5. Lovely Lad and Shame-Faced Catamite
One of the most frequently recurring conventions in Renaissance
literature is the standard reference to Cupid. This may be one
of the most overworked conventions of the period, but it reveals
a significant aspect of love-life during the Renaissance. First
we must dismiss the "merely conventional" theory, and
look at exactly what is happening on the surface of the
literature. Cupid is not merely an allegorical five-letter word,
but a beautiful, young, naked boy. Exclusively heterosexual
relationships between one man and one woman are rare in
Renaissance love-lyrics: the relationship is nearly always a
menage a trois between a man, a woman, and this
beautiful, young, naked boy. It is a mistake to regard Cupid's
every appearance as simply an indicator that the hero has fallen
in (heterosexual) love. This is precisely how E. K. glossed the
appearance of Cupid in the June eclogue
of Spenser's Shepheardes Calender -
quite disregarding the fact that no mistress is even mentioned
in the passage. Cupid is not so much a metaphysical blessing of
heterosexual union as a sensuously naked boy who actively
participates in the plot; in a sense Cupid even entices Thomalin,
or teases him on.
Even when the lover has a specific mistress in mind, the typical
Renaissance lover spends the bulk of his time in a tete-a-tete
with a naked boy, and rarely sees his fully-clothed mistress
except at a disdainful distance. In one passage of Thomas
Watson's Hekatompathia or Passionate Centurie of
Love (1582), we find the lover, his mistress, and
Cupid all in bed together: if this is merely a conventional way
of saying that a man loved a maid, then the convention has
certainly gotten out of hand. In Fulke Greville's
Caelica (1633), Caelica rarely appears,
and seventeen of the sonnets are devoted exclusively to Cupid.
Greville's Caelica, like Drayton's Phoebe, is merely an
Idaea. In most Renaissance sonnet sequences Cupid is the
reality, and the mistress is the mere convention.
Cupid is not a classical allusion, but an English schoolboy. The
title of Barnabe Barnes's sonnet sequence,
Parthenophe and Parthenophil (1592),
indicates that the love relationship is not so much between a
courtier named Parthenophil and a mistress named Parthenophe, but
between an anonymous lover and his anonymous beloved: their names
more resemble those of the twin-brother type of faithful friend
relationship, such as the French story of Amis and
Amile cherished by Walter Pater. And from a
statistical point of view, Cupid is the central character of the
sequence.
Sometimes Barnes's cupid is a very conventional boy-infant with
his mother Venus:
Cupid's favourite companions are always lovely lads themselves.
Fletcher in Brittain's Ida says that
the lovely Anchises would make "A dainty play-fellow for
naked love"; John Wilmot notes that "the kind Deity of
Wine/ Kiss'd the soft wanton God of Love"; Spenser in
The Faerie Queene noted that Cupid
"played his wanton parts" with fair Adonis.
The Renaissance imagination, when it tired of describing Cupid,
turned to Adonis, apparently fascinated by the phenomenon of a
beautiful boy spurning the advances of the queen of love herself.
In the sonnets on the Venus-Adonis myth in The
Passionate Pilgrime (1599), it is Adonis's beauty,
not Venus's, that stimulates the unknown author's poetry: Adonis
is the typical "faire sweet youth" (IX); "louely,
fresh and greene" (IV), "The tender nibler [who] would
not touch the bait" (IV). There is a bit of Leander in him:
"Anon he comes, and throwes his Mantle by, / And stood
sta[rk] naked on the brookes greene brim" (VI).
Every beautiful boy in Renaissance literature, almost without
exception, is compared to Adonis, as much the sacrificed-boy
archetype as are Ganymede and Hylas. Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis (1593) contains the
protytical Adonis, an incarnation of masculine beauty. It is
really his beauty that a jealous Venus wishes to claim as her
due:
In a short roundelay in Robert Greene's
Menaphon (1589), the heroine Samela,
like Shakespeare's Venus, is compared to an eagle pursuing a fly.
