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A Timely Anachronism: Tradition and Theme in Barnabe Googe's ‘Cupido Conquered.’

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In the following essay, Sheidley discusses the styles and themes in 'Cupido Conquered.'
SOURCE: Sheidley, William E. “A Timely Anachronism: Tradition and Theme in Barnabe Googe's ‘Cupido Conquered.’” Studies in Philology 69, no. 2 (1972): 150-66.

It is now commonplace to emphasize the continuity of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance and to stress the conservatism and authoritarianism of Elizabethan culture at the expense of the older and still not entirely discredited view of the English sixteenth century as an age of exuberant expansion and experimentation. Though it is not easy to reconcile modern statements of these opposing positions,1 the two impulses they alternatively fasten upon can be seen working smoothly together in the literature of the age—most clearly, perhaps, in the rough-hewn and often ignored poetry of the 1560's. Barnabe Googe (1540-1594), the author of Eglogs, Epitaphes, & Sonettes (1563), The Ship of Safegarde (1596), and a number of translations, including the popular and influential Zodiake of Life, can be cited as an early example of an Elizabethan innovator: he put together the first collection of short poems by a single author to be published during the reign of Elizabeth; he wrote the only unified set of eclogues before Spenser; he experimented with spondaic and trochaic metrical variations in the age of the wooden iambic line; his translations, finally, came at the inauguration of the literary phase of Elizabethan exploration and discovery. Yet Googe's book of poems is inspired and controlled by the example of Tottel's Miscellany, his eclogues are an epitome of the Mantuan tradition, and the doctrine both of his own works and of those he translated is a conservative Christian Humanism, chastened where necessary by rigid anti-Romanism. The most interesting of Googe's poems from the point of view of this paradox is what he called his “Dreame,” an allegorical love vision entitled “Cupido Conquered.” Though by Googe's own admission shoddily finished,2 this long poem (388 broken fourteeners) commands attention as a resourceful response to a fundamental Elizabethan poetic problem.

C. S. Lewis, when he comes in The Allegory of Love to the point of considering “Cupido Conquered,” is struck by “its complete fidelity to the oldest models in this kind. … There is nothing in the content of the poem to show that it was not written in the fourteenth, or even the thirteenth century.”3 Lewis calls the Roman de la Rose a “germinal” book, “a parent, begetting offspring at once like and unlike itself.”4 “Cupido Conquered” is a scion of this ancient line. By sheer chronology many generations removed from its noble ancestor, in several important ways it fails to show the mark of the three centuries of development and transmutation of the genre that Lewis traces.

Why did Googe in 1563 give birth to a work which, not without reason, seems to Lewis such an anachronism? Googe was consciously trying to produce a poem in a genre of which he had in mind a codified critical definition while at the same time using that genre for new purposes profoundly at odds with its traditional themes. He does not seem to have confined himself to imitating any single work, old or new, though passages analogous to parts of “Cupido Conquered” appear as early as the Roman de la Rose or even the Psychomachia of Prudentius and as late as Tottel's Miscellany. Instead, by an examination of many poems, Googe settled upon what seemed to him the essential features of the genre in which he wanted to write, and he undoubtedly expected his readers to recognize his perfect fidelity to the most venerable traditions of the kind.

J. V. Cunningham has set forth some useful propositions describing the interaction of tradition and experience in poetic composition. A writer's grasp of his experience, he maintains, is largely determined by “what his literary tradition enables him to see and to handle”:

Experience is sometimes obtrusively at odds with tradition. We can see that it is, for we can see how tradition has been modified to render it more supple to experience. But the one term is always tradition, not unalterable but never abandoned, as, of course, the other term is always experience. The one is form, method, a way of apprehending; the other is matter, realization, and what is apprehended.5

For Googe (as, to a degree, for most Elizabethan poets), literary tradition, Cunningham's first term, also forms a large portion of the second term; tradition determines both the means of apprehension and the matter apprehended. Not a belated instance of the flourishing of the allegorical love-vision as a means of ordering experience, “Cupido Conquered” is first of all a retrospective, scholarly attempt to compose in a fossilized style. But Googe does not merely recombine the inert traditional subject matter with the rigid traditional forms. As in his eclogues,6 he writes with a purpose—to drive courtly love, which he finds morally repugnant, out of poetry, which he understands as a means of ethical instruction.

