SOURCE: “The Masks of Cupid and Death,” in Comparative Drama, Vol. 29, No. 1, Spring, 1995, pp. 38-60.

[In the following essay, Dundas discusses James Shirley's masque Cupid and Death in relation to other Renaissance variations on the theme of love and death.]

I

The repetition of the same syllable in the Latin words amor and mors could, in the Renaissance, seem to confirm with lightning speed an essential relationship between these two apparent opposites, love and death. Amor, in short, contains mors.¹ But whatever language was used in poems and the poetic drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, “love” often called for its opposite, “death.” One fable in particular epitomized and dramatized the truth of this relationship. In a widely influential version, Alciati turned the story of the interchange of the arrows of Love and Death into an emblem.² If its moral is somewhat ambiguous, or at least subject to a variety of possible interpretations, it captured in graphic terms a topos to which both masque and drama were drawn, whether as central theme or as metaphor. But the variations on the theme also provide an instructive instance of the generic difference between masque and drama.

The fable seems to offer an explanation for at least two phenomena—the one, a literary fashion; the other, a historical fact. Certainly the popularity of the fable coincides with the Petrarchan propensity to treat love as a sickness unto death. At the same time, according to early commentators, the fable reflects the actual experience of sudden death brought to young people by the epidemics of plague that swept Western Europe in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance.³ The fable thus seems to provide a mythologized explanation for either imaginary or real tragic events; it does so, however, in a somewhat humorous form. Geffrey Whitney actually labels his emblem on the subject “Jocosum.”⁴ This playfulness also enters into Renaissance drama and masque whenever love and death are personified. Recognizing this feature of love, Plutarch, in his essay “Of Love,” notes: “True it is that Poets seeme to write the most part of that which they deliver as touching this god of Love, by way of merriment, and they sing of him as it were in a maske.”⁵ As we shall see, the same applies to personifications of death.

But let us consider a briefer English version than Whitney's or Alciati's emblem. Henry Peacham both recounts the story and makes a plea to Nature to restore the arrows that rightly belong to each deity (fig. 1):

DEATH meeting once, with CUPID
in an Inne,
Where roome was scant, togeither both they lay.
Both wearie, (for they roving both had beene,)
Now on the morrow when they should away,
                    CUPID Death's
quiver at his back had throwne,
                    And DEATH tooke CUPIDS, thinking it his
                              owne.
By this o're-sight, it shortly came to passe,
That young men died, who readie were to wed:
And age did revell with his bonny-lasse,
Composing girlonds for his hoarie head:
                    Invert not Nature, oh ye Power twaine,
                    Give CUPID'S
dartes, and DEATH take thine
                              againe.(6)

The simple narrative is treated as an inversion of nature's law that young people should fall in love and old people should die. Here the Petrarchan note is not sounded; rather, it is the plague that implicitly forms the background against which this travesty occurs. No moral is to be derived, except perhaps that everyone should be ready to face death because it is so unpredictable, so much the tool of Fortune.

The complaint that nature has, by Fortune, been violated is voiced by Shakespeare's Venus in his Venus and Adonis:

“If he be dead—O no, it cannot be,
Seeing his beauty, thou shouldst strike at it:
O yes, it may, thou hast no eyes to see,
But hatefuly at randon dost thou hit.
                    Thy mark is feeble age, but thy false dart
                    Mistakes that aim, and cleaves an infant's heart.
                    “Love's golden arrow at him should
have fled,
                    And not Death's ebon dart to strike him dead.”

(ll. 937-42, 947-48)⁷

The parallel between the two deities, seemingly so opposite, is underlined by the fact that both bear bow and arrows, and that both shoot at random.

It is but a step, as Venus perhaps realized, from her complaint against Death to the view that Death too is a lover—a lover of beauty. Shakespeare uses this idea when he has Venus say that perhaps the boar that killed Adonis loved him too hard, and she adds: “Had I been tooth'd like him, I must confess, / With kissing him I should have kill'd him first” (ll. 1117-18). Personifying death naturally attributes human motives to him. In the case of Venus, who sees love as the only response to beauty, Death could do no other than love.⁸ Her unconscious humor, far from detracting from the pathos of her remark, strengthens her lament.

A related emblem by Alciati treats Death as maliciously exchanging his own arrows with those of the sleeping Cupid, thereby causing the death of a beautiful young girl. This emblem, “In formosam fato praereptam” (fig. 2),⁹ has obvious affinities with, first, the supposed death of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, and then her actual death. Old Capulet, on the morning when his daughter was to have wed the young man Paris, finding her apparently dead, exclaims to Paris:

O son, the night before thy wedding-day
Hath Death lain with thy wife. There she lies,
Flower as she was, deflowered by him.
Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir,
My daughter he hath wedded. I will die,
And leave him all; life, living, all is Death's.