This is intended as an analogy of her pursuit of Menaphon, but
it is indeed awkward within a supposedly heterosexual context for
Green to explicitly call her "Ioues faire bird, .
. . The speedie post [messenger] of Ganimede." This
homosexual metaphor, used to advance a supposedly heterosexual
seduction, has been not quite successfully transformed. Unless,
of course, Greene's Samela, like Prost's Albertine, is really a
man in maid's attire. At one point in the narrative
"she" is even compared to Achilles' lover Patroclus.
Menaphon and Samela, do, however, enter into a heterosexual
marriage, and even beget a son - but it is not surprising that
this child is another androgynous formosus puer. At the
age of five, their son Pleusidippus, a "beauteous boy,"
"another Alcides [Hercules]," "the Thracian
Bacchus," is chosen "Lord of the May game, . . .
ringleader of their reuils." In this role he is accosted by
a pirate while walking along the beach:
The author politely drops the curtain on what happens dring the
voyage, and shifts our attention to the garden of King Agenor and
Queen Eriphila. There they are discoursing upon flowers, a common
Renaissance pastime, particularly concerning those flowers into
which beautiful boys had been metamorphosed. Agenor muses:
I meruaile the Poets that were so prodigall in painting the
amorous affection of the Sunne to his Hyacinth, did neuer obserue
the relation of loue twixt him and the Marigold: it shoulde
either seeme they were loath to incurre the displeasure of women
. . . or that that flower is not so vsual in their gardens as
ours.
But Agenor has thereby incurred the displeasure of Eriphila, who
protests against such a "seruile imitation" of
Hyacinthus and the marigold; with heavy sarcasm she tells Agenor
that "I had as leaue be your page as your spouse." She
goes on to assert that the hyacinth is not Hyacinthus at all, but
the metamorphosis of Adonis - "a faire boy but passing
infortunate," to whom Nature was so bounteous as "to
giue him a face in despite of women so faire."
Then all of a sudden who should appear on the scene but the
veritable archetype of their discourse: Pleusidippus, albeit
accompanied by Eurilachus instead of Apollo. Agenor, whose tastes
have already been hinted at, is dumfounded by the beauty of this
"inestimable iewel," this "second Adonis":
"What euer may deserue the name of faire haue I seen before,
beautie haue I beheld in his brightest orb, but neuer set eye on
immortality before this houre." Eriphila, no longer angry
at Agenor, concurs, and adds Apollo and Cupid to the comparative
catalogue. The pirate Eurilachus, bearer of this sweet gift, is
granted amnesty, and Agenor and Pleusidipus, hand in hand, walk
into the palace to dinner, leaving Queen Eriphila alone in her
garden.
One could go on interminably with brief examinations of all the
beautiful boys in Renaissance literature. There are several dozen
who, like the shepherd in Shakespeare's A Lover's
Complaint, are unambiguously attractive to mortal
men as well as women: "he did in the general bosom reign /
Of young, of old, and sexes both enchanted." This list is
expanded a hundredfold when we add all the brief allusions to the
myths of Apollo and Hyacinthus, Apollo and Cyparissus, Zephyrus
and Hyacinthus, Apollo and unnamed shepherds, Poseidon and
Pelops, Eros and Bacchus, and Zeus and Ganymede. When we add to
this all the boys who look as though they are "maids in
men's attire," we thereby include many of the poems on
Narcissus and Adonis and Cupid. When we were finished, we would
have a list of examples numbering well into the thousands. We can
only conclude that many a Renaissance poet's aesthetic
sensibilities were those of a Socratic pederast.
It is also interesting to examine the beautiful boy who is no
longer beautiful, but who has been degraded, by means of satire,
into the fop, the hustler, the ragamuffin urchin enticing hapless
sodomites to their despair. In the harshly invective - and
resolutely Christian - satire of the Renaissance, the beautiful
boy is no longer "Orpheus, Pallas lovely boy," but the
offspring of the devil. According to a poet known only by the
initials T. M., in Micro-cynicon. Sixe Snarling
Satyres (1599), "As it is Sathans [Satan's]
usuall pollicie, / He left an issue of like qualitie." Sodom
has reared its head in London town, where roaming the streets we
see "a pale Chequered black Hermophrodite."