In all his poetry Googe returns to a motto that sums up the ethically oriented philosophy of Christian Humanism and forms the keystone for the ideal of order to which he adheres: “Let Reason Rule.” For many of his short poems and for The Ship of Safegarde, Googe appropriated medieval and classical genres and the rhetorical modes and structures of humanistic education as vehicles for the inculcation of his conservative doctrines. When turning to the tradition of the love poem, both classical and courtly, Googe, like many poets of his era, found his artistic and his philosophical conservatism in serious conflict. To write poetry at all was to follow the example of the ancients, the Italians, and the writers in Tottel's Miscellany and deal with love. But the sensuality of the ancients and the postured sufferings of the poets of courtly love appear both foolish and evil in the eyes of Christian stoicism. The struggle to resolve this dilemma leads Googe to his most original and interesting poetic achievements.

In describing the tenets of Andreas Capellanus that command high standards of courtly and knightly behavior, Lewis pronounces courtly love “a system of ethics.”7 Nevertheless, he argues, we should take Andreas' volte-face in the third book, which repudiates in favor of religion all that has gone before, to indicate neither joking nor hypocrisy. Andreas was serious in saying that love is “the source of everything in saeculo bonum,” by which he intends not what we might mean by “worldly” good, but

the really good things, in a human sense, as contrasted with the really bad things: courage and courtesy and generosity, as against baseness. But rising like a sheer cliff above and behind this humane or secular scale of values, he has another which is not to be reconciled with it, another by whose standard there is very little to choose between the “worldly” good and the “worldly” bad.8

An absolute cleavage between this world and the next allows the medieval mind to let the religion of love and the true religion stand as statement and palinode.

Whatever else it may entail, the most basic aspiration of humanism is to eradicate the division between secular and eternal values, to bring down the morality of the high cliff and put it into practice on the plain of this world. So Googe, concentrating not on the distance between the two scales of values but on the iron chain that links them into unbroken continuity, cannot leave the conflict unresolved. He does not, like some humanists and some English poets of the next generation, resolve it in the neoplatonism that justifies courtly love as a pathway to the divine. Neither does he salvage the sentiment by eliminating the provision requiring adultery and by making marriage the goal of courtship. Googe's objection to courtly love has nothing to do with the seventh commandment: he rejects the doctrine because it leads to irrational mental states and behavior, and hence is improper and sinful for human beings. The refined sentiment of courtly love is for Googe a mask hiding the brute passion of lust.

In his eclogues Googe worked out his antagonism toward love in moral and theological terms; in his dream vision he deals with a specific—one would like to say personal—instance of a lover wrestling with Cupid's snares. The immediate impulse for rejecting love comes not from an awareness of love's irrationality, though that awareness is presupposed, but from a practical conflict of desires: the sufferings of love have kept the poet from writing and his muses are calling.

Briefly, the three-part progression of the poem is as follows. The poet, wandering forth on a spring day, finds a fountain under a Laurel tree. He falls asleep and dreams that he is accosted by Mercury, who, after some conversation, leads him to the castle where Diana holds her court. As he is exploring the place, a messenger comes with the news that Cupid's army is invading Diana's realm. She sends out Hippolytus with an army to meet the invader. In the ensuing battle, Cupid is captured and his army put to flight. The dreamer awakes and writes the poem about his dream. At every stage Googe echoes the poetry of the tradition he is repudiating.

As is nearly obligatory for a love vision, the poem begins in May, with a reverdie emphasizing the trees, “clothed greene,” and a profusion of white hawthorn blossoms. The colors are significant: white indicates purity or virginity, and green was the color of amorous passion for the courtly-love tradition.9

In a few lines the speaker enters the landscape, seeking and finding in the diversions of the outdoors some relief from the pain of separation from his beloved. He is especially delighted by “the pleasaunt Harmonye / that syngyng Byrdes did make,” birds that excel Amphion, “Sir Orpheus,” and Apollo as musicians. A picture of Orpheus' probable reaction to these singers, while it may not underline the exceptional, weird power of the birdsong, as Googe surely wished, serves a more important purpose:

I rather judge the thracian wold,
          his Harpe wherwith he played,
Have cast a way as one whom Ire,
          had uterly dismayed.

