea in Ruines of Rome (stanza 6), where he translates a meditation
from du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome in which Cybele (Virgil’s ‘Berecyntia mater,’ Spenser’s
‘Berecynthian Goddesse bright’) presides over the fall of Rome just as she once presided over its rise”
(203).

167
sermon. Particularly important for Spenser’s poetic project is George Puttenham’s claim
that poets are necessary to establishing and maintaining civic order and virtue. In the Art
of English Poesie (1589), Puttenham identifies Allegoria as the courtly figure used by
courtiers and princes alike “when we speake of one thing and thinke another, and that our
wordes and our meanings meete not.”
182
For Puttenham, Allegoria’s “principal Vertue…
is when we do speake in sence translative and wrested from the owne signification,
neverthelesse applied to another not altogether contrary, but having much conveniencie
with it as before we said of the metaphre.” In this vein, Spenser states his purpose in
writing The Faerie Queene: “The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a
gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline: Which for that I have
conceived shoulde be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historicall
fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter, then
for profite of the ensample.”
183
Favoring allegorical examples that appeal to common
sense as opposed to draconian rules, Spenser directly responds to critics of allegory in his
Letter to the Authors, concluding that: “So much more profitable and gratious is doctrine
by ensample, then by rule.” Thus for Spenser, allegory is, as Harry Berger Jr.
characterizes it, a “textually productive mode” that constructs a matrix of interdependent
and related meanings. Here I take seriously Berger’s suggestion that readers of The

182
George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie: Ch XVIII (London: 1589) Henry E. Huntington Library
and Art Gallery. Early English Books Online. 2008.
http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99846086.

183
Spenser, “Letter of the Author,” in The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton, 715.

168
Faerie Queene attend to allegory’s etymological Greek roots, which refer to the
politically inflected act of speaking critically in public: allo and agorein together mean to
speak otherwise than openly.
184
Allegory can also be a deceptive mode of self-
presentation or performance, which produces excesses in meaning that often escape the
control of the creator or performer.
Gender, Allegory, and Political Authority
Spenser takes up a subtle critique of the Queen’s chosen modes of self-
representation by moving from the abstract representation of qualities of love and desire
in the allegorical figuration of Cupid to a more pointed focus on the role of allegory in
the representation of gender. The scene in which Busirane violates Amoret’s body takes
the interdependence of male desire on the female body to its extreme. This scene can be
read as one of Gordon Teskey’s “more openly violent” “moments” in which the literal
level of narrative—Amoret’s violation at the hands of Busirane, Busirane’s violence
toward Amoret, and Britomart’s witnessing of the violence—are “subdued” while
allegory attempts to raise an “other” structure of meaning.
185

184
Harry Berger Jr., Lecture, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, Ca., March 11, 2005. See
also OED definition of allegory: “(ælgr) Forms: 4-7 allegorie, 5-6 allegorye, 6- allegory. [ad. L. allgoria,
a. Gr. lit. speaking otherwise than one seems to speak, f. other + - speaking; cf. to speak, orig. to harangue,
f. the public assembly. Cf. Fr. allégorie, perh. the direct source of the Eng. The L. allegoria was occas.
used unchanged in 16th c.].” Oxford English Dictionary Online, 2
nd
. Ed., s.v.”allegory,”
http://dictionary.oed.com.libproxy.usc.edu/ (21 December 2009).

185
As Teskey explains, “the more powerful the allegory, the more openly violent the moments in which the
materials of narrative are shown being actively subdued for the purpose of raising a structure of meaning
…allegory includes in its transcendental movement an opposite project of capture” (Allegory and Violence,
23).

169
The self-consciousness and explicit attention Spenser’s narrator draws to
Busirane’s craft and magic exemplify an instance of the poem’s attempts to raise an
alternate structure of meaning through allegory. The juxtaposition between the excessive
violence that characterizes Busirane’s compulsion to write, Amoret’s intense suffering,
and Britomart’s status as a detached observer have made this scene a compelling site for
critical interpretation of The Faerie Queene’s poetic method. Amoret’s status as
Spenser’s exemplar of married love and “goodly womanhed’ (III, IV), is complicated by
the mysterious circumstances surrounding her birth and her relationship to Venus, the
goddess of love, and her rogue son Cupid. Amoret and her twin Belphoebe, who
represent the two poles of Spenser’s view of married female virtue and unmarried
chastity, are miraculously conceived and birthed by mother Chrysogone. Adopted by
Venus, Amoret replaces the goddess’s lost son Cupid and is brought to the Garden of
Adonis to be raised by Pleasure, the daughter of Cupid and Psyche. We learn in the 1596
revised ending to Book III that Amoret, whom Scudamour previously won from the
Temple of Venus, has been taken against her will by Busirane from the scene of her
wedding. Thomas P. Roche aptly refers to Busirane’s House as the “Temple of Cupid,” a
world in which the principle of “ ‘maisterie’ (i.25)” and tyranny reign supreme and where
gods and humans alike are unmercifully subject to love’s assaults.
186

Since poets and philosophers are the most common traders in metaphors and
symbolic figures of love, it makes sense that Busirane, a figure for the compulsions of the

186
Thomas Roche, “Amoretti, Epithalamion,” 30, and Hyde “Busirane” 124 in The Spenser Encyclopedia.

170
love poet, would form the end point of Book III’s disquisition on love. The goal of
Busirane’s “program” of complete dominance, as Roche explains, is met by a “counter-
program” that “exposes his effort to master Amoret by misrepresenting the mastery of
Cupid.”
187
Although representations of Cupid’s mastery and his “neo-pagan views of love
and history” are countered by Britomart’s bold insistence on the “order or telos” of her
epic destiny, the maintenance of Cupid’s authority is essential to Spenser’s conception of
poetic authority. Part of this attempt to maintain authority is expressed through the
violence that is done to the female body in the poem. The poem’s fantasy of male
domination and control over expressions of female virtue runs counter to the idealization
of female chastity privileged by Queen Elizabeth in the images and speeches that
represent of her authority. Because Spenser cannot openly critique the Queen’s political
program, which is conceived of as part of a masculine body politic, he turns to assault
and to display the vulnerability of the inescapably female body that Elizabeth inhabits.
While the figure of Cupid disappears at the end of Book III, the tyrannical authority that
he notoriously wields finds a second, greatly intensified life through the character of
Busirane.
Over and over again, Amoret, who is “full of sad signes, fearfull to living sight” is
subjected to Busirane’s deliberate acts of cruelty; as Amoret is prodded forward into the
room, her heart, transfixed by a dart, is removed from her breast and laid in a silver basin.
The narrator lingers over the “ruefull sight”—that is Busirane’s piercing of Amoret’s

187
Hyde, “Busirane,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, 124.

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naked ivory breast—describing the “wide wound therein” and how her “snowy cleane”
skin has become “dyed in sanguine red.” This violence, it seems, is necessitated by
Amoret’s previous state: “Her brest all naked, as nett yvory, / Without adornment of gold
or silver bright, / Wherewith the Craftesman wonts it beautify” (III.xii.20.1-3). Lacking
beauty in this unadorned state, Amoret is the ideal subject for Spenser, the poet-
“craftsman” to beautify or in this instance, despoil. In addition, the narrator repeatedly
draws attention to the poet’s work in parenthetical asides: for example, after describing
Amoret’s “wide wound,” the narrator comments, “O ruefull sight,” and after describing
the deep entrenchment of the “accursd” knife and the fading of Amoret’s “spright” as it
“freshly” bleeds “forth,” the narrator continues, “The work of cruell hand,” as if to
remind us that it is really the poet’s busy imagination that is at work here.
188
By focusing
so intensely on the female body’s vulnerability to poetic objectification, Spenser
implicitly responds to the Queen’s attempts to subsume her female body and gender
beneath a single body in the Tudor body politic. Spenser points to the impossibility of
such gestures.
In a 1576 speech at a closing session of Parliament, Elizabeth presents herself as
humble and feminized servant of God who is willing to fuse her private self into “the
public weal;” the Queen’s relationship with God imbues her virginity with a divine

188
In Revisionary Play: Studies in the Spenserian Dynamics, Harry Berger Jr. explains, “Erotic control and
aesthetic control, chaos and art, primitive ends and over refined means, converge in Busirane’s decadence.
Spurred to revenge by pain and jealousy, the male imagination’s attempts at maistrie—the Busy-reign—
become frenetic as the feminine will recoils in ever greater panic (Amoret and ‘wavering wemens wit’),
and the orderly masque degenerates into a ‘rude confused rout / Of persons … whose names is hard to
read’” (xii.25), 115.

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quality that depends on the invocation of her gender but that also allows her to assume “a
gender-neutral identity for herself in relation to other human beings.”
189
The Queen
characterizes herself as God’s “handmaid,” an act, which Janel Mueller argues “evokes a
counterfactual image of a private female self, one sufficiently lowly to make life choices
free of constraint because they are not seen to matter one way or the other – ‘a milkmaid
with a pail on mine arm, whereby my private person might be little set by.’ Even if she
were the milkmaid that she is not, Elizabeth would remain the Lord’s handmaid … and
utterly the servant of England’s well-being.”
190
Elizabeth claims, “For your behoof there
is not way so difficult that may touch my private [self], which I could not well content
myself to take. And in this case as willingly to spoil myself quite of myself, as if I should
put off my upper garment when it wearies me, if the present state might not thereby be
encumbered.”
191
Elizabeth offers an image of her sovereignty that explicitly invokes her
female gender even as she moves to demonstrate that she can throw off her feminine
royal attire if necessary and assume the mantle of a single masculine body politic. The
sacredness of the chaste female body is depicted as a problematic idealization of female
virtue that only perpetuates relationships of inequality and violence between men and
women, subject and sovereign. Amoret’s violent subjection underscores the extreme and
unforeseen consequences of Elizabeth’s claims to exceptional authority based on her

189
Janel Mueller, “Virtue and Virtuality: Gender in the Self-Representations of Queen Elizabeth I,” in
Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, ed. Amy Boesky
and Mary Thomas Crane (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 228.

190
Mueller, “Virtue and Virtuality,” 229.

191
Elizabeth I, “1576 Speech to Parliament,” quoted in Mueller, “Virtue and Virtuality,” 229.

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gender. Spenser takes these claims to their illogical extreme by demonstrating the poet’s
response to such idealizations of female virtue through allegory.
In the previous stanza, the description of Amoret’s appearance draws attention to
the poet’s hand at its allegorical work: “She dolefull Lady, like a dreary Spright, / cald by
strong charmes out of eternall night, / Had Deathes owne ymage figured in her face”
(III.xii.19). Resembling a “dreary Spright” who is summoned out of the “eternall night”
of the poet’s imagination, Amoret remains only a substance without defining shape until
the poet imposes form upon her unmarked body. Recall that later, Busirane is also
associated with the use of charms, which are linked to acts of reading, writing, and
speaking. The verb “figured” suggests that there is a deliberate force behind this shaping
act of poetic representation. Extending the reading of Heather Dubrow
192
and others that
this scene represents a literalization of the violence that Petrarchan poetic tropes do to the
female body, can help to explain why the narrator, nonetheless, is compelled to repeat his
violence toward Amoret in such gruesome detail—repetition serves to reaffirm the poet’s
authority over his captive female subject.
While we can read Busirane’s violence toward Amoret as Spenser’s critique of
Petrachan tropes, we can also read Busirane’s violence as symbolic of the violent
impulses of male desire, which seeks to obtain the object of desire at any cost. In yet
another sense, we can interpret Amoret’s violent subjection as indicative of an attempt to

192
See Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, New
York: Cornell University Press, 1995).

174
draw attention to, or “to raise a structure of meaning”
193
that privileges the force of poetic
creation and the poet’s ability to offer critique through the repetition of violence in poetic
images. Thus the poet is unmistakably complicit in this engendering of a productive
violence through the force of allegory.
The aligning of Busirane with the male poet in the scene of Amoret’s violation
enables us to see the forces of the male imagination at work as the female body is
transformed into a metaphor.
194
This transformation from body to metaphor has the
unintended effect, however, of revealing how poetic representations of male desires are
inextricably dependent on the violation of the female body. The female body, through the
force of metaphor, is thus used to represent its necessary other, male desire, which is so
often represented by its fictive surrogate Cupid. In this way, Spenser reveals his own
dependence upon the gendering of political authority as female. Similarly, allegory and
its figurations are in part dependent upon the “literal” narratives in which they operate
even though Spenser’s allegory attempts to move toward transcendence and unity.
Allegorical Violence and the Female Body

193
See Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 23. Teskey’s prefatory questions underlie this dissertation’s
inquiries into Spenser’s allegorical method and its political use of the figure of Cupid: “What can
questioning of allegory, and especially secretive language, tell us about political risk and political care?”
(xii) and “What do allegorical poets themselves, like Dante and Spenser, reveal about the darker motives of
allegorical expression, about allegory and radical violence?” (23).

194
See Lauren Silberman, Transforming Desire: Erotic Knowledge in Books III and IV of the Faerie
queene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). In her analysis of the shift from Book III to Book
IV, Silberman persuasively demonstrates how Spenser invokes issues of gender and epistemology to serve
the development of the poetic narrative. For Spenser’s Britomart and Busirane, “risk … [is] the precursor
of growth and creative understanding” not only for the characters but also for the poet (33).

175
The tension between allegory and narrative is enacted more exactingly as the
violence done to the female body as Spenser and his narrative attempt to raise a structure
of meaning over and above other allegorical representations. This section discusses how
Cupid and female characters – Britomart and Amoret - are central to articulating,
however implicitly and incoherently, Spenser’s poetic and political project. The 1590 and
1596 endings of Book III of The Faerie Queene exemplify Spenser’s attempts to posit
possible solutions to address the problematic figure of Cupid and masculine fury
associated with unrequited desire.
Unable to unlock the brazen door that separates her from the masque’s
participants, Britomart waits expectantly in the recesses of a secret shade for the return of
Cupid’s Masque. However, instead of a disorderly procession of players, she is met with
the sight of Amoret, bound and tethered to a pillar. As we discover later in Book IV,
Amoret, Spenser’s exemplar of “faire chastity” and married love, is kidnapped during her
wedding to Scudamour by the wicked enchanter Busirane.

