SOURCE: Sheidley, William E. “A Timely Anachronism: Tradition and Theme in Barnabe Googe's ‘Cupido Conquered.’” Studies in Philology 69, no. 2 (1972): 150-66.

In the following essay, Sheidley discusses the styles and themes in “Cupido Conquered.”

It is now commonplace to emphasize the continuity of the Middle Ages into the Renaissance and to stress the conservatism and authoritarianism of Elizabethan culture at the expense of the older and still not entirely discredited view of the English sixteenth century as an age of exuberant expansion and experimentation. Though it is not easy to reconcile modern statements of these opposing positions,¹ the two impulses they alternatively fasten upon can be seen working smoothly together in the literature of the age—most clearly, perhaps, in the rough-hewn and often ignored poetry of the 1560's. Barnabe Googe (1540-1594), the author of Eglogs, Epitaphes, & Sonettes (1563), The Ship of Safegarde (1596), and a number of translations, including the...