This personage is no longer the lovely "maid in man's
attire" as was Marlowe's Leander, or a metaphysically ideal
hermaphrodite as was Spenser's Britomart, but a fop and a
prostitute:
In John Marston's even more virulent satires, fair Ganymede has
become a "catamite," the term itself a corrupted
pronunciation of the word "Ganymede" used to denote the
young male receptor in anal intercourse. The typical fop or dandy
is usually accompanied by such a page-boy: "a dapper, rare,
compleat, sweet pretie youth! / . . . / But ho, what
Ganimede is that doth grace / The gallants heeles. One,
who for two daies space / Is closely hyred"
(The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image. And Certaine
Satyres, 1598, Marston's italics).
"Closely" connotes "secretly," and
"hyred" connotes hired out for "service," or
bought for sex.
"Ganymede" also implies effeminacy: "Yon
effeminate sanguine Ganimede, / Is but a Beuer, hunted
for the bed." This is an allusion not to the voluptuousness
of beaver-fur for a bedspread, but to the Renaissance folklore
belief that the beaver bites off its testicles when pursued,
leaving them as a false scent for the dogs, a curious vulgar
error that equates efffeminacy and eunuchism. Barnfield in
The Affectionate Shepherd compares
Ganymede to such a beaver:
"Sodom beastliness" for Greene, as well as for
virtually all English Renaissance authors, is believed to be
practised especially by the secret society of Jesuits. He
criticizes the "falsed, seeming, Patriotes of Doway [Douai]
seminary" who "snort in source of Sodom vilanie,"
and "Nero like abuse . . . the bloomes of young
nobilitie." The allusion to Nero refers to that emperor's
act of making a transsexual out of his boyfriend Sporus (using
a red-hot iron to cauterize the hollow wound), and then marrying
him as his bride. Greene also finds in the schools of St Omer and
Valladolid "the taste of Jesuit perversion," and, if
he had begotten children, he would prefer that they fell ill to
a new tropical disease "Before some pedant-Tutor, in his bed
/ Should vse my frie, like Phrigian Ganimede."
Girolamo Donato, in an anecdote in Castigilione's
Book of the Courtier, while observing
Lent in Rome noted that Pascua quotque haedos, tot habet tua
Roma cinaedos - "Your Rome has as many sodomites as the
meadows have lambs." Thomas Nashe in The
Unfortunate Traveler (1594) felt, on the other
hand, that Venice was "the Sodom of Italy" (a view
later shared by Byron, who called it "the sea-Sodom of
Italy"). In "A Ramble in St James's Park," John
Wilton doubts that "The Jesuits Fraternity, / Shall
leave the use of Buggery." John Oldham in part of his
Satyr upon the Jesuits (1681) pretends
to be Loyola giving instructions to his followers:
Go on to 6. The Maid in Man's Attire.
CITATION: If you cite this Web page, please use the following form of citation:
The little god of might
But most of the time he resembles a rustic shepherd-boy from
Scotland or an English schoolboy from Eton:
(Such as might fitter seem with cranes to fight,
Than, with his bow, to vanquish gods and kings)
In a cherry tree sat smiling;
And lightly waving, with his motley wings,
(Fair wings, in Beauty! boys and girls
beguiling!)
And cherry garlands, with his hands compiling. [my italics]
LOVE is a name too lovely for the god!
In a paraphrase of a poem by Moschus on Eros, Barnes describes
Cupid as a Whitehall hustler, indifferent as to which sex he
beguiles:
He naked goes, red coloured in his skin,
And bare, all as a boy fit for a rod.
VENUS aloud, for her son CUPID cried,
Barnes, as indicated by his many exclamation marks, is certainly
awe-struck by this lad. Throughout the love-lyrics of the
Renaissance, Cupid repeatedly shoots men with the arrows
of desire, beguiles and tempts them, fires their lust into animal
frenzy, and makes their hearts to burn - but for whom,
whether for a mistress or for Cupid himself, is not always clear.