The reversal of Petrarch’s
scenario in which the rogue Cupid is bound and punished by Chastity in The Triumph of
Chastity, a fitting penalty for his repeated assaults upon female virtue, may represent an
explicit comment upon the hollowness of victories won through Petrarchan discourse.
The hollowness of this Petrarchan victory, in which the male pursuer punishes the
resistant female object of desire, extends equally to both Spenser’s and Petrarch’s
imagined victors—Busirane and Chastity. Yet while Spenser’s adaptation of the amorous
revenge scenario may offer a subtle critique of Petrarchan poetic discourse, his inversion
of the scenario demonstrates its currency as a poetic mode and reinforces the narrative’s

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insistence on the idea that Amoret has substantial reason to fear the aspiring Petrarchan
poet in Busirane. The anxiety that Busirane elicits from Amoret is the poem’s
overdetermined response to the rhetoric of sacred virginity she represents.
Busirane’s cruelty against Amoret is well documented; the “vile enchanter”
figures “strange characters in her blood” in an attempt to persuade Amoret turn her
desires toward him and away from Scudamour. His cruelty is transformed into blind
fury, however, once he spies the virgin knight Britomart and brute force once again
“overmaisters” him. Though Britomart could not use physical force to pry open the door
from which the masque issued, she is now able to effectively disarm Busirane. Earlier in
the poem, Belphoebe’s disarming of Cupid, a powerful figure of masculine desire, is met
with severe consequences – Love usurps her body and it becomes a poetic object.
Like Belphoebe, Britomart recognizes transgressions against female virtue and is
able to act to disarm Busirane. However, the return of Britomart’s force is not met
without a challenge from her male foe; unexplainably Britomart is caught unaware by
Busirane’s blade and is wounded for a second time in the poem. Turning his attentions
from Amoret “to whom his fury, first he ment,” to Britomart, Busirane “rashly”
“wrest[s]” “the wicked weapon” from Amoret’s breast and turns to attack Britomart. The
same weapon that Busirane uses to wound Amoret is used again, to assault Britomart.
This narrative detail suggests that martial chastity and married chastity are equal targets
of Busirane’s fury.
And turning to the next his fell intent,
Vnwares it strooke into her snowie chest,
That little drops empurpled her faire brest.
Exceeding wroth therewith the virgin grew,

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Albe the wound were nothing deepe imprest,
And fiercely forth her mortall blade she drew,
To giue him the reward for such vile outrage dew.
(III.xii.33)

Although Busirane’s offense is characterized by the lines above as superficial, a fury-
driven Britomart sends Busirane to the ground with one powerful blow and readies
herself to kill the enchanter when Amoret intervenes on his behalf. Significantly,
Britomart’s fury is almost transformed into grief; Britomart’s killing of Busirane, who is
both the source of Amoret’s pain and suffering and its cure, would leave Amoret bound
and captive still.
Britomart desires revenge for Busirane’s affront, yet she abstains from killing him
as long as he agrees to reverse his charms and return Amoret to her original state. With
Britomart’s blade steadied above his head, Busirane returns to his “balefull book” to read
again the “sad verse” that “pierced the hearts of virgin” Amoret. In another act of
linguistic violence, Busirane once again subjects Amoret to the force of an objectifying
erotic discourse even as Britomart stands over him and threatens to end his life. The
scene focuses on Britomart’s role as both a witness and check to Busirane’s violent
“charmes” and continued violence against Amoret. While the scene emphasizes Amoret’s
and Britomart’s (she is wounded upon hearing the charmes) affective response to the
repetition of the language that creates Amoret’s state of bondage, it also highlights
Britomart’s ability, yet again, to overcome a test to her virtue. The quaking and rattling of
the house and its parts do not dismay Britomart, who remains steadfast and does not slack
her hand. “Anon she gan perceiue the house to quake, / And all the dores to rattle round
about; / Yet all that did not her dismayed make, / Nor slack her threatfull hand for

178
daungers dout, / But still with stedfast eye and courage stout, / Abode to weet, what end
would come of all” (III.xii.37). The poem’s emphasis on Britomart’s exceptional
courage in this scene privileges her masculine role as the exemplar of martial chastity.
Simultaneously, the invocation of her steadfastness as a form of courage suggests that
Spenser’s dominant conception of female virtue in this scene is linked to more closely to
classical conceptions of courage as political steadfastness, which applied almost
exclusively to male rulers.
195

In a self-protective stance, Britomart does not forget or doubt that she is in
imminent danger as Busirane reverses the spell; instead she remains on constant guard
against the enchanter. Britomart has thus gained erotic experience, but without a loss of
innocence. Yet despite this gain, Britomart’s martial chastity continues to evoke male
fury and compels Busirane to further violence when he wounds Britomart, which marks
the second time she is wounded in the poem. Although Britomart possesses the physical
strength to destroy the male enchanter-poet figure (a rare acknowledgement of the
physical force that female authority can wield), she refrains from exercising force
because Amoret recognizes that the source and cure of her suffering are the same.
So mightily she smote him, that to the ground
He fell halfe deade; next stroke him should haue slaine,
Had not the Lady, by which him stood bound,
Dernly unto her called to abstaine,
From doing him to dy. For else her paine
Should be remedilesse, sith none but hee,
Which wrought it, could recure againe.
Therewith she stayd her hand, loth stayd to bee;

195
Mueller, “Virtue and Virtuality,” 10.

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For life she him enuyde, and long’d reuenge to see.
(III.xii.34)

Unreciprocated desires are transformed into the unchecked fury of male desire,
which imagine and can tolerate nothing less than the complete possession of and control
over the chaste female body and mind. While Amoret’s chaste desire to remain faithful to
Scudamour only compels Busirane to continued violence against the female love object,
the more active forces of martial chastity, as represented by Britomart, temporarily arrest
the direction of Busirane’s erotic fury and turn his attention outward away from his
narcissistic desires to “pen” Amoret to a defensive desire to protect his “work.”
196
This
shift marks a narrative anxiety that moves away from the idea that the “work” of the poet
is based on narcissistic desires that are irrelevant to the work of the commonwealth. The
poet’s work is worth defending because its private appeals have public and political
influence. We can view Britomart’s rescue of Amoret as registering a critique of the
excesses that accompany the overindulgence of poetic prerogatives, which take their form
in the literalization of Petrarchan tropes. However, the relationship between Britomart
and Busirane is less clear. Britomart’s embodiment of particularly masculine virtues –
courage, for instance – makes her an acceptable authority to reconcile Busirane’s
narcissistic compulsions to write with his desperate desire to defend his work. Yet the
ease with which Busirane’s obsession with Amoret turns to fury toward Britomart points

196
In the 1590 ending of Book III, Busirane is bound and led forward in silence as Britomart’s captive. Yet
after Britomart’s triumph over the enchanter in the 1596 ending, the narrator describes Busirane’s
lamentations at the sight of his lost work: “Th’ Enchaunter self, which all that fraud did frame, / To have
efforst the love of that faire lasse, / Seeing his worke now wasted deepe engrieved was” (III.xii.43).

180
to narrative anxiety about attempts to curb the poet’s authority. While the narrative
characterizes Busirane’s wounding of Britomart as unimpressive and “slight,” it
unleashes an equally intense fury from the female knight toward Busirane. Busirane’s
affront is met with Britomart’s demand that he reform by releasing Amoret from
captivity.
In a dramatic scene of breaking apart and fragmentation, Amoret’s chains and the
pillar against which she stands are broken into pieces and fragmented across the room.
The knife that is plunged into her chest falls out as her wound heals and she falls, a
“perfect hole” to the ground. However, Amoret’s redemption and return to her original
state—as Britomart demands—prior to Busirane’s violent acts against her, are
questionable. Critics like Jonathan Goldberg have noted the ambiguous meaning of
Spenser’s paradoxical phrase “a perfect hole” to describe Amoret’s state after she is freed
from Busirane’s tortures.
197
The early critical tendency to interpret the “hole” as a
reference to Amoret’s return to a kind of prelapserian state of wholeness where she
existed spiritually and physically “wholly,” prior to being subjected to Busirane’s
incantations has been countered by Maureen Quilligan and Elizabeth J. Bellamy.
Focusing on the physical and psychological consequences of Amoret’s wound in relation
to experiences of erotic desire, both critics have read Amoret’s post-Busirane state as one
in which her wounding signifies her transformation into a sexualized bodily being, a

197
See Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1981), 78.

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“perfect hole” through which male erotic desires can find physical satisfaction.
198
The
self-conscious ambiguity of the phrase compels readers to rethink Spenser’s view of
“Women’s Excellence;” Amoret’s forceful interpolation into the foreign world of often
violent erotic discourses of love and desire by Busirane, aptly characterized by Quilligan
as a “sadistic sonneteer” is a necessary step in a woman’s progression from chaste virtue
to chastity as monogamy in marriage.
199
Amoret’s “perfect hole[ness]” is determined by a
wholeness that itself is constituted by the painful process of subjection to and
objectification by male-authored discourses of love and desire. If this is the case,
Spenser’s recognition of women as desiring subjects is directly contingent upon their
experience with repressive cultural constructions of love and desire as represented in
Busirane’s Ovidian tapestries, the idol of Cupid, and the objectification of the female
beloved by the male poet. It is with this view that Spenser, in part, attempts to repel
moral and domestic theories that deny women’s sexuality. Yet Spenser is restrained and
tentative in his defense of female virtue, especially when set up as a direct challenge to
the prerogatives of the male poet.

198
Maureen Quilligan characterizes the consequences of Amoret’s wounding: “The wound is healed but
remains still the wound of desire—which Britomart shares with Amoret in her own double-wounding, first
by Gardante and then by Busyrane.” Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1983), 143. Elizabeth J. Bellamy extends Quilligan’s characterization by observing that
“Amoret’s anasemic ‘perfect hole,’ [is] neither fully a process of scarring or healing, [and] may, in the end,
serve as a vivid demonstration that the concept of married chastity is itself a kind of ‘perfect hole’” (408).
Focusing on the altered state of the female body before and after experiencing the metaphoric “wound of
desire,” Bellamy suggests that the making of a “perfect hole” in the breaking of the hymen marks the
transition from married chastity to monogamy (408). “Waiting for Hymen: Literary History as ‘Symptom’
in Spenser and Milton, ELH Vol. 64, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 391-414.

199
Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press,
1992), 84.

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Although Britomart effectively tempers Busirane’s powers, taking him as her
captive, she is unable to prevent Amoret’s pain and suffering at the hands of the
enchanter who disappears from the narrative. The physical and psychic damage has been
done. However, Busirane’s disappearance has the effect of bringing together the aims of
two female characters. Seeking refuge and protection from future violations, Amoret
prostrates herself to Britomart in gratitude and offers to become her vassal. Britomart’s
protection of Amoret, in return, reinforces Britomart’s role as the knight of martial
chastity; Britomart demonstrates the ability to effectively exercise the masculine virtue
expected of a knight by rescuing and shielding a vulnerable female from unseemly
advances of male enemies. In fact, the narrative’s identification of Britomart with the
masculine qualities of her role as knight of martial chastity becomes even stronger when,
in response to Amoret’s praise, Britomart urges her to forget her violation because she
has been safely delivered. Instead of validating Amoret’s experiences of pain and
suffering, Britomart reminds her that Scudamour has also suffered greatly for her sake.
While Britomart’s reminder may seem quite benign or may even seem to encourage
Amoret to empathize with the experience of her missing lover, the emphasis on forgetting
as the remedy to Amoret’s recollections of suffering, which result from her steadfast
rejection of Busirane’s “charmes,” paradoxically highlights the tension in Spenser’s view
of how female subjects experience often violent cultural discourses of love and desire.
While Spenser’s poem favors the representation, in the narrative present, of experiences
of female suffering (the result of constant assaults from within and without to chaste
virtue), these experiences of female suffering are often quickly elided so the narrative can

183
continue its forward epic movement. Indeed, as discussed in the first section of this
chapter, an essential mechanism of Spenser’s allegorical method in the 1590 and 1596
versions of Book III is to use allegory to make readers temporarily forget about the
narrative while the poet raises an alternate or secondary structure of meaning.
While critical assertions about the moral stakes of Amoret’s resistance to
Busirane’s violent advances have helped to highlight the destructive force of love as
represented by the poet and the necessity of the resistant female love object to
expressions of masculine desire (rooted in violence), the effect of Spenser’s vivid
descriptions of violence perpetrated against Amoret’s body depends on the invocation of
the material and gendered body it seeks to transcend. The very physicality of Spenser’s
references to Amoret’s bleeding heart and gored flesh belie an intense interest, bordering
on obsession, with how the physical properties of the female body can be appropriated
and transformed from literal referents rooted in the material world to symbolic poetic
signifiers with figurative meaning. Spenser’s representation of female desire in the case
of Amoret is in fact dependent upon this slippery transaction between the poet’s aims to
transcend the flesh with the word and Spenser’s constant return to the female body.
Solving the Problem of Cupid
Despite repeated narrative attempts, Spenser’s poem ultimately fails to contain the
figure of Cupid; the god of love’s disappearance at the finale of Cupid’s masque does not
mark his permanent narrative end. Cupid is given a longer narrative half-life through the
character of the “vile enchanter” Busirane, who appears as an early modern equivalent to
the love god of antiquity. Busirane shares Cupid’s supernatural ability to transform chaste
females from exemplars of virtue into erotic spoils, all in the name of satisfying furious

184
and sadistic desires. Cupid is also extended a narrative life through the figure of the
hermaphrodite. The hermaphrodite’s ability to efface gender boundaries, act as a benign
or potent figure of androgyny, signifying harmonious synthesis or chaotic monstrosity, or
as Lauren Silberman suggests, to represent sexual difference and sexual identity, lives on
in varied incarnations in Spenser’s Cupid. And though Spenser removes the
hermaphroditic embrace from the 1596 ending of Book III, Cupid remains closely linked
to the figure of the hermaphrodite by functioning as a liminal figure, hovering in-between
states of base and chaste desire, capable of displaying a playful innocence in amorous
matters while equally as able to act as a potent avatar of his own erotic impulses. Unable
to bring the various aims of the poetic narrative together, Spenser’s use of Cupid and the
Hermaphrodite figure represents similar impulses to contain.
For Britomart, who is subjected to performances in Cupid’s Masque and Busirane’s
abuse of Amoret, one model for the fulfillment of erotic desire is represented by the
transcendent union of self and other figured by the Hermaphroditus and Salmacis-like
union of Amoret and Scudamour in the 1590 ending to Book III.
Lightly he clipt her twixt his armes twaine,
And straightly did embrace her body bright,
Her body, late prison of sad paine,
Now the sweet lodge of loue and deare delight:
But she faire Lady overcommen quight
Of huge affection, did in pleasure melt,
And in sweet rauishment pourd out her spright:
No word they spake, nor earthly thing they felt,
But like two senceles stocks in long embracement dwelt.
(III.xii.45a)

Yet while Britomart longs for the erotic experience she witnesses in the coupling of
Amoret and Scudamour, the model itself proves untenable, as it impinges heavily on

185
socially constructed discourses that work to constrain expressions of female desire.
200
“So
seemd those two as grown together quite, / That Britomart half-envying their blesse, /
Was much empassioned in her gentle sprite, / And to herselfe oft wisht like happinesse, /
In vaine she wisht, that fate n’ould let her yet possesse” (my italics III.xii.46.5-9). The
narrative’s description of Britomart’s “half-envying” state points to a suspicion of such
an idealized poetic representation of the complete integration and aestheticization of male
and female desires.
201

The Amoret and Scudamour model also enacts a revision of the myth of
Hermaphroditus and Salmacis from Ovid’s Metamorphoses; however, the 1590
hermaphroditic union that concludes Book III, elides a more insidious and less than ideal
subtext from Ovid’s original tale: male curiosity and desires to learn cannot effectively
counter the destructive force of female desire which emasculates, feminizes, and weakens
men. More problematically, Ovid’s tale offers no productive male response to this
scenario except in the articulation of desires for sameness, which culminate in the
unproblematic conflation of women and boys.
The bodies of them twayne
were mixt and joined bothe in one: Too bothe them did remayne
One countenaunce: like as if a man shold in one barke behold
twoo twigges bothe growing into one and stil together hold.
Even so when through her hugging and her grasping of the toother
the members of them mingled were and fastened bothe together,
They were not any lenger twoo: but (as it were) a toy

200
Silberman, Transforming Desire.

201
I must thank Susanne Wofford for bringing my attention to Britomart’s nuanced state of half-envy when
the female knight witnesses the Salmacis and Hermaphroditus-like coupling of Amoret and Scudamour in
the 1590 ending of Book III. Wofford, discussion at Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 2008.

