Cupid and Death

Cupid and Death is a mid-seventeenth-century masque, written by the Caroline era dramatist James Shirley, and performed on 26 March 1653 before the Portuguese ambassador to Great Britain. The work and its performance provide a point of contradiction to the standard view that the England of Oliver Cromwell and the Interregnum was uniformly hostile to stage drama.

After the closure of the theatres in 1642 at the start of the English Civil War, Shirley earned a living as a schoolteacher. As part of his new occupation, he wrote dramas — morality plays and masques — for his students to perform. The final works of his career, including Honoria and Mammon and The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses (both published in 1659), were works for student performers. Cupid and Death is another work in this category, though its resemblances with the great masques of the late Stuart Court have been noted by critics — it "is much more like a Court Masque than any of Shirley's other school Masques". Perhaps this aspect of the work made it seem appropriate for the Portuguese ambassador, the Count of Peneguiaõ. Shirley's past Royalist connections with the Stuart Court, and even his Roman Catholicism, clearly (if surprisingly) did not stand as insuperable obstacles to a public staging of the work.

Cupid and Death was first published in quarto in 1653, by the booksellers John Crook and John Baker. It was reprinted in 1659. The full musical score for the masque, by Matthew Locke and Christopher Gibbons, has survived, and was published together with Shirley's text in a modern edition in 1951.

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