(ll. 25-6)

“I rather judge …”—this is the same tongue-in-cheek Googe who kneels aghast before Calliope, Urania, and Melpomene in his preface to the translation of Palingenius.10 Occasional puncturing of the solemnity of his mythological references testifies that Googe sensed the artificiality of his chosen mode of composition and that he could see beyond the limitations of his conventions enough to use them without being imprisoned by them.

The source of the first thirty-four lines of “Cupido Conquered” is the first part of Surrey's “Complaint of a lover, that defied love, and was by love after the more tormented.” Surrey's poem begins, like Googe's, when summer sets about overthrowing winter, spreading green over the earth. As in “Cupido Conquered,” spring eases the poet's heart and draws him outdoors to feel the air and hear the birds. Though the birdsong cheers him, he realizes enviously that the birds are rejoicing because nature has given them leave to choose their mates and love freely. He curses love and tries to throw off Cupid's yoke but soon regrets his attempt when he finds that it cannot be done and that he is going to be in a worse situation because now Cupid will not even help him with his courtship:

          A miror let me be unto ye lovers all:
Strive not with love: for if ye do, it will ye thus befall.(11)

Googe takes up the challenge and sets out to prove that Cupid can be overthrown. His imitation of Surrey's poem, besides providing a satisfactorily conventional prologue for the dream vision, serves to recall to the reader's mind a statement of the contrary view. By attacking even the most inanimate of straw men, Googe could give his poem an aura of relevance and importance.

He next discards his model from Tottel's Miscellany to assemble several elements central to the convention of the love vision. The poet watches the singing birds until he notices “a stately Lawrell tree” placed so beautifully beside a spring that “Dame Nature” seems to have been showing off in planting it. The tree and the fountain bristle with literary associations, of which the speaker is not unaware:

For sure I thynke, it was the place,
          wherein Narcissus dyed,
Or els the Well, to which was turnd
          poore Biblis while she cryed.

(ll. 57-8)

Googe does not miss a chance to pursue his vendetta against love. Narcissus and Byblis are not merely unfortunate lovers who suffered from their love: their names suggest subtly repugnant perversions—Narcissus loved himself; Byblis loved her twin brother.

It is the fountain of Narcissus into which the dreamer in the Roman de la Rose peers. Looking down, he sees reflected in two crystals the whole garden and especially the Rosebud he will seek. The crystals represent the lady's eyes, and it is at this moment that the dreamer falls in love, immediately suffering the wounds of Cupid's arrows. In “Cupido Conquered” the poet is already in love, and since he has not yet fallen asleep, it is awkward to attach a specific allegorical significance to the act of his looking into the fountain. But Googe can treat it as a literal experience with symbolic overtones. Within the fountain are reflected green trees, white blossoms, and a choir of birds—a natural garden now solidly connected with the allegorical garden of the Roman de la Rose, where birdsong, almost supernatural in its beauty, also provides a hypnotically charming background. Googe singles out not the beloved rose but the conflict of passion and chastity represented by their conventional colors, green and white.

In the Roman the fountain of love is situated under a pine tree described in the same sort of superlative terminology that Googe applies to the laurel arching over his fountain. His emphasis on this laurel, as well as the progress of the poem from the speaker's enslavement to love to the triumph of the armies of chastity over Cupid's forces, suggests that he may have been indebted to Petrarch's Trionfi, especially the first two, the “Triumph of Love” (where the dreaming poet plucks a laurel branch) and the “Triumph of Chastity.” But the resemblances between the rout of Cupid in Googe and the stately processionals of Petrarch are only of a general nature, and though Cupid is captured in both works, the results and implications differ: for Petrarch it means that his love will not be requited; for Googe it points the way to a rationally achieved and morally commendable self-extrication from the enervating snares of love.12

The laurel tree, together with Googe's use of the green and white color symbolism, recalls another poem that might more likely have provided a major inspiration for “Cupido Conquered,” the Middle English “The Flower and the Leaf,” once attributed to Chaucer, but now supposed to have been written by a woman, perhaps the same person who composed “The Assembly of Ladies.” What might have recommended “The Flower and the Leaf” to Googe is its moralistic tenor. It is a vision dreamed under a laurel tree of gentle rewards and punishments for courtly virtues and vices,13 a dance of conflict and reconciliation between the white-clad company of the Leaf, led by Diana, and the troop of the Flower, dressed in “lusty grene.” Though the whole remains within the matrix of courtly love, one of the virtues rewarded, along with valor and troth, is virginity, and the major vice to be punished is idleness. Idleness personified is the portress of the garden gate in the Roman de la Rose and the first soldier in Cupid's army in “Cupido Conquered.”