186
Of double shape. We could not say it was a perfect boy,
Nor perfect wench: it seemed bothe and none of bothe too beene.
202

This conflation of female and male not only suggests their interchangeability, but also
transforms desires for individuation into a less threatening reconciliation of opposites.
As a result of this reconciliation, masculine desires in Ovid’s “Hermaphroditus and
Salmacis” manifest themselves in the continuation of male suffering, which suggests an
inability to achieve a state of empathy for an other and reveals an inability to reciprocate
except through acts of revenge that are based on emasculation. Once transformed and
“deprived of his manly voice,” Hermaphroditus prays to his parents/gods, who are
“moved by their biform son:” “‘Do grant this gift, / dear father and mother, to the son, /
who carries both your names: whoever comes / into this pool as man, may he emerge / a
half-man; at these waters’ touch may he / be weakened, softened’” (Book IV, lines 390-
395). His parents respond to his plea by pouring “into the pool a potion that endowed /
those waters with a pestilential power” (Book IV, lines 395-398). Hermaphroditus’s own
unwilling transformation only engenders the desire to enforce similarly disabling
transformations on youthful and inexperienced young men.
Although Spenser readily adopts a transcendent model of desire based on Ovid’s
union of opposites in the 1590 ending of Book III, he does so in order to problematize
Ovid’s model of desire as exemplified by the union of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus.
Berger offers the following insight about Spenser’s use of Ovid: Spenser takes the

202
Arthur Golding. The first fower bookes of P.Ovidius Nasos work intitled Metamorphoses translated oute
of Latin into Englishe meter Bk IV (London: 1565) Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Early
English Books Online. 2008. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:10762:50.

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Ovidian “urge to melt into unconsciousness,” “names it,” and “makes it a figure” by
fixing it in marble statue that inhabits a villa. Similarly, Spenser interrupts his description
of the transcendent union of Amoret and Scudamour to directly address the reader, which
has the effect of temporarily affixing the desire for transcendence to a fixed earthly
location: “Had ye them seene, ye would haue surely thought, / That they had been that
faire Hermaphrodite, / Which that rich Romane of white marble wrought, / And in his
costly Bath causd to bee site: / So seemd those two, as growne together quite”
(III.xii.46a). Spenser, in essence, brings Ovid’s model of desire “down-to-earth,” making
it less transcendent. Berger characterizes Spenser’s hermaphrodite as “neither a myth of
spiritual union nor an icon of generative union” and the fact that it stands in a “man-made
pool” in a simple villa, and not a sacred temple, suggests a “distance” between the
antique ideal of erotic transcendence of union and the sacrifices of self sovereignty
required of Ovid’s model.
Yet while Spenser problematizes Ovid’s model of transcendent desire based on
the union of opposites, he does not explicitly address the problematic consequences of
male and female desire as represented by Ovid in the tale of Salmacis and
Hermaprhodtius. In Ovid, as I will discuss next, desire is primarily motivated by error.
The fact that Ovid’s Salmacis initially mistakes the boy Hermaphroditus for the god
Cupid himself exemplifies the idea that the “distance” between classical ideals of
transcendence and the self-sacrifice involved in pursuing these ideals is often based upon
error and mistaken identity. Unable to make sense of Hermaphroditus’s disconcerting
beauty, Salmacis attributes his divine qualities to the mythological god Cupid. Salmacis

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has mistaken the youth before her for Cupid, and it is this error that conditions her erotic
expectations. Salmacis’s desire to join Hermaphroditus in an experience of erotic
transcendence have been shaped, in part, by an error—a mistake in which she takes a boy
for a god. Thus Salmacis’s awareness of the sacrifice of self-sovereignty involved in their
erotic union is subsumed beneath an idealistic conception of erotic union as
transcendence itself.
Masculine Anxiety and the Unintelligibility of Female Desire
Spenser’s solution to the problematic consequences of representations of male and
female desire that are based on idealizations of transcendence is to omit or “banish” the
elements he cannot explain. Berger’s characterization of Spenser’s revision of Ovid’s
hermaphrodite in the 1590 ending of Book III, highlights Spenser’s strategy of eliding or
banishing what he cannot account for: Spenser “intertwines his lovers even more closely
in their happy ending, [and] he sends them back to whence they came—back where they
inhabit and symbolize the enfeebling (costly)—climate of Busirane’s decadent
forbearers.”
203
Extending Berger’s argument, I would characterize Spenser’s strategy as
one in which the negative elements invoked by Ovid—elements that frame female desire
as destructive and effeminizing and male desire as unable to respond productively to
expressions of female desire—are effectively elided and remain unaccounted for by the
narrative.

203
Berger, Revisionary Play, 192.

189
Part of Spenser’s tendency to elide the negative elements of desire invoked in
Ovid, and his inability to account for the destructive consequences of male and female
desire, can be traced to masculine anxieties about the unintelligibility of female desire.
Certainly, early modern pamphlets and treatises attempted to define and delineate
culturally acceptable expressions of female desire. Most of these, of course, expressed
concern over the morally unstable nature of the female imagination that could be easily
incited to desire through idleness, reading, writing, and play going. Any of these events
could provoke women to thoughts and acts of inconstancy, deception, and lust. Adding to
this misogynistic view of female desire, and complicating ideas about the singular nature
of female desire (women as acting only with chaste and obedient motives) was the
conception of the queen as the exemplar of female virtue and chastity. Thus female desire
became intimately tied to the political prerogatives of the female monarch and could no
longer be completely separated from acts of political provenance. What was Spenser to
do with these competing ideologies of female desire? I argue that Spenser highlights
masculine anxieties about the unknown origin and unintelligibility of female desire by
playing out imagined scenarios in which female characters are made to confront desire, in
all its various shapes and forms. Yet a range of different literary and artistic forms
variously represented desire itself. To this end, Spenser’s reliance on multiple literary
forms and genres—from Ovid, to Virgil, to Petrarch, and Cicero—also marks a history of
sorts, of representations of erotic desire and women, from antiquity to the early modern
period.

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The removal of the hermaphroditic embrace (which appeared in the 1590 edition
of Book III) from the 1596 revised ending, and the joining of Amoret to Britomart in a
shared aim and forward movement toward Scudamour, may seem initially to provide a
sense of conclusion for Spenser’s altered third book. Spenser pulls the multitude and
copia that make up the spectacular theatrics and aggressive erotic dynamics of male-
female relations in Book III back, folds up chaotic structures, and moves on to the Book
of Friendship, without glancing backward. Yet the threat of subjection to a tyrant lover or
tyrant monarch is not so easily elided as Book III ends. Busirane’s disappearance from
The Fairie Queene does not erase the memory of the violent physical and psychic effects
of his furious imagination and desire upon the body and mind of Book III’s virtuous
female protagonists. Scudamour’s inability to pass a crucial test to his martial virtue and
failure to act as a courtly lover or as “Cupid’s man,” shed doubt on the strength of such a
system of masculine value. And Britomart’s paralytic wonder and inability to make sense
of the furious plentitude of myths, images, and forms Busirane’s imagination conjures
leads to a kind of epistemological stasis that the narrative is unable to escape or reconcile.
The idealized fulfillment of Scudamour and Amoret’s desires for one another in
the 1590 ending to Book III, and Britomart’s profession of a desire for similar erotic
fulfillment are strikingly muted by Spenser’s 1596 revision.
204
Spenser retracts the
original 1590 ending of Book III of The Faerie Queene in 1596, removing the

204
In “The Hermaphrodite and the Metamorphosis of Spenserian Allegory,” ELR 17 (1987): 207-223,
Lauren Silberman argues that the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene, containing the image of the
hermaphrodite, did not please Lord William Cecil Burleigh, one of Spenser’s most vocal critics. However,
along with this critical view, Silberman also speculates that one of the main causes of Burleigh’s
dissatisfaction with the poem’s ending might have to do with “the poet’s choice of sexual love as an epic

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“hermaphrodite embrace” between Amoret and Scudamour and replacing it with an
ineffective Scudamour who must depart from Busirane’s house in order to procure aid for
his beloved Amoret.
205
After despairing over Amoret’s imprisonment and Britomart’s
ability to rescue his beloved, Scudamour, “depart[s] for further aide t’ enquire”
(III.xii.45.8). Consequently, Amoret’s fate is completely in the hands of Britomart.
206

Traditionally, readers and literary critics alike interpreted the emblem of the
hermaphrodite, derived in part from Ovid’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, as a symbol of
harmony and a model of synthesis.
207
Yet the hermaphrodite’s ambiguous status as
neither male nor female—an androgynous figure capable of eliding gender and sexual

subject” (152). Spenser’s decision to make love and desire the epic matter for his poem and to court a
female audience, coupled with a concluding image of sexual pleasure and androgyny in the 1590 version of
the poem, threatened to destabilize cultural assumptions about female desire and sexuality. Maureen
Quilligan suggests that Spenser’s response to the censure of “criticall statesmen” like Burleigh was to offer
a “traditional defense of allegory,” directed to a traditional reader like Burleigh, “not one who has failed to
understand the nature of allegory—it is one who is incapable of feeling love: ‘Such ones ill judje love, that
cannot love, / Ne in their frozen hearts feele kindly flame’” (149). Quilligan asserts that Spenser’s reaction
to such criticism is to defiantly dismiss the censuring male reader in favor of “paradigmatic female one, and
then reconstitute the cancelled full-gendered readership (as imaged in the closing embrace of Amoret and
Scudamour) within the ‘androgynous’ queen—who is both queen of love and prince of peace” (145). As
such, Quilligan speculates that Book III may have been the cause of Burleigh’s censure because it is where
“the lovers’ dear debate [is] magnified” (145).

205
I see Scudamour’s ineffectual response to Amoret’s imprisonment and Britomart’s absence in Book III
as neatly summed up by the following lines from Petrarch’s Triumph of Chastity: “Virtue, that would never
doth forsake the good, / Proved then how deeply in the wrong is he / Who, leaving her, complains of his
defeat” (I). Scudamour “complains of his defeat” when he refuses to challenge the flames barring entrance
to Busirane’s house; later, Scudamour forsakes Amoret, chaste virtue itself, by leaving Busirane’s house
without attempting to rescue Amoret from the grips of the enchanter. Indeed it is the “Virtue” represented
by Britomart and Amoret that proves or brings to light “how deeply in the wrong” Scudamour is and how
far he has strayed from the conventional role of courtly lover.

206
Bellamy points to the work of “gender-based” critics who have identified the “canceling” of the
“hermaphroditic embrace” between Scudamour and Amoret as one of the poem’s most crucial sites of
intersection for gender and narrative (91-92).

207
See Donald Cheney, “Spenser’s Hermaphrodite and the 1590 Faerie Queene, PMLA 87, no. 2 (1972
March):192-200.

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distinctions—is complicated by the figure’s ability to be both male and female and to
signify gender distinction and sexual identity.
208

While insidious political threats are shown to underlie conventional literary forms
like the encomia and modes like allegory, the narrative, in both the 1590 and 1596
versions of the concluding cantos of Book III, fails to offer a single or privileged solution
to remove these pervasive threats. As we discover, Britomart cannot simply remove
Busirane, for he is both the source of and remedy for Amoret’s suffering. Indeed
Busirane’s demise would mark the end of Amoret, who must remain the steadfast love
object of her amorous “other,” the languishing and arguably unproductive knight
Scudamour. In order to address the unavoidable paradox surrounding Burirane’s role as
both the origins of and remedy to Amoret’s suffering, Busirane is forcibly removed by
Britomart from the scene as he grieves over his “wasted” “worke” in the 1596 ending
(III.xii.43.9). As the canto concludes, Britomart liberates Amoret from Busirane’s wicked
possession and Amoret emerges ambiguously “whole” to serve a female master.
In the 1596 revision, Britomart’s longing becomes a forestalling of the union
between Amoret and Scudamour as a despairing Scudamour leaves Busirane’s house to
seek aid for his beloved. In the original 1590 ending, Britomart comes upon Scudamour
where she has last left him—in “greate distresse,” in a state “twixt dolour and despight.”

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Bellamy also points to interpretations of this ending that are not as “redemptive;” for example, Lauren
Silberman “has termed the Faerie Queene a[n] ‘androgynous discourse’ (1986)” and “has interpreted the
hermaphroditic image as the poet’s way of deconstructing gender as ‘essence.’ Moreover, focusing on
Britomart’s fragmented distance from Scudamour and Amoret’s heterosexual embrace, critics, most
notably Silberman, have read Britomart against the grain of Ovid’s myth of the hermaphrodite as effacing
sexual difference, concluding that, at this point, Britomart’s chastity represents both sexual identity and
sexual difference” (92).

