Sidney for the Stage
BEAUMONT, Francis, and John FLETCHER.
Cupids Revenge. As it was often acted (with great Applause) by the Children of the Revells … The second Edition.
Second edition of a striking classical revenge drama first acted at court, although not necessarily for the first time, on 5 January 1612, and first printed in 1615, then attributed to Fletcher alone. Modern consensus is that it is a collaboration, and perhaps one of the earliest by the pair – some suggest a date as early as 1607 – its style unusually unified, likely as a result of revision by Beaumont. The plot is based on a story in the second book of Sidney’s Arcadia, and describes the bloody comeuppance arranged by Cupid for the royal family of Lycia after they suppress his worship. For a play written for a children’s company, it is unusually ‘perverse: a stepmother tries to seduce a stepson to commit incest, the stepson is so honour-bound that he’s willing to be executed rather than reveal her misconduct to his father the king, and his princess sister dies of love for a misshapen dwarf’ (Finkelpearl, under Beaumont in ODNB). It also ‘plays fast and loose both with classical representations of the god of love and with the category of revenge drama’ (ibid. under Fletcher).
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