Perhaps the most important divergence between the twenty-first century perception of Cupid and that of early modern England is that, where the former is strongly influenced by his French Rococo decorativeness and Victorian infantile charm, the latter believes in Cupid's capacity for murderous sadism. As the Chorus of Euripides' Hippolytos observes:

This revelation was made available to early modern audiences through the revival of classical Greek and Roman tragedy in the mid-sixteenth century. It was also inscribed within Renaissance mythography, for example, Conti describes Cupid as a ‘God of the insane and the mad … there is nearly no unspeakable act, sacrilege, or arrogant deed that Cupid has not authorized’ (245). Yet, perhaps the most important influence was a Protestant sense of the self-destructive nature of desire and the impossibility of controlling it. This chapter explores the fatal power of Cupid in early modern culture, first as it was imagined visually in a series of artistic conflations of Love and Death, and then as it was manifest on the stage through Cupid's reinvention as a tragic antagonist.