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Lying “on the cold earth … / In willful anguish, and dead heavinesse,” Scudamour is
envious of “the hardie Britomart’s successe” in rescuing Amoret. Britomart, accompanied
by a redeemed Amoret, calls to Scudamour, who recognizes the voice as familiar and
rears up from his prone position to see “his dearest love, the comfort of his dayes.”
Scudamour runs to Amoret “with hasty eagernesse, / Like a Deare, that which he in
chace endureth hath, now nigh breathlesse” (III.xii.44). In Stanza 45, no words are
spoken as bodies join together; Scudamour lightly grabs and embraces Amoret while she
is “overcommen quight / Of huge affection, did in pleasure melt / And in sweet
ravishment pourd out her spright” (IIIxii.45.5-7). This description of transcendent erotic
pleasure is, however, more spiritual than physical, as it is only the initial physical
embrace that initiates their experience of transcendence: “No earthly thing they felt, / But
like two senceles stocks in long embracement dwelt” (III.xii.45.8-9). In contrast, the 1596
ending to Book III effaces Britomart’s expression of erotic desire for sexual gratification
as the amorous union between Amoret and Scudamour is delayed, and male and female

desires remain unfulfilled as Book III concludes.
209
No longer a witness to the sensuous
coupling of Amoret and Scudamour, Britomart is, instead, left to witness a different sort

209
In The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure From Spenser to
Marvell (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Dorothy Stephens argues that “the poem’s
replacement of the hermaphrodite revises and extends the implications of its disapproval of Busirane’s
form of seduction” (32). Stephens also sees the 1596 revised ending of Book III as a creating a productive
space for articulations of female desire between books: “The distance between ‘Amoret’ as the sign of
Scudamour’s proprietary loss in book 3 and ‘Amoret’ as the sign to Belphoebe of Timias’s lust in Book IV
constitutes a space for female desire, in which Amoret and Britomart may ‘wend at will’ just as Scudamour
does, and without his company. This is the promise—and the warning—with which the second version of
Book III ends” (32).

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of transformation: the destruction of art and artifice in Busirane’s house after she compels
the enchanter to return Amoret to her prior state.
In the 1596 ending of Book III, Britomart leads the bound captive Busirane
through the same rooms she earlier found filled with fantastic spectacles, and she is
astonished by the unexpected ruin she encounters. Even the flames rising up across the
perilous porch, waiting to consume any one who dares to cross their threshold, are gone
replaced with solemn waste.
210
While Britomart feels pleasure at being able to pass
through the threshold, Busirane, in the 1596 ending, is deeply aggrieved that his work has
gone to waste: “Th’ Enchaunter selfe, which all that fraud did frame, / To have efforst the
love of that faire lasse, / Seeing his worke now wasted deepe engrieued was” (III.xii.43.7-
9). Instead of simply disappearing from the narrative, as in the 1590 ending, Busirane, as
the bound captive of Britomart, grieves over his work’s destruction in the 1596 revised
ending. Britomart arrives where she last left Scudamour and her squire and is surprised
they are not waiting for her. Amoret, who had begun to feel hope at reuniting with
Scudamour, becomes filled with fear at his absence. Similarly, Scudamour, who waited
hopefully to see Britomart and his love, is consumed with fear when he begins to think
about their fate; instead of seeking them out in the House of Busirane, however,
Scudamour and Britomart’s squire completely leave the scene to seek help. Without
comment upon Scudamour’s premature departure from Busirane’s house in the 1596

210
A.C. Hamilton’s gloss on this stanza notes that “The sudden vanishing of an enchanted palace is a
romance motif—e.g. in Ariosto, Orl. Fur 4.38—[and is] used here to contrast Guyon’s deliberate razing of
the ‘goodly workmanship’ of the Bower of Bliss at II.xii.83.3” (footnote 405). Spenser’s emphasis on the
equal destruction of both “goodly” and problematic forms of workmanship points to Spenser’s ability to
apply romance conventions in the service of epic ends.

195
conclusion, the narrator gives the pair leave to depart the scene: “Thence to depart for
further aide t’enquire: / Where let them wend at will, whilest here I doe respire”
(III.xii.45.8-9). Seemingly exhausted by the narrative’s latest events, the narrator pauses,
allowing Scudamour’s “turn,” his alteration in direction and implied purpose to remain
without critical comment, as the character transitions into Book IV without “looking
back” to offer aid to Britomart and Amoret. In Book IV, Scudamour’s lapse is neither
commented upon further by the narrator nor accounted for by the events of the poetic
narrative.
Claming the heroic mantle of “Cupid’s man” which he previously abandoned,
once again for himself, Scudamour demands the possession of Amoret against the
rebukes of Womanhood, who argues that Scudamour’s pretenses are “over bold” in the
laying hold of the “recluse Virgin” Amoret, who was “unto Venus services was sold.”
Scudamour counters Womanhood’s claims upon Amoret by replying,“Nay but it fitteth
best, / For Cupids man with Venus mayd to hold, / For ill your goddesse services are
drest / By virgins, and her sacrifices let to rest” (IV.x.54.6-9). To prove that he is indeed
“Cupid’s man,” Scudamour draws forth his shield “On which Cupid with his killing bow
/ And cruell shafts emblazoned” (IV.x.55.1-4). The sight of his shield makes
Womanhood shake with “terror,” rendering her speechless. Yet it is difficult to reconcile
the renewed heroism of Scudamour with his performance earlier in Book III when he was
an ineffectual and languishing knight, failing to cross over the flames at the threshold of
Busirane’s castle and to rescue Amoret from Busirane’s tortures. Scudamour’s shield,
which depicts the figure of Cupid, confers an almost magical authority to Scudamour’s

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amorous but over bold claims to Amoret. Acting as “Cupid’s man,” with shield in hand,
Scudamour can effectively exercise authority over Womanhood herself.
Scudamour’s earlier failures make his “pledge of faith” to Amoret, which is now
based on his renewed identity as “Cupid’s man,” problematic. Comparing Amoret to a
“warie Hynd within the weedie soyle,” he makes his intention to ignore Amoret’s
entreaties for freedom, in favor of his desires to possess “Faire Chastity,” transparent:
“For no intreatie would forgoe so glorious spoyle” (IV.x.55.7-9). Amoret is trapped as
the “glorious spoyle” of Scudamour. Instead of looking back at Amoret like Orpheus,
after losing his beloved Eurydice, Scudamour fixes his eyes “upon the Goddesse face”
“for feare of her offence” (IV.x.56.1-2). Scudamour describes the goddess’s countenance
as being animated “with amiable grace,” laughing at his “pretence” to claim Amoret.
This view leaves Scudamour “emboldned with confidence, / And nought for envy
sparing, / In presence of them all forth led her thence, / All looking on, and like astonisht
staring, / Yet to lay hand on her, not one of all them daring” (IV.x.56.1-9). In a repetition
of the scene from Cupid’s masque in which two grysie villains lead a suffering Amoret
forward and Britomart remains silent, the spectators in Venus’s Temple are also silent
witnesses to Scudamour’s pretensions to authority and are able only to look upon the
spectacle in wonder.
211
Amoret’s willfulness is paradoxically revealed by Scudamour’s
recollection that she repeatedly beseeched him for her freedom: “She often prayd, and

211
Lauren Silberman attributes “Womanhood’s silence” to “the terror [the female spectator’s experience]
at the sight of ‘Cupid with his killing bow / And cruell shafts’ (4.10.55.3-4) on Scudamour’s shield”
(4.10.55.3). Yet Silberman also notes that Amoret is not completely silent, characterizing Amoret as “both
voluble and unwilling” (86).

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often me besought, / Sometime with tender teares to let her goe, / Sometime with
witching smyles: bit yet for nought / That ever she to me could say or doe, / Could she
her wished freedome fro me wooe;” (my italics 4.10.57.1-5). Despite Amoret’s entreaties,
which demonstrate her knowledge of the amorous discourses of Petrarchan romance—her
use of prayers, pleas, “tender teares,” and “witching smiles”—Scudamour does not give
her freedom but leads her away from Venus’s protection “through the Temple gate”
(4.10.57.6). Praising his own martial prowess and ability to overcome danger, he calls
Amoret his “glorious spoyle of beautie” and compares his “struggle” to redeem Amoret
to Orpheus’s encounter with Cerebus, the fierce guardian of Pluto’s bower during his
attempts to rescue Eurydice.
This is, as many critics have pointed out, an ironic reference since Ovid’s
Orpheus, overwhelmed by desire, ultimately loses Eurydice, just as Scudamour loses
Amoret.
212
Yet this ironic Ovidian subtext also passes without explicit comment by the
narrator, as Scudamour’s amorous exploits conclude triumphantly as the canto ends: “But
evermore my shield did me defend, / Against the storme of every dreadfull stoure: / Thus
safely with my love I thence did wend. / So ended his tale, where I this Canto end”
(4.10.58.6-9). Scudamour admits that his shield is the crucial instrument in his successful
taking of Amoret from Womanhood’s temple. Amoret’s desires, which take the form of
pleas for liberty, are effectively ignored as she is once again subjected to the wavering
will of Scudamour, who appears to function as Spenser’s acceptable replacement for the
tyrant Cupid and the vile enchanter Busirane, because he is a more benign, less overtly

212
A.C. Hamilton, The Faerie Queene IV.x.58n, 491.

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threatening figure of male desire. It is notable, however, that even though Scudamour
presumes to act under the aegis of Cupid, he cannot be Cupid’s man without the
instrumental authority conferred by Cupid’s shield.
Bringing Book III to a Close
The concerns that led Spenser to remove the hermaphrodite image from the 1590
version of Book III can in part be traced to early modern cultural anxieties over the
popular and potentially corrupting use of pagan sources (erotic Ovid in particular) and
images in English letters. These anxieties make Spenser’s dependence on the figure of
Cupid to stage representations of female desire all the more curious. Like Ovid before
him, Spenser invokes the figure of Cupid to establish the form or “matter” of his poetry.
Spenser also directly invokes Ovid’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in the image of
Amoret and Scudamour’s “hermaphroditic embrace” in an attempt bring some of the
unfulfilled erotic desires of Book III’s central characters to fulfillment, thus bringing
narrative closure to Book III and highlighting the potential force of female desire. The
1590 ending of Book III brings to light the potential force of female desire in Britomart’s
articulation of empathic longing, though expressed as “half-envying” at Book III’s end, to
experience a similar union as Amoret and Scudamour.
In the 1590 ending of Book III, the narrator invokes the common georgic topos of
reciprocation between Amoret and Scudamour by describing the couple’s union in
agricultural terms:
213

213
A.C. Hamilton, The Faerie Queene III.xii.47 footnote, 406.

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Thus doe those lovers with sweet counteruayle,
Each of loves bitter fruit despoile.
But now my teme begins to faint and fayle,
All woxen weary of their journal toyle:
Therefore I will their sweatie yokes assoyle
At this same furrowes end, till a new day:
And ye faire Swayns, after your long turmoyle,
Now cease your worke, and at your pleasure play;
Now cease your work; tomorrow is an holy day.
(III.xii.47)

The narrator’s intervention aligns the weakening of the poet’s theme to the end of an
erotically charged sexual union in which the physical release of male desire - the
subsequent “faint and fayle” of the poet’s theme - is reflected in the literal softening of
the poet’s lines. The narrator absolves the lovers’ of their “sweatie yokes,” ordering them
to “cease” their labor for the experience of pleasure. The lovers take up loving,
counterbalancing “loves bitter fruit” with playful pleasure. Thus consummation becomes
part of a natural and necessary act that marks the fulfillment of desires as part of an
orderly progression from physical work in the fields to sexual toil, followed by spiritual
“work,” and a holy respite from all physical labors. Spenser’s conception of desire is
made part of a process of erotic fulfillment that occurs only after a “long turmoyle”
(III.xii.47). In making desire part of a progression, Spenser effectively combines georgic
topos from Virgil and erotic themes from Ovid and situates experiences of love and
desire—forms of play and pleasure—as productive counterpoints that balance the toil of
work. In contrast to the 1596 revised ending in which romance more explicitly gives way
to epic, the consequence of Spenser’s mixing of elements from Virgilian and Ovidian
modes is the establishment of a productive relationship between the genres of epic and
amor.

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Yet the productive relationship that results in the pleasurable fulfillment of erotic
desire after “long turmoyle” is consistently marred by Spenser’s Cupid and the god’s
narrative counterparts – Busirane and the figure of the hermaphrodite - who spectacularly
and gruesomely highlight the violence and loss of individual liberty underlying Spenser’s
representations of female experiences of love and desire. Spenser’s activation of the
political force of allegory within The Faerie Queene’s emblem intertexts concomitantly
underscores the insistent threat of tyranny that accompanies the poet’s narrative of praise.

201
Chapter Four
“Must we be servile, doing what he list?”:
Taking Ovid’s Cupid and the Rhetorical Structures of Roman Elegy to Task
in Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus

Think butt on this;
Who weares loves crowne, must not doe soe amiss,
Butt seek theyr good, who on thy force doe lye
(Lady Mary Wroth, Sonnet 3, Pamphilia to
Amphilanthus,12-14).
214

“Poor love,” said the Queene, “how doth all storyes and every
writer use thee at their pleasure, appareling thee according to
their various fancies? Canst thou suffer thy selfe to
be thus put in cloathes, nay rags instead of virtuous habits?
Punish such Traytors, and cherish mee thy loyall subject
Who will not so much as keepe thy injuries neere me.”
(Lady Mary Wroth, The First Part of The Countess of
Montgomery’s Urania 317.23-26)

In Chapter four, I argue that Lady Mary Wroth’s sonnet sequence Pamphilia to
Amphilanthus takes up Spenser’s skepticism of Elizabethan representations of erotic
transcendence, with their basis in error and the surrender of self-sovereignty, from a
female perspective. In choosing rhetorical forwardness over reticence and withdrawal, the
female speaker of Wroth’s sonnet sequence demonstrates how expressions of bold speech
as well as demonstrations of modesty are constructed, self-aware responses to two of
classical elegy’s most pervasive figures – the cruel, unfaithful, manipulative male amator

214
The majority of information regarding Wroth’s literary borrowings, biography, publishing history, and
poems is from Josephine A. Roberts’edition of The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1983 and repr. 1992).

202
and the oft-blamed divine cause of his erotic compulsion, Cupid/Amor. Unlike the
directly addressed and named female objects of Greek and Roman elegy - Propertius’s
Cynthia, Tibullus’s Delia, Ovid’s Corinna - Wroth’s main addressee, Amphilanthus (in
Greek, “the lover of two”), remains explicitly unnamed in her sequence.
215
Wroth’s other
major addressee, Cupid, is more often than not, directly engaged as either Cupid or Love.
Thus Wroth seems to take seriously the Ovidian amator’s claim that Cupid is the origin
of his erotic persistence and behind his choice to pursue the female lover against her will.
Wroth appropriates the male elegists’ identification of self-worth in their claim-
to-power as writers who can impart fame upon the female subjects of their poetic lines.
While the male elegist sees poetic fame as a reasonable bargaining chip – a just reward
for the female subject’s acceptance of him (without the prerequisite payment) into her
bedroom, Wroth’s female persona promises poetic infamy for the deception and cruelty
of her male beloved – a just punishment for the male subject’s cruelty and absence.
While Petrarch’s adaptation of Ovidian materials and myths provided Wroth with
one model for articulating experiences of erotic desire and their problematic
consequences, this chapter will concentrate more explicitly on Wroth’s extensive and
strategic borrowings from Ovid and the generic structures of Roman love elegy.
216

Josephine Roberts notes that Wroth’s admiration for Ovid’s work is evident when she

215
By not explicitly naming the male subject of her verse, Wroth amplifies Ovid’s method. Unlike
Tibullus and Propertius who invoke the names of their female beloveds at the beginning of their sequences,
Ovid delays naming Corinna until Amores 1.5.