The atmosphere of “The Flower and the Leaf” is fanciful and feminine, quite different from the sturdy earnestness of Googe. The lady who composed it lingers lovingly over each pearl, each gold thread of the costumes of the revellers. Googe, though his subject perhaps demands descriptive detail, can bring himself only to pronounce a few hurried epithets. The keynote of the fairyland world of “The Flower and the Leaf” is graceful inconsequentiality. Throughout “Cupido Conquered,” though there are a number of humorous passages, we are aware of Googe's attempt to impress us with the solemn importance of the psychomachy that ends the dream. If we conclude that Googe knew and used “The Flower and the Leaf,” it does not necessarily follow that he misread the old poem, overlooking its essential lightness. All the conventional material he borrowed retains its external identity even as Googe transmutes its meaning by turning it to new purposes.

The glare of the sun forces the speaker of “Cupido Conquered” to give over staring at the reflections in the spring and to take shelter beneath the laurel tree. Under the influence of weariness, strange fumes from the spring, the music of the birds, and the agency of “woddy Nimphes,” he soon falls into a “slumbre Deepe,” and immediately the second poem of the poem begins. Mercury, dresses in white, acosts the dreamer, who at first is stunned, and then comically offended:

Thou Goddesse Son, why standste thou there
          what busines now with thee,
What meanest thou in thy flying weed,
          For to appeare to me.

(ll. 71-2)

Mercury replies that he has come as a messenger from the Muses to thank the poet for taking the trouble “In theyr affaires (a thankeles thyng) / to occupie thy Brayne,” and to encourage him in the face of “Momus ill report” to set to work with a will. Mercury assures him that “The day shall come when thankfull men, / shall well accept thy Paine,” and mentions some of Googe's friends whose writing has seen the light. But it is not reticence that keeps the poet from his work:

Moreover yet the Ladyes nine,
          have all commanded me,
Bycause they know, the blynded God
          has somethyng pearced the.
To leade the foorth, a thyng to see,
          Yf all thyngs happen right,
Whiche shall gyve the occasion good,
          with joyfull mynde to wryght.

(ll. 103-6)

The opposition between the idleness that results from the enervation of love and the praiseworthy work that the muses urge on the poet recalls the opposition between the idle company of the Flower and the industrious company of the Leaf, many of whom are crowned with laurel, the traditional reward of the working poet. The terms in which Googe couches his dreamer's encounter with Mercury bind together his moral and artistic themes.

The god tells the astonished dreamer to follow him; wings sprout on his sides and they fly off to “a Gorgyous Castell.” Cautioning him to “note what thou doose se,” Mercury hurries away. leaving the dreamer frightened and alone, cursing his guide in a comic soliloquy for having deserted him. Still, he decides, “hap what hap will to me,” to approach the castle.

In a line, Googe nods his acknowledgement to the conventional exterior description of the castle usually included in court-of-love poems and neglects entirely the next incident, the dreamer's entrance into the palace itself—an entrance often assisted by a porter such as “Genius” or “Fair Welcome,” with, or pointedly without, obstacles. But after his dreamer has strolled into the castle, Googe does full justice to one of the most fascinating and variously exploited features of the genre, the paintings on the walls.

Many authors took advantage of these frescoes to retell mythic or legendary tales. In “Cupido Conquered” the paintings indicate to the dreaming poet whose palace he has entered and remind him of something he needs to know. He finds himself in what amounts to Diana's trophy room. There is a picture of Acteon; one showing Orion in his discomfiture, subscribed “Account thy selfe lost, yf that / thou bearste a lecherous Hart”; and “many storyes more” of “What fearfull haps to many men, / for lust uncleane befell.”

