Chapter Seven: In the Company of Cuckolds

The cuckoo then, on every tree,Mocks married men; for thus sings he,

Cuckoo;Cuckoo, cuckoo! O word of fear,Unpleasing to a married ear!

- Love’s Labor’s Lost1

No comedic topos so perfectly registers shifts in modes of

laughter as that of cuckoldry. Cuckold jokes and stories pass

from eliciting carnival laughter through the Middle Ages and

early seventeenth century to becoming impolite during the late

1600s. By the mid-eighteenth century, female adultery is such a

serious matter that it does not dare enter into comic forms. This

sea-change is partly due to the social mores concerning marriage

and gender roles, but also to the comic tastes that accompany

those mores. We will elaborate more fully on both of these

developments later in the chapter.2

Like all good folkloric formulas, the cuckoldry triangle has

a deceptively simple premise while in fact permitting an infinite

variety of modalities depending on the way it is handled and the

1 Refrain for the song of Spring, or “Ver” (5.2.894-98, 903-7).2 While the stock type of the old man in love (senex amans) also frequently appears in Aristophanes and Plautus and generates a comic love triangle similar to that of the cuckold-wife-lover, classical comedy is outside the scope of this chapter.

historical context in which it emerges. Medieval and early modern

European literature reveals two general approaches to cuckoldry:

the moralizing and the ambivalent. The moralizers make absolute

claims (whether good or bad) about marriage as an institution,

love as a philosophical problem, men as the default category of

humankind, and women as the marked category. Proponents of

ambivalence treat the cuckold, his wife, and her lover as at once

symbols of nature’s regenerative principle and actors in an

eternal carnivalesque farce. Seen through the ambivalent lens,

cuckold tales depict the husband as a figure of necessary

ridicule and the representative of a dying order, while the wife

and her lover are trickster figures who serve to undermine the

old rule. Bakhtin characterizes cuckoldry, in the ambivalent

tradition, as “the uncrowning of the old husband and a new act of

procreation with the young husband.” Here “the image of the

woman”—whose lower body represents both death (the earth as a

grave) and life (the infinite womb)—is “at once mocking,

destructive, and joyfully reasserting” (1984, 241). If the

moralizing strain seeks to evaluate the moral worth of men and

women based on their roles in the cuckoldry narrative, the

ambivalent strain employs the ambiguous imagery of grotesque

realism to create a spectacle containing carnival truths. Whereas

the ambivalent strain, with all its incongruities and

oppositions, naturally harmonizes with the comic mode, the

moralizing strain often comes across as stilted in humor texts.

Abstract moralizing looks absurd in the face of, on the one hand,

the cuckold’s impending death and, on the other, the unending

perpetuation of life by the wife and her vigorous young lover.

A study of cuckoldry across the medieval and early modern

periods reveals that it takes a robust-minded audience to

appreciate the topic and to laugh at it for its ambivalent

values. Vladimir Propp gives one clue to the abiding success of

this kind of age-old folktale tradition: “[t]he victory of the

weak over the strong,” in which “[c]unning and deception are the

tools of the weak.”3 Regardless of whether the woman and her

3 Theory and History of Folklore, trans. Ariadna Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin and several others. Ed., with an introduction and Notes, by Anatoly Liberman (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 28. Natalie Zemon Davis corroborates this reading of marital relations as sexually symbolic of social experience: “At the end of the Middle Ages and in early modern Europe, the relation of the wife—of the potentially disorderly woman—to her husband was especially useful for expressing the relation of all subordinates to their superiors” (Society and Culture in Early Modern France [Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1975], 127). The answer to the riddle in The Wife of Bath’s Tale, of course, reaffirms this: of all things women most desire sovereignty over their husbands.

lover are violating contemporary ethics, they come off as heroes

by making a fool of the (more powerful) husband. Thus there is no

room for sentimental sympathy with the cuckold in this

literature, for the cuckold is always a self-deluded member of

the establishment who would force nature; as such, from a comic

perspective, he demands debasement and ridicule.4 His natural

inclination to jealousy seeks to impose rigid order where freedom

and gay truth irrepressibly surge forth. Further, as pretentious,

even hypocritical, claimants to philosophic authority, the most

thoroughgoing cuckolds are themselves moralizers: January in

Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, Panurge in Rabelais’s Third Book, Ford and

Falstaff in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, Arnolphe in

Molière’s L’Ecole des Femmes, Pinchwife in William Wycherley’s The

Country Wife, and Foresight in William Congreve’s Love for Love.5

Nothing so surely marks a character as a determined cuckold as

4 We do, however, encounter some wily cuckolds who match their wits with the lovers and successfully turn the tables on their adversaries—notably King Agilulf in the second tale of the third day of Boccaccio’s Decameron; and the clever shoemaker Baillet, in the fabliau Baillet, who locks the priest-lover in a meat-locker, puts it up for sale in public, and, as the enclosed priest calls out for help in Latin, crows over the meat-locker’s learned ventriloquism.5 As soon as Iago incites Othello to start moralizing in this way, he has basically drawn him into the circle of cuckolds and the results, from his—and even our—viewpoint, are full of mirth.

seeing him hold forth on marriage, women, and love. By the same

token, the audience of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro may rest

assured, from the merrily taunting, festive cavatina sung by

Figaro at the beginning of the opera (“Se vuol ballare”), that he

will not be cuckolded.

Later in this chapter we shall explore how the moralizing

and ambivalent approaches toward cuckoldom point historically

toward two fundamentally opposed modalities of cuckoldry

narrative—respectively, the obsessive-cuckold and the blithe-

cuckold modes. The obsessive-cuckold mode eventually develops

into the modern, bourgeois perspective on adultery that precludes

the possibility of making light of the subject. The blithe-

cuckold mode, like carnival itself, largely dies out after the

seventeenth century as it dwindles to the occasional, formalized

ritual that evokes an antic past. In their civilizing approach,

the moralizers at once register and enable higher ideals about

marriage that require of both husband and wife compatibility,

individual integrity, and mutual love beyond the merely priapic.

Our first line of argument, however, concerns the early

modern querelle des femmes, or “argument about women.” The authors

examined in this chapter all place in tension the moralizing and

ambivalent tendencies in their cuckoldry jokes and narratives in

order to critique the very notion of such a querelle as necessarily

monologic, biased, and unrealistic. This four-hundred-year

controversy, which engaged numerous authors from different

sectors of society, centered around the relative merits and evils

of women and marriage. The second, longer section of the Roman de

la Rose (1280, by Jean de Meung) kindled the debate by virulently

attacking women and wedlock through the mouths of several

authoritative characters (le Jaloux, Raison, la Vieille, Génius).

In response, Christine de Pisan’s Epitre au dieu d’amours (1399)

raised the standard in defense of women by condemning the Roman

for its misogynous (and misogamous) morality.6 Bakhtin divides

the medieval and Renaissance dispute over women into two main

groups—adherents of the negative “Gallic tradition,” who condemn

women from an ascetic standpoint; and advocates of the

6 Joan Kelly, “Early Feminist Theory and the ‘Querelle des Femmes,’ 1400-1789,” Signs 8 (1982):4-28, p.10. For a thorough analysis of Pisan’s counterattack against Jean de Meung see also Rosalind Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 11-17. According to Ernst Robert Curtius, “the most elaborate piece of misogynistic writing in the Middle Ages is the Lamentationes Matheoli” (written byMatheolus at the end of the thirteenth century), which Christine de Pisan answered in her City of Women (1405) (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 155).

“idealizing tradition,” who “exal[t] womanhood” from a chivalric

standpoint.7 We should add to these a third group, the feminists,

who were often themselves female, and who, in the words of Joan

Kelly, “sought to break through the prejudice and limits of male

learning, initiating the first attempts at ‘women’s studies’”

(20). The prejudiced “male learning” deprecated by Pisan and her

feminist cohorts through the eighteenth century comprises

Aristotle, the Bible, the patristic fathers, and other classical

and medieval writers who characterize woman as a flawed version

of man, a demon of lust, and “the incarnation of sin.”8

Contemporary physiological theory bore out what the Bible showed

to women’s detriment, namely, that “the female was . . .

changeable, deceptive, and tricky,” and “[h]er womb was like a

hungry animal” (Davis 124).9

7 1984, 239. Bakhtin notes that while the term “Gallic tradition” was actuallyin contemporary usage (tradition gauloise), the term “idealizing tradition” was coined by the great twentieth-century Rabelais scholar Abel Lefranc.8 Bakhtin 1984, 240. Aristotle writes that “the female is, at it were, a mutilated male, and the menstrual fluids are semen, only not pure; for there is only one thing they have not in them, the principle of soul” (“Generation of Animals,” 737a.27-29; in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 1 [Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984], p.1144). Chaucer’s Wife of Bath names the other major classical and medieval anti-feminists: Theophrastus, Chrysippus, Valerius Maximus, Tertullian, and Jerome (Wife of Bath’s Prologue, lines 671-77).9 The physician Rondibilis quotes Galen and Plutarch to espouse this view of the womb as an animal in Rabelais’s Third Book. Rabelais’s legal friend André Tiraqueau, who appears as the character Trinquamelle during the trial of

While the theorizing authors of the “Gallic tradition” were

content to vilify women from the conventional clerical

perspective, those who dramatized women and marriage in this

tradition portrayed both in a much more ambiguous light.

According to Bakhtin, this second, ambivalent, strand of the

“Gallic tradition”—the “popular comic tradition” that included

Rabelais—showed

[w]omanhood . . . in contrast to the limitations of her partner [and as] a foil to his avarice, jealousy, stupidity,hypocrisy, bigotry, sterile senility, false heroism, and abstract idealism. The woman of Gallic tradition is the bodily grave of man. She represents in person the undoing ofpretentiousness, of all that is finished, completed, and exhausted. She is the inexhaustible vessel of conception, which dooms all that is old and terminated. (1984, 240)

In this popular comic tradition, the pros and cons of women and

marriage are not at issue; the tradition dispenses altogether

with moralizing in favor of presenting a dynamic struggle of life

and death that stages the cosmic triumph of change over stasis

and of new over old. Like the uncrowning and killing of the old

king in festive rituals, cuckoldry enacts the uncrowning of “old

age, of the old year, and the receding winter. [The husband] is

Bridoye in the Third Book, contributes to the querelle with his work condemning women, On the Laws of Marriage (1513). Amaury Bouchard answers him with a defense of women, An Apology for the Feminine Sex (1522).

stripped of his robes, mocked, and beaten” (Bakhtin 1984, 241).

Like the world of Boccaccio’s Decameron, cuckoldry in the

ambivalent tradition inspires no concern over “immorality,” but

“rather the feeling that man is a part of nature, which is not

governed by moral laws or principles, but answers only to

instincts and impulses and biological phenomena that fall outside

the scope of ethics.”10 When contrasted with the richly symbolic

and comically grotesque ambivalent tradition, the moralizing

tradition appears sterile and narrow.

The popular comic tradition does, however, feature plenty of

moralizers—and they are not just the cuckolds. If the formal

moralizers of the querelle des femmes are the authors who theorize

within the Gallic, idealizing, and feminist traditions, their

literary counterparts are the poetic and dramatic speakers,

narrators, and characters in the various comic modes who declaim

on the same questions. It is to these dramatized moralizers that

we look in arguing our first thesis, since their example reveals

the underlying problem of most theory in general: that it

10 Azzurra B. Givens, La dottrina d’amore nel Boccaccio (Messina-Florence: G. D’Anna, 1968), p.207, trans. and qtd. in the translator’s introduction to Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. with introd. by G.H. McWilliam (New York: Penguin, 1995), civ. Hereafter cited as Decameron.

produces at best a one-sided picture of reality and truth. The

characters who appear in the fabliaux, farces, and even the short

witty jests involving cuckoldry have far greater individuation

and vitality than the husbands, wives, and lovers whom the

moralizing debates of the same period fix in a formulated phrase.

This is because these characters’ thoughts and actions embody the

“real grotesque” as Bakhtin defines it: that comic form which

“seeks to grasp in its imagery the very act of becoming and

growth, the eternal incomplete unfinished nature of being” (1984,

52). We will contrast the moralizing tendency in popular comic

literature with the ambivalent deeds and sayings that cut through

that moralizing and reveal it as shallow and univocal. The

moralizers we study—like their formal counterparts—insist on

stereotyping and flattening men, women, and marriage in ways

which the popular comic forms as a whole never do. The texts we

analyze demonstrate, through their narratives of cuckoldry, that

theorizing necessarily distorts reality and that only by placing

characters in dynamic tension can one represent the

particularities of their roles and the “contradictory and double-

faced fullness of life” as seen through the comic grotesque lens

(Bakhtin 1984, 62). Cuckoldom, in short, is a thoroughly

carnivalesque topic whose true meaning can only be recovered by

casting moralization aside.