(IV.v.35-40)

Romeo, finding Juliet in the Capulet tomb, takes up the same interpretation of Death's action:

                                                            Shall I believe
That unsubstantial Death is amorous,
And that the lean abhorred monster keeps
Thee here in dark to be his paramour?
For fear of that, I still will stay with thee,
And never from this [palace] of dim night
Depart again.

(V.iii.102-08)

Fittingly, these words express more passionate grief than Capulet's conventional lament. Death is now characterized not simply as a son-in-law but as “the lean abhorred monster”; his proper sphere of darkness is alluded to; and, finally, the emotive word “paramour” is used to make him seem a rival to Romeo as husband. To prevent that from happening, Romeo too must die to claim his bride.

In considering the relationship between Alciati's “In formosam praereptam fato” and Shakespeare's use of a similar topos, the question may be asked: what is the relevance of the emblem to Shakespeare? There is no need to make any assumptions about influence or sources, given the widespread theme of Death and the Maiden in paintings of the Renaissance,¹⁰ not to mention the Greek Anthology with its laments for the young who have died an untimely death. Such poems as the following express a mourning similar to old Capulet's:

The very torch that laughing Hymen bore
To light the virgin to the bridegroom's door,
With that same torch the bridegroom lights the fire
That dimly glimmers on her funeral pyre.
Thou, too, O Hymen! bid'st the nuptial lay
In elegiac moanings die away.(11)

There are a number of other epitaphs on the cutting short of young life, and they remind us that behind Alciati's emblems often lie the epigrams of the Greek Anthology.

Death as lover, a topos in both “De morte et amore” and in “In formosam praereptam fato,” puts one kind of interpretation on the relationship between love and death. Death is now personified, not solely as a figure that represents destruction but as desire, in competition with an earthly lover. It seems that this view is more comprehensible to Shakespeare's Venus, the embodiment of love, than any other view of death. For his Cleopatra, a Venus figure, “The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch, / Which hurts, and is desir'd” (V.ii.295-96). Charmian also views death as a lover when she says, after her mistress's suicide, “Now boast thee, death, in thy possession lies / A lass unparallel'd” (V.ii.315-16). We have moved from the idea of the young girl who is carried off by death to a much older woman who, nevertheless, remains perpetually desirable. In a sense, she too is carried off before her time by the god who covets her for his own.

All these allusions to Death as a lover of course mirror or in some sense reflect the myth of Proserpina, carried away by Pluto to the underworld to be his wife. One lament from the Greek Anthology asks: “Why, Pluto, thus our loved companion seize? / Had Venus maddened even thy gloomy soul?”¹² An allusion to the myth in the pastoral scene of the fourth act of The Winter's Tale mingles melancholy with the sweetness of Perdita's famous flower speech:

                                                                                                                        O Proserpina,
For the flow'rs now, that, frighted, thou let'st fall
From Dis's wagon!

(IV.iv.116-18)

The dialogue between Perdita and Florizel that follows this speech continues the note of et in Arcadia ego:

Perdita: O, these I lack,
To make you garlands of; and my sweet friend,
To strew him o'er and o'er!
Florizel: What? like a corse?
Perdita: No, like a bank, for love
to lie and play on,
Not like a corse; or if—not to be buried,
But quick and in mine arms.

(IV.iv.127-32)

Beautiful as the language is, we almost overlook both the link to the actual death of Antigonus that introduces the pastoral episode and the more dramatically crucial supposed death of Hermione. But studying the language of Shakespeare's plays, we become aware of the broader context in which the Cupid and Death fable had a role to play. The popularity of the emblem in the literature of the Renaissance suggests the extent to which it captured something latent in the minds of people. From the emblematic point of view, Love and Death have no business using each other's arrows; it is an overturning of nature. The English emblem writers Whitney and Peacham interpret the exchange of arrows in just this way. From Shakespeare's more profound perspective, nature implies both love and death. Mention of the one almost inevitably evokes the other. The range of treatment may vary—from the supposed death of Hero in the comedy Much Ado About Nothing to the tragic real death of Desdemona in Othello—but all serve as reminders that the most intense emotions are destructive as well as creative. John Donne in his Nocturnall upon St. Lucy's Day uses alchemical imagery to bring love and death together:

                    For I am every dead thing,
                    In whom love wrought new Alchimie.
                                        For his art did expresse
A quintessence even from nothingesse,
From dull privations, and leane emptinesse;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

(ll. 12-18)

This poem, like a soliloquy from a drama, meditates on this central mystery of human life.