Just as the poem is grinding to a halt in static description, Googe infuses it with action and life. A messenger, “blowyng fast for want of breath,” rushes past the dreamer, who follows him into Diana's presence chamber. Here Diana, in a shining robe of silver-white, sits on a high throne surrounded by her court. Among the throng are chaste but not virgin women (Dido, Hisiphile, Lucretia, Penelope); famous virgins, led by Hippolytus; and a trio of personified abstractions—Continence, Labour (“Of bodie bygge and strong … and somwhat Crabtre faced”), and Abstinence (“a leane unwyldy wyght” of “Diet thyn”).

The fraternization of mythological and legendary figures with personified abstractions is a customary feature of the medieval tradition that stands behind “Cupido Conquered.” Allegorical thought frequently chooses for its visible symbols typical or exceptional practitioners of the virtues or vices they are meant to stand for. Thus Diana, the chaste goddess, comes in this poem to represent the principle or ideal of Chastity, just as Venus, who is mentioned but never appears, looms over the poem as the erotic principle. So Hippolytus plays a foil for Cupid; the latter represents the action of lust in the soul, the former the counter-action of the ideal of Chastity. Continence, Labour, and Abstinence are concomitant virtues to chastity, and though Continence is not described (the proposition does present some difficulty), Googe pictures Labour as a laborer, Abstinence as one who has abstained. Later he envisions one of Cupid's attendants, “Exces,” in a passage anticipating Spenser's description of Gluttony, as “A lubbour great … full trust with guts.”

The messenger falls on his knees before Diana and bursts into a plea for aid against a terrible invader. Once his terror so overcomes him that he must pause, and then he launches a description of Cupid's army and the manner in which it is ravaging Diana's realm. As captain, Cupid rides with his golden bow and a quiver of poisonous arrows in a chariot. He has sacked a number of Diana's forts and slain many with his mysterious arrows. The wounds he inflicts fester and spread venom to the victims' hearts; they burn with fever or seek relief in suicide. “Nothyng abashde,” Hippolytus knows his duty and, reassuring the frightened ladies of the court, vows to bring the rampaging “Chieftain back” in chains.

Diana accepts Hippolytus as her champion, but she does not, as might have been true in a medieval poem, send him forth to meet Cupid in single combat. She charges him to raise an army and to march out to meet the invaders in a full epic battle. Here “Cupido Conquered” reaches back to the archetype of another literary tradition, the Psychomachia of Prudentius. One of the goriest conflicts in Prudentius' poem is the slaying of Libido by Pudicitia.14 Such a victory is possible, argues Prudentius, because all human flesh shares in the nature of the virgin birth and may be purified by Baptism. Prudentius' theological rationale differs from the moral-psychological scheme of “Cupido Conquered” as much as the bloody details that adorn the Psychomachia differ from Googe's generalized reports of who strikes blows and who then falls.

Hippolytus, choosing Abstinence, Continence, and Labour for his captains, takes his leave amid the tears of the ladies in the castle and sallies forth into the countryside to raise an army. Soldiers, “All armed brave in Corsletes white,” courageously rally to his trumpet and prepare to meet the enemy, whose general, Cupid himself, approaches, scattering flames in all directions and leading behind him a thousand bleeding hearts.

The dreamer hears Hippolytus harangue his soldiers, praising their courage, virtue, and manhood while disparaging their enemies, and the inevitable pattern of battle unfolds. The soldiers of Labour overcome those of Idlenes, and the two captains fight it out until Idlenes falls. Labour then goes to the aid of “Syr Abstinence” and together “the gresye Hoaste, / of Glottonye they slewe,” as Cupid's forces take to their heels before the joyous pursuit of the victorious army.

Googe renders the precise moment of the victory of the powers of chastity within the soul through a familiar image from the Phaedrus:

The dryver of his [Cupid's] Charyot soone
          Hipolitus there slewe.
And down from Horse, the wretche doth fall.
          The horses spoyld of guyde,
A souldier stoute of Reasons bande,
          is wylled there to ryde.
Who turnyng Raynes another waye
          restrayns hym of his flyght.

