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

UnrestrictedMy 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 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