But the fear of death also finds other expressions in poetry and drama, including some that are less obviously related to love. Richard II, hearing of Bolingbroke's triumphal return to England, prepares for his own demise by contemplating the death of kings:

                                                            for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and humor'd thus,
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores thorough his castle wall, and farewell king!

(Richard II III.ii.160-70)

But even this notion of Death as a clown finds an echo in the Cupid and Death emblem. Whitney calls it a humorous tale—jocosum—humorous, no doubt, because of the accidental meeting of Cupid and Death at an inn and the havoc that results. Some versions of the fable even show the two deities getting drunk together.¹³ In any case, they sleep side by side—hence, the confusion of their arrows when they wake up in the morning.

Not only can Death play the fool but he makes fools of others, as the Duke of Measure for Measure, disguised as a friar, informs Claudio, who is lying in prison awaiting death: “Merely, thou art death's fool, / For him thou labor'st by thy flight to shun, / And yet run'st toward him still” (III.i.11-13). There is, in fact, a long tradition of Death as a fool or an employer of fools.

The danse macabre, or the Dance of Death, includes all ranks and classes of society, even the fool.¹⁴ Hamlet makes this discovery when, in the last act of the play, he finds the skull of Yorick the jester: “Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning—quite chop-fall'n” (V.i.189-92). In a much earlier play, Love's Labor's Lost, Shakespeare was already treating the inadequacy of laughter to keep away death. Berowne, the fool who has not contemplated death, is brought up short by Rosaline's charge to him to make the sick laugh:

To move wild laughter in the throat of death?
It cannot be, it is impossible:
Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.

(V.ii.855-57)

Yet in one way the fool and death may be allied: death itself is not to be taken too seriously. Perhaps Cerimon in Pericles is thinking of this alliance when he expresses his preference for his medical studies

                                                            which doth give me
A more content in course of true delight
Than to be thirsty after tottering honor,
Or tie my pleasure up in silken bags,
To please the fool and death.

(III.ii.38-42)

Death may wear the mask of the fool as well as that of the lover. In Cymbeline, the face of the apparently dead Imogen, disguised as Fidelio, teasingly suggests a response to a secret joke:

Thus smiling, as some fly had tickled slumber,
Not as death's dart being laugh'd at; his right cheek
Reposing on a cushion.

(IV.ii.210-12)

That the Dance of Death could be treated as entertainment in the form of a masque suggests one possible interpretation that could be placed on the grin of a skeletal death. James M. Clark, in his The Dance of Death, takes note of “a Dance of Death masque or tableau vivant performed at a royal Scottish wedding in 1285.”¹⁵ As a wedding entertainment, it might not have seemed the most appropriate, except for those who were accustomed to see life, love, and death as bound up together. In these dances, the living dance with the dead, and the dance thus becomes an allegory of death.¹⁶

One of the most famous treatments of the subject, and the culmination of the whole tradition, is Holbein's Dance of Death (1538). In each of the many separate scenes—really, each a memento mori—in which a skeletal Death mocks the living, the satiric note is sounded. In one of these scenes, Death mocks a married couple, whom he will separate:

The love by which they are united,
By faith should teach them, ere too late,
That soon such unions be blighted,
And Death steps in to separate.(17)

These scenes are close to the emblems of Laurentius Haechtanus, with a picture, a poem, and a biblical verse. His Cupid and Death emblem, for example, includes the biblical quotation “The wages of sin is death” to act as a reminder that death is always imminent and that one should therefore prepare oneself spiritually for it.

Another message of the Dance of Death is that death is the great leveler, that the social distinctions observed in Holbein's woodcuts are there only to show that all members of society—the monk, the duchess, the knight—are equally subject to death. Belarius, commenting on the death of Cloten in Cymbeline, draws attention to both aspects of the Dance of Death:

                    Though mean and mighty, rotting
Together, have one dust, yet reverence
(That angel of the world) doth make distinction
Of place 'tween high and low. Our foe was princely,
And though you took his life, as being our foe,
Yet bury him as a prince.

(IV.ii.246-51)

Guiderius responds: “Pray you fetch him hither. / Thersites' body is as good as Ajax', / When neither are alive” (ll. 251-53). The beautiful song that follows for Imogen, the Ajax to Cloten's Thersites, also reflects the Dance of Death:

Fear no more the heat o' th' sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

(ll. 258-63)

All power and learning come to the same end: “The sceptre, learning, physic, must / All follow this and come to dust.” Lovers, too, finish both their “joy and moan”: “All lovers young, all lovers must / Consign to thee and come to dust” (ll. 268-69, 273-75).