(ll. 354-7)

The rational will reins in the appetites and holds lust in check; the soul, formerly in disarray because of the unrestrained triumph of the erotic impulse, is now in its proper order.

Cupid pleads with Hippolytus for his life, reminding his conquerors that he is entitled to respect because he could very well have won the battle. Like the teller of ghost stories who lets his demon vanish into the night, perhaps to return, Googe leaves Cupid's fate undetermined. The poem ends with a passage of pleasant recapitulation that recalls earlier motives and artfully rounds off the narration. The dreamer awakes in confusion but soon recognizes the fountain and the laurel. After watching the sunset and the birds preparing for rest, he returns home to a restless bed. But:

When Phebus rose to passe the tyme,
          and passe my gryefe awaye
I toke my Pen and pend the Dreame
          that made my Muses staye.

(ll. 387-8)

The grief and the sleepless night suggest that the poet still suffers from the pangs of love, and that his situation, despite the outcome of the psychomachy, has not changed. This is only partly true. Googe recognizes that resolving in the mind to cast off love by exercising the rational will (to defeat love in the arena of the soul) does not result in immediate freedom from all further pain: love and lust act on the body as well as on the soul. But by rising in the morning and setting about to write, the poet acts positively on his resolve. He writes “to passe the tyme,” that is, to avoid idleness, which is the first step toward overcoming love's torments.

The locus classicus for this conception of the role of idleness in matters of love is Ovid's Remedia Amoris. Googe acknowledges his indebtedness in a marginal note to the brief gnome “To Alexander Nevell,” a translation of verses 139-40, 162-3 of Ovid's poem. “The Aunswere of A. Nevell to the Same” states succinctly the psychological mechanism that operates in “Cupido Conquered” and indicates its moral implications, even using two of the same epithets—“Drowsy Idlenes” and “vyle exces.”15 Perhaps, then, we should pronounce “Cupido Conquered” and its allegory needless elaboration, charming to the medieval and even the Renaissance mind; for us, however, only a bothersome interposition between the reader and the kernel of meaning it buries.16 But the allegory of “Cupido Conquered” does not simply expand a preformulated packet of truth. It shadows forth in what was probably the only way available to Googe the actual interplay of ambition, desire, and knowledge that, according to the traditional psychology, leads to human choice.

A suggestive contribution to the perennial controversy over the nature of allegory and how to read it is to be found in Lewis' description of the Roman de la Rose as a radical allegory. A radical allegory is a poem whose allegorical surface can otherwise be rendered “without confusion, but not without loss,” into a consistent literal story.17 Externalization of inner conflicts forms the core of the radical allegorical method; to be successful it must presuppose the existence of a character or characters within whom the conflicts are really taking place, such as the lover and his mistress in the Roman.

“Cupido Conquered” can be read as a radical allegory and translated into literal narration. A poet has fallen in love and lost his mistress. The loss, as we learn, added to his natural reluctance for fear of adverse criticism, has rendered him unable to write. He sets forth one spring day to distract himself from his woe. The conventional elements of the landscape, the birds, fountain, and laurel cannot be translated, but this is not necessary, for the externalization of the poet's inner conflict begins only when he falls asleep. As the messenger of the gods, Mercury often stands for eloquence, but let us say that here he represents the poet's desire to be eloquent, his poetic ambition. This ambition spurs the poet on by reminding him of others' success and instilling a hope for eventual fame, and drives him to the point—the gate of Diana's castle—where he can see a way to overcome his major obstacle, love, and so get on with his work. The triumph of Hippolytus over Cupid shows the chaster and more ambitious impulses of the poet's soul getting the upper hand on his debilitating erotic desires. When he awakes he is able to write again. Certain other elements of the poem fit the pattern of this story. For instance, the pomp of the mustered court of Diana, set beside the ragged army of Cupid and its devastation of the countryside, can represent the poet's knowledge of the dignity and nobility of chastity balanced with his perception of the repulsiveness and destructive effect of love. The descriptions of the frescoes play a similar role. These passages are appropriately bookish and derivative: the poet has learned what he knows from ancient authors. In short, then, “Cupido Conquered,” far from just decking a moral saw with gratuitous ornamentation, presents the externalized story of how and why a poet, meditating his case on a spring afternoon, makes up his mind to overcome the tyranny of love over his spirit and return to his work.18

