The King and the Beggar-maid

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".

[5] William Warburton believed that John Falstaff's lines in Henry IV, part 2, referencing Cophetua were taken from a now lost play based on the ballad.

[8] The oldest version of the tale surviving is that titled "A Song of a Beggar and a King" in Richard Johnson's anthology Crown Garland of Goulden Roses (1612).

[2] The ballad was probably sung to the melody (air) of "I Often with My Jenny Strove", published first in the third volume of Henry Playford's The Banquet of Music (1689).

[7] The Cophetua story was famously and influentially treated in literature by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (The Beggar Maid, written 1833, published 1842); in oil painting by Edmund Blair Leighton (The King and the Beggar-Maid) and Edward Burne-Jones (King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, 1884); and in photography by Julia Margaret Cameron and by Lewis Carroll (his most famous photograph; Alice as "Beggar-Maid", 1858).

Although often attributed first to Graham Greene in his 1951 novel The End of the Affair, the term was used as early as 1942 by Agatha Christie in her mystery The Body in the Library [NY: Collier, pp.

119-121] when Jane 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 of The Barchester Chronicles.

The English poet and critic James Reeves included his poem "Cophetua", inspired by the legend, in his 1958 book The Talking Skull.