Let us begin by looking at a literary moralist who straddles

the feminist tradition, but who by her own lively, dialogic idiom

defies moralizing: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. By placing all textual

authorities on women and marriage in scare quotes and by turning

her life-narrative into an open novel, the Wife energetically

overspills the narrow bounds of theoretical discourse. In the

first part of the prologue to her tale (lines 9-183), she surveys

the various scriptural stances on marriage; later (lines 273-

378), she falsely charges her husbands with having quoted to her,

in their drunkenness, a slew of anti-feminist sayings popular in

medieval culture. She receives her comeuppance when her fifth

husband actually cites to her such sayings and exempla in a

lengthy, abusive catalogue that causes her to rip pages out of

his book and strike him (lines 715-93).11 The Wife of Bath’s

Prologue is funniest precisely in those places where she inserts

her own colloquial voice in dialogue with the authorities she 11 All citations to The Canterbury Tales are to The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed., ed. F.N. Robinson (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1957).

alleges. With hilarious acuity she finds the source of most anti-

marital, anti-feminist diatribes in their impotent, ascetic

authors:

Therfore no womman of no clerk is preysed.The clerk, whan he is oold, and may noght doOf Venus werkes worth his olde sho,Thanne sit he doun, and writ in his dotageThat wommen kan nat kepe hir mariage! (lines 706-10)

If women had written the stories, she says, they would have

imputed even more “wikkednesse” to Adam’s race than has been

imputed to Eve’s. “Who peyntede the leon, tel me who?” she

wittily asks, referring to a fable of Aesop in which a lion,

seeing a picture of a man killing a lion, points out that the

identity of the painter always determines who gets to do the

killing in his painting (lines 692-96). Within a few lines the

Wife of Bath discredits the whole androcentric foundation on

which the querelle des femmes is based.

But it is the Wife’s keen awareness of time’s passing, as

well as her frank acknowledgement of her age, that most propels

her beyond static theorizing into the ever-changing realm of

grotesque realism:

But, Lord Christ! whan that it remembreth me

Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee,It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote.Unto this day it dooth myn herte booteThat I have had my world as in my tyme.But age, allas! that al wole envenyme,Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith.Lat go, farewel! the devel go therwith!The flour is goon, ther is namoore to telle;The bren, as I best kan, now moste I selle;But yet to be right myrie wol I fonde. (lines 469-79)

The cuckolds we will be surveying in the rest of this chapter

would have done well to listen to this speech, which reveals that

self-consciousness consists specifically in consciousness of

social time. The body’s biological functions find their

corresponding social uses, and as the first dwindle, so do the

second. The Wife’s “tyme” was her “yowthe,” the days of her

“jolitee,” and her “world” was predicated on her beauty and

vigor. The old woman’s decline, like that of the old husband,

entails not just death but renewal of life in all of nature. The

Wife’s determination to be merry as age overtakes her reveals a

gay, philosophic acceptance of the way creation has always worked

—by means of destruction. Her recognition of what the clown

Touchstone will later reflect, that “all is mortal in nature,”

sharply contrasts with the blindness of the moralizing cuckolds

we are about to witness.

Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale places just such a blind cuckold-as-

moralizer front and center. The aptly named old January

speechifies, first to himself and then to his friends, for nearly

two hundred lines on the virtues of women and marriage. He proves

his self-delusion and “dotage” by touching on and, in turn,

dismissing all the problems he himself will ironically encounter

once he weds young May (line 1253). Theophrastus’ guarantee that

every husband will be cuckolded is fulfilled in the final scene

of the tale, when January sees Damyan screwing May in the pear

tree. The very images January presents of himself—as a tree whose

white blossoms, far from betokening imminent death, promise

fruit; and as an evergreen laurel—anticipate the laurel and the

fatal pear tree in his walled garden (lines 1457-66, 2037, 2217).

His wilful self-blinding in marrying a beautiful young woman at

his advanced years, and in doing so against the council of his

friend Justinus (who is experienced in marriage), looks toward

his literal blinding (line 2071). The theoretical debates on

marriage which January cites and hurriedly waves aside (1263-

1468) find their counterpart in the marriage debate between Pluto

and Proserpina in his garden (lines 2237-2319). The unself-

awareness of the cuckolded man, who ignores the natural life-

force, acts as the main engine generating the ironies and double

meanings in this, as in many another, cuckold comedy.

The gods’ quarrel in The Merchant’s Tale exhibits the carnival

battle between winter (Pluto as death and the underworld) and

spring (Proserpina as cyclical regeneration and fertility).12

Pluto’s protection of cuckolds and Proserpina’s of women ensures

that the struggle will be re-enacted time and again between

husbands who discover their own cuckolding and wives who have a

ready answer to explain everything. In this domestic battle the

cuckold is always the dupe and the wife (together with her lover)

is the rogue. To emphasize this, the narrator harps on January’s

excessive “folye,” which Justinus’ dry wit cuts through like a

knife (line 1655). When January frets to his friends about not

being able to enjoy a perfect afterlife in heaven, since he is

sure to have already enjoyed a perfect life in this world with

his wife, Justinus wryly replies, “Dispeire yow noght, but have 12 H.A. Guerber, The Myths of Greece and Rome (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1907; rptd. New York: Dover, 1993), 158-69.

in youre memorie, / Paraunter she may be youre purgatorie!”

(lines 1669-70). Readers make a mistake in seeing the various

generic layers of The Merchant’s Tale—fabliau, myth, high-flown

rhetorical debate, magical realism—as ill-suited. Each genre

presents a distinct facet of the one, unifying, popular comic

theme of the cuckold, who wishes his life and reign to last

forever, being fairly ousted by the new order. Further, to find

January a figure of pathos is to ignore all the carefully encoded

signals of his ridiculousness: the description of how he drinks

cordials to get it up on the marriage night (lines 1807-12); how

he rubs the sharp “brustles of his berd” against May’s soft skin

when they first caress (lines 1823-27); how he prefaces his slow

lovemaking with a lengthy moral harangue (1832-41); how he drinks

wine after “labour[ing]” all night (wine-drinking being a sure

sign, in early modern literature, that a man’s days of love-

making are over) (lines 1842-43); and, most unforgettable of all,

how “the slakke skyn aboute his nekke shaketh” (line 1849). As

for January’s sexual performance, the narrator coolly reports

that May “preyseth nat his pleyying worth a bene” (line 1854).

These elements of grotesque realism underscore the fact that the

three main characters enact the natural processes of destruction

and rebirth. The forceful oppositions that this realism presents

give rise to continual irony, as when the narrator describes the

merriment at the wedding feast: “Whan tendre youth hath wedded

stoupyng age, / Ther is swich myrthe that it may nat be writen”

(lines 1738-39). Indeed, great mirth, though undoubtedly at the

aged husband’s expense.

The ironies that abound when age forces nature come to a

head whenever the cuckold rationalizes his actions. Such

rationalizing can only amount to self-deception, since the

realities of nature so starkly contradict the words of the

cuckold’s speech. Two aspects of folly particularly bind January

to his fellow cuckolds across the texts we examine: his decision

to marry late in life; and his choice of a beautiful young wife.

The complex reflections that go along with the first (the

decision to marry late) will find their echo in the mouths of

January’s avatars—Panurge, Falstaff-Ford (for the two together

make up one symbolic cuckold), Arnolphe, Pinchwife, and

Foresight. When January tells his friends, “I have my body folily

despended,” he is making an admission no other cuckolds we

examine will have the courage to join him in, namely, that their

sexual prowess is used up (line 1403). Frère Jean will hold up

the mirror to his self-blinded friend Panurge to show the latter

just how wizened his balls will soon become, how white his beard,

and how slow to rise his cock (Third Book, chap. 28). Falstaff will

flatter himself that the women are still chasing him despite his

old, fleshy body. The cuckold-making Horner will have to remind

Pinchwife of the fact that the latter has been a whore-monger for

some thirty years (just as he reminds him he is now aged 49).

Countless reminders of Arnolphe’s advanced age fill L’Ecole des

Femmes, none of which, tellingly, come from Arnolphe’s own

mouth. The astrologically inclined Foresight is already on to his

second wife and she is vigorous, for which reason he does well to

concentrate on the horned signs among the constellations.

Although marriage (or, in Falstaff’s case, love) comes late to

all these cuckolds, such is the force of self-deception that they

can spend lengthy passages contemplating its problems and still

pursue it.

The beauty of their young brides underscores these cuckolds’

self-delusion: they are asking for trouble, not just in the form

of rivals, but in the form of the mental torments they put

themselves through. Like the Catch-22 situation that the old hag

poses to the knight at the end of the Wife of Bath’s tale—whether

he would like her to be foul and virtuous or fair and unchaste—a

husband choosing a bride is faced with mutually exclusive

propositions: he can only enjoy his wife if he knows he alone

possesses her; he can only know this if she is ugly; but if she

is ugly he cannot enjoy her. The blithe cuckold happily embraces

both ends of the spectrum of human folly as it is presented by

Erasmus’ character Folly, for he enjoys love blindly, in the

spirit of youth, and submits to ignorance and delusion, in the

spirit of senility—these are Folly’s gifts to the young and old,

respectively (Praise of Folly 31-32, 21-24). While “[t]he deceived

husband is a standing joke,” says Folly, “how much happier it is

to be thus deceived than to eat out your own heart with jealous

suspicion and to turn everything into a tragic uproar!” (33). But

the obsessive cuckolds we are examining doom themselves to

perpetual misery, for they both want and do not want to know the

truth and they torture themselves trying to make both conditions

simultaneously possible. On the level of grotesque realism a

husband who chooses an ugly wife—or a wife his own age—can never

be absurd. Youth and beauty represent the procreative principle

that the cuckold-to-be wilfully flouts, and out of his

unrealizable wish to be forever lusty and powerful all the

incongruities of the cuckold narrative spring.

Panurge is just such a self-torturing cuckold-to-be.

Rabelais’s Third Book (1546) comprehends both the moralizing and

ambivalent approaches toward women, marriage, and cuckoldry.

Rabelais is concerned enough with the problem of marriage to

devote eight chapters (29-36) to answering the general thesis

“Should one marry?” (and chapter 48 to condemning clandestine

marriages). But most of the Third Book tackles the much more

specific hypothesis “Should Panurge marry [and if he does, will

he be cuckolded]?”13 The first question generates a small querelle

des femmes in the middle of the book whose tone is correspondingly

moralistic. The second question keeps the focus of most of the

book comedically on Panurge’s psychological predicament and on

13 Screech proposes using these legal terms to distinguish the two kinds of question tackled in the consultations of the Third Book (521, 585). As Huchon points out, the question of Panurge’s marriage is merely a pretext for treating various legal, medical, religious, and moral problems posed by the choice between celibacy and marriage; however, we will be focusing only on Panurge as cuckold-to-be and on his perplexity (Huchon 1350).

his farcical status as would-be cuckold. Yet the laughter

generated by the moralizing section of the book naturally

harmonizes with the popular-festive humor of the book overall

through the unifying, ambivalent idea that in the matter of

matrimony a man should “make a reasonable decision with the help

of grace, and . . . accept with resignation the consequences.”14

While this idea may not seem particularly ambivalent or funny,

when it is set off in contrast with the popular comic theme of

Panurge as dithering cuckold, it acts as the straight-man foil to

his funny-man demeanor.

The entire book presents a prismatic play of varying

perspectives on the popular comic cuckold’s concerns, which

Panurge rehearses in chapter 9. The usual catalogue of these

concerns would normally make for mere moralizing, but here it

takes the unusual, delightful form of the chanson de ricochet, or

“song in which the same thing is repeated endlessly.”15 Panurge’s

interlocutor, Pantagruel, echoes, in his rejoinders, the last

sounds of each of Panurge’s speeches, which has the effect of

14 M.A. Screech, The Rabelaisian Marriage (London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1958), 123. Hereafter “Screech 1958.”15 OED “ricochet” n.1, etymology. The dialogue in this chapter imitates that of Erasmus’s colloquy “Echo” (Screech 442, introductory note).

emphasizing Panurge’s back-and-forth vacillations on the question

of whether he should marry. Not surprisingly, Panurge gets

nowhere by the end of their exchange. Like all the cuckolds in

our chapter, he wants a companion to keep him from being lonely,

a means of satisfying his lust, a person to care for him when he

is ill, a means of passing on his worldly goods, and a means of

perpetuating his lineage. He does not want: other men to do to

him as he has done to them (ie. cuckolded them); his wife to “be

impatient with [his] debility and abandon herself to other men”;

his wife to rob or beat him (444). As Pantagruel points out in

the next chapter, “there are so many ifs and buts” in Panurge’s

propositions that he has turned what should have been a simple,

clear-cut decision into a complex dilemma (446). From the

standpoint of the ambivalent tradition of cuckoldry literature,

Panurge’s anxieties are not only prescient but self-fulfilling,

and they render him laughable. From Pantagruel’s Stoical-

Christian standpoint, the more ifs and buts Panurge introduces

into the equation, the less even-keeled his resolution becomes,

and the more he lays himself open to being “seduced by the Evil

Spirit” (481). Panurge’s indecision, the first of the two related

stumbling-blocks in his “marriage quest,”16 bears looking into

more closely.