II

The parallel between the Cupid and Death emblem and the Dance of Death is too obvious to need emphasis, but the satiric element in both is worth further consideration, especially as it emerges triumphantly in Cupid and Death, a masque by James Shirley.

The relationship of emblem to masque is more direct than that between emblem and drama. If a play sets out to be an imitation of nature, a masque proposes no such thing; essentially, it is ornamental in its combination of poetry, music, dance, scenery, and costumes. Its symbolic language may be described as emblematic because the significance of the images is immediately translatable, unlike, say, Hamlet, with its richness of implication and complexity of meaning.¹⁸ There are those who do not like masques for the reason that they lack fully developed characters and interesting plots. And yet the very absence of character development enables the artist (both poet and designer) to conceive of the masque as a vehicle for compliment and entertainment, rather like a song in which intricate meaning would be out of place. Still, the emblematic or symbolic features of the masque in their decorative form imply, without fully expressing, the deeper mysteries of human existence. It was such mysteries that Ben Jonson insisted on in his masques, “which, though their voice be taught to sound to present occasions, their sense or doth or should always lay hold on more removed mysteries.”¹⁹

But these Platonic ideals play a lesser role in Shirley's Cupid and Death for the very good reason that it uses a well-known fable, with an intrinsic plot structure, and it draws more upon the real world than do Jonson's mythologized masques.²⁰ When Shirley turned to the subject of Alciati's emblem De Morte et Amore for the subject of a masque, he both played up its humorous potential and gave it a new artistic being. By providing the happy ending intrinsic to the genre, he also resolved the problem posed by the emblem.

Shirley did not move directly from emblem to masque, however; he used a transitional form: the version of the fable in the Aesop's Fables of John Ogilby.²¹ From the various seventeenth century editions of the Fables, it is apparent that a movement away from strictly emblematic form toward narrative expression was already taking place even before Shirley's masque. Ogilby, in his version, shows more of the social setting for the customary actions of Cupid and Death before the exchange of their arrows. Cupid, for example, roves all day, “wounding a thousand hearts,” but it is at night when he pursues his sport “to a mask” that his activities call for the most amplification: “Where he his Quiver empties, and supplies / Again from beauteous Ladies eyes.” Death, too, is busy at a “cruell fight,” and by night he visits towns. All this is a prelude to explaining why Cupid and Death happened to meet, exhausted, at an inn.

Among those shot with the arrow of Death is a young man, who prays to Cupid to shoot him with a golden arrow, not with Death's “charnell bone.” The illustration that accompanies the first edition of the Fables, by Francis Cleyn, shows a youth who prays with clasped hands to Cupid in the sky (fig. 3).²² The old men and women are also shown in the exact dance described by Ogilby, while the young people appear pale and languishing as they look at (or turn away from) one of their number who lies stricken on the ground, near his grave. Like Ogilby's poem, Cleyn's illustration provides a more copious narrative treatment than any of the illustrations to Alciati's emblem. Usually in these, only two couples, one young, one elderly, are shown. Now the implication that the whole of society was affected by the exchange of Cupid's and Death's arrows is given greater confirmation in terms of pictorial narrative. The illustration in turn helps to make the appended moral more meaningful:

Age burns with Love, while youth cold
ague shakes;
And Nature oft her principles mistakes:
So suffers Youth in Ages cold imbrace,
As living men to dead bound face to face.(23)

In the enlarged folio edition of the Fables, illustrated by Hollar and Stoop in 1665, the basic design remains the same as in Cleyn's 1651 illustration (fig. 4).²⁴ But the redrawn plate is much easier to interpret, though it less accurately reflects Ogilby's version in one respect. Gone is the young man who prays to Cupid. On the other hand, the volumes of the figures are much better Barlow by bringing Cupid and Death into a genre scene. He based this masque on Ogilby's version with a little help from another fable, “Cupid, Death, and Reputation,” in the Fables of 1651, to which he had already contributed a dedicatory poem.²⁶ He could not have seen Barlow's illustration, of course, because it did not appear until 1666, but both artist and masque-writer clearly tried to imagine a scene in which Cupid and Death would appear in the everyday world.

