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Art, for centuries, has cast the cuckold as a fool whose young wife is seduced by a randy hunk. 

ITV’s summer hit reality show Love Island, in which a cast of impossibly buffed twentysomething singletons are thrown together in a villa with the intention that they will canoodle, has taken the opposite approach.

More than three million viewers — almost as many as those watching Poldark — were this week gripped by the saga of Georgia, a bikini-clad student, and Josh, a presenter in whom she had sweetly put her faith.

The programme’s ‘baddies’ have included model Megan (top left), jilter Josh (top right) along with loved up couple Dani and Jack (bottom left) and indecisive Dr Alex (bottom right)

Georgia trusted Josh, whom she had been dating for a number of weeks, not to stray when the producers despatched the men to a different villa — filled with a new batch of female contestants — for two nights.

But then she learned — in full view of the cameras — that her beloved was, in fact, a cheating rascal who had hooked up with a different honey.

Ignominiously dumped! Lovely Georgia had been cuckolded.

Earlier centuries cackled at cuckolds. But we felt sorry for her. That flush of sympathy was rather reassuring and it may help explain the show’s success.

Yes, Love Island — now in its fifth week — is daft entertainment.

It is a six-packed bonkfest, a voyeuristic fantasy, with semi-bared bottoms, jaunty commentary, risible self-absorption and more tattoos than Edinburgh.

But it has a heart. And, with its sharply drawn villains, smoochy sweethearts and expendable extras (in medieval plays, they would have been exiled to a French dungeon, but here, they are packed off home on the next QueasyJet to England), it includes many of the ingredients of classic theatre.

Rivalries, jilted honour, misunderstandings between lovers — all played out under the gaze of an all-seeing controller: Shakespeare would have understood this mix.

The heterosexual contestants have been packed off to rural Majorca to pair up with one another, while we, thanks to night-vision cameras, get to watch their fumblings in bed.

So much for the supposed prudishness of this era when upskirting is top of the agenda at the House of Commons.

The surging ITV2 audiences are plainly completely at ease with up-duveting.

The programme’s ‘baddies’ have included a model called Megan, personal trainer Adam, his almond- eyed accomplice Zara, and jilter Josh.

Megan, all slinky hips and a smear of rubbery lipstick, is a tremendous maneater, casting aside Eyal for Wes, who had been happily bunked up with Scots air hostess Laura, and then quickly moving on from Wes to bespectacled, beefy Alex. All change!

Adam also behaved badly, dumping Kendall and, moments later, kissing Welsh solicitor Rosie, whom he promptly gave the heave-ho in favour of Westminster politician’s aide Zara — not that she lasted long.

The programme’s ‘baddies’ have included a model called Megan (pictured), personal trainer Adam, his almond- eyed accomplice Zara, and jilter Josh

Dear, dear, what games the elves of Eros play with us. These romancers hip-hop from one gorgeous bloom to another like bumblebees exploring a rural hedgerow’s honeysuckle. All power to their sun-oiled elbows.

At the end of this fourth series of Love Island, one couple will be chosen as the winners and handed £50,000, but everyone will earn much more from promotional fees and celebrity endorsements.

Along the way, there is much talk of who fancies whom and almost as much of who is cheating on whom.

There is also endless snogging, which, thanks to the body microphones the youngsters wear at all times, we hear as much as see. Snog, snog, snog. Lowered, Botox-pumped lips lock on to sloppy, stubble-covered mouth — close-up, camera two! — and the sound is like someone walking through mud in gumboots.

Here, you might think, is reality TV at its most sun-tanned and tawdry. The whole thing is so silly and manipulative, isn’t it? Up to a point.

You can practically hear the producers’ brain-cogs whirring as they calculate the maximum commercial extraction from these skimpily covered angels and muscle-bound adonises.

But in this social media-savvy age, where a B-list celebrity can make millions from exposure to transient fame, who is exploiting whom? And, although the whole thing is obviously shallow, it somehow resonates with wholesome truths about the riskiness and sheer optimism of love. If love this properly be.

Georgia and Josh were one of the programme’s two supposedly solid couples.

The other devoted lovebirds have been Dani and Jack, she a Cockney barmaid with a voice like a sea lion, he a thick-jawed stationery salesman from Kent.

Jack’s teeth dazzle, they are so white. Maybe that is why everyone wears sunglasses.

If nothing else, Love Island is testament to modern British dentistry. Biro salesmen from the Thames Estuary nowadays have teeth like Hollywood lead actors.

Love Island is a primer on the Millennial generation and its grooming habits. The lads seem to spend as much time getting ready in the evening as the girls, as they squirt clouds of pit-spray under their arms. The ozone layer above Majorca may have taken a terrible hit, I fear.

These boys also sometimes kiss one another — little pecks on the lips — as a sign of comradeship. Try that at your next office party at your peril.

Dani and Jack were tested by their two-night absence almost as much as Georgia and caddish Josh had been — but they came through it heroically.

The moment of their reunion, when they discovered they had both remained chaste, was a prize tear-jerker.