Panurge cannot resolve upon a course of action one way or

another in the matter of marriage because he fears the

consequences. In order to carry out his decision, he would have

to accept the results either way and embark on marriage humbly

and blindly. Even though Panurge takes an entire chapter to

explicate to Pantagruel the reasons behind his outrageous garb—

mainly, that he is burning with lust and wants to get married—he

then spends another whole chapter wavering over his decision. He

wants the prince to confirm him in his resolution (chaps. 8-9).

Pantagruel provides Panurge with the only way of following

through with his resolution: “Once you have cast the dice, so

decided and firmly resolved, there should be no more talking: all

that remains is to implement it” (443). Pantagruel advises a

clear-cut decision-making process whereby an individual squares

his will (and, thence, his actions) with the dice of judgement,

which indicate not only the will of fortune, but the will of

providence. Even before he “implement[s]” his decision, however, 16 The term is used by Scrrech (1958:125). This “quest,” of course, continues into the Fourth Book.

Panurge would have to accept its possible outcomes, which would

amount to being “fully persuaded in his own mind,” as Pantagruel

tells him, echoing Romans 14:5 (437). That is, Panurge would have

to approach marriage as in itself a neutral, or “indifferent,”

thing—a thing which, in Pantagruel’s evangelical explication of

Paul, “do[es] not spring from our hearts and thoughts” but is

“external” to them (437). It is the attitude a person brings to

such “things indifferent” that makes them either good or bad. In

the words of Screech, “the mind of each man is the battleground

of God and Devil,” which means that by overthinking the question

of marriage Panurge allows the devil to step into the arena of

his thoughts and to turn the subject under debate into something

sinful (1958, 112). In the very passage in which he explicates

Paul, Pantagruel warns Panurge that he can allow marriage to

become an evil if he lets his “emotions [be] perverted out of

equity by the foul Spirit” (437).17 Only Stoical-Christian apathy

—a detachment from the things of this world and an aptness to

receive God’s grace in making the right decision and acting upon

it directly—can “further the course of providential wisdom, 17 For a fuller discussion of contemporary theological positions on “things indifferent” see Screech 1958, 108-112.

[rather than] thwart it” (Screech 1958, 125). Panurge represents

the antithesis of such apathy and indifference, and his book-long

quest (to be followed by the search for the Word of the Dive

Bouteille in the Fourth Book) fights providential wisdom all the

way.

In advising Panurge, Pantagruel paints as vivid a picture as

he can of the decisive man who bows down before fate. Once the

human will has determined upon a course of action, chance

(fortuitousness), destiny, and providence align in producing the

outcome by connecting causes and effects. Pantagruel presents

Panurge with the example of, on the one hand, a Platonic vision

of marriage, and on the other hand, a fabliau-style marriage,

concluding with the advice that he submit in humility to the will

of God like an anchorite:

“Are you not sure of your will? The principal point lies therein: all the rest is fortuitous and dependent on the destined dispositions of Heaven. We see many couples so happily

met that there seems to shine forth in their marriage some Idea and Form of the joys of Paradise. Others are so wretched that the devils who tempt the hermits in the deserts of the Thebaid and Montserrat are not more so. Once it is your will to enter upon it, you must embark on it blindfold, bowing your headand kissing the ground, commending yourself meanwhile to God. No other assurance can I give you.” (446)

Pantagruel’s “assurance” to Panurge is twofold: he recommends

that he unwaveringly following his will, seeing the outcome as

out of his hands; and that he humbly bow down before the will of

God. Both of these courses of action involve adopting a Stoical-

Christian attitude that is completely beyond Panurge’s scope as

the comic cuckold.

As an obsessive cuckold, Panurge is the comedic foil to the

example of the blithe cuckold, the Pyrrhonian philosopher

Trouillogan, who takes the stoic’s approach to marriage. When

Panurge asks what he should do, Trouillogan unhelpfully replies,

“What you will” (547). This philosopher has been married twice

and he holds the view that cuckoldry is what you make of it.

Panurge inquires how he has found marriage the second time

around. “As bears my fated lot,” Trouillogan responds. When

Panurge asks him if he has ever been cuckolded, he fatalistically

answers, “No. Unless it were so predestined” (549). Trouillogan’s

placid resignation to his fate serves as the model of ideal

conduct to married men, but Panurge grows increasingly irked with

his cryptic answers. Panurge’s understandable impatience at

Trouillogan’s calm demeanor escalates the comic tension of their

exchange. At one point, Panurge tells the page boy to take his

bonnet, “[g]o down into the back yard and do a little half-hour’s

swearing for me” (548). Trouillogan would certainly never make a

ridiculous cuckold figure in a comedy—he is too philosophic.

Because Panurge chafes and struggles, he is thoroughly comical.

Just as inactivity is not an option for Panurge, once he has

married, neither is nonchalance, or indifference, both of which

are required to free him from his ongoing perplexity. Pantagruel

sums up this problem in the next chapter, telling Panurge, “To me

you look like a mouse caught in pitch: the more it struggles to

be free of it, the more bespattered it gets. You, likewise,

striving to free yourself from the snares of perplexity, are more

caught up in them than before (551).18 Panurge’s persistent yet

futile struggles generate the main hilarity of the Third Book.

The second stumbling-block Panurge encounters as he tries to

hit upon the right course of action is one that is intimately

connected to his indecision—his self-love. Not only does Panurge

flatly refuse to accept the truth of any of the predictions the

various divinatory devices and agents tell him about his future 18 Erasmus’s adage 1.3.68 is the model for Panurge as a mouse in pitch. Erasmus’s adages haunt the pages of the Third Book.

(that he will be cuckolded, beaten, and robbed by his wife), but

he distorts them all to read in his favor. Further, he is all too

ready to condemn people like the magician Herr Trippa—or, indeed,

anyone who finds fault with him—while being unable to see his own

flaws. Epistemon concludes chapter 15 with a long diatribe on

self-love that Panurge does not stay to hear, even though it is

directed at him:

“To know, foresee, recognize and predict the woes of others is, amongst human beings, common and ordinary: but O! how rare it is one’s own woes to predict, recognize, foresee and know. And how wisely did Aesop illustrate that in his fables, saying that every man is born into this world with a beggar’s-wallet over his shoulder; in the pouch hanging down in front are kept the faults and defects of others forever exposed to our gaze and knowledge: in the pouch hanging down behind are kept our own faults and defects, where never are they seen nor known save by those to whom the heavens show a benevolent aspect.” (469)

Aesop’s fable of the beggar’s wallet is immensely popular during

the Renaissance.19 Erasmus treats it at length in an adage

(1.6.90), where the double wallet exemplifies self-love, the

opposite of self-knowledge.20 Montaigne uses the adage as the

basis for his essay “On presumption,” in which “vainglory has two

19For further commentary on this fable, see M.A. Screech, Rabelais (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), 235. Hereafter referred to as Screech 1979.20 Erasmus also discusses philautia, or self-love, in adage 1.3.92. Folly names Philautia as one of her “attendants and handmaidens” in Praise of Folly (17).

sides: the over-estimation of ourselves, and the under-estimation

of others.”21 Shakespeare refers to the beggar’s wallet in Troilus

and Cressida when Ulysses tries to convince Achilles to rejoin the

war. Their conversation runs on how a man cannot know his own

excellence until he judges of it in the applause of others and

sees it reflected through the eyes of others. When Ulysses tells

him how everyone now exclaims upon Ajax, Achilles muses how they

have forgotten his own great deeds. Ulysses replies, “Time hath,

my lord, a wallet at his back, / Wherein he puts alms for

oblivion” (3.3.145-46). Shakespeare here expresses self-knowledge

in temporal terms: a person must continually renew his virtues in

order still to see them through the mirror of others (ie.

“time”). Allowing one’s noble deeds to slip into “oblivion” while

still fancying oneself great amounts to lack of self-knowledge.

Like an old husband who thinks himself eternally young, so a has-

been hero who thinks himself perpetually heroic is unself-

conscious insofar as he ignores the passage of time.

21 Michel de Montaigne, Essays, trans. J.M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1958), 192. Like other Renaissance authors, Montaigne could also read of Aesop’s fable of the wallet in Plutarch’s Lives (“Comparison of Lucullus with Cimon Nicias Crassus”).

Epistemon uses Aesop’s fable to show how most people

(notably Panurge) turn a blind eye to their own “faults and

defects,” while keenly recognizing the shortcomings of others.

Such blindness, or self-love, is antithetical to self-knowledge,

as Erasmus’s adages contrasting these two qualities make clear.22

If the inscription at Delphi reads “Know thyself,” a man renders

himself laughable (as Socrates tells Protarchus in the Philebus)

by acting according to the opposite of that oracle—“By no means

know thyself.”23 That ignorance of self, or self-deception,

equates with self-love Pantagruel himself makes clear. In chapter

29 he interprets the enigmatic “swan song” of the poet

Raminagrobis as follows:

He means, in sum, that when venturing into wedlock each man must be the arbiter of his own thoughts and seek counself fromhimself. That has always been my opinion and I told you as much when you first brought it up with me: but you quietly laughed, I remember, and I realized that your amour de soi—yourphilautia—vous deçoit. (522)

22 For a full discussion of how Rabelais adapts these two polar opposite qualities as he inherits them from Erasmus’s Adages, see Screech 1979, 236-38 and Huchon 1352-53. Huchon points out that to the Platonists, just as self-love is the source of all evils, so its antidote, self-knowledge, is the source of all good (1352).23 Philebus 48c-49c. See Screech 1979, 238.

Pantagruel not only punningly links self-love with self-

deception, but he also opposes these faults to self-knowledge,

which takes the explicit form of acting as “the arbiter of

[one’s] own thoughts and seek[ing] counsel from [one]self.”

Pantagruel thus exposes Panurge’s entire search for advice on

marriage as self-flattering and self-indulgent. Had Panurge known

his own mind from the very start, he would have acted upon it

decisively, and there would have been an end to his search. We

have already seen how for Panurge to know his own mind he would

have to accept the troublesome potential consequences of

marrying. This, in turn, would mean not worrying about them—

taking the nonchalant approach of Trouillogan. Self-knowledge

proves to be the key to assuming this indifferent attitude: to

know oneself means to acknowledge the limited scope of one’s own

actions in determining one’s future. To return to Epistemon’s

harangue on self-love and self-knowledge, those few people “to

whom the heavens show a benevolent aspect” have the grace of God

to know their how small a part they play in deciding their own

fate. Paradoxically enough, then, knowing one’s own mind depends

on knowing how small an effect one’s choice has on the ultimate

outcome of things. Let us further consider what it entails when

Panurge refuses to recognize how little he determines his own

fate.

Panurge repeatedly kicks at learning he will be cuckolded

because he lacks the wisely-foolish grace to accept that his fate

is largely out of his hands.24 Like all the obsessive cuckolds we

will see in this chapter, Panurge wants to do something to

control his destiny—another aspect of his lack of self-knowledge

(his self-love). Panurge rejects the terms of human ignorance, or

folly, whereby one cannot both know and enjoy the same thing at

one and the same time. Typical is his response to Frère Jean’s

jocular riddle: “‘Come on now, Big-balls: what would your rather

be, not cuckold but jealous, not knowing but cuckold?’ ‘I’d

rather be neither one nor the other,’ Panurge replied. ‘But if

ever I did find that I was a cuckold, I’d soon knock things into

shape . . . !’” (519). By bullheadedly trying to wrest all

conditions surrounding his marriage out of the hands of fate and

circumstance and into his own hands, Panurge overlooks the surest

remedy for his perplexity, an ambivalent outlook. Assuming this

24 We treated this kind of fool’s grace in Chapter Five.

ambivalent stance, however, requires at once renouncing the

possibility of taking action against his fate and fully accepting

the ambiguities that marriage and women represent.

Panurge’s consultants propose three practical preventives

for cuckoldom, all of which depend on a philosophic acceptance of

the limitations of human power and knowledge, and which

demonstrate the ambiguities surrounding women and marriage. Not

surprisingly, Panurge in one way or another rejects them all.