Reviving the “jocosum” spirit of the tale, Shirley plays up its humorous potential, particularly in the person of the down-to-earth and greedy Chamberlain who receives the guests at a rural inn where Cupid and Death are to pass the night. He describes the sleeping arrangements for the “immortal guests”: “The great chamber, / With the two wooden monuments to sleep in, / (That weigh six load of timber, sir,) are ready.”²⁷ Appropriately, Cupid's bed is decked with roses and myrtle; Death's, with yew from a churchyard. The attendant of Death, Despair, appeals to the Chamberlain's greed by saying that he has made a will in which he leaves everything to the man who brings Death to him. In his eagerness to be that man, the Chamberlain supplies Despair with a bottle of wine, paid for out of his own pocket. Ironically, as Despair drinks, he cheers up and is not inclined to make the Chamberlain his beneficiary. He will not even pay for the bottle of wine: “Your free gift, I remember. … We men of money, worn with age and cares, / Drink in new life from wine that costs us nothing” (Works, VI, 355). Despair's own free gift is some hemp, which the Chamberlain can use to hang himself when the time comes.

Annoyed with both Cupid and Death, the Chamberlain deliberately exchanges their arrows. If he should ever see them again, he thinks he will be safe: “should I meet with Death, / I shall not fear him now; for Cupid, if / Lovers must only by his arrows fall, / I'm safe, for, ladies, I defy you all” (Works, VI, 358). In the event he is proved wrong. But interestingly it is now the common man who plays the role of Fortune, thereby domesticating, as it were, the fable.

At the end of each of the five entries is a song; the first of these is on Love's power, the second on Death's. After the exchange of arrows, a song to Cupid asks the little god to pity pale lovers, not to kill them. This theme of Petrarchan love, already present in Alciati's epigram, receives new emphasis in the fourth entry when the scene changes to a garden of dead lovers, and a distraught Nature warns people against love, which has “now become your enemy, a murderer” (Works, VI, 358). The various illustrations to the fable are echoed in Nature's exclamation:

                                                            Look, everywhere
The noble lovers on the ground lie bleeding,
By frantic Cupid slain; into whose wounds
Distracted virgins pour their tears so fast,
That having drain'd their fountains, they present
Their own pale monuments.

(Works, VI, 359)

Again, one lover speaks for all: “Hah! What winter creeps / Into my heart!” As Nature looks on, old men and women begin their dance.

The Chorus' song “Change, oh change your fatal bows” (Works, VI, 360-61) prepares for the happy denouement of the masque. But first the Chamberlain, having left his old employment, appears, leading two apes as entertainment at fairs.²⁸ But, struck by death's arrow, he falls in love with them. Praising their beauty as Nature's own—“No borrow'd ornament of white and red”—he kisses the “Black cherries” of their lips (p. 362). However, when a satyr carries them off, he decides to make use of the hemp that Despair had so generously bestowed on him, to hang himself.

After this anti-masque, Mercury, as deus ex machina, descends to restore order. Cupid is banished to humble “cottages,” no more to trouble “princes' courts,” and Death is forbidden finally to kill people who have “Marks of art or honour” (Works, VI, 365). Nature, still concerned about the young who have died from Cupid's arrows, is granted, in a second scene change, a vision of the Elysian fields, where these are shown to be living happily, true to their first love:

Open, blest Elysian grove,
Where an eternal spring of love
Keeps each beauty fair: these shades
No chill dew or frost invades.
Look, how the flowers, and every tree,
Pregnant with ambrosia be;
Near banks of violet, springs appear,
Weeping out nectar every tear.

(Works, VI, 366)

Instead of Ogilby's somber moral, the masque ends with a dream of ultimate harmony for which music and dancing are the natural expression.

It may be argued that Shirley has diminished the profundity defined, while the composition as a whole is better balanced, in part because the background is simplified and subordinated to the foreground figures.

But for charm and elegance in an illustration of the fable, there is no question that Francis Barlow's plate for his own edition of the Aesopics (1666) shows what an artist who entered into the spirit of the tale could do (fig. 5).²⁵ In it, the narrative element is developed much further and with more variety of light and shade. A more realistic elderly couple are courting, a garland in the hands of the woman, a bunch of flowers in the hand of the man. Ogilby's young man prays to Cupid, while around him lie two dying young men, with arrows in their breasts. Above all, drama is supplied by the emergence of a menacing skeletal Death from the darkness of his cave (actually a tomb); a dog barks at him, causing the old man to look toward it in fear. A greater reality of figures in space and also a greater harmony of narrative detail liberate this illustration from the confines of the emblematic tradition. Departing from the usual schematic arrangement of the old and the young, Cupid and Death, the scene is believable as an experience in itself. Alciati's pictura has given way to naturalistic illustration, a world which the viewer can enter. As the design becomes more specific in treatment of figures and landscape, it tells the story better; on the other hand, in so doing, it necessarily loses something of the simple didactic emphasis of the emblem.

