Love's Cruelty
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Love's Cruelty is a Caroline era stage play, a tragedy written by James Shirley, and first published in 1640.
The play was licensed for performance by Sir Henry Herbert, the Master of the Revels, on Nov. 14, 1631. Like the majority of Shirley's dramas, it was acted by Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit Theatre. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on April 25, 1639 by the booksellers Andrew Crooke and William Cooks, along with three other Shirley plays.[1] Crooke and Cooke published the play in quarto the next year, one in a long series of Shirley plays that the two stationers issued in this era.
Shirley based his plot on material from two sources: novel 36 of the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre, and novel 6, decade 3, of the Hecatomithi of Cinthio. Shirley may have accessed Marguerite's tale in English translation in The Palace of Pleasure by William Painter. Shirley's work also bears a significant resemblance to Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness.[2]
Among its other features, Love's Cruelty contains a noteworthy indication of the influence of the masque on the mind of the contemporary audience. The masque—which Inigo Jones, probably its greatest artistic innovator, termed "pictures with light and motion"—was the seventeenth century's closest analogue to the modern cinema spectacular. In Shirley's play, the character Hippolito offers a contemporaneous response to the spectacles of the form:
- A scene to take your eye with wonder, now to see a forest move, and the pride of summer brought into a walking wood; in the instant, as if the sea had swallowed up the earth, to see waves capering about tall ships...In the height of this rapture, a tempest so artificial and sudden in the clouds, with a general darkness and thunder, so seeming made to threaten, that you would cry out with the mariners in the work, you cannot escape drowning.
Not long after, Shirley would himself write perhaps the most successful masque of his generation in The Triumph of Peace (1634).
Love's Cruelty was revived early in the Restoration era; it was acted at the Red Bull Theatre on Thursday, Nov. 15, 1660. Samuel Pepys saw another performance of the play on Dec. 30, 1667; he judged it "a very silly play."[3]
[edit] Synopsis
The play is set in the northern Italian city of Ferrara. Bellamente and Clariana are engaged to be married. She is interested to meet Bellamente's close and highly-praised friend Hippolito. She visits him in disguise; he is called away to answer a summons from the city's Duke, and locks her in his room. Delayed longer than he expected, Hippolito sends his friend Belamente to release the mysterious woman; Belamente is astonished to find this fiancée, but accepts her explanation, and eventually married her. Clariana, however, commits adultery with Hippolito. They are caught by a servant, who informs Belamente—who, after an internal debate, lets the pair off unpunished, largely to conceal his own dishonor.
The Duke of Farrara is attempting to seduce a young woman named Eubella; he employs Hippolito as his advocate. Yet Hippolito feels quilty about his betrayal of Belamente's trust, and is charmed by Eubella's innocence and virtue; he proposes marriage to the girl. The Duke learns of this, but his own guilt leads him to bless their intended marriage. Clariana doesn't feel the same way: desrious to break up the marriage, Clariana summons Hippolito to her chamber under a false pretext on the morning of his intended wedding. Hippolito has no interest in Clariana, and rejects her attempted interference; but they are caught together, once more. Clariana stabs Hippolito, who in turn wounds her with his sword. Clariana confesses her fault to her husband, then dies; and Hippolito also dies after seeing Eubella one last time. Belamente dies of shock; the Duke marries Eubella himself.
[edit] Notes
- ^ The three were The Opportunity, The Coronation, and The Night Walker.
- ^ Forsythe, pp. 164-5.
- ^ Nason, pp. 154, 157.
[edit] References
- Forsythe, Robert Stanley. The Relations of Shirley's Plays to the Elizabethan Drama. New York, Columbia University Press, 1914.
- Nason, Arthur Huntington. James Shirley, Dramatist: A Biographical and Critical Study. New York, 1915; reprinted New York, Benjamin Blom, 1967.