“Has Nature left humans so bereft,” Panurge despairingly asks

Frère Jean, “that a married man cannot go through this world of

ours without falling into the dangerous deeps of cuckoldom!”

(519). Frère Jean answers by alleging the “infallible remedy”

that Hans Carvel learned from the devil in a dream one night:

keep your finger or your member in your wife’s “ring” at all

times, and she will be incapable of cheating on you (520-21).

Panurge receives this clever, yet clearly impossible, suggestion

in complete silence. To adopt this remedy for cuckoldom would be

to imitate the laughingly philosophic attitude of Ariosto’s

characters King Astolfo and the knight Jocondo in the comic tale

told by the innkeeper in canto 28 of Orlando Furioso.

After discovering that both of their wives have been

unfaithful, the young, rich, handsome men Astolfo and Jocondo

conduct an experiment to see whether all women are “equally

pliant” by setting out across Europe and sleeping with thousands

of men’s wives.25 They soon relieve their wounded pride by

discovering that indeed, “if faith and chastity were not to be

found in their own wives, no more were they to be found in those

of others” (345). Eventually becoming bored, they resolve to

share one damsel between the two of them, reasoning that “if

every woman had two husbands she would be more faithful to the

pair of them than to one alone” (345). Thus they adopt a young

Valenciana named Fiammetta whose “springtime was still but in the

bud” (345). Traveling from inn to inn, they have her sleep

between them at night, taking “their pleasure with her in turns,

in peace and charity, like two bellows each blowing alternately

upon the furnace” (345). But the page at one inn solicits her in

the name of a youthful love he and she enjoyed together before

she joined Astolfo and Jocondo’s ménage à trois. Out of pity for

the boy, she has him enter the bed at night and “straddl[e] her 25 Lodovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, trans. Guido Waldman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), 344. All references are to this edition.

till daybreak,” knowing that each of her noble bed companions

will think the other is riding her (346). Sure enough, the next

day each man teases the other about the wild ride he had all

through the night, until their mutual denials cause them both to

lose their tempers. When Fiammetta confesses how she has tricked

them, first they “star[e] at each other in utter amazement”; then

“they burst into fits of laughter, their mouths open and their

eyes shut till, practically breathless, they f[a]ll backwards

onto the bed” (347). In their hilarity both men accept the

inevitable about women—their endless resourcefulness under the

guidance of love, and their insatiable sexual appetite: “What

precautions can we take against being fooled by our wives when

it’s even useless hemming this maid between the two of us so

closely that we both touch her? If a husband had more eyes than

hairs he could not prevent his being betrayed” (347). Thus they

marry Fiammetta to the page, and return to their wives, “who

never occasio[n] them another moment’s distress” (348).

Ariosto’s story, with its ambiguous message about women,

demonstrates the impracticability of Hans Carvel’s “ring”: a man

cannot keep it on his finger at all times. Yet short of doing

this, he cannot guarantee his wife’s faithfulness. His only

resort is contentedly to accept his badge of cuckold as a common

badge shared by all men. Insofar as Ariosto’s tale focuses on

these two points—a woman’s eternal womb and a man’s jovial

recognition of his role in the carnivalesque comedy of cuckoldry—

it is thoroughly ambivalent. The moralizing reception that the

listeners give to the innkeeper’s tale enacts a querelle des femmes

of sorts, chiefly between an old man and the pagan Rodomont. The

old man maintains that the story must have been fabricated by a

man who had a bad experience with one or two women and so bore a

grudge against the whole sex. He takes the tale as an unjust

slander on the constancy of women, whom, he says, men far surpass

in setting examples of marital infidelity. His position

altogether idealizes women along the lines of the courtly

Platonists, to whom we will return later in this chapter when we

look at Castiglione’s treatment of cuckoldry.

Panurge is utterly unable either to resign himself

philosophically to the inevitable cuckolding or to recognize his

impotence in the face of an all-devouring female womb. He tells

Frère Jean, “I am not unaware of what Solomon says . . . nor of

what Aristotle declared after him: that women are by nature

insatiable; but . . . my tool is indefatigable too” (514).26 So

he continues to seek other practical ways to ensure he will not

be fooled by his wife.

The theologian Hippothadée recommends marrying the virtuous woman

of Proverbs 31, who loves and fears God too much “to offend Him

and forfeit His grace through lack of faith or by any

transgression of His holy law” (526). Panurge also dismisses this

advice as impracticable: no such woman exists anymore, or at

least, Panurge has never seen such a one (527). Finally, the

physician Rondibilis varies a fable of Aesop to tell Panurge that

Cuckoldry and Jealousy are two gods whose “sway over married men”

is correlative: the surest way to be cuckolded is to be jealous,

since women naturally covet that which is forbidden them (536-

38). The converse is also true: to avoid cuckolding, shun

suspicion. Panurge flatly refuses to be a blithe cuckold,

however, telling the doctor, “You’ve followed the wrong suit

there!” (541). Nor can he stand listening to Rondibilis’ other,

26 Prov. 30:15-16: “[F]our things say not, It is enough: The grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not filled with water; and the fire . . . .” Aristotle writes that women “suffer from unsatisfied desires” (Problems IV.26.29-30).

equally realist, advice, namely, “[I]nscribe this saying on your

brain with a pen of iron: every married man is in danger of being

cuckolded. Cuckoldom is naturally one of the adjuncts of

matrimony. The shadow no more naturally follows the body than

cuckoldom follows married men” (533). Panurge, like Batman’s

Robin, always finds the perfect oath to fit to each situation,

and no less so here. In response to the doctor’s words he cries,

“Hypochondriums of all the devils! What are you telling me!”

(533).

As he refutes every last piece of evidence that he will be

humiliated as a husband, Panurge becomes, in Pantagruel’s words,

more and more “seduced by the Evil Spirit” (481). If Judge

Bridoye’s consistently correct judgements testify to the favor a

fool of this world may enjoy when he “invokes the help of

heavenly grace,” Panurge’s increasingly lunatic ravings and talk

of devils proclaim his demonic influence (583).27 One form this

diabolism takes is his unself-conscious approach to relieving his

27 For more on Panurge’s diabolism, see Chapter Two. For a study of Judge Bridoye, see Chapter Seven. Pantagruel’s description of the prophetic folly ofTriboullet applies with equal force to that of Bridoye: “a man must forget himself, sally outside himself, void his senses of every earthly affection, purge his mind of all human anxiety and treat all his affairs as indifferent: which is popularly attributed to folly” (552).

anxiety. Rather than acknowleding that, in the words of Frère

Jean, “time overmasters all things” and his sexual potency cannot

last forever—that, in short, he must die—he insists on his

immortality (516). He hyperbolically boasts to Frère Jean of the

miraculous potency of his codpiece which, by its mere approach

near the pit where a passion-play was being produced, wreaked

havoc among the actors and audience members:

“there was not one angel, one man, one male or female devil who did not want to fornicate! The prompter abandoned his copy; the fellow playing Saint Michael slid down like a deus ex machina, the male devils burst out of Hell and bore away all the poor little females. Even Lucifer raged and broke his bonds. In short, on witnessing such disorder I quit the place, following the example of Cato the Censor, who, on seeing that the

festivities of the Floralia were thrown into disorder by his presence, ceased to be a spectator.” (515)

Panurge invites us to imagine that if his mere codpiece is this

potent, the equipment it protects is even more so. Mountebanking

aside, Panurge remains completely unaware of natural time as

measured in social terms. Unlike the Wife of Bath, but altogether

like January in The Merchant’s Tale, he refuses to accept the

limitations such social time would impose upon him. In this way

he thoroughly deserves the epithet “raging fool” that Triboullet

gives him, for he seeks to “bind and enthral [him]self in

marriage in [his] declining days”—despite ample evidence that he

will fail to keep his wife satisfied (588).

As we have already seen, Panurge’s diabolism also takes the

form of his refusal to respect fate’s decrees. After the

Virgilian lots have told Panurge he will be beaten, robbed, and

cuckolded, Panurge adopts a refrain he will repeat, often to

hilarious effect, throughout the book: “On the contrary.” He

twists all the Virgilian lines to point, respectively, to small

lovers’ tiffs, to the stealing of small trifles, and to a perfect

love between him and his wife. In short, he takes every verse to

be in his favor—“Otherwise: I appeal” (455-56). But Pantagruel

says no one can appeal “against verdicts reached by lots and

Fortune . . . . Fortuna recognizes no superior authority with

whom an appeal against her or her lots can be lodged” (456). To

make a decision, confirm its rightness through the higher powers

of judgement, and accept the outcome with resignation and

humility amounts to a kind of grace. To torture oneself imagining

the many possible consequences and to attempt to stave them off

is to succumb to the persuasions of Satan. Pantagruel makes this

clear when he expounds Panurge’s dream, which began delightfully

and ended badly, waking Panurge up “with a start, all troubled,

perplexed, and angry” (463). Using medieval biblical commentators

to gloss the text of 2 Corinthians 11:14, Pantagruel leaves no

doubt that Satan is behind Panurge’s self-delusion in the

aftermath of his dream: “whenever the good angel of consolation

appears to man, he frightens him at first but finally consoles

him, whereas the evil angel of temptation delights him at first

but finally leaves him perturbed, anxious and perplexed.” In this

way, “the angel of Satan often transfigures himself into an angel

of light” (466). Frère Jean and Trouillogan corroborate

Pantagruel’s wisdom in telling Panurge that it is “predestined”

and “fated” for him to be cuckolded (and bullied and robbed), and

all the lots, prophecies, and predictions bear this out—but

Panurge will have none of it (519, 549). This obstincacy in

itself signals not only that he is swayed by the devil but that

he will be cuckolded. For by not knowing his own will,

vacillating in his decision, refusing to act, ignoring human

limitations, and torturing the issue, Panurge manages to turn a

morally indifferent thing (marriage) into something sinful.

Further, in rejecting the help of grace and yielding to demonic

inspiration in his decision-making process, he proves, on the

level of farce, that he will be every bit the unself-knowing,

foolish cuckold whose wife takes full advantage of his blindness

and delusion.

Reading Panurge’s quandary in light of earlier medieval

fabliaux, contemporary French farces, and the humorous cuckoldry

tales of Boccaccio’s Decameron sheds further light on the themes

and imagery of the popular comic love triangle. Not only (as

Bakhtin claims) does an economy of natural vigor prevail, whereby

the old husband, who would be eternal king, must be uncrowned and

buried, while the sexual desires of the young wife and her lover

generate new life through his death. Textual elements in these

stories also reveal the economy of suspicion that informs them:

if a husband is jealous, it behooves the wife and her lover to

give him cause for his jealousy; their acts of uncrowning and

humiliating the husband (by robbing, beating, and cuckolding

him), in turn, teach him not to be suspicious anymore, thereby

enabling them to continue cuckolding him beyond the end of the

story. In this way, the aging husband’s jealousy proves to be a

fertile, rather than a sterile, passion—rather than himself

procreating with his wife, the husband spurs her and her lover to

acts of continual procreation. A common variation on this theme

is the economy of blindness: if the evil spirit of jealousy

descends on a husband and makes him suspicious, it ironically

places blinders on his eyes; with the husband rendered thus

doltish, it behooves his wife and her lover to take advantage of

his stupor and cuckold him. Love grants the woman almost

miraculous resourcefulness to fool the husband within the story,

while also teaching her how to trick the husband in perpetuity,

thereby extending the period of his blindness beyond the bounds

of the story and into the future. Chaucer makes explicit the

correlation between January’s physical blinding and the onset of

his jealousy. January gives Damyan and May at once the reason to

trick him and the means to succeed in doing so; through the

ironic intervention of the gods January’s sight returns, only to

showcase woman’s endless inventiveness in covering up the illicit

deed. A further variation on suspicion and blindness is

miserliness (another old man’s quality in farce): jealousy of

one’s coffers, like a symbolic impotence, warrants robbing,

beating, and cuckolding. Let us briefly survey some noteworthy

popular comic sources for Panurge to see how his approach to

women and marriage stands out from the intellectual debates at

the center of the Third Book.

Panurge’s reasoning throughout the book is surprisingly non-

misogynistic and pragmatic: to his mind, as long as a husband can

satisfy his wife and be on the spot to fulfill her desires, she

will not cuckold him. When Panurge dreams that his wife will

plant horns on his forehead, Pantagruel interprets this as her

being unfaithful; Panurge, however, eagerly takes them to be at

once cornucopias and satyrs’ horns: “Thus shall I have my bradawl

eternally at the ready and inexhaustible . . . and therefore

never shall I a cuckold be, since lack of the above is the sine

qua non, the one and only cause, turning husbands into cuckolds”

(463). Though he flatters himself, Panurge keeps his anxiety to

the one theme—will his physical performance satisfy his wife?