When James Shirley set out to write his masque Cupid and Death in 1653, he in a sense moved in the same direction as life.

Among the images that suggest a transforming faith is the one used by Posthumus when, after his vision, he remarks to his jailer: “I am merrier to die than thou art to live” (V.iv.171). When the jailer tells him, “look you, sir, you know not which way you shall go,” the blindfolded Posthumus replies, “Yes indeed do I, fellow” (ll. 176-77). Then the jailer voices his disbelief by saying: “Your death has eyes in's head then; I have not seen him so pictur'd” (ll. 178-79). This image of a skull with eyes in it certainly suggests an emblem, whether or not the jailer has seen it. Indeed, an earlier version of the image, in Richard II II.i.270-71—“Even through the hollow eyes of death / I spy life peering”—drew from Henry Green, in his pioneering study of emblems in Shakespeare's plays, the suggestion that somewhere there was just such an emblem, though he could not identify it.³¹ But if such an emblem has not been found, there are analogues in the form of infants shown beside skulls, with sometimes an interpretation appended that points to new life as emerging from death (fig. 6).³² The image of eyes in a skull is a metaphor for the regeneration that can come through death. Posthumus asserts: “there are none want eyes to direct them the way I am going, but such as wink and will not use them” (V.iv.185-87). But the jailer has the last word on the subject: “What an infinite mock is this, that a man should have the best use of eyes to see the way of blindness!” (ll. 188-90). In this context, sight stands for life and blindness for death, but, as the dialogue shows, the enlightened view of Posthumus finds spiritual sight compatible with physical blindness just as Gloucester, in King Lear, finally learned.

The skull that represents death's triumph thus can be converted in the perception offered by Shakespeare's quasi-emblematic image into something resembling the message of Reusner's emblem on a child with a skull: “vitae mors via sancta novae est” (“Death is the holy path to new life”). But Shakespeare gives picture and interpretative poem in a single line; he restores the metaphor to its original wholeness instead of separating its visual and verbal content. Some of this separation continues in the development of emblem into masque. But if at the end of James Shirley's masque the heavens open to reveal the truth about love, that it is “strong as death” (Song of Songs 8.6), Shakespeare returns the revelation to the world of human beings. That is why both his emblematic and his masque imagery play a subordinate, though characteristically pictorial and illuminating part in his drama. Neither Cupid nor Death can put in more than a brief symbolic appearance in his plays because they are, after all, personifications. To claim for Shakespeare's plays that they are emblematic is to mistake his genre.³³ The whole picture he creates, his imitation of nature, constitutes a history painting in which emblematic detail is subsumed into a larger action, in which the passions of real people are given credible existence, and in which love and death belong together.

This too is the theme of a song from Ben Jonson's last play, the unfinished pastoral The Sad Shepherd. As the sad shepherd, Aeglamour, laments the supposed death by drowning of his beloved Earine, the kind shepherd, Karolin, sings to comfort him:

Though I am young, and cannot tell,
                    Either what Death, or Love
is well,
Yet I have heard, they both beare darts,
                    And both doe ayme at humane
hearts:
And then againe, I have beene told
                    Love wounds with heat, as
Death with cold;
So that I feare, they doe but bring
                    Extreames to touch, and mean
one thing.
As in a ruine, we it call
                    One thing to be blowne up,
or fall;
Or to our end, like way may have,
                    By a flash of lightning,
or a wave:
So Loves inflamed shaft, or brand,
                    May kill as soone as Deaths
cold hand;
Except Loves fires the vertue have
                    To fright the frost out of
the grave.

(I.v.65-80)²⁹

Close as Jonson's play is to the masque in its lyricism and fantasy, his song suggests the same kind of solution to the pain of losing the beloved that enables the happy ending to Shirley's Cupid and Death that love may live beyond the grave.³⁰ Aeglamour's response expresses his skepticism as he clings to his grief:

Doe you thinke so? are you in that good heresie?
I meane opinion? If you be, say nothing:
I'll study it, as a new Philosophy,
But by my selfe alone; Now you shall leave me!

