• 1  William Percy, Sonnets to the fairest Cœlia [London, 1594], in Sidney Lee(Ed.), Elizabethan Sonnet (...)

1Elizabethan authors frequently opposed Venus, the goddess of beauty and sensuality, with Diana, the goddess of chastity. On the other hand, it is rarer at this period to find Venus in a contrastive relationship with the Gorgon Medusa. It is however the case in the line “A Gorgon shadowed under Venus’ face”, from the Sonnets to the Fairest Coelia1 (1594), a sequence by William Percy (1574-1648), a poet and playwright who was also son to the eighth earl of Northumberland. This line led me to interrogate the links between the two mythological figures in the Elizabethan love sonnet sequences, a genre that peaked around the 1590s. Venus is as seductive as Medusa is repugnant. The smile of the former attracts and ravishes while the face of the second frightens and petrifies. The former conjures up sensuality and sweetness of living, whereas the second leaves the death of the senses behind her. The appearance of the Gorgon next to Venus indicates that beauty is only a façade, a trompe-l’œil hiding a personality which is darker than it seems, in the purest Petrarchan vein.

• 2  My translation. “[L]a grâce figure au xvi^e siècle dans un ensemble de notions qui sont en relation (...)

4About fifteen such blazons are to be found in the Elizabethan love sonnet sequences. In most of them, Venus comes and offers her beauty, her grace, her sweetness or her smile to the Poet’s beloved, who, hence, becomes the embodiment of venustas, thus defined by Françoise Joukovsky: “grace is in the 16^th century among a set of notions related with the goddess of seduction, Venus. […] Together they make up venustas […]. It is a form of beauty linked with pleasure”2.

• 3  Barnabe Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe.Sonnettes, Madrigals, Elegies and Odes [London, 1593] (...)
• 4  William Alexander of Menstrie, Aurora.Containing the first fancies of the Authors youth [London, 1 (...)
• 5  David Murray, Cælia. Containing certaine Sonets [London, 1611], in Holger M. Klein (Ed.), English (...)

5However, negative connotations creep into some of these blazons. For indeed the Lady does not have only positive qualities, and especially, one of her shortcomings is the disdain she shows towards her suitor. For instance, the Lady is compared to Jupiter for his anger and thunder (Parthenophil and Parthenophe3, 19 and Aurora4, 74), or to Saturn for his grave air and his frowning brow (Parthenophil and Parthenophe, 78 and Aurora, 74). In a blazon by the Scottish poet David Murray, the beautiful Caelia is endowed with Cupid’s eyes, with which she throws the darts that give the love disease5.

• 6  Petrarch, Canzoniere / Le Chansonnier, trans. Pierre Blanc, Coll. Classiques Garnier, Paris: Borda (...)

Equating the eyes of the Lady with the god of love’s darts is a commonplace in Elizabethan love sonnets. The comparison with the Gorgon is less usual but nevertheless is a topos of Renaissance love poetry; Petrarch himself used it about his Laura6. Surprising though it may seem, the Poet’s beloved and the Gorgon have common points.

• 7  Natale Conti, Mythologiae, trans. John Mulryan and Steven Brown, Tempe, Arizona: Arizona Center fo (...)
• 8  The 1627 French edition makes the bodies of the Gorgons even more monstrous since the translator w (...)

7At first sight, Medusa looks the exact opposite of the Lady. One is hideous, with living venomous snakes for hair, whereas the other is beautiful and has sun-like hair. But on closer scrutiny, the Lady shares two characteristics with the Greek Medusa. The first one is physical. The mythographer Natale Conti offers a description of the three Gorgons, Stheno, Euryale and Medusa, as Perseus discovers them: “These creatures had heads entwined with scaly serpents, huge boar-like teeth, iron-hard hands, and wings they used to fly all over the place”7. Even if the style is very different, it sounds like one of those blazons that map out the body of the beloved8. The Greek iconography, which is very abundant as far as the Gorgons are concerned, confirms the composite character of the monster, denoting a mixture of humanity and bestiality and a threatening androgyny. Among the monstrous features, the Ovidian and Elizabethan descriptions only take into account the snaky hair: at the time of the sonnet vogue, the Gorgon was more humanised than bestial.

• 9  My translation. “[L]es artistes transforment sa laideur en beauté. Avant la fin du 5^esiècle, elle (...)

8Furthermore, Medusa’s ugliness is misleading, because the latter was not always a monster. Antiquity sometimes represented her as a superb woman. The Hellenist Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux explains it: “Artists turn her ugliness into beauty. Before the end of the 5^th century, she became too beautiful a woman, the sight of whom petrified as inescapably as her original ugliness did9”. Ovid, through Perseus, reminds us that Medusa was a much-courted beauty before being changed into a repulsive creature by Minerva:

• 12  Apollodorus, The Library of Greek Mythology, trans. Robin Hard, Coll. Oxford World’s Classics, Oxf (...)
• 13  Euripide, Ion, in Théâtre complet, Marie Delcour-Curvers (Ed.), Coll. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, (...)

9The second characteristic that the Lady shares with the Gorgon is the power of life and death, because she is capable of killing or of bringing her wooer back to life with a single look or a single smile. Medusa’s blood possesses the same power. According to the Greek mythographer Apollodorus, the god of medicine, Asclepios (Esculapius for the Romans) “had received from Athene blood that had flowed from the veins of the Gorgon; and he used the blood that had flowed from the veins on the left side to put people to death, and that which had flowed from the right, to save them — and it was by this means that he raised the dead”12. Euripides, in Ion, also evokes this double particularity13.