Later, when consulting Frère Jean, Panurge expresses his worry in

equally simple terms: “What I fear is that, through some

prolonged absence of Pantagruel, our king, of whom it is my duty

to be the companion even if he went to the devil, my wife should

make me a cuckold” (517). Without inquiring into the moral

nuances of cuckolding, Panurge concerns himself solely with

proving himself vigorous enough to prevent it altogether. As

holds true for the circle of youths trading stories of adultery

in Boccaccio’s Decameron, “the natural progression of instinctive

forces” is the only standard by which Panurge measures the

rightness or wrongness of conduct in love.28 The problem, of

course, is when Panurge insists on maintaining his honor—that is,

his social reputation.

Of the experts Panurge consults, the realist Rondibilis

comes closest to Panurge’s viewpoint as he muses that men “do not

always have the wherewithal to pay up and satisfy [the womb] to

its contentment” (535). But though relatively undogmatic, the

doctor is still a staunch theorist, and he winds up painting a

one-sided picture of marital relations that stereotypes women as

fickle, volatile, hypocritical, and perverse. He uses Tiraqueau,

Plutarch, Virgil, and Galen, among other authorities, to adduce

further sources of male anxiety: when husbands are absent, women

“seize their opportunity, have a good time, roam and trot about,

lay aside their hypocrisy and manifest themselves, just as the

28 Translator’s introduction to Decameron, lxxx-lxxxi.

Moon” only shows herself at night, when the Sun is furthest away

(533). Rondibils also explains that a husband’s trustingness

dissuades his wife from cuckolding him because, like their first

mother Eve, women naturally desire forbidden things (538).

Rondibilis’ heavy moral encoding of women and marriage contrasts

sharply with Panurge’s practical, libertine standpoint and the

related, common-sense perspective of contemporary farces and

medieval fabliaux, in which a woman’s sexual dissatisfaction is

more than sufficient warrant for her to cuckold her husband.

This ethos is clear in a farce printed around the same time

as the Third Book, called The Newlywed Who Couldn’t Pay His Wife’s Salary (Du

Nouveau Marié Qui ne Peult Fournir à l’Appoinctement de sa Femme). The four-

person comedy effectively places the new husband on trial with

the mother-in-law (the wife’s mother) as the prosecution and the

father-in-law as mediator. The daughter complains to her parents

that after a month of marriage her husband still has not made

love to her. The mother-in-law adamantly takes up her daughter’s

cause, reminding her son-in-law how before he married her

daughter he wanted to do everything to her; now that he can do

everything, like a traitor, he does nothing. To the peaceable

father-in-law she says, “If you were to go a week, or even three

days, without doing it to me and you had no excuse, I’d be sure

to break with you.”29 After she has threatened not to let her

daughter return home with her son-in-law, the latter promises to

change his ways and to deliver a good serve to her daughter,

rather than a fault (the metaphor being taken from tennis). The

mother-in-law holds him to his word and assures him she will be

keeping close tabs on him (20).

Boccaccio also makes explicit this economy of natural

desires in the sixth story of the third day of the Decameron, the

story of Madonna Filippa. Her husband discovers her in the arms

of her lover and takes her to the chief magistrate, demanding she

be put to death according to the town’s statutes. She confesses

the adultery, but asks one favor of the podestà before he condemns

her: that she be allowed to pose a question of her husband in

front of the court. She asks him whether or not she has given her

body to him whenever he wanted; he concedes that she always has.

“Well then,” she tells the judge, “What am I to do with the

29 Ancien Théâtre François, ed. M. Viollet le Duc, vol. 1 (Paris: P. Jannet, 1854), 19. All references to the farces are to this edition, hereafter Ancien Théâtre. Translations are my own.

surplus? Throw it to the dogs? Is it not far better that I should

present it to a gentleman who loves me more dearly than himself,

rather than allow it to turn bad or go to waste?” (464). The

editor G.H. McWilliam notes that Madonna Filippa’s clever retort

echoes Matthew 7:6, “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs,”

where a woman’s body is colloquially known as “that which is

holy” (sanctum, sacrum) (841). Not only does she move the well-

filled court to hearty laughter, but she gets off free, and the

magistrate amends the town’s law so that henceforth wives who

cheat out of true love may escape the punishment; only those who

take money for sex shall be put to death. The husband leaves the

court fully mortified at having been made a fool of, while his

wife, like a phoenix, rises “in triumph” from the flames on which

her reputation was burning (464). The story presents a nexus of

themes that converge here to humiliate the husband: he is not

able to satisfy his wife sexually; because she does not love him,

he possesses her in body only; and he is presumably among the

“dogs” to whom the waste material is thrown. Above all, love

justifies adultery, ennobles sex, and renders the woman’s body

sacred.

In story after story of the Decameron Boccaccio brings to

bear a similar “clear-headed, practical common sense” on “the

highly emotive question of marital honor.”30 Although fully a

fourth of the one hundred stories center around adultery,

contrary to what The Courtier’s messer Bernardo claims, Boccaccio

is not, like messer Gasparo, “a very great enemy of women.”31

Rather, he often uses tales of feminine adultery to satirize the

hypocritical conventions whereby women are married off for money

or status, regardless of their own desires.32 In the tradition of

both the fabliaux and courtly love, Boccaccio champions the cause

of the natural inclinations and of mutual love and trust between

spouses. A strange combination of the theme of courtly love and

of the popular cuckold farce occurs in the form of the seventh

story of the seventh day (the theme of which is, fittingly, “the

tricks which, either in the cause of love or for motives of self-

preservation, women have played upon their husbands, irrespective

of whether or not they were found out”). The son of a merchant,

Lodovico (under the name of “Anichino”) enters the service of a

30 G.H. McWilliam, introduction to Decameron, xcii.31 Castiglione, The Courtier, 193.32 See introduction to Decameron, cii-ciii.

gentleman of Bologna, Egano, in order that he may woo Egano’s

wife, Beatrice, with whom he has fallen in love by hearsay, from

a distance. This courtly scenario takes a farcical turn when

Beatrice gives Anichino an assignation in her bedroom at night

and, while gripping him by the hand, tells Egano that Anichino is

waiting for her in the garden. Egano, dressing in her apparel,

goes out to wait for Anichino while the latter enjoys his wife.

Beatrice then has Anichino take a stick into the garden and

thrash her husband as if he (Anichino) had only sought to test

the faith of his master’s wife and punish her if she showed up.

In this way, when Egano re-enters the bedroom, he is satisfied of

the fidelity not just of his servant but his wife, and Beatrice

utters the punchline, “Thanks be to God that he tested me with

words, and saved his deeds for you!” (523).

How can we justify the drubbing which Beatrice gratuitously

deals out to her husband, who is neither jealous nor lacking in

sexual desire? The energy of the folkloric motif seems to be too

powerful to be dammed up: once the momentum of the familiar

cuckoldry narrative gets going, the tale must unfold and

culminate in the usual sadistic way. The underlying story pattern

(suggested by Propp) of the underdog cleverly upending the social

structure also asserts itself, since although Lodovico was born

the son of a nobleman, he is now the servant of Egano. Beatrice

can hardly fail to reward him for his loyal service to herself

(in love) by punishing her husband, the master in power. Further,

she cannot waste the opportunity of humiliating Egano once he has

gone out, disguised in woman’s clothes, to trick her lover. We

may recall that the theme of the day’s stories is, after all, the

tricks that women play on their husbands.

A similarly harsh punishment is meted out in the thirteenth-

century fabliau De la Borgoise d’Orliens (also known as Of the Lady Who

Had Her Husband Beaten), which from the outset characterizes the

merchant husband as miserly: “That which he held in his fist /

Was very firmly held.”33 His wife sets out to give him real cause

to watch his coffers. The merchant has his young niece spy on his

wife and the scholar whom he suspects. He pretends to go away on

a trip, only to return later, disguised as the scholar; his wife,

33 Lines 8-9. This and other fabliaus discussed here come from Fabliaux, selected and edited by R.C. Johnston and D.D.R. Owen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,1965), pp. 21-27. For a modern French version, see Fabliaux ou contes: fables et romans du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, ed. and trans. Legrand d’Aussy, 3rd ed., vol.4 (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1829), pp. 294-98.

seeing right through his disguise, welcomes him as if he were her

lover. Under the pretense of finding a suitable moment for their

liaison, she locks him up, and meanwhile, she and the scholar

have their fill of lovemaking. Then she sends the servants—

including the niece—into the locked room to whip and beat the

husband (as though he really were a lover whose attentions she

spurns), and they eventually throw him out onto a dungheap. At

the end, sore as he is, the husband congratulates himself on his

virtuous wife, since it seems she had him beaten out of

faithfulness to him. The canny author of the fabliau calls

attention to feminine ingenuity and perspicaciousness, comparing

the merchant’s wife to Argus and noting that women have been

tricking wise-men since the time of Abel (lines 85-87). When the

wife leads the husband to be locked up, the author strikingly

compares him to an ass and her to an ass-driver, and marvels at

how little the beast suspects what the driver plans to do with

him (lines 102-5). The household staff cry out to the supposed

scholar (the husband), “We’ll discipline you!” before beating him

to a pulp and hurling him out “like a dead dog” onto the

flattened dungheap (line 185, 198-99). Thereafter not only does

the whole household celebrate the woman’s reputation for wisdom

and virtue, but the husband never mistrusts her again. Through

the entire story the fabliau’s author underscores the stinginess

of the husband, the admirable presence of mind of the wife, the

regaling that she and her lover enjoy at the husband’s expense,

and the thorough corrections the husband receives. Above all, the

author emphasizes how the would-be deceiver, the suspicious

husband, is himself deceived.

The most jealous husbands generally receive the longest-

lasting hoodwink. The fifth tale of the seventh day of the

Decameron opens with the teller, Fiammetta, remarking that

jealous husbands “deserve all the suffering their wives may

inflict upon them, especially when they are jealous without

reason” (506). Here another rich merchant closely guards his wife

without reason, making her life “a complete misery” and “her

suffering . . . all the more difficult to bear in that she had

done nothing to deserve it” (507). The lady thus has a highly

ironic cause for cuckolding him—that “of supplying him with a

just and proper motive for his jealousy” (507). Once again,

extreme suspicion and officiousness lead the husband out of his

own bed such that the lover can enter it in his place, and a

disguised husband receives more punishment than he ever could

have received had he honestly stuck to his own identity. The lady

cleverly tells him (when he imposes on her as her priest at

confession) that a priest mysteriously manages to come sleep with

her every night when her husband is asleep. He subsequently stays

up night after night by the front door, “supperless, aching all

over, and freezing to death,” waiting for the nonexistent priest,

while his wife is cuckolding him (511). When her husband finally

confronts her in a rage about her relations with the priest, she

points out that in order to know about these he “must have been

eavesdropping” at her confession (512). This partial exposure of

the husband prepares the way for her to put the crowning touch on

his humiliation by making him realize his own folly. The lady

says, smiling,

It’s an edifying sight, I must say, when a mere woman leads an intelligent man by the nose, as though she were leading a ram by its horns to the slaughter. Not that you are all that intelligent, nor ever have been since the day you allowed the evil spirit of jealousy to enter your heart, without any obvious reason. (512)The wife explains that she recognized him right away as her

confessor and only fed him the story he was looking for. She

highlights his own lack of self-esteem by pointing out that had

he really trusted in himself and her, he “would never have

resorted to that sort of trick” or “become a prey to idle

suspicion” (512). He has deceived himself doubly, first by

suspecting her, and second, by failing to recognize that the

priest she was referring to the whole time was none other than

himself: “How could anybody, other than a man who had allowed

himself to be blinded by his jealousy, have been witless enough

not to understand all this?” (513). She warns him to leave off

watching her so closely, since she could easily make him wear

horns (porti le corna) if she really set her mind to it. Seeing “that

he had made an ass of himself,” the rueful husband casts aside

his jealousy, “now that his need for it was paramount” (513). The

lesson is as ironic as the rest of the story: “the evil spirit of

jealousy” not only blinds a man (renders him self-deluded), but

opens up to his wife and her lover the opportunity of making him

blind (deceived by others) in perpetuity.

We have seen how in cuckoldry tales wives take the impotence

of their husbands and turn it into something fertile, in the form

of a liaison with a virile lover. We have also seen a wife turn

the miserliness of her husband into generosity, as the Orléanais

merchant’s wife shared her husband’s best wines and victuals with

her lover. We have seen a wife (May) make her blind husband

(January) see, only to render him virtually blind again through

her clever deception. And, finally, we have seen a wife turn the

evil demon of jealousy into an actual physical cause for

jealousy, while ironically exorcizing the demon from her husband.

