Cophetua
Encyclopedia
Medieval literature
Medieval literature is a broad subject, encompassing essentially all written works available in Europe and beyond during the Middle Ages . The literature of this time was composed of religious writings as well as secular works...
romance
Romance (genre)
As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance is a style of heroic prose and verse narrative that was popular in the aristocratic circles of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a knight errant portrayed as...
which tells the legend of the prince Cophetua and his unorthodox love for the beggar Penelophon (or Zenelophon).
The legend
According to tradition, Cophetua was an African king known for his lack of any natural sexual attractionSexual attraction
Sexual attractiveness or sex appeal refers to an individual's ability to attract the sexual or erotic interest of another person, and is a factor in sexual selection or mate choice. The attraction can be to the physical or other qualities or traits of a person, or to such qualities in the context...
to women. One day while looking out a palace window he witnesses a young beggar (Penelophon) suffering for lack of clothes. Struck by love at first sight
Love at first sight
Love at first sight is a common trope in Western literature, in which a person, character, or speaker feels romantic attraction for a stranger on the first sight of them...
, Cophetua decides that he will either have the beggar as his wife or commit suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
.
Walking out into the street, he scatters coins for the beggars to gather and when Penelophon comes forward, he tells her that she is to be his wife. She agrees and becomes queen, and soon loses all trace of her former poverty
Poverty
Poverty is the lack of a certain amount of material possessions or money. Absolute poverty or destitution is inability to afford basic human needs, which commonly includes clean and fresh water, nutrition, health care, education, clothing and shelter. About 1.7 billion people are estimated to live...
and low class. The couple lives a "quiet life" but are much loved by their people. Eventually they die and are buried in the same tomb.
In literature
The legend is mentioned in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's LostLove's Labour's Lost
Love's Labour's Lost is one of William Shakespeare's early comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s, and first published in 1598.-Title:...
, Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the career of playwright William Shakespeare about two young star-crossed lovers whose deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare's most popular archetypal stories of young, teenage lovers.Romeo and Juliet belongs to a...
, Richard II
Richard II (play)
King Richard the Second is a history play by William Shakespeare believed to be written in approximately 1595. It is based on the life of King Richard II of England and is the first part of a tetralogy, referred to by some scholars as the Henriad, followed by three plays concerning Richard's...
, and Henry IV
Henry IV, Part 2
Henry IV, Part 2 is a history play by William Shakespeare, believed written between 1596 and 1599. It is the third part of a tetralogy, preceded by Richard II and Henry IV, Part 1 and succeeded by Henry V.-Sources:...
. An ancient ballad of the tale is included in Richard Johnson's anthology Crown Garland of Goulden Roses (1612), and in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), but the origin is otherwise obscure. The girl's name is variously given as Penelophon or Zenelophon.
The Cophetua story was famously and influentially treated in literature by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (The Beggar Maid, written 1833, published 1842); in oil painting by Edward Burne-Jones
Edward Burne-Jones
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...
(King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1884); and in photography by Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
(his most famous photograph; Alice
Alice Liddell
Alice Pleasance Liddell , known for most of her adult life by her married name, Alice Hargreaves, inspired the children's classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, whose protagonist Alice is said to be named after her.-Biography:...
as "Beggar-Maid", 1858), and by Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron
Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary themes....
.
The painting by Burne-Jones is referred to in the prose poem König Cophetua by the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Hugo Laurenz August Hofmann von Hofmannsthal ; , was an Austrian novelist, librettist, poet, dramatist, narrator, and essayist.-Early life:...
and in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is a long poem by Ezra Pound. It has been regarded as a turning point in Pound's career , and its completion was swiftly followed by his departure from England. The name "Selwyn" might have been an homage to Rhymers' Club member Selwyn Image. The name and personality of the...
(1920), a poem by Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
. The painting has a symbolic role in the a short novel Le Roi Cophétua by the French writer Julien Gracq
Julien Gracq
Julien Gracq , born Louis Poirier in Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, in the French département of Maine-et-Loire, was a French writer. He wrote novels, critiques, a play, and poetry. His literary works were noted for their Surrealism.Gracq first studied in Paris at the Lycée Henri IV, where he earned his...
(1970) - which in turn inspired the film Rendez-vous à Bray, directed by the Belgian cineast André Delvaux.
The story was combined with and inflected the modern re-telling of the Pygmalion
Pygmalion (mythology)
Pygmalion is a legendary figure of Cyprus. Though Pygmalion is the Greek version of the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton, he is most familiar from Ovid's Metamorphoses, X, in which Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.-In Ovid:In Ovid's narrative, Pygmalion was a...
myth, especially in its treatment by George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
as the play Pygmalion
Pygmalion (play)
Pygmalion: A Romance in Five Acts is a play by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a veneer of...
.
It has also been used to name a sexual desire for lower-class women, apparently first by Graham Greene
Graham Greene
Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...
in his 1951 novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
The End of the Affair
The End of the Affair
The End of the Affair is a novel by British author Graham Greene, as well as the title of two feature films that were adapted for the screen based on the novel....
: "I don't know whether psychologists have yet named the Cophetua complex, but I have always found it hard to feel sexual desire without some sense of superiority, mental or physical." (p. 23).
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.According to...
uses the phrase "Cophetua syndrome" in her novel The Body in the Library
The Body in the Library
The Body in the Library is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie and first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in February 1942 and in UK by the Collins Crime Club in May of the same year. The US edition retailed at $2.00 and the UK edition at seven shillings and sixpence...