216
Early literary approaches and criticism of Wroth’s sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (1621),
prose romance The Countesse of Montgomery’s Urania (1621), and pastoral tragicomedy Love’s Victorie
(1620s) have maintained that Wroth’s female speakers worked to “reverse” the traditional dynamic

203
praises the poet directly in her prose romance Urania “when Antissia meets a scholar,
‘one who had bin mad in studying how to make a piece of poetry to excel Ovid, and to
bee more admired then hee is’” (II.i.f.13 qtd in Roberts 48).
217
I argue that Wroth’s
dramatic staging of female encounters with the figure of Cupid and use of Ovidian
materials to achieve poetic authority are narrative strategies that highlight the rhetorical
failures of both the persuasive strategies of masculine elegy and chaste discourse. These
failures, as Wroth demonstrates, extend to the relationship between the subject and

between the desiring and writing male speaker and the silent but cruel female love-object of Petrarchan
discourse. See Ann Rosalind Jones, “Designing Women: The Self as Spectacle in Mary Wroth and
Veronica Franco,” in Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed.
Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 135-153. Jones argues
that Wroth’s poetry is an attempt to redeem her diminished social standing at James’s Court after her
husband’s death. Naomi J. Miller, in contrast, argues that Wroth does not reverse the dynamics of the
conventional Petrarchan sonnet but that she alters the subject of Wroth’s sequence, allowing her to address
“a wider range of cultural discourses than masculine love poetry” (36). See Miller, Changing The Subject:
Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press
of Kentucky, 1996) and “Mary Wroth and the Invention of Female Poetic Subjectivity” in Reading Mary
Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England, ed. Miller and Waller, 175-190. These
readings were made possible, in part, by the work of Nancy J. Vickers and Patricia Parker. In her seminal
essay, “Diana Described: Women and Scattered Rhyme,” in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth
Abel, 95-108 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), Nancy J. Vickers argues that Petrarch reverses
the threat of defeat through the fragmentation of Laura’s body. In Literary Fat Ladies (London and New
York: Metheun, 1987) 61-62, Patricia Parker extends Vickers’ argument to the world of Elizabethan
England where Elizabethan courtiers readily adapted the language of Petrarchan poetics in their appeals to
the Queen who was often addressed as though she was the cruel mistress of Petrarch’s sequence. For her
suggestive discussion of the ways in which women writers exploited lyric conventions, see Ann Rosalind
Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990).

217
Josephine Roberts and Melissa E. Sanchez have emphasized the idea that Antissia’s aggressive pursuit
of revenge for the wrongs committed against her by Amphilanthus, represents the flip side of Pamphilia’s
devotion to constancy. Roberts suggests that the literal meaning of Antissia’s name (“opponent”) can be
linked to Mary Fitton, who was also involved in a love affair with the Earl of Pembroke and who also gave
birth to an illegitimate child by him. Antissia’s later condemnation by characters as mad make her attempts
to exceed Ovid’s poetry even more striking. By attempting to place herself in the role of the aggressive
Ovidian amator, Antissia makes a claim for both the creative authority of the poet and the erotic license of
the male lover. See Melissa E. Sanchez, “The Politics of Masochism in Mary Wroth’s Urania,” ELH 74,
no. 2 (Summer 2007): 449-478.

204
sovereign and suggest a breakdown in political uses of affective discourse, which require
the surrender of personal liberty and will in exchange for public stability.
Wroth capitalizes on the opportunities she identifies in Ovid’s erotic poems and
those of other classical elegists like Propertius. These classical poets held a strong appeal
for Wroth because their representation of male-female relationships tended to elide the
social and emotional struggles of the economically and sexually compromised woman in
favor of the male amator’s sexual and poetic prerogatives. Wroth’s own loss of social
standing in King James I’s court in 1610, her status as a widow with two illegitimate
children, and her incurrence of substantial debt after her husband’s death in 1614 made
her all too familiar with the paradoxical cultural requirements that such a position of
political, economic, and emotional dependence demanded.
Wroth boldly addresses issues of rhetorical manipulation in the amorous discourse
of Ovid’s elegiac poetry and takes the Ovidian amator to task for the cruelty and
aggression that underlie his persuasive appeals. Wroth adapts pervasive Ovidian themes
like the subjection of women against their will and the loss of liberty that are
characteristic of Ovidian experiences of erotic desire. In so doing, Wroth alters the terms
of one of the dominant figures of Roman love elegy - servitium amoris -“slavery of love”
in which the lover is cast as a hopeless and helpless slave to a cruel and indifferent
mistress (domina). Wroth’s female speaker does adhere, in part, to elegiac conventions in
her frequent complaints about her helplessness in the face of a cruel and indifferent male
love object; however, she also broadens her complaint to include an indictment of the
dominating figure of Love itself.

205
Cupid is also a central figure for Wroth’s interrogation of modes of political rule.
Literary scholars like Elaine V. Beilin and most recently, Melissa E. Sanchez have
focused attention on the political nature of Wroth’s poetry and its participation in
political debates over the relationship between sovereign and subject in Jacobean
England. “Wroth’s fascination with the predicament of erotic thralldom allows her to
evaluate what historians have described as a widening fissure in seventeenth century
England between royal claims to discretionary authority and a communitarian view of
sovereignty emphasizing counsel and consent.”
218
Wroth poetry takes up scenarios of
erotic subjection between the female speaker and Cupid or Love in an attempt to make
explicit her political interest in the shifting dynamics of Jacobean models of governance.
By activating popular literary incarnations of the figure of Cupid – the god as
playful competitor, weeping child, and fugitive – Wroth’s poetry insists upon the
rhetorical nature of the figure’s appeals and their failure to persuade the female reader or
lover. Wroth’s sequence works to weaken such culturally constructed discourses that
limit the female speaker’s eloquence and consign her to ineffective responses to the
figure of love. For Wroth’s female speaker, knowledge is derived from the ability to
recognize the poetic mechanisms that keep the female lover in servitude to Love. In the
process, Wroth aligns the female speaker’s erotic subjection with the feminized subject’s
political subjection and questions the surrender of self-sovereignty required by absolutist
models of rule.

218
See Sanchez, “The Politics of Masochism in Mary Wroth’s Urania, 449.

206
Wroth’s sequence is also interested in investigating what happens to female desire
– the physical and ethical consequences - when Cupid and chaste discourses of desire that
employ the figure as a mode of expression fail to persuade. By emphasizing Cupid’s
status as a boy, for example, Wroth weakens the authority of affective discourses that
attempt to constrain expressions of female desire. By mocking Cupid and the genre of
court compliment in which he appears, Wroth demonstrates that Cupid is just one, among
many, poetic figures with specific rhetorical purpose and thus reduces the figure’s
affective potency and persuasive authority. By rendering Cupid’s affective abilities
ineffective, Wroth exposes the disingenuousness, insincerity, and rhetoricity at the center
of courtly narratives of praise. This tactic contributes to the domestication of Cupid as a
figure of rhetorical manipulation - a poetic toy - that can be more easily resisted and
dismissed by the female speaker.
Throughout her sequence, Wroth works to weaken Cupid’s authority and to assert
the just and reasonable nature of female authority in amorous matters. Yet Wroth’s
female speaker is frequently torn between the expected shame and suffering evoked by
the conventional erotic excesses of female desire attributed to Venus, and cultural
imperatives reinforcing female chastity, silence, and obedience. Because the relationship
between rhetoric, idolatry, and sexual excess is often intensely focused on the character
of Venus, this chapter’s discussion of Cupid and female desire includes attention to the
paradoxical position of Venus in Wroth’s poetry. More broadly, the oppositional
representations of Venus in Wroth’s poetry help to expose the rhetorical extremes that

207
contribute to the ethical and political dilemma of the desiring woman in seventeenth
century England.
Gender and the Social Function of the Sonnet
Wroth’s choice of the sonnet, a form that traditionally featured a male speaker
lavishing praise upon the beauty of a female mistress who inspires his verse, marks a
dramatic shift in the sonnet’s conventional male-dominated interests. This novel shift has
been repeatedly noted by critics who agree that Wroth’s sequence is marked by a distinct
movement away from the representation of the erotic suffering of the male poet-lover and
the poetic objectification of the female beloved, to a focus on the paradoxical experience
of the desiring woman and the female poet. What has not been noted with such frequency
is the bold challenge Wroth offers to the morally prescriptive content of conduct books in
her sequence. In addressing the stigma of early modern print as it attached itself to a
woman poet, Wroth returns to classical sources. Wroth’s return to classical sources of
inspiration includes an expansion of models from Ovid and Petrarch to the larger social
group of erotic elegists like Tibullus and Propertius. These elegists cultivated models not
just for rhetorical imitation, but they also modeled a generically produced “place” for
women (as lovers, poets, and political subjects) that Wroth’s sequence revalues.
Seizing upon the contemptuous rhetoric forwarded by satirists like Richard
Lovelace, Wroth’s sequence exploits the potential for amorous boldness in female writers
and readers of love poetry and romance, who were frequently identified with erotic
transgression and sexual caprice by many early modern conduct books, religious
treatises, and anti-theatrical tracts. In her study of the reading practices of early modern

208
women, Heidi Brayman Hackel identifies the implicit threat posed by the female reader
in conduct books:
conduct books … voiced the anxiety that women might be overly attentive to
their reading and seek to make use of it. [Richard] Brathwait, for example,
advises the English gentleman to throw off any books of love “to the darkest
corner of our studies,” and he then imagines women readers attending excessively
to books like “the amorous toyes of Venus and Adonis: which Poem…they heare
with such attention, peruse with such devotion, and retaine with such delectation.”
Attending, perusing, and retaining: these habits of reading were urged by
humanists and often facilitated by annotation. Brathwait is alarmed, it seems,
by the intensity of women readers’ attention to love poetry, and he worries that
they will read it as one should read a school text or Bible. (208)
219

The facility for close, critical reading that Braithwait identifies with alarm in women
readers is most problematic in its threat to become explicit action. Wroth’s sequence
capitalizes on the possibility of female action contained within this threat and demands a
careful reader of love poetry who possesses the ability to not only interpret the rhetorical
structures underlying love elegy but also to take responsive action.
In spite of an atmosphere hostile to female education in which women were urged
to focus their reading and writing efforts primarily upon understanding and applying the
moral tenets of Scripture, Wroth’s decision to write in the form of the much-maligned
love lyric is notable because it suggests that she recognized potential in “a tradition that
was flexible enough to express subjectivity, or even to encode political discontent.”
220
In
England, the conflation of female writing and unchastity was a popular justification for

219
Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England (Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).

220
Margaret Hannay. “The Countess of Pembroke’s Agency in Print and Scribal Culture,” in Women’s
Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550-1800, edited by George L.
Justice and Nathan Tinker (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 22.

209
the cultural view that a woman’s participation in the emerging print culture at all (not to
mention if her subject matter involved amor) was equal to performing knowing acts of
vanity and the sexual trafficking of one’s body. Margaret Hannay notes that
Englishwomen experienced greater resistance to their poetic endeavors than did their
Continental counterparts: “Richard Lovelace, for example, satirizes a woman who
‘Powders a Sonnet as she does her hair, / Then prostitutes them both to publicke
Aire.’”
221

Aristocratic female readers were among the close friends and family that formed
the “public” that received Wroth’s sequence in circulated manuscript form as early as
1613.
9
Publication for women, as became the case for Wroth in 1621 after the
publication of Urania, was often connected to libelous and sexually open— and therefore
inappropriately bold—female speech. Lord Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham’s claim
that Wroth had slandered his family and his infamous accusation that she was a
“Hermaphrodite in show,” is suggestive evidence of the public scrutiny a woman writer
encountered for writing publicly about private indiscretions.
217
Although Wroth
effectively countered Denny’s accusations with great wit in her poem “Railing Rimes
Returned upon the Author by Mistress Mary Wrothe,” she immediately requested that her
work be pulled from publication and sale.
222

221
Richard Lovelace, The Poems of Richard Lovelace, ed. C.H. Wilkinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), 200.

222
See Jonathan F.S. Post, English Lyric Poetry in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1999),
212.

210
Wroth’s awareness of the stigma attached to women writers who published is
made evident in her careful attention to the relationship between female speaker and male
beloved in her sequence. The speakers of Wroth’s sonnets do not necessarily “articulate
a new form of social distinction;” instead, I would argue that the speakers of Wroth’s
sequence articulate an already existing relationship of interdependence between men and
women. Sharon L. James has demonstrated that this implicit interdependence is
characteristic of the dynamics between the poet-amator and docta puella (learned woman)
in classical elegy. The shifting dynamics of courtship in the Elizabethan love lyric
between a male speaker, seeking the amorous approval of a female love object or female
patron, also speak to this interdependence. What Wroth offers is not, as Christopher
Warley suggests, an “appropriation of the noble imaginary [a social ideal which] helps to
make possible the reimagination of ‘female’ as private and increasingly domestic,” but
instead a “reappropriation” of the noble imaginary that positions the woman and female
speaker as participants in emerging “publics” that are inseparably tied to already existent
and productive “private” spheres of activity.
223

While Wroth identifies opportunity in the sonnet form, she does not adopt it
uncritically. Anxiety and uneasiness about the sonnet’s masculine conventions are
notable in Wroth’s denigration of the socially acceptable forms of courtly compliment
and the economic exchanges and transactions they conceal. The female speaker’s claim
in Sonnet P8 (9) that “lines … bought” further alienate female experiences of love and

223
Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge,
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

211
desire and perpetuate an artificial distance between women as objects of desire and
women as desiring subjects, attests to this uneasiness.
Led by the power of griefe, to wailings brought
By faulse conseite of change fall’ne on my part,
I seeke for some smale ease by lines, which bought
Increase the paine; griefe is nott cur’d by art (P9 8 1-4).

By employing “bought,” a term of economy and exchange to introduce a set of terms that
refer to poetics and subjective experiences of pain and suffering, Wroth suggests that
poetry is a mode of exchange that is not curative and only accentuates the speaker’s
suffering (P8 [9]). Wroth’s speaker concludes that “grief is nott cur’d by art” and the
“smale ease” she seeks in “lines … bought,” only “Increase the paine.” Wroth’s use of
“bought” suggests that the poet’s “lines” are a concession that is not equivalent to the
female speaker’s suffering.
224
Early in her sequence, Wroth throws doubt onto the male
amator’s claim that the female love object’s immortalization through his poetic skill can
remedy her discontent. The poem concludes with a triumphant assertion that neither love
nor poetry cannot assuage the female speaker’s suffering or the male beloved’s injustice:
“Yett though I darke do live I triumph may; unkindness, nor this wrong shall love
allay”(13-14). Wroth shifts the focus of her triumph away from love’s power to remedy
amorous error to love’s inability to mitigate the injustice done to the constant female
lover.