All these tales enact, on a social level, the work of nature as

it conserves energy and turns all potential for growth and change

into actual growth and change, filling in any gaps in the cycle

as soon as they form. Panurge seems to intuit, without any

marital experience of his own, that nature in love abhors a

vacuum, and that women and lovers will not let good opportunities

go to waste. His great fault, like all the cuckolds we are

examining, is his obstinate fantasy that time can stand still.

Death, for the unself-aware cuckold, does not exist. The medieval

and early modern farces of cuckoldry, for the most part, insist

on asserting the forward thrust of time from the present into the

future, in the form of the husband’s ousting and the wife and

lover’s triumph. Yet a farce printed in 1547, Advice to the Newly

Married Man, offers a startlingly modern picture of the ideal

marriage. When the new husband asks a doctor how he can well

govern his mental disposition in marriage, the doctor recommends

treating his wife gently; not giving her cause for jealousy so

that she does not give him cause; tolerating patiently any

spiteful words she might give him; not being suspicious of her;

never hearing ill spoken of her; taking care she has no reason to

disdain his performance in bed; facing her when making love to

her; and not letting her take control of him so that she keeps a

decent fear and respect for him.34 This advice carries us over

into the world of Shakespeare, his vision of marriage, and his

depictions of cuckoldry.

Reading Shakespeare’s references to cuckoldry after

examining cuckoldry in French fabliaux, farces, Boccaccio,

Castiglione, and Rabelais reveals several important differences

in tone and focus, not to mention style. First of all, the

favorite Continental theme of the woman who has become an

enlightened genius under the tutelage of Love does not come into

play in early-modern English portrayals of cuckoldry, and does

34 Le Conseil au Nouveau Marié, in Ancien Théâtre, 1-10.

not occur at all in Shakespeare.35 The first time an English

author will take up this theme, it will notably be inspired by a

French source—when Wycherley adapts Molière’s L’Ecole des Femmes in

1675 for his Country Wife. We have already seen how Ariosto has the

ingénue Fiammetta improvise in such an ingenious way as to

instruct her worldly lovers. Likewise, Boccaccio emphasizes many

times how Love transforms the meanest wits into masterminds, as

in the fourth tale of the seventh day of the Decameron, which

begins with Lauretta’s apostrophe to Love:

O Love, how manifold and mighty are your powers! How wise your counsels, how keen your insights! What philosopher, what artist could ever have conjured up all the arguments, all the subterfuges, all the explanations that you offer spontaneously tothose who nail their colours to your mast? (501)

If a woman is quick-witted enough to deceive her husband at the

critical moment when she and her lover are most in danger, it is

only because Love guides her—this, at least, is the Continental

explanation. We will see this fully developed in Molière’s L’Ecole

des Femmes, in which the various meanings of “the school” and the

35 Were Shakespeare interested in this theme, he surely would have used it when Jessica tricks her father (a symbolic cuckold) by robbing him of a casketof jewels and stealing away with her fiancé Lorenzo in act 2 of The Merchant of Venice. Instead, Jessica jokes about how darkness happily covers the shame of her being dressed as a boy, and Gratiano praises her as “a gentle and no Jew” (2.6.52).

nature of the instruction offered by it become the main focus of

the comedy. Yet neither in Chaucer nor in Shakespeare, nor in the

popular English jestbook tradition, does the woman have love to

thank for her guile and ready tongue. The common proverb “A

woman’s answer is never to seke” (Tilley W670) rounds off many

merry tales in the jestbooks, and is the guiding idea behind the

wit of the heroines of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies.

This brings us to the second major difference in the cuckold

humor on the Continent and in England during the early modern

period: while Continental texts worry that women have no defense

for the shame that cuckoldry jokes impute to them (unless a

chivalrically minded man should champion their cause), English

texts leave women to defend themselves through their own wit.

Castiglione’s messer Bernardo notably impugns those courtiers

who do not scruple to stain the honor of some noble lady forthe sake of pronouncing a witticism; which is a very bad thing, and deserving of the gravest punishment, for in this

respect ladies are to be numbered among the weak, and so should not be attacked, as they have no weapons with which to defend themselves. (179)

This speech follows on the heels of an extended discussion (one

which, in fact, straddles books 2 and 3) that the duchess’s

company hold on the extent of free speech a courtier should be

allowed when jesting about cuckoldry. A cuckoldry reference, for

some of these courtiers, makes it too plain that some woman,

somewhere, has dishonored herself—and for that reason, it is a

highly dubious subject for humor. Because unchastity is women’s

most shameful fault, the ideal courtier should “show respect and

reverence to women above all . . . especially when some damage

might be done their honor” (190, 188). Fascinatingly, this does

not stop those very same courtiers (messer Bernardo among them)

from openly admiring certain of the most egregious cuckoldry

tales from the Decameron. Further, messer Bernardo grants that

women “may sting men for their faults more freely than men may

sting them” (188).36 In the end, Castiglione measures a company’s

politesse by the degree to which it shields the ladies present

from mention of cuckoldry.

By contrast, the women of Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor

(1599) know well how to defend their honor, both in word and

36 Typically, during the entire debate about the appropriateness of tales and jests of adultery, the misogynistic signior Gasparo balks at the wives’ freedom and demands that women be held to the same standards, both in action and speech, as men (190). He later reveals himself to be fully an exponent of the medieval gallic tradition in the querelle des femmes, at one point remarking that nearly all women secretly hate their husbands (226).

deed. From the moment they receive Falstaff’s propositioning love

letters, Mistresses Ford and Page treat the hypothetical matter

of their unchastity with the fleetest wit imaginable. Mistress

Ford tells her companion, “If I would but go to hell for an

eternal moment or so, I could be knighted” (2.1.43).37 Mistress

Page notes that the letter-writer “cares not what he puts into

the press, when he would put us two,” punningly noting the

desperate straits Falstaff must be in when he “boards” two such

respectable, middle-aged married women (2.1.69-70, 79). The two

women mockingly sift through every aspect of the surprising

affair before vowing to have their revenge on its old, fat

instigator. Their virtue and sagacity appear all the more

striking in contrast with Ford’s bitter assessment of women at

the end of the next scene. Here, after delivering a monomaniacal

cuckold’s tirade that runs over all the fears Panurge confronted

in the Third Book, Ford lumps women together in the same rough way

the misogynists of the querelle des femmes do:

See the hell of having a false woman: my bed shall be abused, my coffers ransacked, my reputation gnawn at; and I shall not only receive this villainous wrong, but stand under 37 The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (London: Cengage Learning, 2000; Arden Third Series). All references to the play are to this edition.

the adoption of abominable terms, and by him that does me this wrong. Terms, names! Amaimon sounds well; Lucifer, well;Barbason, well; yet they are devils’ additions, the names of fiends. But cuckold? Wittol? Cuckold! The devil himself hath not such a name! Page is an ass, a secure ass; he will trust his wife, he will not be jealous. I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter, Parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese, an Irishman with my aqua-vitae bottle, or a thief to walk my ambling gelding, than my wife with herself. Then she plots, thenshe ruminates, then she devises; and what they think in their hearts they may effect—they will break their hearts but they will effect. God be praised for my jealousy! . . . Fie, fie,fie! Cuckold, cuckold, cuckold! (2.2.276-97)

Throughout, the comedy sustains this sharp contrast between

Ford’s impotent rage as a self-determined cuckold and the wives’

triumphant practical and verbal wit, which exposes Ford’s fumings

as so many smoke wisps. Ford-as-Brook does not allow himself to

appreciate the irony of his own status as “wittol” in the

Falstaff affair. This speech—one among many moralizing

soliloquies uttered by an increasingly demonic Ford—highlights

not just his jealousy but his miserliness (“my coffers

ransacked”), his low self-esteem, and his over-concern for common

opinion. He readily falls into the trap of over-simplifying

people and their motives, whether those people are his neighbors

(the Welsh Parson Evans), stereotyped versions of men from

neighboring countries (the “Fleming,” the “Irishman”), or his own

wife, whom he quickly moves from referring to as “she” to more

broadly calling “they.” Abstraction has thoroughly taken Ford

over, driving out all sense of reality. Like January, Panurge,

and the husbands of so many fabliaux and farces, the moralizing

tendency in Ford—a clear form of blindness—ironically enables and

necessitates his cuckolding. The death of the old and the birth

of the new require it.

Yet Ford’s actual cuckolding is canceled out by his would-be

cuckold-maker, who himself represents a cuckold of sorts—namely,

Falstaff. Falstaff is even older and more deserving of a drubbing

and ousting than the middle-aged Ford (who, after all, perfectly

matches his wife in age). Serving as an even more thorough-going

scapegoat in this comedy than he does at the end of The Second Part

of Henry the Fourth, Falstaff absorbs much of the ridicule that might

otherwise have alighted on Ford. If Ford must put up with direct

insults from Falstaff in all the scenes where Ford plays “Master

Brook,” and if he is derided by the townsmen who witness his mad

ransackings of his own house in futile search of Falstaff, he

none the less confesses to a full reformation by 4.4: “Pardon me,

wife. Henceforth do what thou wilt: / . . . Now doth thy honour

stand, / In him that was of late an heretic, / As firm as faith”

(4.4.6-10). Significantly, Shakespeare dramatizes Ford’s growth

in self-knowledge through the latter’s recognition of his wife’s

constant integrity, which compares with the true religion—in

which Ford was heretofore a “heretic.”

Falstaff, on the other hand, must be “publicly shamed,” as

the wives note after he has been beaten and chased from the house

dressed as “the fat woman of Brentford” (4.2.209, 211). At the

end of 4.2, the ladies hold a brief debate on whether they have

cured him of his demon of lust. Using an extended legal metaphor

Mistress Page wittily muses, “The spirit of wantonness is sure

scared out of him. If the devil have him not in fee-simple, with

fine and recovery, he will never, I think, in the way of waste,

attempt us again” (4.2.198-201). But presently both women intuit

that Falstaff is fully possessed by the devil, and that he will

gladly attempt them again. Consequently it is doubly fitting that

Falstaff wear the horns when he appears in the final scene as

Herne the Hunter. First, he incarnates the “spirit of

wantonness,” a point which Mistress Page emphasizes when she

proposes that the entire fairy crew finally “present

[them]selves, dishorn the spirit, / And mock him home to Windsor”

(4.4.62-63; my emphasis). Second, in his “unvirtuous” seduction

of the wives, Falstaff embodies the bestial urges: he is thus

“unclean” and must be purged of his animalism (4.2.206, 4.4.56).

No more suitable form for this purgation could be devised than

that of a mythical Actaeon figure whose punishment involves a

transformation of the hunter into the very stag he hunts, and of

the sacrilegious would-be violator of female chastity into a

symbolic cuckold.

Disguised as Herne the Hunter, Falstaff himself marvels at

how love has turned him into a beast: “O powerful love, that in

some respects makes a beast a man, in some other a man a beast!”

(5.5.4-5). Insofar as Falstaff’s bestiality comprises the lustful

passions that he has failed to subordinate to his reason, in his

“hot” pursuit of love he not only renders himself a fool, but

partly dehumanizes himself (5.5.11). The final scene sustains

this ironical play on the many symbols of Falstaff’s role as he

tells the ladies, “[M]y horns I bequeath your husbands. Am I a

woodman, ha? . . . As I am a true spirit, welcome!” (5.5.26-29).

At once enacting a substitute-cuckold, a sham hunter and

womanizer (“woodman”), and a physical embodiment of a ghost, or

“spirit,” Falstaff only partially glimpses the truth of his

incarnation, which now, more than ever, appears demonic.

But throughout the scene Falstaff maintains the high comedy

of his demonism through the impartial distance of the clown’s

mask, as he comments to hilarious effect on the unfolding events.