This ambiguity is inherent to the convention, for it is derived
from originally homosexual classical literature. It reaches a
high point in Barnes's twelfth Ode, in which a boy, to all
intents and purposes, seduces a shepherd. The Ode nearly
resembles some poems in the later French School of Decadence,
with the shepherd's Poe-like fascination with the boy's
"long dart," and the boy's role as a demonic tempter,
a homme fatale:
'If any spy LOVE gadding in the street,
It is my rogue! He that shall him betray,
For hire, of VENUS shall have kisses sweet!
. . .
By many marks, the Boy thou mayst bewray!
'Mongst twenty such beside, thou shalt perceive him!
Not of a pale complexion, but like fire!
Quick rolling eyes, and flaming in their gyre!
. . .
A fair curled head, and a right waggish face!
His hands are small; yet he shoots far away!
Clotheless, he, naked goes in every place!
. . .
Swift, as a bird, he flies! and quickly footeth,
Now to these men! and women, now to those!
"Served" in Renaissance diction is frequently a pun
upon copulation.
One night, I did attend my sheep,
Which I, with watchful ward, did keep
And would into the cottage creep,
(What time clear CYNTHIA shineth bright)
But nought appeared in my sight,
And then myself crossed three times thrice;
Yet how he might, could not devise!
A little boy did naked lie
He groaned, as he were like to die;
Good master, help me, if you may!
And brought him to my couch of hay.
Well gilded with fine painter's art;
Said I, "Will this pile wound a heart?"
Eftsoons it pierced to the joint!
Cannot prevail with it, a point;
"Thrice fairer than myself," thus she began,
Adonis is rose-cheeked, his breath is heavenly moisture, his
tender hairless cheek is like new-fallen snow, his hand is lily
and ivory, his lips exude nectar: he is the earth-spirit, a
personification of the fecundity of the harvest-field. He is a
curious amalgam of Love and Death:
"The field's chief flower, sweet above compare,
Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man,
More white and red than doves or roses are;
Nature that made thee, with herself at strife,
Saith that the world hath ending with thy life.
True sweet beauty lived and died with him.
Adonis is pursued not only by Venus, but also by Apollo and
Zephyrus, gods of the sun and air:
. . . Adonis smiles as in disdain,
That in each cheek appears a pretty dimple.
Love [i.e. Cupid] made these hollows, if himself were slain,
He might be buried in a tomb so simple,
Foreknowing well, if there he came to lie,
Why, there Love lived, and there he could not die.
. . . when Adonis lived, sun and sharp air
"Venus" is characterized in the poem as if she were a
man - "she" probably personifies Shakespeare himself.
Venus, like a male suitor, pursues Adonis and carries him off
just as Zeus abducted Ganymede:
Lurked like two thieves, to rob him of his fair.
And therefore would he put his bonnet on,
Under whose brim the gaudy sun would peep.
The wind would blow it off, and, being gone,
Play with his locks; then would Adonis weep,
And straight, in pity of his tender years,
They both would strive who first should dry his tears.
Over one arm the lusty courser's rein,
In an extended simile, Shakespeare portrays Venus as the Jovian
eagle glutting upon its Ganymedic prey:
Under her other was the tender boy,
Who blushed and pouted in dull disdain.
Even as an empty eagle, sharp and fast,
Venus tries to make love to Adonis, and throws him upon the
ground, but he will not rise to the occasion: "All is
imaginary she doth prove, / He will not manage her, although he
mount her." He rejects her pleas and protests "I know
not love . . . nor will not know it, / Unless it be a boar, and
then I chase it." Venus warns Adonis that a boar might kill
him, and this warning is in effect a threat: "I prophesy thy
death, my living sorrow, / If thou encounter with the boar
tomorrow." The word "encounter" for Renaissance
poets was often a synonym with "cope" and hence a pun
on "copulation." Venus has in effect arranged for
Adonis to be castrated by the boar, and after his death she gazes
with rapt fascination upon "the wide wound that the boar had
trenched / In his soft flank whose wonted lily white / With
purple tears, that his wound wept, was drenched." The male
boar who kills Adonis with a sexual thrust of his tusk is none
other than Venus herself. Venus herself is nearly conscious of
her identity with the boar - who is portrayed as having fucked
Adonis to death:
Tires [tears] with her beak on feathers, flesh, and bone,
Shaking her wings, devouring all in haste,
Till either gorge be stuffed or prey be gone,
Even so she kissed his brow, his cheek, his chin,
And where she ends she doth anew begin.
