ABSTRACT
The figure of Dipsas in early modern literature embodies several significant and overlapping cultural anxieties about female sexual power, witchcraft and concupiscent desire. In “Dipsas”, the specters of dangerous siren, loathsome witch and devilish serpent come together. Although she has received relatively little critical attention, the character of Dipsas – as she is remade and re-imagined in early modern texts – is clearly part of an important misogynistic tradition of representing feminine temptation, stretching from Lena and Luxuria in classical thought, through the medieval treatment of la femme aux serpents and the female-headed serpent (and Eve) in Eden, to Spenser’s serpent-woman Error and Shakespeare’s serpent of the Nile, Cleopatra.1 Indeed, her name, first coined by Ovid in the deeply misogynistic Amores, is the name of a deadly serpent whose bite causes a fearsome transformation of self that is either fatal in its own right, or else compels the victim to a self-destructive excess of drinking. Dipsas the snake-woman is thus a powerful imagining of processes of emasculation and transformation that threaten to separate man from his essential, rational self.2 In comedy, her withered physical body is emphasized in order that she becomes an object of male ridicule on the early modern stage; nevertheless, Dipsas and her related serpent-women figures clearly play on the early modern imagination as suspect and dangerous forces of temptation, corruption and self-division.