Unlike Panurge, Falstaff never succumbs to fear in his encounter

with those otherworldly agents, the fairies. His first remark, on

seeing his paramours run away at the approach of the fairies, is

“I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil that’s

in me should set hell on fire; he would never else cross me thus”

(5.5.34-35). And his satirical prayer on hearing Evans’ fairy

speech—“Heavens defend me from that Welsh fairy, lest he

transform me to a piece of cheese”—suggests a butt fully

cognizant of the practical joke being enacted at his expense. But

the burning and pinching, accompanied by the ritual song the

fairies chant against lust and followed quickly by the appearance

of the wives with their husbands, serves to drive home to

Falstaff how he has been “made an ass” and “an ox too” (5.5.119-

20). He has been at once fooled and cuckolded, shamed and

corrected. It may be that Falstaff’s greatest humiliation

consists of having been startled, with his guilty conscience,

into accepting the fairy hoax, if only momentarily, for he tells

the mocking company, “See now how wit may be made a Jack-a-Lent

when ’tis upon ill employment” (5.5.126-27). He accepts their

collective taunts philosophically, however: “Well, I am your

theme: you have the start of me. I am dejected, . . . ignorance

itself is a plummet o’er me. Use me as you will” (159-62). His

humility is as complete as was Ford’s in the earlier scene (4.4),

and as a reward for his gracious reception of the joke at his

expense, he—like Evans and Caius earlier—is allowed to see his

deceivers themselves deceived. Whereas earlier the parson and

doctor gleefully saw the Host of the Garter Inn cheated of his

horses after leading each man into a dead-end duel, Falstaff now

sees Page and his wife undermined in their plots to marry Anne to

their favorite suitors. Thus Falstaff tells them both, “I am

glad, though you have ta’en a special stand to strike at me, that

your arrow hath glanced” (5.5.228-29). And Ford, in turn, enjoys

addressing Falstaff in a witty closing couplet, which expresses

all the self-awareness of a jealous husband reformed, “To Master

Brook you yet shall hold your word, / For he tonight shall lie

with Mistress Ford” (5.5.238-39).

With Molière’s L’Ecole des Femmes (1662) we return to the

favorite Continental theme of love instructing a woman in a

lightning-flash as to how she may save herself and her lover. The

“school for wives” that Agnès attends is none other than the

school of love, and the quickness with which she learns its

lessons shocks even her lover, Horace. Her sudden ingenuity

particularly takes aback her guardian, Arnolphe, who has always

held her wit in the lowest estimation. Arnolphe is not a literal

cuckold, for he is not married to Agnès, but he has plighted

himself to her (and her to him, by force), and so they are, in a

manner, married. Yet Agnès’s unwavering faith in her right to

assert youth, love, and truth where age, discipline, and

hypocrisy have reigned for so long—under the coldly tyrannical

rule of Arnolphe—leaves her honor and integrity fully intact

throughout the play. Molière editor R. Jouanny remarks that

throughout the theatrical history of L’Ecole audiences have

responded with overwhelming sympathy to Agnès’s character and

delighted in seeing this captive flower, hitherto kept inside,

allowed to open up under the full light of day.38 There is no

danger of reading Agnès’s inspired bravura in this cuckoldry

narrative as anything other than fully virtuous and justified.

Horace characterizes Agnès’s lesson with a speech that is

highly ironic (as are most of Horace’s speeches, since they are

delivered directly to Arnolphe but also apply unfavorably to the

latter). His praise of love might have been borrowed from

Boccaccio’s Decameron:

Love is indeed a wondrous master, Sir,Whose teaching makes us what we never were,And under whose miraculous tuitionOne suddenly can change one’s disposition.It overturns our settled inclinations,Causing the most astounding transformations:. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .Love spurs the sluggard on to high endeavor,And moves the artless maiden to be clever.39

Agnès’s learning is all the more striking in that it points up

Arnolphe’s main deficiency, namely, self-awareness. The man who

has painstakingly changed his name, “Arnolphe,” patron saint of 38 “Notice” to L’Ecole des Femmes, in Œuvres complètes de Molière, vol. 1, ed. R. Jouanny (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962), 406. All references to line numbers andto the French text are to this edition.39 The School for Wives, trans. Richard Wilbur (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), pp. 77-78 (3.4); lines 900-909. Unless otherwise noted, alltranslated material derives from this edition, with references first to the pages, with act and scene numbers following in parentheses, and then to the lines in the French text.

cuckolds, to the highly suggestive “Master of the Stump”

(Monsieur de la Souche), reveals time and again throughout the

play a hypersensitivity to any association with cuckoldry.

Arnolphe is characterized, in Richard Wilbur’s phrase, by “a deep

general insecurity, which has somehow been focused into a

specific terror of being cuckolded.”40 Like Panurge, there is

something maniacal about Arnolphe that transforms his insecurity

into a glaring form of unself-consciousness. He refuses to

acknowledge what so many other characters (Horace, Chryalde,

Agnès) in the play do: that (at 42) he is over the hill—

especially in comparison with a girl of eighteen.41 In contrast

with Arnolphe’s complacent self-blinding, Agnès declares, in her

first love letter to Horace, “I mistrust my own words. I begin to

perceive that I have always been kept in a state of ignorance,

and so I am fearful of writing something I shouldn’t, or of

saying more than I ought” (79 [3.4]). Agnès’s self-awareness here

consists precisely in her realization of how time is passing, of 40 “Introduction” to The School for Wives, ix. 41 Jouanny is at pains to downplay this aspect of the archetypal cuckoldry triangle, but at least ten separate textual cues alert the reader to the fact that Molière has kept his eye firmly on this carnival-folkloric pattern of theolder man being displaced by the younger (p. 403, 405; see lines 170, 248, 256-58, 1186, 1431-32, 1444-45, 1589 ff., and 1649 of the play for direct pokes at Arnolphe’s age).

where she stands in respect to her own development, and how her

naïveté affects her place in society. When Arnolphe marvels, in

the following scene in soliloquy, that for an innocent girl she

has “un esprit si présent” (at once “so sly” a mind and a mind so

aware of the present and its relation to other moments) he is

unwittingly giving her credit for a quality he himself sorely

lacks.42

If Molière depicts Agnès as a heroine progressively gaining

in self-consciousness, he also provides a model for self-

conscious men, in the form of Arnolphe’s good friend Chrysalde.

Chrysalde is clearly meant to act as a wise Pantagruel to

Arnolphe’s fretting, unself-aware Panurge in several ways. First,

he repeatedly advises Arnolphe stoically to accept that he has

limited control over the future when it comes to marital matters—

and particularly to cuckoldry. According to the married

Chrysalde, marriage and wives alike turn out according to the

will of fate. Chrysalde alternately calls cuckolds’ horns “blows

of fate” (“coups du hasard”) which a man cannot help, a destiny

(“sort”) with which a kindly community refuses to taunt a husband

42 School 83 (3.5); L’Ecole line 979.

to his face (provided he has not jeered at others who have

received the same), and “an ill chance” (“cas fortuit”) for which

a man cannot be blamed.43 All these ways of characterizing the

marital state recall Pantagruel’s sage words to Panurge on the

same topic. For the very reason that fate, chance, and fortune

are responsible for giving a man a faithful or unfaithful wife or

for securing his marriage against dishonor, Chryalde claims a man

is foolish to stake all his own honor on the outcome. Such wisdom

is both philosophic and courtly.

Second, just as Pantagruel showed marriage to be a thing

“indifferent” which is only good or bad according to the attitude

a man assumes towards it, so Chrysalde argues that cuckoldry is

merely what one makes of it: “there’s no harm done, whatever they

say, / If one but takes things in the proper way.”44 An “honnête

homme” (honorable man) thus equates with an “homme prudent” (“man

of sense”), not only insofar as he remains indifferent to the

“blows of fate” but as he steers a “middle way” through domestic

difficulties: he neither exhibits extreme laxity and trustingness

43 School 8, 9, 105 (1.1, 4.8); L’Ecole lines 13, 59, 1237, 1246.44 “[E]nfin tout le mal, quoi que le monde glose, / N’est que dans la façon derecevoir la chose” (L’Ecole lines 1248-49), School 106-7 (4.8).

by parading his wife among the gallants, nor rails to the world

of his wife’s indiscretions.45 As long as a man hews to this

moderate stance (tantamount to Stoic apathy), he is beyond

reproach, regardless of how his wife treats him. The theatrical

director Louis Jouvet rightly compared Chrysalde’s attitude to

pantagruélisme which, as we earlier noted, Rabelais’s Prologue to

the 1552 edition of the Fourth Book defines as “a certain

merriness of mind pickled in contempt for things fortuitous.”46

Chrysalde advocates an outlook on cuckoldry that is at once

philosophical and aristocratic—and in both senses Arnolphe is

incapable of following his advice. Arnolphe’s Panurgic obsession

with cuckoldry, as well as his bourgeois possessiveness and

jealousy, prevent him from either understanding or taking

seriously Chrysalde’s cool, detached, courtly perspective. At the

end of 4.8, Arnolphe dismisses his words as mere “mockery,” and

most editors take this as a definitive cue that Chrysalde intends

them as such (108).47 But Chrysalde’s arguments run too

45 L’Ecole lines 1268-69; School 105-6 (4.8).46 “Une certaine gaieté d’esprit confite au mépris des choses fortuites” (Huchon 523). Screech 650. See L’Ecole 910, note 569.47 Wilbur recommends that an actor treat “Chrysalde’s discourses on cuckoldry . . . as dubious ‘reasoning’ and as bear-baiting; a good actor wouldknow where to modulate between them” (Introduction, xiii). Jouanny also thinks

pervasively through the entire play (framing Arnolphe’s critical

periods of action, in 1.1, 4.8, and 5.9) and jibe too completely

with Chrysalde’s overall Pantagruel-like role to be discounted as

mere teasing. There is, however, ample room for an audience to

take them both ironically and in the spirit of truth.48

Chrysalde’s wise advice, similar to Pantagruel’s, relates

self-awareness on a social level to self-awareness on an

existential level, through the medium of time. A man’s honor or

virtue, Chrysalde tells Arnolphe, does not depend on the chance

circumstance of his having been spared cuckolding—rather, he

preserves his good name by the face he shows society. Since one

cannot know one’s own fate or manage the integrity of another

person (here, one’s wife), the prudent man assumes an ambivalent

stance toward cuckoldom. This entails accepting that “it’s fate /

Whereby we’re joined to one or another mate” (107; line 1281). He

warns Arnolphe not to swear he will not be a cuckold, since he

“may be forsworn. / If fate has willed it, your resolves will

Chrysalde is deliberately enraging Arnolphe with jokes and aggravating his thoughts (910, note 569).48 Arnolphe himself highlights Chrysalde’s Pantagruelic role when he ironically identifies himself with Pantagruel in chapter five of the Third Book:“Preach and harange from now to Whitsuntide / . . . You’ll be amazed to find, when you have ceased, / That I’ve not been persuaded in the least” (School 12 [1.1]).

fail, / And all your oaths will be of no avail” (108; lines 1309-

11). This theme echoes age-old proverbs that give voice to the

ambivalent, popular comic tradition.49 According to this

tradition, fate not only determines the nature of a marriage but

its timing, and in this way, Chrysalde implicitly criticizes

Arnolphe’s conduct: his timing is all off. Not only does Arnolphe

ignore the extreme age gap between him and Agnès and marry at a

late age, but he thinks to freeze Agnès in a permanent state of

ignorance and himself in the permanent role of one who

condescendingly ridicules her deficiencies. Chrysalde urges this

theme, on three occasions, that the self-knowing man either

embraces time’s unfolding uncertainties and marries with a

readiness for anything, or remains celibate. Near the end of the

play Chrysalde once more recommends that Arnolphe shun marriage: 49 Both Rabelais and Shakespeare—and, it seems, Molière too—delight in varyingthe proverb “Marriage is destiny.” In French, the most common forms of the proverb are “Les mariages se font au ciel et se consomment sur la terre” (“Marriages are made in heaven and consummated on earth”) and “Les mariages sont écrits dans le ciel” (“Marriages are written in heaven”). A variant on this has fortune bringing men and women together: “Le plus grand malheur ou bonheur de l’homme est une femme” (“The greatest misfortune or happiness of man is a woman”). In Tilley’s Dictionary of Proverbs in England we find the following versions of this idea: “Marriage is a lottery” (M681); “Marriage is destiny” (M682); “Marriages are made in heaven” (M688); “Wedding and hanging go by destiny” (W232); “Cuckolds come by destiny” (C889). These proverbs can be taken misogynistically only in isolation, for when they are spoken in dramaticcontexts of skeptical men and women debating marriage onstage, they come across as thoroughly ambiguous.

“Since your chief treasure is a hornless head, / The safest

course, for you, is not to wed” (145 [5.9]; 1762-63). The play’s

conclusion underscores how self-knowledge consists in submitting

to the will of heaven: Horace tells his father that

“coincidence,” fatherly “wisdom,” and “chance” have all worked to

produce the same happy effect, his union with Agnès; and

Chrysalde invites them all to “[t]hank Heaven, which orders all

things for the best” (146 [5.9]; 1766-67, 1779). Dithering over

the choice of a partner directly relates to delaying the matter

of marriage and expecting time to stand still once one has

married: in all these areas Arnolphe flouts popular, as well as

Stoical, wisdom and, by doing so, shows he is utterly lacking in

self-knowledge. No wonder Chrysalde mutters to himself, as he

leaves the first scene, “The man’s quite mad. A lunatic, in fact”

(16; 195).

