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Chapter
Cupid, Infantilism and Maternal Desire on the Early Modern Stage
DOI link for Cupid, Infantilism and Maternal Desire on the Early Modern Stage
Cupid, Infantilism and Maternal Desire on the Early Modern Stage book
Cupid, Infantilism and Maternal Desire on the Early Modern Stage
DOI link for Cupid, Infantilism and Maternal Desire on the Early Modern Stage
Cupid, Infantilism and Maternal Desire on the Early Modern Stage book
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ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Cupid kissing Venus as a visual theme in the Italian Renaissance. It then explores how discussions of maternal eros in early modern childcare manuals contextualise this theme. Finally, it tries to account for the peculiar intensity of the image of mother-and-Cupid on the early modern stage, specifically in John Lyly's Sappho and Phao, and Marlowe and Nashe's Dido, Queen of Carthage. Twenty-first century psychiatry recognises a condition called 'paraphilic infantilism' or 'adult baby syndrome', usually found among adult, heterosexual men, who take pleasure in the abandonment of all responsibility and inhibition through becoming an infant. In William Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis where the threat of maternal desire is suggested by the way in which the goddess imprints upon his flesh. The erotic sensations produced by breastfeeding are reaffirmed when Laurent Joubert describes the sensitivity of the nipples and how the nursing child tickles and pulls on them gently with its tongue and tender mouth.