The fountain, laurel tree, birds, and the May morning, though packed with connotations accumulated from centuries of use, exert their symbolic force only outside the radical allegory. Unlike Mercury or Diana's castle, they purport to be objects of the actual world. Googe uses them in two ways. First, he includes them in his poem as obligatory stage-properties of the genre in which he is writing. But, having no use for them in his allegory, he excludes them from the dream proper. Second, he playfully exploits the literary associations they recall in the mind of such a well-read person as the poet in “Cupido Conquered” by suggesting that it is under their mysterious influence that the dream appears to him. It is only natural that a scholarly poet, having found in the real world a place so similar to the landscapes of the old visionary poems he knew, should one way or another conceive an analogous dream vision for himself.

What the poet finally learns in the dream is not only how to overcome love in the soul but how to deal with it in poetry. “Cupido Conquered” acts out in detail the response Googe made to the problem presented by his artistic conservatism and his desire to use poetry for moral suasion; it is a poem about poetry, a piece of literary criticism. The dream sent him by the muses shows how, by portraying love defeated, one can treat the traditional subjects in the traditional genres without abdicating moral responsibility. Though Googe wrote “Cupido Conquered” in the medieval manner, imitating with precision the form of the dream-vision allegory, court of love, and psychomachy, a comparison of his work with three previous British analogues shows how much he has transformed the conventions to fit his needs.

Googe unequivocally takes sides on the conventional opposition between love and reason or religion or chastity. William Dunbar's The Goldyn Targe presents the opposition, but does not attempt to communicate a judgment. The shield of Reason protects Dunbar's dreamer from the arrows of the whole pagan pantheon and the allegorical court of love until a figure called Presence blinds Reason and the dreamer is captured. He is passed from Beauty to Dissimulance, and then in succession to Fair Calling, New Acquaintance, Danger, and Heaviness before he finally awakens. Reason, Dunbar implies, is helpless in the presence of beauty; no exercise of will or virtue can prevent the disaster. But Dunbar's forces of love are charming and seem not seriously dangerous; the poet awakens undisturbed. The purpose of the poem, as the envoy praising Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate makes clear, is to display eloquence in the statement and celebration of the poetic traditions of love.

“Cupido Conquered” brings to bear on the question of love a moral concern that is foreign to Dunbar's poem and to the much more pretentious Palice of Honour by Gavin Douglas, an encyclopedic dream vision against which the unity and focus of “Cupido Conquered” stand out sharply. Early in the poem Douglas' dreamer describes a triumph of Diana, whose crew, he notices, is badly diminished. Soon after, he meets a glorious triumph of Venus, to which he responds by singing a poem on the sufferings of love. Arraigned for this offense before the bar of Venus, he frees himself after some humorous interplay by composing a more acceptable lyric. Though it is clear that love is an obstacle to be avoided on the way to the Palace of Honor, this incident is handled without any of the moral fervor that Googe would have brought to it. Douglas' dreamer, as poet, gives in to the commands of Venus, thus debasing his art in precisely the way that Googe strives to avoid.

Stephen Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure employs the dream framework to begin an allegory of man's life structured as a romantic quest. The dreamer, besides passing through an allegorized scholastic education, must learn the discipline of chivalry in order to gain his beloved, La Belle Pucell, who personifies Beauty and Purity. Courtship and love are set forth after the manner of the Roman de la Rose and are climaxed by marriage. There is no question of evading love, though its shortcomings and decay with age are duly noted.

All three of these works deal in general types to describe what is real in the abstract, idealistic medieval sense. Love is incontrovertibly a part of life and so finds its literary representation in the usual ways. Googe is less concerned with what is real than with what is good, or rather, what one should do. Thus he builds his allegory not around man's life but around a single choice made by a particular man in a particular situation. The allegory brings to life the elements that enter into the choice, and though it does not deny that they are real, it discloses their true nature as perceived by the moral sense. Cupid's crew is by no means attractive, even though love is undeniably attractive in real life.