. . . thus was Adonis slain:
Throughout the poem, Venus is portrayed as the devourer at a
sacrificial feast. Usually she is depicted as a birdlike harpy;
she kisses Adonis like an eagle tears at its prey with its beak;
"gluttonlike she feeds," like a vulture; she flies
"as falcons to the lure." She is like Diana the
Huntress pursuing either Actaeon or her prey, and Adonis is like
"a fleet-foot roe" chased down by her; he is fastened
in her arms "as a bird lies tangled in a net." The
identification of a supposed "woman" as Jove's eagle
pursuing Ganymede is not uncommon in Renaissance literature, and
is one of the coded tropes of the homosexual tradition.
He ran upon the boar with his sharp spear,
Who did not whet his teeth at him again,
But by a kiss though to persuade him there,
And nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine
Sheathed unaware the tusk in his soft groin,
Had I been toothed like him, I must confess,
With kissing him I should have killed him first.
there arriued on the strond a Thessalian Pirate named
Eurilachus [who] espied this pretie infant; when gazing
on his face as wanton Ioue gazed on Phrygian
Ganimede in the fields of Ida, hee exhaled into his
eyes such deepe impression of his perfection, as that his thought
neuer thirsted so much after any prey, as this pretie
Pleusidippus possession: but determining first to assay
him by curtesie before he assayled him with rigour, he began to
trie his wit.
Eurilachus rather discourteously suggests that pretty Pleus is
a bastard begotten during the dog days, whereat the infant waxes
indignant and throws at the dirty old man the cockles and pebbles
which he has so industriously gathered. But this childish anger
only causes Eurilachus to burst into laughter, his fancy
inflamed, and he abducts Pleusidippus to his ship. He plans to
present the boy (after using him?) as a gift to his master King
Agenor in order to receive amnesty.
Sometimes he jets [struts] it like a Gentleman,
This "lovely smiling Parragon . . . of Bewtie," called
Pyander, is no mere androgyn from Ovidian mythology, but a drag-
queen hustler walking the streets of Whitehall, "in a
Nymphes attire, / Whose rowling eye sets gazers harts on fire:
/ Whose cherry lip, black brow & smiles procure / Lust
burning buzzards to the tempting lure." (The practice of
male prostitutes dressing as women is well documented in the
nineteenth century, and there are occasional instances of it in
the eighteenth century, and a couple in the late seventeenth
century; the evidence for its existence in the sixteenth century
is limited to literature, as here.) The author for a time
"loved Pyander well," but, stung by the pricks
of conscience - and the fact that Pyander spent all his money and
then deserted him - he repents and confesses his sin by writing
this snarling satire. But there are still fond memories:
"Never was a boy so pleasing to the hart, / As was
Pyander for a womans part."
Otherwhiles much like a wanton Curtesan:
But truth to tell a man or woman whether,
I cannot say shees excellent in ether.
But if Report may certifie a truth,
Shees nether or ether, but a Cheating youth.