224
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, bought (ppl. a) could refer to something “purchased from
an outside source (i.e. not raised/produced on one’s own premises,” or something “ransomed, gained by a
sacrifice.” OED Online, 2
nd
ed., s.v. “bought,” http://dictionary.oed.com.libproxy.usc.edu.

212
Wroth’s choice of a “defunct” poetic mode may seem curious since the sonnet
reached the height of its popularity in early modern England between the 1580s and
1610s.
225
However, the appeal of the sonnet for a female writer can be explained in terms
of the form’s social function. As a mode of overt compliment and subversive critique,
the sonnet’s social function offered Wroth a familiar structure in which to draw attention
to relationships of interdependence between men and women, subject and sovereign. I
would add to Warley’s argument that the sonnet “provided a form to describe social
positions for which no vocabulary existed,” the idea that the sonnet form could also be
viewed as articulating a social position of political, economic, and sexual
interdependence.
Recasting Love’s Triumph
Similar to the literary accomplishments of her aunt Mary Sidney, the Countess of
Pembroke, Wroth’s intellectual work was, and is often, assessed in relation to the literary
successes of her uncle. While these comparisons can be limiting if Wroth’s literary
achievements are viewed as solely relational and in terms of her relationship with and to
her uncle’s poetic work, Sidney’s verse did provide one of many accessible models for
Wroth to imitate, revise, and reject. In addition, Sidney’s Defense of Poetry, with its
amorous themes, mythological figures and tropes, validated lyric poetry as a didactic and
moralistic form if handled by a skillful poet. While Wroth’s sonnet sequence is clearly
influenced by Petrarchan conventions and indebted to Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, her

225
Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction, 10.

213
appropriation and use of classical sources and figures is often quite different from her
male counterparts. By staging dramatic encounters between the speaker and mythological
figures, especially Cupid, in her sonnet sequence, Wroth draws attention to the erotic
inequities and rhetorical challenges underlying the female speaker’s engagement with
these troubling figures of antiquity.
226

The opening sonnet of Wroth’s sequence reimagines Sidney’s perverse Petrarchan
dream vision in Astrophil and Stella. In recognizing that female resistance enables the
rhetorical conditions of elegy, Wroth’s poetry takes seriously the male poet’s dependence
upon the body and mind of the female love object for the materials of his poetry. In
doing so, Wroth suggests that the act of writing love poetry is not solely recuperative but
may instead be a form of self-deception and delusion, which only validates the self-worth
of the male amator and elides the male poet’s necessary dependence upon the female love
object.
In Wroth’s opening sonnet, Cupid, in obedience to his mother’s commands,
martyrs the speaker’s heart and the Petrarchan world of the dream-vision becomes the
speaker’s lived experience: “I, waking hop’d as dreames it would depart / Yett since: O
mee: a lover I have binn” (P1 13-14). Because the female speaker is transformed into a
lover while asleep, she can claim little direct control over the actions of Venus and
Cupid. Thus she does not have any choice but to love when she is made into Cupid’s

226
Rebecca Lemon suggestively notes that it may be the idea that it is “the fascination of Cupid and Venus
with the speaker” that “licenses the poet’s subsequent desire and poetic inspiration, having stung the
speaker against her will” (147-148) that makes Wroth’s deployment of Cupid so different than her male
counterparts. See Lemon, “Indecent Exposure in Mary Wroth” in Women and Culture at the Court of the
Stuart Queens, ed. Clare McManus (London: Palgrave, 2003), 140-160.

214
sacrificial victim. Here Wroth uses the elegiac lover’s “excuse of Divine compulsion” to
a different end than Ovid’s amator who utilizes it to conceal his sexual agenda. Cupid’s
theft of a foot from Ovid’s poetic line is both a conventional recusatio or refusal to
conform to the expectations of genre and a divine excuse to transform himself from a
writer of epic to a writer of elegy. Wroth’s recusatio is enacted in her refusal to maintain
the conventional position of the desired female love object of Petrarchan lyric and
Ovidian elegy. Cupid obeys his mother’s orders and the female speaker expresses the
conventional sentiments of an abject female lover by hoping her transformation is a
fantasy. However, she wakes to discover that she is no longer in the fictional world of a
Petrarchan dream-vision but has been thoroughly metamorphosed into a lover.
Wroth’s use of the classical elegiac “excuse of Divine compulsion”
227
works on
two levels: on one level, as Rebecca Lemon argues, the sonnet’s dream-vision is a
distancing moment that reinforces emphasize the unconscious origins of Wroth’s poetry,
and the female speaker’s vulnerability, lack of control, isolation, and subsequent
virtue.
228
On a secondary level, Wroth uses the “excuse of Divine compulsion” to conceal
her agenda: writing love’s conquest from a distance, in the form of a Petrarchan dream-
vision, allows the female writer more implicitly to highlight the idea that the experience
of desire, as represented by the discourse of Venus and Cupid in the martyring of the
speaker’s heart, is the stuff of life, not only of literary dream-visions. The speaker’s state

227
See James, Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy,1-34, 155-
211.

228
Lemon, “Indecent Exposure,” 140-141, 145-149.

215
at the end of the sonnet attests to this transformation from the senseless world of fantasy
and fiction to the realm of lived experience as she initiates her sequence with a
literalization of Petrarchan convention. However, unlike Ovid and Petrarch, Wroth
displaces Cupid’s relative importance in the triumph of love and positions Venus in a
central role as the primary instigator of the female persona’s metamorphoses.
Wroth’s assignment of Venus to a central position of authority and agency in her
opening sonnet and the female speaker’s apparent passivity represent two distinctly
oppositional postures Wroth negotiates throughout her sequence. For Heather Dubrow,
“P1 exemplifies the paradoxical links between storytelling and absence of agency which
are more subtly present throughout the sequence, and the fact that almost all narratives
are located in a mythological realm may suggest that she cannot achieve narrativity in
other worlds.”
229
Like Jonson’s alignment of Wroth’s agency with the mythological
figures she can seemingly become, Dubrow’s suggestion begs the question: Can a female
speaker achieve agency and “narrativity” in the “mythological realm” without becoming
the abstract object of moral allegorization?
Wroth’s turn to Ovid allows her to avoid this fate; like the learned female reader
(docta puella) who is inscribed into Ovid’s Amores and who possesses the necessary skill
to judge the rhetorical merits of the amator’s poetry, the female speaker of Wroth’s
sequence is a vigilant and educated reader who can recognize the elegiac praise and

229
Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, New York:
Cornell University Press),141.

216
compliment (blanditiae) aimed at her by her lover.
230
Thus, she can approach the blind
figure of Cupid with eyes wide open.
The recognition of the speaker’s own servitude to well-worn amorous conventions
offers her crucial insight into the rhetorical nature of the male beloved’s compliment.
Thus, Wroth’s female speaker discovers a form of agency when she realizes, in a poem
addressed to “fond jealousy” that “flattery and skill, / which idly did make me observe
thy will” are the cause of her current state of bondage (P69). Wroth’s speaker
demonstrates the self-serving motivations behind the Ovidian amator’s “idle” pursuit of
love poetry and the docta puella – fame, immortality, and sex. In Amores 1.15, Ovid’s
speaker addresses “gnawing Envy” who questions the idle pursuits of the poet-lover. The
poet justifies his choice of amorous occupations by concluding that Envy only “feeds on”
the living while love will make his verses immortal. For Wroth’s female speaker, Ovid’s
“gnawing Envy” is transformed into “fond jealousy,” whose “secret artts” are familiar,
not new. The male amator’s skillful compliment is the source of her careless obedience,
and the female speaker concludes, “Thus is my learning by my bondage bought” (14).
Wroth’s female speaker recognizes that her “bondage” to the program of love elegy with
its aim to seduce or placate the female reader with “excuses” and “faulcehood [s]” (P64)
need not render her entirely submissive. Wroth’s association of “bondage” with
“learning” transforms her oppression into an opportunity for enlightenment.
Encoded in this opportunity for personal enlightenment within the erotic discourse

230
See James, Learned Girls and Male Persuasion, 12, 14-15, 17-19, 22.

217
of love elegy is an implicit critique of the absolutist conception of sovereign authority. In
The Trewe Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598), James I presents himself as a teacher whose
goal is to “teach” and “instruct” “honest and obedient subjects to your King in all times
coming.”
231
Using the model of divinely chosen Biblical Kings, James argues for a
relationship of “mutuall” obligation and care between monarch and subject. Despite the
personal defects of a sovereign, which may lead him to perpetrate cruel and unjust acts
against his people, subjects are to remain passive, submissive, and obedient. Rebellion
against even the most unjust sovereign is never justified since revolt against a king is
framed by James as rebellion against God. Although Wroth’s female speaker observes
the martyring of her heart in the sequence’s first sonnet, and assumes the role of a passive
and obedient subject in love, her passivity is later disavowed in favor of a more active
political subjectivity. After citing examples of how she has fulfilled her obligations as
love’s servant, the female speaker assumes the role of instructive authority and reminds
love that it shares an equal obligation to exercise balanced rule.
Watch butt my sleepe, if I take any rest
For thought of you, my spirit soe distrest
As pale, and famish’d, I, for mercy cry;
Will your servant leave? Think butt on this;
Who weares loves crowne, must not doe soe amiss,
Butt seek theyr good, who on thy force doe lye. (P3 12-14)

231
See James I, The Trewe Lawe of Free Monarchies: Or the Reciprock and Mutuall Duetie Betwixt a Free
King, and His Naturall Subjects. Edinburgh: 1598. Cambridge University Library. Early English Books
Online. http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-
2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:99854622 (accessed 30 October 2009).

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In the third sonnet’s concluding couplet, the speaker invokes the absolute authority of
Cupid, who “weares loves crowne.” As love’s subject, Wroth’s speaker aligns her
dependence upon love’s restraint and good judgment in matters of love with the equally
important obligation of sovereign authority to seek the “good” of those they rule.
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Sympathy and the Reformation of Cupid
Like so many elegiac lovers before her, Wroth’s speaker draws attention to her
suffering and grief in an attempt to move the god of Love to treat her with mercy and to
exercise reasoned authority. Unlike past elegiac lovers, Wroth’s speaker appeals to the
sense of shared suffering between the female lover and the goddess of love. In P58
(Song), Venus’s “sacred power” is linked to her ability to empathize with the female
speaker. The female speaker’s appeals to the goddess’s empathy suggest that empathy
itself can be turned toward purposes of persuasion and reform.
Say Venus how long have I lov’d and serv’d you here?
Yett all my passions scorn’d or doubted although cleere
Alas thinke love deserveth love, and you have lov’d
Looke on my paines, and see if you the like have prov’d:

Remember you ar the Goddess of desire,
And that your sacred power hath touch’d, and felt this fire,
Parswade the flames in mee to cease, or them redress
In mee, poore mee who stormes of love have excess. (P58 Song 1-8)

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By suggesting the idea that a relationship of interdependence exists between the female speaker’s state
of subjection and Love’s exercise of an ethical authority, Wroth takes seriously the claim made in the First
Song of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella that “Only by you Cupid his crown
maintaineth.” Sir Philip Sidney, Selected Writings, ed. Richard Dutton (New York: Routledge, 2002), 60.

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To elicit Venus’s sympathies, the female speaker’s complaint includes the conventional
woes of the abject lover, who suffers from the pains of love - “restless nights,” “sighs
unfained,” and “saddest looks” (9-12). These demonstrative shows of the tormented
lover stand as evidential “witness[es]” to the female speaker’s ability to love. Framed by
the speaker as a sacred figure of devotion, Venus is depicted as the rightful authority in
Love who has the power, and more importantly, the right to exercise her power over her
unruly son: “Command that wayward child your sonn to grant your right, / And that his
bowe, and shafts he yeeld to your fayre sight / To you who have the eyes of joye the hart
of love, / And then new hopes may spring that I may pitty move” (13-16). Indeed, if
Cupid’s powers are not curbed, the speaker warns Venus that her son will turn his
weapons toward her. The female speaker provides the most compelling rationale for
Venus’s restraint of Cupid’s authority: “Let him nott triumph that hee can hurt, and save,
/ And more brag that to you your self a wound he gave. / Rule him, or what shall I expect
of good to see / Since hee that hurt you, hee alas may murder mee” (17-20). Venus’s
temporary lapse in authority is presented as an issue of grave ethical import for the
female speaker who fears that if the goddess of Love cannot rule her son, the violence of
his effects will only intensify when turned toward the female speaker. Cupid’s ability to
injure Venus is also problematic for the speaker because the goddess’s injury will
become the occasion for the god to willfully boast of his transgression against his
mother’s authority. Wroth points to the necessity of re-establishing the familial hierarchy
and restoring Venus’s authority over her son in order to redress the imbalance in power
that threatens to annihilate the speaker.

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The fourth poem (F1) from the Folger Manuscript of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.
represents an early appeal for ethical reform of upstart Cupid, which was removed from
the published version of the sequence. The sonnet presents Venus’s case against Cupid
and her request that he should be given sight to see his errors and shame.
233
However,
Venus’s suit is unsuccessful and Cupid is freed from blame. The poem narrates Venus’
appeal to the gods and her attempt to “move” them in the form of a quasi-legal “sute,”
which claims “That since she was of love the goddess stil’d / She only might have the
power of love, / And nott as now a partner with her child” (1-4). “Stil’d” as the goddess
of Love by the gods, Venus desires separation from her son and wants “the power of
love” her position entails. In contrast to earlier depictions of Venus as the “Goddess of
Lust,” in F1, she is described as “the Godess milde,” who is “stird” by the wildness of
Cupid’s actions against her. Cupid has proven that he is a “servaunt faulse” by exceeding
the boundaries of his authority, wounding Venus, and pursuing a chaste Nimphe. Hoping
for her son’s repentance, Venus requests that the Gods give him eyes “That hee might
see, how hee his shafts did drive.” However, the gods deny Venus’s suit, reasoning that
“if he blind did ill / What would hee seeing?” (11-12). The gods refuse to grant Venus’s
suit and conclude that Cupid is immune from punishment for the illogical reason that his
blindness prevents him from recognizing his errors. Cupid is prohibited only from

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The female speaker makes a similar request in P16/14: “Am I thus conquer’d? have I lost the powers /
That to withstand, which joy’s to ruin mee? / Must I bee still while itt my strength devowres / And captive
leads mee prisoner, bound, unfree? / Love first shall leave mens phant’sies to them free, / Desire shall
quench loves flames, spring hate sweet showres, / Love shall loose all his darts, have sight, and see / His
shame, and wishings hinder happy howres; / Why should wee nott loves purblind charmes resist? / Must we
bee servile, doing what hee list? / Noe, seeke some hoste to harbour thee: I fly” (P16 14 1-8).