(I.v.81-84)

Nevertheless, in the incomplete third act, which may be the last dramatic writing of Jonson's life, Aeglamour celebrates his love by imagining that she has been turned to a heavenly sphere:

But shee, as chaste, as was her name, Earine,
Dy'd undeflower'd: and now her sweet soule hovers,
Here, in the Aire, above us; and doth haste
To get up to the Moone, and Mercury;
And whisper Venus in her Orbe; then
spring
Up to old Saturne, and come downe
by Mars,
Consulting Jupiter, and seate her
selfe
Just in the midst with Phoebus; tempring
all
The jarring Spheeres, and giving to the World
Againe, his first and tunefull planetting!
O' what an age will here be of new concords!
Delightfull harmonie! to rock old Sages,
Twice infants, in the Cradle o' Speculation,
And throw a silence upon all the creatures!

(III.ii.23-36)

Perhaps it is only in the masque imagination that such “A Cogitation of the highest rapture!”—as Karolin calls it—can prevail. Aeglamour continues:

The loudest Seas, and most enraged Windes
Shall lose their clangor; Tempest shall grow hoarse;
Loud Thunder dumbe; and every speece of storme,
Laid in the lap of listning Nature, hush't;
To heare the changed chime of this eighth spheere!
Take tent, and harken for it, loose it not.

(III.ii.37-43)

The more reasonable shepherds call this a “wild phantsy” or “a strayn'd, but innocent phant'sie” (III.iii.9, 15). Certainly a leap has been taken here—and in Shirley's masque—away from the conclusion to the various versions of Alciati's Cupid and Death emblem. Although emblem finds a home in masque, and, in the case of Shirley's masque, supplies the essential plot, it stops short of the dramatic revelation, the epiphany, that the masque as a genre moved toward.

An emblem does not progress; even when it is of a narrative type, it necessarily takes on a static form, within a frame, as of something eternally valid as a truth. The Cupid and Death emblem begins as narrative but ends with a permanent condition in which Love and Death use the wrong arrows on their unsuspecting victims. Pageants and tableaux share this quality of symbolically representing an idea. Anything designed for performance on the stage, including the masque, must, on the other hand, represent an action that proceeds in time. The masque-like revelation of Jupiter to the sleeping Posthumus in Cymbeline (V.iv.93-113) itself points to the final resolution, from death to new

Notes

1. On the significance of syllabic repetition in Latin literature, see Frederick Ahl, Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), esp. p. 40 for his citation of the example of amor and mors.

2. For a recent study of this emblem, see my “De Morte et Amore: A Story-Telling Emblem and Its Dimensions,” in The Art of the Emblem: Essays in Honor of Karl Josef Höltgen, ed. Michael Bath, John Manning, and Alan R. Young (New York: AMS Press, 1993), pp. 39-70.

3. See, for example, L. Guicciardini, Detti et fatti piacevoli et gravi (1565), fol. 83^v.

4. For the emblem De Morte et Amore, see Geffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leiden, 1586), p. 132.

5. Plutarch, The Philosophie, Commonlie called The Morals, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1603), p. 1151.

6. Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna (London, 1612), p. 172.

7. All quotations from Shakespeare's works are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

8. A Greek poem on “The Dead Adonis,” frequently included in editions of the Bucolic Poets, represents the boar as defending himself against Venus' accusation by saying that he only wanted to kiss Adonis; he blames his tusks for killing the youth. The parallel with the words of Shakespeare's Venus on the boar's desire to kiss Adonis is remarkable. See “The Dead Adonis,” in The Greek Bucolic Poets, trans. J. M. Edmonds (London: William Heinemann, 1912), p. 483.

9. Alciati, Emblemata (1577), No. clv (later reversed with cliv).

10. See H. W. Janson, “A Memento Mori among early Italian Prints,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 3 (1939-40), 243-48, who comments on Northern forms of the memento mori theme such as the girl and the skeleton and “the young man surprised by death.” Both of these suggest parallels with Alciati's “In formosam fato praereptam.”

11. Ascribed to Erinna. This translation is quoted and attributed to J. H. Merivale, in Lord Neaves, The Greek Anthology (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1874), p. 60.

12. Ibid., p. 69. The translation is “based on one by Mr. Hay.”

13. See, for example, Jean Le Maire, “Les Trois Contes Intitulez de Cupido et D'Atropos: Le Premier Conte,” in Oeuvres, ed. J. Stecher (Louvain: Lefever, 1885), III, 39-42.

14. See James W. Clark, The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Glasgow: Jackson, 1950). Enid Welsford observes that the Fool “laughs in death's face, but his laughter cannot save him” (The Court Masque [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1927], p. 385).

15. Clark, The Dance of Death, p. 93.

16. Ibid., p. 105.

17. The Dance of Death, by Hans Holbein the Younger; facsimile edition of the Original 1538 Edition of Les simulachres & histories faces de la mort, trans. Werner L. Gundersheimer (New York: Dover, 1971), p. 140.

