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In John Donne's lyric poem ‘Loves Deitie’ the speaker expresses nostalgia for a time before Cupid:

Unrequited passion is attributed to an essentially sadistic deity. Yet it is the cultural reinvention of Cupid specific to early modern England that is ultimately to blame. Love's natural ‘Correspondencie’ (line 12) has been replaced by passion for one who scorns through the influence of Petrarchism, whilst his ‘Tyrannie’ has been enhanced by an expansion in divine power, perhaps attributable to Calvinism (line 19). The present book argues that Cupid did indeed extend his range of identities (and thence his facility for performing ‘cultural work’) in early modern England – ‘To rage, to lust, to write to, to commend, / All is the purlewe of the God of Love’ (lines 17–18) – but that what unites his disparate roles and makes Cupid a controversial, often seductive, figure for poets, dramatists and polemicists alike is his adversarial relationship to English Protestantism. Through this minor love-deity, matters of grave importance to the establishment of the ‘true’ faith were articulated and debated.

In 1613, Captain John Saris, leading the first English trade expedition to Japan for the East India Company, described in his diary ‘an odd Mistake, in a matter of Devotion, made by some of the Japonese Gentlewomen whom I admitted into my Cabin’:

‘Cupid and Psyche’ is the narrative in which Cupid finally comes of age. He is the morally upright husband of Psyche, the father of Pleasure, and the guide who leads humanity towards knowledge of the divine. Yet such an idea of Cupid is profoundly at odds with the profane and rebellious deity that we have seen troubling early modern England. This final chapter explores the way in which the Neoplatonic reading of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ inherited from Apuleius was baffled in England by the charged eroticism of Cupid. His redemption would depend on Continental and elite influences, requiring a change of performance space and genre from the Elizabethan popular theatre to the Caroline court masque, but ultimately seeming to demand the material absence of Cupid. In this respect, the English appropriation of ‘Cupid and Psyche’ from 1566 to 1635 traces a larger narrative arc: from the most lustrous period of Cupid's fame to his gradual fading-out in the Caroline era.

CUPID AND PSYCHE: APULEIUS, FULGENTIUS AND BOCCACCIO

The union of Cupid (Love) with Psyche (Soul) seems to have been imagined as early as the fifth century bc, when Greek terracotta reliefs used these figures to symbolize the soul's journey after death. A more profane interpretation soon took hold, inspired by ‘the Hellenistic taste for sentimentality and sensuality’, which defined the figures in a more romantic relationship.

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.

Looking back over the first three books of The Faerie Queene, Spenser's narrator perceives a disturbing pattern of female torture. He challenges the artist behind the design:

In condemning Cupid's sadism, the narrator attests to women's innate vulnerability and subjection. Love's ‘cruell dart’ has only ‘add[ed] anguish to the bitter wound, / With which their lives thou lanchedst long afore’, a wound that is synonymous not merely with women's lovesickness but with their sex. But just as the fictional authorship of Cupid stands in for that of Spenser, so the victimization described seems more like a fantasy than the ‘reality’ of the poem. Passive suffering at the dart of Cupid may reflect the fates of Florimel and Amoret, but Britomart is empowered by love, taking up the sword to pursue her own erotic fulfilment.

Although Cupid's imposition of desire is often a means of asserting patriarchal authority over powerful and transgressive women, thus tacitly identifying him with the adult male, he was also an archetype for the beautiful boy in early modern culture. This rendered him an object of pleasure for both men and women, capable of arousing a remarkable range of desires while blurring the distinctions between them.

Immediately, we encounter the problem of setting an age on the early modern boy. This seems normally to have been between ten and eighteen, but he could be as young as three or as old as late-twenties, reflecting the use of ‘boy’ as a derogatory term, connoting social, moral or intellectual inferiority. Cupid's boyhood is further complicated by iconographic and literary traditions that fix him at different ages – in Ovid and Petrarch he is generally an adolescent; in Anacreontic poetry, a toddler or young child – and by early modern poets' vacillation between these traditions. For example, in Astrophil and Stella 73 ‘Love still a boy, and oft a wanton is’ (line 1), ‘wanton’ being used to describe the child's cruelty and rebelliousness whilst also carrying its adult meaning of ‘lascivious, unchaste, lewd’ (OED 1a, 4a, 2).

The popularity of Aristotle's maxim in English Renaissance literature seems partly due to its vagueness. Who is Aristotle's solitary man? Can he remain in society and yet be considered an outcast? Is he one who has chosen to live outside society or one who has been forced out? We might also ask who decides whether the subject is beast or God, and consider whether he can occupy those identities simultaneously. Aristotle's riddling definition of the solitary man was repeatedly quoted because it expressed an ambivalence understood by contemporary historians, philosophers, poets and dramatists as central to the experience of exile. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare exploited the dramatic possibilities of this ambivalence. The protagonist's banishment is partly incurred through his virtues; he is both the beast and god of Aristotle's dictum. Perhaps more unexpected is the influence of Aristotle's Politics and other paradigms of exile on The Tempest. Prospero's self-exile in his library allowed Antonio to usurp the kingdom; banishment brought Prospero to the island; alienation dictates his actions there. It is my contention that critics of The Tempest have not taken Prospero's banishment, or the identity crisis that it inspires, seriously enough. The competing discourses surrounding banishment at the time can be seen to shape not only Prospero's posturing as an exile but also, more startlingly, his identity as a magician and colonialist.