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shooting “without her leave” (13). As a result, the speaker discloses that Cupid has ever
since observed the gods’ imperative and “obays her will” (12-14). Although Venus is
granted authority over the initiation of Cupid’s wayward arrows, her rhetoric fails to
persuade the gods, and Cupid is essentially freed from responsibility for the
consequences of his erotic impulses.
By highlighting the failure of Venus’s “sute” and Cupid’s freedom despite the
transgression against his mother’s authority, Wroth responds to the contradictory
discourses of early modern conduct books, which urged women to exercise rigorous
moral control over the expression of erotic desire, especially in the reading and writing of
amorous literature. As an uncontrollable element of masculine desire in Wroth’s poem,
however, Cupid poses a challenge to the protective function of the moralistic discourses
of conduct books. What is a female reader to do when the Goddess of Love herself is
powerless to contain the direct assaults against chaste virtue levied against her? By
stressing the idea that Venus’s logical appeals to justice and divine status are
overshadowed by Cupid’s illogical claims to blindness and an inability to see or repent of
his errors, Wroth weakens the moral authority of conduct books over expressions of
female desire.
The Failure of Chaste Discourse
For Wroth, knowledge is derived from the ability to recognize the poetic
mechanisms that keep the female lover in servitude to Love. Cupid’s childlike persona
and feigned innocence often conceal the more serious consequences of his love games –
the loss of individual will. As a playful performer, unbound by rules or ethical

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imperatives, Love is an embodied theatrical figure that can effectively feign adult
passions. In fact, Cupid is so talented at his craft that no one suspects his disguise and as
such, his persuasions become even more insidious and difficult to recognize or resist.
Wroth highlights the vulnerability of the female speaker to subjection by love as it
is represented by the Alexandrian or Anacreontic personification of Eros as a weeping
child.
234
Wroth’s awareness of a pervasive Ovidian theme – all are subject to the powers
of love whether one resists or yields – is visible in the rhetorical failure of the poem’s
empathetic and obliging female speaker. In Sonnet 74, Cupid is cast as an endlessly
crying child who delights in folly and whose pleas are insincere. The female speaker
urges readers to leave the crying boy and to avoid seeking him out.
Love a child is ever criing,
Please him, and hee straite is flying,
Give him hee the more is craving
Never satisf’d with having;
His desires are noe measure,
Endles folly is his treasure,
What hee promiseth hee breaketh
Trust nott one word that hee speaketh;
Hee vowes nothing butt faulce matter.
And to cousen you hee’l flatter,
Lett him gaine the hand hee’ll leave you,
And still glory to deseave you. (P73 Song 1-12)

By chastising Cupid and calling the god a child, an oath-breaker, and a false-flatterer, the
female speaker boldly criticizes the persuasive strategies of love elegy and highlights
their negative effects on the female love object – she will be abandoned and deceived. In

234
Lisle Cecil John. Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences: Studies in Conventional Conceits (New York:
Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature: Russell and Russell, 1964), 75.

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the final lines of the sonnet, the speaker advises readers: “As a child then leave him
crying / Nor seeke him soe giv’n to flying” (19-20). The speaker’s advice recognizes that
this incarnation of Cupid is a rhetorical device with specific appeals to maternal pathos,
yet even the speaker’s most chaste intentions cannot protect her from love’s unrelenting
assault.
The consequences of not heeding the speaker’s advice and indulging the figure’s
rhetorical appeals to maternal pathos are explored in Sonnet 96, where the speaker’s
“sight” of blind Cupid wandering “cold, wett, and crying” (1-2), breeds “a kind
compassion” (3-4) in her as she “kindly” takes pity on the “Poor child” (6). Cupid
responds to the speaker’s sympathetic attentions by complaining that he is starving as he
“pin’de for want of his accustom’d pray, / For non in that wilde place his host would bee”
(7-8). In the third section of the sonnet, the speaker’s delights in locating the wandering
Cupid: “I was glad of his finding, thinking sure / This service should my freedome still
procure, / And in my armes I tooke him then unharmed” (9-11). Believing that she will
be rewarded for her faithful service, she takes Cupid in her arms. Yet instead of
rewarding the female speaker for her compassion and nurturance, Cupid makes the
speaker “feel his power” as her heart burns with insatiable desire: “Carrying him safe
unto a Mirtle bowre / Butt in the way hee made me feel his power, / Burning my hart who
had him kindly warmd” (12-14). This scenario, which transforms the speaker into
Cupid’s prey (“pray”) and unwilling “host,” suggests that empathy and faithful service
are ineffective responses to the affective rhetoric of the truant god of Love. The female

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speaker’s inability to resist such persuasion throws doubt onto the utility of female
compassion as a rhetorical tool for the reform of the masculine structures of elegy.
Wroth is equally critical of the utility of chaste discourse and takes up its failure
in her sonnet featuring “Cupid as runaway.” Wroth’s variation on the “Cupid as
Fugitive” motif locates desire within a discourse of love that suggests the idea that even
discourse chaste and virtuous in intention cannot physically contain Love or prevent the
circulation of desire. Thus, the loss of female authority in the sonnet is used more broadly
to highlight the inadequacies of chaste discourse to resist the rhetorical strategies of love
elegy itself. Sonnet 70 features a bound Cupid, mercilessly chastised, not by a temperate
female speaker, but by the angry huntress Diana. Wroth’s Diana stands in stark contrast
to the powerful, authoritative Diana of Ovid’s Metamorphosis - the stern virgin who
banishes the raped Callisto from her company in Book 2 and the vengeful goddess who
punishes Acteaon for his transgression in Book 3 - and the “fairest votary” of
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 154. Sonnet 8 P [70] depicts a Cupid in chains, watched by a train
of nymphs who are persuaded by the god to release him against Diana’s commands:
Poor Love in chaines, and fetters like a thiefe
I mett led for the, as chast Diana’s gaine,
Vowing the untaught Lad should no reliefe
From her receave, who glory’d in fond paine,
She call’d him theife; with vowes hee did maintaine
Hee never stole, butt some sadd slight griefe
Had given to those who did his power disdaine,
In which reveng, his honor, was the chiefe:
She say’d hee murder’d, and therfor must dy;
Hee, that hee caus’d butt love: did harmes deny
Butt, while she thus discoursing with him stood
The Nimphs unty’d him, and his chaines tooke off
Thinking him safe; butt he loose, made a scofe
Smiling, and scorning them, flew to the wood. (P70 8. 1-4)

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Diana’s nymphs are effectively persuaded by Cupid’s denials of Diana’s complaints and
convinced of his innocence, they untie him “thinking him safe” (13). Diana’s nymphs,
chaste as they may be, cannot resist Cupid’s persuasions and the chaste goddess herself is
unable to restrain the truant god with discourse. Ultimately, Diana cannot restore balance
by punishing Cupid’s injustices, and she fails as a convincing figure of her own chaste
authority.
The loss of Cupid, the figure of love, leaves Diana and her nymphs staring
helplessly at the fugitive boy as he “smiling, and scorning them, flew to the wood” (14).
Wroth’s addition of Diana and her nymphs to this mythological scene underscores the
idea that Diana is not a figure of her own authority; in fact, in Wroth’s sequence, Diana
fails to contain the unruly and deceptive Cupid and loses him at the very moment she
brings to light his wrongdoings and demands reform. While the female speaker actively
advises Cupid in Sonnet 2 to temper his impulses toward excessive force, emphasizing
his dependence on her choice to accept subjection, the female speaker in Sonnet 70 can
only watch as Diana’s chastisements fail to contain the captive Cupid. Here Wroth
highlights the idea that the mythological Diana, the classical model of exemplary
chastity, has limited rhetorical authority in countering Cupid’s claim that his only “harm”
is “that hee caus’d butt love” (10).
The explicit failure of chaste discourse to defend against Cupid’s assaults, enables
Wroth to engage a more bold strategy by temporarily weakening the figure’s divine
authority in order to de-emphasize his claim to absolute influence over the female
speaker’s will. By juxtaposing the female speaker’s obedience to Cupid with the figure’s

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excessive exercise of authority, Wroth highlights the problematic effects of submission –
loss of “freedome” - to the force of Love’s rhetorical “charmes.” In emphasizing Cupid’s
status as a boy and not an all-powerful god, Wroth mocks both her tormentor and the
genre of court compliment in which he willfully operates without consequence. This
tactic contributes to the domestication of Cupid as the figure is reduced to a rhetorical
device and a poetic toy. Wroth extends Ovid’s dismissal of his youthful erotic poems The
Amores as “no more than toys or games (ioca),” to the figure that initiated Ovid’s shift in
genre from epic to elegy.
235
Opposition to a central figure of elegy comes from the
complaints of Wroth’s female speaker. Wroth identifies a central disconnect between the
representation of female experiences of love through the rhetoric of elegy and the figure
of Cupid. The experience of love is not, as expressed through the poetic figure of Cupid,
blind. Despite the literary conventions that demand abject suffering and pain of lovers,
Wroth’s female speaker lays claim to an experience of love that can possess clarity even
in a situation of subjection. In Sonnet 7 [P8], the speaker comes to “dispise” Cupid
because of the force of his “fair showes:”
Love leave to urge, thou know’st thou hast the hand;
‘T’is cowardice, to strive wher none resist:
Pray thee leave off, I yeeld unto thy band;
Doe nott thus, still, in thine owne power persist,

Behold I yeeld: lett forces bee dismist;
I ame thy subject, conquer’d, bound to stand,
Never thy foe, butt did thy claime assist

235
See Heather James, “The Poet’s Toys: Christopher Marlowe and the Liberties of Erotic Elegy” in MLQ
67, no. 1 (2006 March), 103-127.

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Seeking thy due of those who did withstand;
Butt now, itt seemes, thou would’st I should thee love;
I doe confess, t’was thy will made mee chuse;
And thy faire showes made mee a lover prove
When I my freedome did, for paine refuse.

Yett this Sir God, your boyship I dispise;
Your charmes I obay, butt love nott want of eyes. (P8, 1-14)

Playing on a popular theme in Ovid, the female speaker criticizes Cupid’s excessive
force, which she characterizes as “cowardice,” especially “to strive where none resist”
(2). Beginning from the first line of the sonnet, the female speaker repeatedly
emphasizes the idea that her surrender to Love is met with disproportionate force: “Love
leave to urge, thou know’st thou hast the hand;” “Pray thee leave off, I yield;” “Doe not
thus, still, in thine owne power persist;” “Behold I yield.” While Wroth’s repetition of
her submission to love and love’s insistent force may highlight the vulnerability of the
female speaker, the repetition also reinforces the importance of asserting the need for
restraint and reason against the use of excessive force. References to excessive force as a
form of cowardice underscore the more important inequalities that underlie the
relationship between the male lover and the female beloved.
At the same time, Wroth’s critique of the excessive force exercised in erotic
relationships can be read as an implicit questioning of the unequal terms that characterize
the nature of political obligation between sovereign and subject. As a result, the female
speaker’s mockery of Cupid draws attention to the problematic nature of Cupid’s divine,
and at times, irrational authority. Alternately, as a poetic ornament, stripped of divine
force, the figure is subject to the female poet’s directives. By temporarily rendering

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Cupid’s affective abilities ineffective, Wroth parodies the popular genre of court
compliment and exposes its disingenuousness, insincerity, and rhetoricity.
236

Wroth’s speaker not only highlights the cowardice of forceful amorous persuasion
but also draws attention to the effects of this persuasion—submission to Cupid—stating,
“I ame thy subject, conquer’d, bound to stand” (P8/7 5-8). The use of excessive force
upon a vulnerable and isolated female recalls the struggles of Ovid’s heroines in the
Metamorphoses, who unsuccessfully strive to escape male entrapment and force. As
Cupid’s subject, the speaker’s repeated assertions of subjection against the insistent
forces of love draws attention to the unequal relationship between the god of Love and
the female lover. Choosing to submit to the desires of another and choosing to love
because of one’s own desires are two markedly different acts for the female speaker. The
female speaker has dutifully served Love, “Seeking thy due of those who did withstand;”
however, she questions the sudden change in her status from Love’s servant to Love’s
victim. “Butt now, itt seemes, thou woulds’t I should thee love; / I doe confesse, t’was
thy will made me chuse; / And thy faire showes made mee a lover prove / When I my
freedome did, for pain refuse” (9-12). The female speaker casts blame for her
transformation into a lover (and her loss of freedom) on Love and the male beloved: she
admits that “thy will” and “thy faire showes” caused her to make the choice to abandon
her freedom for “paine.”

236
In Song 2 (93), Wroth recasts Cupid as a figure that reinforces the poem’s conception of the Court as a
place of deception that is devoid of genuine expressions of love: “Iff to the Forest, Cupid hyes, / And my
poore soul to his law ties Ay me; / To the Court? O no. Hee cryes fy Ay mee; / Ther no true love you shall
espy Ay mee; / Leave that place to faulscest lovers / Your true love all truth discovers Ay mee;” (P14 Song
2.15-20, in Roberts 93).

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The speaker does maintain some control over the direction of her desires,
however, because she suggests that true love (deriving from “sight” and choice), unlike
blind Cupid (a figure also associated with blind desire), does not lack eyes and can see.
Excessive desire coupled with excessive force and impulsive “outward showes” result in
this blindness, lack of sight, and rashness of action. In order to limit Cupid’s powers to
influence her, the speaker characterizes love as a boy who can only playfully charm but
cannot truly alter the direction of individual desires: “Yett, this Sir God, your boyship I
dispise” (13). For the speaker, Love is a figure that “wants” eyes, cannot see, and lacks
clarity of vision. Love can neither see nor understand the effects of his effective force on
the female love object. Here, Cupid’s power is reduced as he, and Wroth’s beloved and
love itself, become mere “poetic ornament(s)” and “mythological playthings” as opposed
to forces that can affect the direction and course of lovers’ desires.
237

Understanding the rhetoric underlying culturally constructed discourses of love is
a crucial source of insight for Wroth’s female speaker. Once the speaker “understand[s]”
Cupid’s “might,” “How hee inflam’de, and forc’d one to affect,” she admits to loving: “I
lov’d and smarted, counting itt delight / Soe still to wast, which reason did reject” (P72
10-12). The speaker recounts experiences of loving in the past tense as completed

237
See Hyde, The Poetic Theology of Love: Cupid in Renaissance Literature, 26. Hyde excludes “sonnets
and other short lyrics,” which are marked by Cupid’s tendency “to be an ornament or mythological
plaything” as opposed to a figure whose “potential” develops in “longer narrative or discursive works like
the Roman de la rose, the Vita Nuova, or The Faerie Queene. These longer works are more apt to
demonstrate what Hyde terms “poetic theology” because of their ability to “create a fictional world with
sufficient detail and integrity to make Cupid a force, perhaps a god, and therefore to call both characters
and author to a reckoning” (26-27). By limiting Cupid’s ability to unfold as a narrative force that can affect
the speaker of Wroth’s sonnet, Wroth effectively reduces the figure’s influence in the narrative and over the
female speaker.

