"The King and the Beggar-maid" is a 16th-centurybroadside ballad[1] that tells of an African king,Cophetua, and his love for the beggarPenelophon (ShakespeareanZenelophon). Artists and writers have referenced the story, and King Cophetua has become a byword for "a man who falls in love with a woman instantly and proposes marriage immediately".[2]
Cophetua is an African king known for his lack ofsexual attraction to women. One day, looking out of a palace window, he witnesses a young beggar, Penelophon, "clad all in grey".[2] Struck bylove at first sight, Cophetua decides that he will either have the beggar as his wife or commitsuicide.
Walking out into the street, he scatters coins for the beggars to gather and when Penelophon comes forward, he tells her that she is to be his wife. She agrees and becomes queen, and soon loses all trace of her formerpoverty andlow class. The couple lives "a quiet life during their princely reign"[3] and are much loved by their people. Eventually they die and are buried in the same tomb.
William Shakespeare mentions the ballad by title in several plays.[4] It is referenced or alluded to inLove's Labour's Lost (I, ii, 115 and V. i. 65–85),A Midsummer Night's Dream (IV, i, 65),Romeo and Juliet (II, i, 14),Richard II (V, viii, 80), andHenry IV, part 2 (V, iii, 107), all written in the 1590s.[5]William Warburton believed thatJohn Falstaff's lines inHenry IV, part 2, referencing Cophetua were taken from a now lost play based on the ballad.[6] InLove's Labour's Lost, Armado asks his page Moth, "Is there not a ballad, boy, of 'The King and the Beggar'?", to which Moth responds, "The world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages since, but I think now 'tis not to be found; or, if it were, it would neither serve for the writing nor the tune."[7]Ben Jonson also makes reference to the ballad in his playEvery Man in His Humour (1598)[3] andWilliam Davenant inThe Wits (1634).[8]
The oldest version of the tale surviving is that titled "A Song of a Beggar and a King" inRichard Johnson's anthologyCrown Garland of Goulden Roses (1612).[9][6] This was the source of the ballad in the first edition ofFrancis J. Child'sThe English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1855), although it was removed from the second edition (1858).[1] The ballad was also published inThomas Percy'sReliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).[2]
The ballad was probably sung to the melody (air) of "I Often with My Jenny Strove", published first in the third volume ofHenry Playford'sThe Banquet of Music (1689). In the first volume of the anonymousCollection of Old Ballads (1723), a ballad titled "Cupid's Revenge"—which is a mere paraphrase of "The King and the Beggar-maid"—appears set to the music of "I Often with My Jenny Strove".[1][10] This may be the original air of the Cophetua ballad.[7]
The Cophetua story was famously and influentially treated in literature byAlfred, Lord Tennyson (The Beggar Maid, written 1833, published 1842); in oil painting byEdmund Blair Leighton (The King and the Beggar-Maid) andEdward Burne-Jones (King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1884); and in photography byJulia Margaret Cameron and byLewis Carroll (his most famous photograph;Alice as "Beggar-Maid", 1858). Tennyson's poem was set to music byJoseph Barnby (published 1880).
The painting by Burne-Jones is referred to in theprose poemKönig Cophetua by the Austrian poetHugo von Hofmannsthal and inHugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), a long poem byEzra Pound. The painting has a symbolic role in a shortnovelLe Roi Cophetua by the French writerJulien Gracq (1970). This in turn inspired the 1971 filmRendez-vous à Bray, directed by theBelgian cineasteAndré Delvaux.
The story was combined with and inflected the modern re-telling of thePygmalion myth, especially in its treatment byGeorge Bernard Shaw as the 1913 playPygmalion, though Henry Higgins does not, in the play, display any romantic attraction to Eliza Doolittle whatsoever; thus, the parallel with the 'king and the beggar-maid' is not valid.
It has also been used to name a sexual desire for lower-class women by upper-class men. Although often attributed first toGraham Greene in his 1951 novelThe End of the Affair, the term was used as early as 1942 byAgatha Christie in her mysteryThe Body in the Library [NY: Collier, pp. 119-121] whenJane Marple reflects on the attraction of older wealthy men for young lower-class girls and in 1861 where Anthony Trollope referred to the story in Chapter XXXV of Framley Parsonage, his fourth novel ofThe Barchester Chronicles. Sir Henry Clithering inThe Body in the Library dubs it a"Cophetua Complex."
The English poet and criticJames Reeves included his poem "Cophetua", inspired by the legend, in his 1958 bookThe Talking Skull.
Hugh Macdiarmid wrote a brief two-verse poemCophetua inScots, which is a slightly parodic treatment of the story.[11]
Polish composerLudomir Rózycki wrote a symphonic poem "Król Cophetua", Op. 24, in 1910.
Alice Munro titled one story in her 1980 collection, "The Beggar Maid". Before her marriage to Patrick, Rose is told by him: "You're like the Beggar Maid." "Who?" "King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. You know. The painting." The American edition of Munro's collection is also titledThe Beggar Maid, a change from the Canadian title,Who Do You Think You Are?