, to refer to the case of an elderly upper-class Englishman who becomes infatuated with a working-class girl, albeit in a fatherly rather than sexual way. Christie also references Cophetua in her novel "Crooked House
Crooked House
Crooked House is a work of detective fiction by Agatha Christie first published in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company in March 1949 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on May 23 of the same year. The US edition retailed at $2.50 and the UK edition at eight shillings and sixpence .The action takes...
".
Dorothy Sayers, in "Strong Poison
Strong Poison
Strong Poison is a 1929 novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her fifth featuring Lord Peter Wimsey.-Plot introduction:It is in Strong Poison that Lord Peter first meets Harriet Vane, an author of police fiction. The immediate problem is that she is on trial for her life, charged with murdering her former...
," depicts Lord Peter Wimsey saving Harriet Vane
Harriet Vane
Harriet Deborah Vane, later Lady Peter Wimsey, is a fictional character in the works of British writer Dorothy L. Sayers ....
's life by his detective skills and immediately departing from court, whereupon one of Harriet's friends predicts that Peter will "come see her;" to which another friend declares "No, he's not going to do the King Cophetua stunt." This usage, unexplained, suggests that the Cophetua story was familiar to the reading public in early-20th-century England.
She makes another reference in "Have his Carcase
Have His Carcase
Have His Carcase is a 1932 novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, her seventh featuring Lord Peter Wimsey and her second novel in which Harriet Vane appears...
" where she has Harriet Vane
Harriet Vane
Harriet Deborah Vane, later Lady Peter Wimsey, is a fictional character in the works of British writer Dorothy L. Sayers ....
telling Peter Wimsey: "You think you can sit up there all day, like King Cophetua being noble and generous and expecting people to be brought to your feet. Of course people will say, "look what he did for that woman - Isn't it marvellous of him!"
Florence King
Florence King
Florence Virginia King is an American novelist, essayist and columnist.While her early writings focused on the American South and those who live there, much of King's later work has been published in National Review...
recently revived the term for her 15 July 2002 essay entitled "On Keeping a Journal," which appeared in "The Misanthrope's Corner" of the National Review
National Review
National Review is a biweekly magazine founded by the late author William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1955 and based in New York City. It describes itself as "America's most widely read and influential magazine and web site for conservative news, commentary, and opinion."Although the print version of the...
magazine.
C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...
often used Cophetua and the beggar girl as an image of God's love for the unlovely. In The Problem of Pain
The Problem of Pain
The Problem of Pain is a 1940 book by C. S. Lewis, in which he seeks to provide an intellectual Christian response to questions about suffering...
, for instance, he writes, "We cannot even wish, in our better moments, that [God] could reconcile Himself to our present impurities - no more than the beggar maid could wish that King Cophetua should be content with her rags and dirt..."
Georgette Heyer
Georgette Heyer
Georgette Heyer was a British historical romance and detective fiction novelist. Her writing career began in 1921, when she turned a story for her younger brother into the novel The Black Moth. In 1925 Heyer married George Ronald Rougier, a mining engineer...
, in 1928's "The Masqueraders
The Masqueraders
The Masqueraders is a 1928 novel written by Georgette Heyer. It is set in Britain at a time shortly after the 1745 Jacobite Rising and is concerned with a family of escaped Jacobites.-Plot summary:...
," has Prudence tell her brother: "Lord, it’s a marvellous man! We become persons of consequence, and Tony’s denied his cherished role. He’d an ambition to play King Cophetua, Robin.’"
In "The American" by Henry James, Valentin the Comte de Bellegarde, in describing his near-perfect aristocratic lineage to Newman states, "Horrible! One of us, in the middle ages, did better: he married, like King Cophetua. That was really better, it was like marrying a bird or a monkey, one didn't have to think about her family at all."
Hugh Macdiarmid
Hugh MacDiarmid
Hugh MacDiarmid is the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve , a significant Scottish poet of the 20th century. He was instrumental in creating a Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century...
wrote a brief two-verse poem Cophetua in Scots, which is a slightly parodic treatment of the story.
P.D. James, in her book "Cover her Face" (1962) has a character saying "These King Cophetua marriages seldom work out." This was her first novel, and the first in the Adam Dalgleish series.
The English poet and critic James Reeves
James Reeves
John Morris Reeves was a British writer known as James Reeves principally known for his poetry and contributions to children's literature and the literature of collected traditional songs.-Life:...
included his poem "Cophetua," inspired by the legend, in his book The Talking Skull (1958).
In Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire novel "Framley Parsonage", Lucy Robarts likens her relationship with Lord Lufton, who has proposed to her and whom she loves, to that of King Cophetua and the beggarmaid. It is clearly implied that such a relationship would have unfortunate consequences for them both.
Alice Munro
Alice Munro
Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short-story writer, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her lifetime body of work, a three-time winner of Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction, and a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize...
titled one story in her 1980 collection, "The Beggar Maid". Before her marriage to Patrick, Rose is told by him: "You're like the Beggar Maid." "Who?" "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. You know. The painting." The American edition of Munro's collection is also titled The Beggar Maid, a change from the Canadian title: Who Do You Think You Are?
In Robin McKinley
Robin McKinley
Robin McKinley is a distinguished author of fantasy and children's books who has written sixteen books to date. Her latest book Pegasus was published in 2010...
's Beauty - A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast, she writes of Beauty's first entrance into the Beast's castle: "I wondered how King Cophetua's beggar-maid had felt when the palace gates had first opened for her."