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actions; she “lov’d” and felt the pains of loving yet frames the “delight” and pleasure she
experiences as continuing experiential processes. The speaker offers an alternative
valuation of the experience of love by reason and rejects framing the experience as a
“waste.” In the last couplet of the sonnet, the female speaker asserts that either she loved
Cupid as “wanton boy” (a child and not the all-powerful god of Love), or she loved
Cupid as “wanton boy” (a denigration of Love as merely a boy) and not the unnamed
male beloved. “When love came blindfold, and did challenge mee / Indeed I lov’d butt
wanton boy not thee” (13-14). It is the idea of love, the playful figure of love, not the
man himself whom the speaker loves; if this is the case, the speaker’s assertion is a
powerful, defensive rejection of the affective power of the male beloved and the
rhetorical strategies of elegy on the female speaker. In the process, Wroth elevates and
privileges the role of the female speaker and lover above the male beloved. While
Wroth’s sonnet sequence begins with a focus on origins, it moves to epistemological
concerns about how the female speaker has learned to love in spite of the flawed poetic
materials she has inherited.
Wroth rejects the poetic fragmentation of the female body that characterizes
Ovidian elegy and Petrarchan lyric and instead emphasizes the physical and intellectual
experience of the desiring female. Ovid’s elegiac poetry often sought to separate the
female body and mind into distinct and separate “parts,” with an aggressive emphasis on
the female body as the means to satisfy male desires for sex. Wroth’s poetry works to
reverse this movement by bringing body and mind back together. Wroth valorizes the
thinking woman and locates freedom and the “true forme of love” (P100/6) within the

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space of the autonomous female mind: “Then kinde thought my phant’sie guide / Lett
mee never hapless slide; / Still maintaine thy force in mee, / Lett me thinking still bee
free: / Nor leave thy might until my death / But let mee thinking yeeld up breath” (P21
Song 3). The female speaker’s consistent emphasis on the individual liberty maintained
in thoughts and thinking throughout the sequence reinforce Wroth’s resistance to the
Ovidian amator’s rhetorical attempts to divide and conquer.
By personifying love and erotic passion and staging female encounters with
Cupid and Venus, Wroth underscores the tension in early modern representations of
female virtue, desire, and experiences of love. These restrictive representations – women
as chaste objects of unrequited love, marriage partners, or unmarriageable whores –
attempted to deny women an entire range of erotic experiences. In addition, discourses of
absolutist authority, derived from Elizabethan models, exploited the language of love and
affection in order to secure the willing obedience and sacrifice of feminized political
subjects. Wroth’s sequence negotiates the contradictions and ambiguities in cultural
representations of women as lovers, writers, readers, and political subjects by addressing
the affective forces that drive the Ovidian amator’s erotic compulsion. Thus by
emphasizing the failure of these discourses to persuade, Wroth registers a forceful
critique of the rhetorical structures underlying love elegy and the political obligations
required of the Jacobean subject.
Imitation versus Innovation: Wroth as Female Poet
The tensions surrounding the moral and social value of poetry, in particular the
love lyric, were intensely magnified when female writers like Wroth adopted these forms

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and their discourses to write about love and desire. It is no surprise, then, that Wroth’s
reception as a writer within the male–dominated literary milieu tended to sway between
overzealous praise and blatant attack. Taking up Wroth as a subject of praise, Ben Jonson
boldly names the female poet “a Sydney,” “the imprese of the great, / And glorie of them
all” (Epigram 103,7-8).
238
Jonson’s allusion to the Sidney impresa connects Wroth’s
name, verse, and by extension, her masquing performances, with the creative
accomplishments of her uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, her father, Sir Robert Sidney, and her
aunt, Mary Herbert Sidney, Countess of Pembroke.
239
Certainly Jonson appears to admire
Wroth’s work and his desire to emulate her verses suggests that he approved of her
method and manner of classical imitation.
240
John Mulryan argues that “Aristotle’s
definition of poetry as the art of imitation (Poetics 1447a) is a the heart of Jonson’s
classicism … in addition to the assumption that an imitative poet is unoriginal, there is
the added stigma of plagiarism. Jonson himself distinguished between slavish and true

238
Johnson, Epigrams, The Forest, Underwoods, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson. (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1936).

239
Jonson’s reference to the Sidney impresa may have been drawn from Sir Philip Sidney’s reference to the
family impresa in his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. In Sonnet 65, Sidney refers to the Sidney
impresa in an assertion of his political purpose and poetic authority in love and over Cupid, the poetic
figure of love. Sidney’s concluding couplet playfully asserts, “Since in thine arms, if learn’d fame truth
hath spread, / Thou bear’st the arrow, I the arrowhead” (13-14). In Sidney’s proclamation, the political and
poetic authority of the male poet trumps the latent authority of Cupid in amor. See Sidney, Selected
Writings, ed. Richard Dutton. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 62.

240
Indeed Jonson may have been drawn to Wroth’s poetry because of shared similarity in tone in select
poems; though at times less explicit, Wroth approaches her poetic subject matter with the same wryness
that characterizes Jonson’s work.

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imitation of the classics.”
241
On the one hand, as a highly valued and accepted form of
educating women, imitation offered opportunities for female writers to master classical
forms of writing and to inscribe their own literary mark. On the other, Jonson’s praise,
no matter how much it extols her skillful imitation of classical sources, tends to align
Wroth with classical figures and allegorical metamorphoses. Thus the central focus of
Jonson’s praise is Wroth’s ability to properly play scripted roles through the imitation of
male literary predecessors. Jonson emphasizes the idea that Wroth’s verses are
acceptable as exercises in reading and imitation as opposed to innovative models of
creativity.
As an exemplary member of the Sidney family, Wroth’s authority as a convincing
embodiment of all mythological women and persuasive performer is both celebrated by
Jonson and complicated by the fact that Wroth is also a female poet, writing about love
and desire in early modern England. Indeed, Jonson’s insistence on aligning Wroth with
allegorical figures of authority who are female points to a “counter-pressure,” to use
Maureen Quilligan’s term, within his narrative of praise. Quilligan notes “females in
allegory may be figures of authority because they have the appropriate gender for moral
and immoral abstractions; they usually counsel, or seduce, the male protagonist whose
adventures carry the process of ‘fashioning.’”
242
As the subject of Jonson’s praise, Wroth
possesses authority only as a performer of allegory. Jonson is “the male protagonist”

241
John Mulryan,“Jonson’s Classicism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson. eds. Richard Harp
and Stanley Stewart (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 163-174, esp. 165-166.

242
See Maureen Quilligan “The Comedy of Female Authority in The Faerie Queene.” ELR 17, no. 2
(Spring 987): 156-171.

234
whose curious “fashioning” of Wroth as various allegorical figures of authority draws
attention to the cultural tensions between her success as a desired object of the stage and
her wish to become a desiring subject, as represented in her poetry.
In Sonnet XLVI, a sequence dedicated to Wroth from Jonson’s Underwood, the
male speaker emphasizes his state as an experienced lover who has “been a lover, and
could shew it,” but who is nonetheless charmed by Wroth’s more restrained verse.
243

Such a statement hints at the way that, as Quilligan observes, female authority was often
bound up in the ability to counsel or seduce. In fact, according to Jonson’s speaker,
Wroth’s lines contain “all Cupid’s armory, / His flames, his shafts, his quiver, and his
bow,” even “His very eyes are” under Wroth’s control (9-11). While these lines are often
read as a straightforward compliment of Wroth’s well-crafted lines, which like Venus’
ceston, give her readers the power to evoke desire, it is Jonson’s emphasis on Wroth’s
ability to temper her power to “overthrow” Cupid that is striking. Jonson’s male speaker
is most taken by Wroth’s restraint as evident in the concluding lines of the sonnet: “But
then his mother’s sweets you so apply, / Her joys, her smiles, her loves, as readers take /
For Venus’ ceston every line you make” (12-14). Wroth’s poetic lines, as described by
Jonson, can effectively disarm the instruments of Cupid’s wayward authority; however,
Jonson’s invocation of Venus’s girdle or “ceston,” which signifies both fidelity in
marriage and female chastity, as well as lasciviousness and lust, highlights the
paradoxical position of the female poet, who is praised for her temperate approach to

243
Jonson, Epigrams, The Forest, Underwoods, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson. (New York: Columbia University
Press,1936).

235
eros, but who, as a woman, is nonetheless associated with the potential for sexual excess
and transgression.
Jonson’s praise of Wroth’s modesty in writing about desire, however, is
complicated by his particular attention to Wroth’s ability to perform convincingly
through dress, dance, and physical expression on the masquing stage. Jonson’s attention
to Wroth’s persuasive skill on stage suggests the vital role of the female body as an
effective agent of persuasion, not solely imitation. In the performances of elite women
masquers, like Wroth, female bodies were central signifiers of meaning on the stage. In
an explicit reference to the masquing stage, for example, Jonson praises Wroth’s
theatrical ability to persuade any spectator that she indeed is one of the gods of antiquity:
He, that but saw you weare the wheaten hat,
Would call you more than Ceres, if not that:
And, drest in shepherds tyre who would not day:
You were the Bright Oenone, Flora, or May?
If dancing, all would cry th’Idalian Queene,
Were leading forth the Graces on the greene;
And armed to the chase, so bare her bow
Diana’s alone, so hit, and hunted so. (7-14)

Throughout her sonnet sequence, Wroth applies Jonson’s praise of the bold persuasive
authority of the female masquer to the imitative posture of the modest woman in her
representation of Pamphilia as the silently abject love object who chooses rhetorical
forwardness over reticence and withdrawal.
244

Abandoning the Discourse of Love Elegy

244
See Clare McManus, Women on the Renaisssance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the
Stuart Court 1590-1619 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 9.

236
The final sonnet of Wroth’s sequence (P103) may seem to mark a return to
culturally favored modes of writing for women in the female speaker’s declaration that
she will abandon the amorous discourse of the love lyric and direct her studies and
thoughts to the divine.
245
Yet Wroth’s farewell poem adapts a self-consciously Ovidian
posture in which the female poet, mirroring the male speaker of Ovid’s “farewell” poem
Amores 1.15, announces her abandonment of elegy as a poetic mode. At the end of his
third book, Ovid writes, “Tender loves Mother a new Poet get, / This last end to my
Elegies is set. / Which I Pelignis softer child have framed. / (Nor am I by such wanton
toyes defamd).” In Wroth’s “Farewell” poem, the female speaker puts her literary muse
to rest to “sleepe in the quiet of a faithfull love” and the speaker commands an end to her
writing: “Write you noe more, butt lett thes phant’sies move / Some other harts, wake
nott to new unrest” (1-4). In a turn toward heaven and the divine, the speaker directs her
thoughts to “To truth, which shall eternall goodness prove; / Injoying of true joye, the
most, and best, / The endless gaine which never will remove” (5-8). The speaker affirms
that elegy no longer serves her purpose: “Leave the discource of Venus, and her sunn /
To young beeginers, and theyr brains inspire / With storys of great love, and from that
fire / Gett heat to write the fortunes they have wunn” (9-12). The classical discourse of
“Venus and her sunn” is directly implicated in evoking experiences of desire in youthful,
inexperienced readers that, in turn, motivate acts of writing stories about love. Yet for

245
Wroth also signs “Pamphilia” at the end of the first group of sonnets (P1-55). However, P55 is not a
conventional farewell poem. The female speaker does not renounce the conventions of elegy or signal her
shift to a more culturally “important” genre. Instead, the female speaker narrates her state of desperate
languishing. Unreciprocated, the fiery passions of love take a destructive inward turn and threaten to
annihilate the speaker. Yet the speaker’s blind adherence to ideals of constancy leave transform her into a
Dido figure and make her complicit in her own self-destruction: “love I will till I butt ashes prove” (14).

237
those like the speaker who are experienced in matters of love, this elegiac discourse is
inadequate and offers little recourse to justice when Cupid’s authority threatens to
annihilate the speaker.
As Ovid signals his move to weightier poetic feats, he imagines himself as a
regional poet of national renown, a poet of the “Pelignis nation” “whom liberty to honest
armes compeld, / When careful Rome in doubt their prowesse held” (1-3). No longer
adequate, Ovid bids farewell to “Weake Elegies … / A worke, that after my death, here
shall dwell” (19-20). As she abandons elegiac discourse, Pamphilia also imagines her
future renown as an exemplar of constancy. Wroth’s farewell ends with a conventional
bid for poetic fame but shifts the terms of Ovid’s final elegy. Before Pamphilia signs her
name after the last line of the sonnet, she says, “And thus leave off, what’s past showes
you can love, / Now lett your constancy your honor prove” (P103 13-14). Both Ovid’s
and Wroth’s final lines testify to their skills as poets who effectively exploit the rhetorical
structures of elegy. While Ovid makes a last conventional bid for poetic immortality,
Wroth recasts her poetry as a monument that not only attests to her creative skill as poet
but affirms her reputation as a woman of constant faith and virtue.

238
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract My study locates an unexpected early modern interest in the political potential of the rhetorical structures of Ovidian love elegy. In sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English drama and poetry, many writers self-consciously attempted to delineate the individual’s relationship to existing structures of authority through recourse to figures from classical mythology. In particular, the Roman figure of Cupid, as represented in the love elegies of Ovid, helped early modern writers to amplify the relationship between desire, persuasion, and coercion that was central to the courtly mode of encomia. Many early modern writers chose to draw upon the more subtle political strains in Ovid’s amorous rhetoric, capitalizing on Cupid’s ability to represent a spectrum of modes of affective authority, from benevolent king to willful tyrant.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Tymoczko, Alison (author)

Core Title The politics of eros: writing under the auspices of Ovid's Cupid in early modern English literature

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Degree Conferral Date 2010-05

Publication Date 01/16/2010

Defense Date 11/11/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cupid,early modern English literature,elegy,encomia,eros,OAI-PMH Harvest,politics

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor James, Heather (committee chair), Braudy, Leo (committee member), Lemon, Rebecca (committee member), Rosenthal, Margaret F. (committee member), Smith, Bruce R. (committee member)

Creator Email atymoczko@earthlink.net,tymoczko@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2802

Unique identifier UC1437887

Identifier etd-Tymoczko-3428 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-291359 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2802 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Tymoczko-3428.pdf

Dmrecord 291359

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Tymoczko, Alison

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu