Cophetua
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King Cophetua was said to have been a legendary king who showed no interest in females, until one day he saw a pale barefoot beggar-girl dressed all in grey. He fell in love with her, and raised her to be his queen.[1]
The legend, usually called The King and the Beggar or some variant thereof, is mentioned in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry IV. 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 Lord Alfred Tennyson (The Beggar Maid, written 1833, published 1842); in oil painting by Edward Burne-Jones (King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1884); and in photography by Lewis Carroll (his most famous photograph; Alice as "Beggar-Maid", 1858), and by Julia Margaret Cameron.
The painting by Burne-Jones is referred to in the prose poem Konig Cophetua by the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), a poem by Ezra Pound. The painting has a symbolic role in the a short novel Le Roi Cophétua by the French writer Julien Gracq (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 myth, especially in its treatment by George Bernard Shaw as the play Pygmalion.
It has also been used to name a sexual desire for lower-class women, apparently first by Graham Greene in his 1951 novel The End of the Affair: "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 uses the phrase "Cophetua syndrome" in her novel The Body in the Library, 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.
Dorothy Sayers, in "Strong Poison," depicts Lord Peter Wimsey saving Harriet Vane'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.
Florence King 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 magazine.
C. S. Lewis often used Cophetua and the beggar girl as an image of God's love for the unlovely. In The Problem of Pain, 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..."
The English poet and critic James Reeves included his poem "Cophetua," inspired by the legend, in his book The Talking Skull (1958).
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