From Land’s End to the northern tip of Scotland, you could practically hear the parping of noses into living-room hankies. Neither Dani nor Jack is likely to be a candidate for Mensa, but they have the sweetness of rustic lovers in a medieval romance. They give the programme’s plot an ideal, an extreme of domestic happiness.

As they clasped one another, she choking back tears of happiness, the British public succumbed to the sugary moment.

Intellectuals may sneer at sentimentalism in drama, but the rest of us know that it is addictive — as, indeed, Love Island is addictive, in the manner of Angel Delight or a supermarket lemon meringue pie.

We know it is full of E numbers, but still we crave it.

Were there only a little more sentimentalism in the Beeb’s TV dramas, its ratings might improve.

The other devoted lovebirds have been Dani (pictured) and Jack, she a Cockney barmaid with a voice like a sea lion, he a thick-jawed stationery salesman from Kent.

Love Island’s directors were clever enough to sprinkle a tiny measure of salt into the recipe. As Dani reclaimed her faithful Jack, she let slip a little shaft of bitchiness at Jack’s former girlfriend, Ellie, who had just shown up in the programme. ‘I ain’t f****** talkin’ to her,’ she whispered to Jack. ‘I’m not clapping her, either.’

Love Island’s language is ripe and the chat-up lines may be said to lack the subtlety of Noel Coward.

Typical of these come-hithers is ‘you’re quite f****** hot’ and ‘I’ve been sh****** myself all day’. There’s more Anglo-Saxon than in Beowulf. The demotic is inventive. We learn that the expresison ‘to crack on’ with someone means ‘to flirt with and try to bed’.

One of the more eloquent contestants, curly-haired dreamboat Eyal, announced earnestly to one of the girls: ‘I very much bounce off someone else’s energy and I can talk all day.’

She looked horrified at the thought and promptly ran off with someone less windy.

Eyal was booted off the show at the next of its regular culls. Into the catapult and over the castle walls he flew.

Love Island’s formula may be similar to that of Big Brother, but this show is more watchable, less depressing. It helps that it is being filmed outdoors in bright sunlight with views of Balearic countryside — so much more attractive than the urban, mainly indoors set of Big Brother.

And where the participants in Big Brother are often grungy, world-weary lumps, these youngsters are easy on the eye and have that certain dynamism that comes with body fitness.

But maybe the real reason Love Island is so much cheerier is that it is about, yes, love, whereas Big Brother’s driving engine is merely negative — the scrap to survive.

There is less rancour in this Eden than in Big Brother’s drab compound.

‘Everyone keeps kissing me and I can’t deal with it!’ squawked Ellie, a Geordie model, flapping a hand over her face.

The initial object of her affections was Alex, a doctor from west Wales, but her ardour cooled.

Not one of life’s lungers is Dr Alex. Indecisive, introspective and emotionally constipated, he is the closest the show comes to Jaques in As You Like It — the perpetual melancholic whose philosophical musings contrast with the immediacy of the lovers who surround him. Several commentators have compared past series of Love Island to Shakespeare. Is there not something of A Midsummer Night’s Dream about its more fantastical moments and the way the producers direct these lovers at whim, sending them half-mad in the process?

Shakespeare’s The Tempest is even set on an island, just like this show.

The love jealousies, which acquire such rare force in this bubble of the villa, have something of Othello’s control-freakery to them.

Love Island's Georgia Steel lashed out at Josh Denzel for betraying her with new girl Kazimir Crossley

When things are in danger of becoming too settled, the directors send in a new contestant to cause a stir. This is the age- old dramatic technique of the disruptive incomer.

Meanwhile, the occasional mobile phone messages sent by the producers to the lovers are a textbook example of deus ex machina — higher beings contriving an unlikely episode.

Shakespeare might have made more of the script. Though the characters repeatedly say how much they prize ‘banter’ and ‘conversation’ in a potential lover, the dialogue lacks poetry.

Adverbs are an endangered species — ‘I want to stay in the villa so bad’ and ‘I need to be spoken to genuine’ — and, when they are at a loss to say anything else, they resort to ‘f***’ or ‘yeah’. Not one ‘hey-nonny-no’ so far!

No one ever reads a book (such things are banned, as they would discourage flirtation). And yet, again, we must admit, this melodrama, this tacky tale of petty longings, is weirdly gripping.

Record audiences of 3.4 million viewers have been going back to this series for more. Why?

In part, it is a relief to watch a world from which hectoring political correctness is so absent and in which no one is moaning about money or equality or even Brexit (when the B-word was mentioned, few of the contestants had an opinion, or even much of a clue, about our pending departure from the EU).

But the greater compulsion, I think, is that we want to know if narrative justice will be served.

As the best soap operas understand, we want to know how things will develop for our favourite characters.

Will the wrong ’uns receive their comeuppance? Will honourable, and markedly moral, Georgia have the last laugh on naughty Josh?

Will Dr Alex learn to smile properly? Will anyone ever have a proper swim?

And will Dani and Jack announce they are pregnant before the end of the series?

Every island fantasy must eventually end but, for the moment, we are bewitched.