• 14  Robert Tofte, Laura.The Toys of a Traveller: or The Feast of Fancy. Divided into Three Parts, by R (...)

11When reading sonnet I, 39 in Robert Tofte’s Laura14, one realises that the eponymous heroine is petrified by her own reflection in the mirror:

• 15  Maurice Scève, Délie, objet de plus haute vertu [Lyons, 1544], Françoise Charpentier (Ed.), Paris: (...)

13The scene recalls an engraving in Maurice Scève’s Délie (1544), representing a basilisk, the fabulous animal with a petrifying look like Medusa’s, watching himself in a looking-glass. The title is “Le Basilisque et le Miroir” and the motto “Mon regard par toi me tue” (“My look kills me through you”)15. The scene in Tofte’s poem is also reminiscent of the famous circular painting by Caravaggio (1600-1601, Uffizi, Florence). The canvas is fixed on a poplar shield, which is supposed to symbolise Perseus’s, but its shape can also evoke a mirror. Caravaggio has chosen to paint his androgynous Medusa open-mouthed, thereby conveying the astonishment associated with petrifaction.

• 16  Vincenzo Cartari, The Fountaine of Ancient Fiction, trans. Richard Linche, Amsterdam and New York: (...)

The “Cyprian dreams” which oppress Coelia’s suitor must be read as “Venusian dreams”, “dreams of love”. The Poet transports himself onto the island of Cyprus, probably in the town of Paphos, where a temple devoted to Venus sat. The temple is thus described in Richard Linche’s adaptation of Vincenzo Cartari’s mythographic treatise: “the people therabouts adore and worship hir with great zeale & veneration, and erected and dedicated vnto her a most rich and stately temple, very gorgeous and costly16”. As soon as he enters the temple, the Poet is deluded by a trompe-l’œil:

• 17  “An unreal appearance; a delusive semblance or image; a vain and unsubstantial object of pursuit. (...)
• 18  See Sylvain Détoc, La Gorgone Méduse, Coll. Figures et Mythes, Monaco [Paris]: Éditions du Rocher, (...)

The Poet is the victim of an optical illusion, which is nevertheless not caused by the art of the sculptor, but rather by that of the Poet. Coelia’s beauty and ivory skin — characteristics so often constructed by the sonneteers — explain her wooer’s error. This is an example of inverted trompe-l’œil: while a statue’s function is to give an illusion of life, here it is a living being who gives the illusion of being a statue. This sonnet creates a double movement of petrifaction, first from the Poet to the Lady who is as beautiful as a statue of Venus, and then from the Lady to the Poet, transformed into a mute stone by Coelia’s Medusean aspect. In the line “A Gorgon shadowed under Venus’ face”, the notion of artistic illusion and statuary is extended by “shadowed”, used here in the meaning of “a delusive semblance or image”17, highlighting the Lady’s specious character. “Under” indicates the superimposition of two images, as on a palimpsest or on a medal with two different faces. Hence, the superimposition, in the Elizabethan love sonnet genre, of Venus and Medusa, of voluptuous beauty and murderous cruelty, is summarised in this single line by Percy. Coelia’s two opposite identities bring about two different responses in the Lover, underlined by two adjectives which are placed in parallel on lines 11 and 13: with Venus, he is “cheerful”, with Medusa, “affright”. In different centuries, petrifaction results from watching either the Gorgon’s repelling ugliness or her dazzling beauty, which is the version that the Pléiade poets remember18. In this sonnet, it seems that the Poet’s petrifaction is rather due to her ugliness, which was artfully hidden under a beautiful trompe-l’œil. It is when he finally makes out the Lady’s Medusean face that he is frightened and is metamorphosed into cold stone.

• 20  See the footnote, Ibidem.

What Cleopatra is describing here is a kind of painting which was in vogue during the Renaissance, the “perspective” picture20. It provoked an optical illusion: when looking at it from one side, one could see Mars, and from another side, one could see Medusa. The common point between the two is rage: Mars’s warlike rage, making him a great man, and the Gorgon’s destructive rage, with no positive side to it. The mythological references also illustrate Cleopatra’s rage when she hears the news of Antony’s marriage. The dividing line is thin between beauty and ugliness, between warlike qualities and destructive energy. In Shakespeare’s play, Medusa is Antony’s hidden face, as she is the Lady’s in the Elizabethan love sonnets.

• 21  My translation. “[S]on extrême fugacité en littérature”, Sylvain Détoc, op. cit., 33.
• 22  My translation.“Méduse est une figure qui se dérobe, précisément parce qu’elle a pour fonction d’e (...)

16Beauty is but a snare, an illusion under which lurks destructive cruelty. The Gorgon, therefore, is the reverse side of a coin showing the enticing but deceptive Venus, who looks so perfect at first glance. In the book he devoted to Medusa, Sylvain Détoc writes of what he calls “her extreme fleetingness in literature”21. For him, “Medusa is a figure who hides from view, precisely because her function is to express the inexpressible, to speak the unspeakable and to represent the irrepresentable”22. I see a similarity between this remark and the fact that in some love sonnets, the Gorgon only reveals herself in trompe-l’œils or through indirect means like the mirror. Hence, she seems to symbolise the darkest, the most shameful and the most deeply buried aspects of man, which cannot be expressed otherwise.