. . . the brownish Beaver,
In Marston's The Scourge of Villanie
(1598), the character Luscus "hath his
Ganimede" as well as his wench, but unaccountably
prefers "the Cynick friction" to "faire
Cynedianboyes." Cynic friction is an allusion to the Cynic
philosopher Diogenes' legendary preference for masturbation. The
term cinaedus can generally mean "lewd fellow"
or "obscene man," but it was more specifically used as
a synonym for sodomites or pederasts, from the Greek
kinaidos, "a lover of boys". Ctessipus, in
Timocles' fragment 480, is a cinaedus who loves a boy;
according to Strato the boxer Cleomachus fell in love with a
cinaedus (Greek Anthology,
14.648a); the term also became applied to effeminate men and
transvestites (Greek Anthology,
14.272); there are numerous cinaedi throughout Martial's
Epigrams (2.28, 3.73, 6.37. 7.58, 9.63,
11.21 et passim). Greene goes on to describe houses of
male prostitution, "male stewes," and gives an
intriguing side-note: "If this sort of thing [i.e.
masturbation] is the alternative, I can give a (specious)
justification for male prostitution."
Running for life, with hounds pursued sore;
When Hunts-men of her precious Stones bereaue her
(Which with her teeth sh' had bitten off before):
Restoratiues and costly curious Felts
Are made of them, and rich imbroydred Belts.
Let each with demure, or scruple pay
A pathic is the so-called "passive" receptor during
anal intercourse, a buggerer the active insertor. But "the
vice" is not exclusively Roman: in "News from
Colchester" Sir John Denham laments
A strict Obedience to the Roman Sway:
To the unerring Chair all Homage Swear,
Altho' a Punk, a Witch, a Fiend sit there:
. . .
Tho' he be Atheist, Heathen, Turk, or Jew,
Blaspheamer, Sacriligious, Perjured too:
Tho' Pander, Bawd, Pimp, Pathick, Buggerer,
What e're Old Sodom's Nest of Lechers were.
Now alas what hope
Not only Colchester, but, according to Andrew Marvell in
"Further advice to a Painter":
Of converting the Pope,
When a Quaker turns Italian?
. . .
Rome that Spiritual Sodom but thou,
Even according to the Letter?
Painter once more thy Pencell reassume,
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, the finest satirist of the
Restoration age of satire, happily recombined the formosus
puer with the shame-faced catamite. Wilmot apparently
exhausted himself by practising his Libertine preachments, ending
in impotence. In "The Imperfect Enjoyment" his
"dart of love"
And draw me in one Scene London and Rome,
There holy Charles, here good Aurelius Sate,
Weeping to see their Sonns degenerate,
The Roman takeing up the fencers trade,
The Brittain Jigging it in Mascarade;
Whilest the brave youths tired with the work of State
Their wearied Limbs and minds to recreate,
Do to their more belov'd delights repair,
One to his Pathic, th' other to his Player.
Stiffly resolved, 'twould carelessly invade
Wilmot quite candidly admits to being bisexual, and he is often
held up as a typical Libertine who equally favours men and women.
But much of his poetry shows a preference for homosexual over
heterosexual love. His best, but characteristic, poem on the
subject clearly gives the palm of victory to the boys, and brings
the homosexual literary tradition back to its roots in the pagan
philosophy of wine, boys, and song:
Woman or man, nor ought its fury stayed:
Where'er it pierced, a cunt it found or made.
The very existence of satire as frank as Micro-
cynicon, and works by Marston and Greene, suggests
that Renaissance poets would have to have been inconceivably
naive not to have been aware of the homosexual realities
reflected in their fanciful lines on Ganymede and Adonis. Sir
Philip Sidney knew that Plato's
Phaedrus and
Symposium authorized physical
homosexual love, and Shakespeare believed that Achilles and
Patroclus were bugger and catamite - then surely others suspected
that "Platonic love" was not wholly pure, and they
either rationalized the concept beyond recognition or slyly used
it as subterfuge. One cannot accept the premise that every poet
who referred to Ganymede was unaware of how he served Zeus. After
reading the more explicit passages in works by Barnfield and
Marlowe, not to mention Wilmot, one suspects that the Renaissance
poets who described the formosus puer as being innocent
and "merely conventional" were being evasive and coy.
Love a woman? You're an ass!
Return to The Homosexual Pastoral Tradition
Rictor Norton, "Lovely Lad and Shame-Faced Catamite",
The Homosexual Pastoral Tradition, 20 June 2008 <http://rictornorton.co.uk/pastor05.htm>.
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