Preoccupied with revealing the love celebrated in poetry as a disruptive passion that can lead directly to mortal sin, Googe makes no provision for even a purified version of love, thus cutting off his poetry from a significant part of human experience. Unlike the later Elizabethans, who struggled to find new literary embodiments of love that could be reconciled with religion and morality, Googe dealt entirely with the traditional outlines of love in poetry, and, finding them at odds with his system of ethics, uncompromisingly rejected them. Thus he formulated a problem his successors worked to solve and in the process assembled many of the elements necessary to the solution. In “Cupido Conquered,” Googe demonstrated one way in which, by the application of moral philosophy to traditional subject matter, a dead genre could be revitalized.

Notes

  1. Hiram Haydn's The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1950) demonstrates the scale of effort required.

  2. In the prefatory epistle to his collection Googe asks his readers “to beare with the unpleasaunt forme of my to hastely fynyshed Dreame, the greater part whereof with lytle advyse I lately ended, because the beginnyng of it, as a senseles head separated from the body was gyven with the rest to be prynted” by a friend while Googe was out of the country. Eglogs, Epytaphes, & Sonettes (1563), ed. Edward Arber (Westminster, 1895), p. 25. All quotations from Googe are from this edition; I have expanded typographical contractions and regularized the usage of i/j and u/v.

  3. New York, 1958, pp. 257-8. Earle Broadus Fowler, in Spenser and the Courts of Love (Menasha, Wis., 1921), tabulates the outstanding conventions of the genre. “Cupido Conquered” fulfills them almost without exception.

  4. The Allegory of Love, p. 157.

  5. Tradition and Poetic Structure (Denver, 1960), pp. 61-2.

  6. See Paul E. Parnell, “Barnabe Googe: A Puritan in Arcadia,” JEGP, LX (1961), 273-81. Parnell shows that in his eclogues Googe writes a homily against the love customarily celebrated in the genre.

  7. The Allegory of Love, p. 39.

  8. Ibid., pp. 41-2.

  9. See J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (Garden City, N. Y., 1954), p. 271.

  10. See Rosemond Tuve, ed., The Zodiake of Life (New York, 1947).

  11. No. 5 in Tottel's Miscellany, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1928, 1965).

  12. Petrarch has no court-of-love or court-of-chastity scene. Diana does not appear. In Petrarch, Love is defeated in the vain endeavor to subdue the chaste Laura in a single combat; in Googe two large armies clash, one led by Hippolytus, the other by Cupid. To remark that Googe was not closely following the Trionfi, nevertheless, is not to demonstrate that he did not know them. If he did not have Italian, he could have read them in an English version by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, published in 1554. In addition to the conventional trappings of the dream vision which they share and the partial similarity of their plots, the Trionfi and “Cupido Conquered” have several characters in common among those in the camp of the chaste. It is likely that Googe knew Petrarch had done something in the “dream” genre in which Cupid was overcome by the forces of chastity, that he was thus emboldened to try his own scheme for “Cupido Conquered,” and that he wanted to evoke the authoritative name of Petrarch along with all the other literary associations he weaves into the poem.

  13. See The Allegory of Love, p. 247. “The Flower and the Leaf” is printed in Chaucerian and Other Pieces, ed. W. W. Skeat (Oxford, 1897).

  14. Prudentius, ed. H. J. Thomson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1949), I, 40-108.

  15. Eglogs, Epitaphes, & Sonettes, p. 92.

  16. This view is held by Frank B. Fieler, editor of the Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints version of Googe's poems (Gainesville, Fla., 1968), pp. xix-xx.

  17. The Allegory of Love, p. 166.

  18. The danger of applying such a notion as radical allegory to the interpretation of poems is that once the general pattern emerges, the temptation is strong to push the case too far by trying to fit every detail into the scheme. It seldom works, and the critic finds himself rejecting the poem as inconsistent and confused simply because it does not form a mathematically perfect cryptogram. In Googe's poem, for example, we are compelled to understand the chariot seized by the soldier of Reason as a symbol of the poet's soul, while at the same time we must regard the whole world of the dream as a representation of his soul as well. Graham Hough in his Preface to the Faerie Queene (London, 1962), offers a healthy remonstrance against this kind of over-schematization in the reading of allegory. It is in the whole sweep of the narration that we are to seek the final meaning of the allegory, and we need ask only that each incident be consistent with the others on the surface level.

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