18. On this subject, see my “Shakespeare's Imagery: Emblem and the Imitation of Nature,” Shakespeare Studies, 16 (1983), 45-56.

19. Preface to Hymenaei (1606), in Ben Jonson, The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), p. 76. Interestingly, Sidney, in his Old Arcadia, ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 44, notes: “the fool can never be honest, since not being able to balance what points virtue stands upon, every present occasion catches his senses, and his senses are masters of his silly mind.” The link between “present occasions” and the senses supplies a context for Jonson's plea for “more removed mysteries.” See also Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, revised ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), esp. pp. 163-64, on the mystery that is reduced to emblem in Alciati's De morte et amore.

20. See the discussion of “Platonic Politics” in Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1973), I, 49-73.

21. John Ogilby, The Fables of Aesop, Paraphras'd in Verse (1651), Fable 39. Much of my discussion of Shirley's masque of Cupid and Death is drawn from my “De Morte et Amore” (cited above, n. 2) by permission of AMS Press.

22. On Cleyn's etchings for this edition, see Edward Hodnett, Aesop in England (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1979), pp. 51-53. Hodnett comments on Cleyn's concern with factual correctness.

23. The last line apparently alludes to the legend of the Three Dead and the Three Living; see Clark, The Dance of Death, p. 95.

24. On this second edition of 1665, see Hodnett, Aesop in England, pp. 53-56, who considers the illustration to “Cupid and Death” to be by Stoop, though this attribution remains open to question. See his Concordance, No. 47, p. 88.

25. Francis Barlow, Aesop's Fables in English, French, & Latin (1666), p. 123. For a discussion of Barlow's illustrations, though with no specific reference to “Cupid and Death,” see Hodnett, Francis Barlow (London: Scolar Press, 1978), chap. VIII.

26. “To My Worthy Friend Mr. John Ogilby,” in The Fables of Aesop (1651). John Webster's allusion to Cupid, Death, and Reputation in his Duchess of Malfi (1623) is said to be based on P. Matthieu's Henry IV, trans. Grimeston (1612), sig. SsI^v. Ferdinand relates the fable to his sister as a warning to her that she has “shook hands with Reputation, / And made him invisible” (III.ii.134-35).

27. Cupid and Death, in The Dramatic Works of James Shirley, ed. William Gifford and Alexander Dyce (London: John Murray, 1833), VI, 347. All quotations from the masque in my text are from this edition.

28. Edward Dent, in his edition of the music for Cupid and Death, by Matthew Locke and Christopher Gibbons (London: Stainer and Bell, 1951), notes no fewer than five anti-masques, including a dance by Death (p. xiii). B. A. Harris, in his edition of Cupid and Death (in A Book of Masques [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967], pp. 371-99), computes the number of entries and anti-masques differently. Incidentally, Harris notes that Death, who was a female in Ogilby's fable, has now become a man, counter-balanced by Dame Nature (p. 375).

29. Quotations in my text from The Sad Shepherd are from Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, VII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941). Cf. Thomas Stanley, “The Sick Lover,” in Poems (1651), p. 21. This poem, after Guarini, has as its first stanza:

                                            My sickly breath
    Wastes in a double flame;
                                            Whilst Love and Death
    To my poor life lay claim;
    The fever, in whose heat I melt,
    By her that causeth it not felt.

30. One of Sidney's songs in the Arcadia seemingly pays a similar tribute to love. A sorrowful prince, Plangus, asks:

    And shall she die, shall cruel fire spill
    Those beams that set so many hearts on fire?
    Hath she not force even death with love to kill?

    Unfortunately, he fears that death itself will be so “inflamed with hot desire” that it “becomes a rival to us all” (The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia [The New Arcadia], ed Victor Skretkowicz [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987], p. 201 [ll. 28-30]).

31. See Henry Green, Shakespeare and the Emblem Writers (1870; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1964), pp. 339-40.

32. See H. W. Janson, “The Putto with the Death's Head,” Art Bulletin, 19 (1937), 423-49; and also Rudolf Wittkower, “Death and Resurrection in a Picture by Martin de Vos,” in Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), pp. 159-66.

33. See, for example, Dieter Mehl, “Emblems in English Renaissance Drama,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 2 (1969), 39-57, especially his reference to the way in which dialogue and visible stage action illuminate each other: “and this is akin to the characteristic method of an emblem book” (p. 54). Rosemary Freeman, however, in her English Emblem Books (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), comments that “the emblem, even as used by dramatists like Chapman and Webster who rely upon it so much, was never more than an adjunct, one device among many. It could not be said to colour their whole technique” (p. 101).