Arnolphe proves Chrysalde amply justified in this assessment

of his character. Sympathetic as he may appear to the audience

through his many soliloquies and asides, Arnolphe is

fundamentally a monomaniac whose viewpoint consistently

superimposes tragedy upon hysterical situations. In the

thoroughly farcical 2.2, for instance, Arnolphe frightens his

servants Alain and Georgette into abject cowering and theatrics

(“My heart’s stopped beating,” cries Georgette; “I’m dying,” says

Alain) (39; 402). In the midst of their terrified postures,

Arnolphe tells us, aside, “When I saw him [Horace] in his cradle,

I didn’t know / What he’d grow up and do to me. O woe! / . . .

Patience, my wounded heart! Beat softly, now!” (40; 405-10).

Arnolphe here plays the tragic king who fears for the safety of

his life and throne. Bakhtin persuasively argues that the comic

theme of cuckoldry parallels the mythical-tragic theme of

patricidal regicide: the king who casts out his son (or daughter)

to avoid being eventually killed and displaced by that same

child, mirrors the cuckold who dreads uncrowning at the hands of

his wife and her lover (1984, 243).

But if Arnolphe appears mad or pathetic in many of his

soliloquies and asides, he also reveals himself, in such speeches

as well as in the lectures he gives Chrysalde and Agnès, as a

thorough moralizer in the tradition of January, Rondibilis, and

Ford. More so even than those characters, Arnolphe loves to utter

universals which are patently untrue in the light of dramatic

realities played out on stage. Among the declarations that appear

blatantly wrong is Arnolphe’s claim that Agnès is “like a lump of

wax” whom he can mold “Into what shape I like, as she grows

older” (71 [3.3]; 810-11). Smugly thinking to have successfully

indoctrinated Agnès with the gloomy, long-winded Maxims of Marriage

that he has had her read aloud in the previous scene, he is about

to find out (in 3.4), that, on the contrary, Agnès has conveyed a

love letter to Horace. She later tells Arnolphe that marriage

sounds so “sweet” when described by Horace, that she much prefers

to enter into it with him rather than her guardian (126 [5.4];

1518). Far from being as wax in his hands, Agnès has a definite

will of her own on which she acts, and she clearly perceives that

Arnolphe is putting blinders on her. Arnolphe finds himself, in

5.4, falling in love with Agnès in earnest, despite himself, even

as he inveighs against women:

How strange love is! How strange that men, from suchPerfidious beings, will endure so much!Women, as all men know, are frailly wrought:They’re foolish and illogical in thought,Their souls are weak, their characters are bad,There’s nothing quite so silly, quite so mad,So faithless; yet, despite these sorry features,What won’t we do to please the wretched creatures? (130-31;

1572-79)

All of these misogynistic truisms ring particularly false in

light of Agnès’s noble bearing throughout the same scene: she

refuses to indulge in the lying, hypocrisy, volatility, hysteria,

weakness of character, and cowardice that Arnolphe, both by his

words and example, invites her to succumb to. In contrast with

his speeches, which vacillate between insincere posturings and

violent threats, Agnès (significantly the only woman in the play

besides the servant Georgette) maintains unwavering dignity,

poise, and integrity. Her virtuous demeanor not only gives the

lie to Arnolphe’s empty words, but seems calculated to refute the

centuries-old moralizing texts against women and marriage on

which his words are based, and to prove the stilted one-sidedness

of their theories.

When Arnolphe is not delivering moral sentences, he is

either declaring ironic truths of whose validity he himself is

utterly unaware, or he is unwittingly acting in precise

fulfillment of other characters’ predictions. Perhaps the most

forcefully ironical—because prophetic—of his own statements is

his declaration to Horace when they first meet that “[c]uckolds

are made by such as you, young man, / And looks like yours buy

more than money can” (30 [1.4]; 301-2). In 4.9 Arnolphe busies

himself fortifying his house as if it were a besieged castle,

giving orders to Alain and Georgette to beat back the coming

enemy (Horace) as if they were defending their master’s home in a

veritable “battle” (110; 1326). Horace in fact earlier crowed to

Arnolphe of his success in attacking his as-yet unseen enemy’s

fortification:

My, what a fool! He fortifies his placeAgainst me, using bricks for cannon balls,As if he feared that I might storm the walls;What’s more, in his anxiety he ralliesHis two domestics to repulse my sallies;And then he’s hoodwinked by the girl he meantTo keep forever meek and innocent!I must confess that, though this silly man’sReturn to town has balked my amorous plans,The whole thing’s been so comical that I findThat I’m convulsed whenever it comes to mind.You haven’t laughed as much as I thought you would. (78-79

[3.4]; 927-38)

All the elements of Horace’s description, down to the letter,

prove to be true not just in retrospect but in view of things to

come. The audience is thus able to enjoy a satisfying symmetry,

through the first four acts, as Arnolphe’s power gradually

declines and Horace’s correspondingly rises. The dyamic shifts in

irony as Arnolphe gradually accrues more knowledge to his own

detriment from the very source of his torments, Horace, and then

hurries to act in his own interest and unwittingly undoes himself

in the process, all point up the farcical necessity of Arnolphe’s

cuckolding.

We do not need to see Molière as endorsing a tolerant

attitude toward cuckoldry in order to read the play’s action as

yet further ambivalent commentary on the moralizing strains of

theories about women and marriage. By equating honnêtteté with

equanimity and self-awareness, the skeptical Chrysalde suggests,

to the courtly culture for which the comedy was written, that to

marry is to prepare oneself to meet the ironies of life head-on.

Like Arnolphe, Pinchwife in The Country Wife learns to his own

detriment the marvelous efficacy of love’s schooling. His wife

Margery picks up in a trice more than just the London ways, after

she hears that a gallant (Horner) has fallen in love with her at

the play. From that moment on, Margery’s clever eleventh-hour

deflections of her husband’s suspicions become increasingly

dizzying, until she is caught, in the last scene, in the rooms of

her lover, demanding that he become her next husband. Far more

than Molière, Wycherley focuses on the ironies of education by

society and the kinds of “love” that city life breeds. In one of

several direct references to L’Ecole, Pinchwife alarmedly answers

Harcourt’s suggestion that the former bring his wife to town “to

be taught breeding” with the following speech: “To be taught! no,

sir, I thank you. Good wives and private soldiers should be

ignorant. – [Aside.] I’ll keep her from your instructions, I

warrant you.”50 As in L’Ecole, here knowledge is the commodity

jealously hoarded by the miserly cuckold-figure—even as wine,

money, and sex were hoarded by the cuckolds we earlier examined.

But the knowledge Arnolphe withholds from Agnès is emotional: he

keeps her from experiencing the warmth of human affection. Unlike

Agnès, Margery learns not so much how to lose her heart as how to

have extramarital sex without damaging her reputation or letting

her husband know. For this reason the moralizing speeches that

Pinchwife delivers against “damned woman” and “damned love, their

old tempter” resonate far differently than do Arnolphe’s

equivalent diatribes (65). Pinchwife accurately predicts from the

50 William Wycherley, The Country Wife, in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy, 2nd ed., ed. Scott McMillin (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 13. All references are to this edition by page number.

start the downfall—through sophistication—of his simple country

wife. In his moments of extreme cynical commentary on marriage

and women Pinchwife is at once most likable to the audience—

because most self-aware—and most ironically prophetic.51

Paradoxically enough, like other cuckolds he hastens his own

undoing precisely through his jealous suspicions and controlling

behavior.

As part of the farcical tradition of cuckold tales, The

Country Wife insists at once that husbands cause their own

cuckolding and that a husband’s trustingness must never go to

waste. Alithea and her maid Lucy vary the theme revolved by the

lady in Fiammetta’s story of the seventh day of the Decameron—

namely, which husbandly behavior warrants the faithfulness of a

wife, and which behavior calls for cuckoldry. Boccaccio’s lady

judged that since her husband seemed determined to be cuckolded

in theory, he might as well be in fact. Lucy, seeing Sparkish

discourage his fiancée Alithea’s virtuous conduct, muses, “Well,

to see what easy husbands these women of quality can meet with; a

poor chambermaid can never have such lady-like luck. Besides, 51Thus Pinchwife tells Margery, as they visit the Exchange, “[I]f every husband’s proper sign here were visible, they would be all alike” (36).

he’s thrown away upon her; she’ll make no use of her fortune, her

blessing; none to a gentleman for a pure cuckold, for it requires

good breeding to be a cuckold” (37). As a maid among gentry Lucy

brings a bifocal perspective to cuckoldry. Presenting the obverse

of the usual male-centric popular-comic notions, she suggests it

is “fortune” and “luck” which bring a wife the “blessing” of an

unsuspicious husband (one ripe for cuckolding). Acknowledging the

courtly scorn for possessiveness and jealousy, she calls lack of

suspicion “good breeding.” Later iterating this concept of an

economy of jealousy, Lucy tells Alithea, “[T]hat husbandly

virtue, credulity, is thrown away upon you.” Alithea replies, “He

only that could suspect my virtue should have cause to do it;

’tis Sparkish’s confidence in my truth that obliges me to be so

faithful to him” (46). That is, a man only deserves to be

cuckolded if he is overly jealous; conversely, as long as a man

is trusting, his wife owes it to him to be faithful. Alithea’s

views are far more idealistic—and, the satire suggests, untenable

—than her rakish maid Lucy’s.

As an unabashed rake, Horner deplores jealousy, which he

calls “[t]he worst disease that love and wenching breeds” (15).

He traps Pinchwife into admitting that he “only married to keep a

whore to [him]self,” by which he exposes the major flaw

undermining the entire institution of marriage, namely, human

possessiveness (14). He even goes one step further, telling

Harcourt that “a foolish rival and a jealous husband assist their

rival’s designs; for they are sure to make their women hate them,

which is the first step to their love for another man” (32-33).

By this reasoning it is not so much fortune which enables a wife

and her lover to enjoy one another, as the foolish husband

himself—“for fools are most easily cheated when they themselves

are accessories” (33). Pinchwife bears out the truth of these

statements as he repeatedly brings about his own humiliation. He

conducts his new wife, masked, to the play, thereby inviting the

greedy stares of the likes of Horner and his friends. He dresses

Margery up as a boy, allowing her to be kissed by all the

gallants. He forbids her to go out into society and teaches her

to write letters, thus indirectly provoking her desperate love

letter to Horner in 4.2. And he forces her, again out of

desperation, to play the part of Alithea in act 5, whereby she

has him conduct her straight into the arms of her lover. In these

monomaniacal attitudes Pinchwife looks most farcically

ridiculous, just as he decrees his own cuckolding. Like most of

the other cuckolds we have seen, Pinchwife stubbornly asserts his

right to rule forever, despite nature’s indications to the

contrary. Horner repeatedly notes that Pinchwife is over-the-hill

at forty-nine, and when he asks whether marriage has “cured

[Pinchwife] of whoring,” Harcourt wryly observes, “’Tis more than

age can do” (13-14).52 Pinchwife shares that single-mindedness

with Arnolphe that enables him not to mind being laughed at, just

so long as he is not cuckolded. The irony in both comedies is

that clear-sighted prudence in such matters makes a man the

ultimate fool.

If Chrysalde was the closest thing to a self-aware character

that L’Ecole presented—even as his self-awareness consisted of

ambivalence and skepticism toward marriage and women—no one

single character in The Country Wife adopts such a philosophic

52 It should be noted that like the reluctant editor of Molière, the Restoration scholar Jocelyn Powell mistakenly dismisses the possibility that Pinchwife is forcing nature by marrying Margery. She claims that Pinchwife cannot be too old for Margery because the marriageable Alithea is his sister. Yet two ready explanations for this age difference present themselves: either Wycherley does not expect us to associate Alithea that closely with Pinchwife,and so anticipates that the audience will overlook this gap; or the brother and sister share only a father (at the very least, it is conceivable that theywere born at tail ends of the reproductive cycle of one same mother).

stance. Rather, the gallants speak isolated sentences that warn

of the potential pitfalls of marriage. Sparkish, of all people,

tells Pinchwife, “[W]e men of wit have amongst us a saying that

cuckolding, like the smallpox, comes with a fear, and you may

keep your wife as much as you will out of danger of infection,

but if her constitution incline her to’t, she’ll have it sooner

or later, by the world, say they” (66). This unexpected urbanity

from the play’s fop reveals that of the two extremes—credulity or

suspicion—the former flaw, for good reasons, is always more

attractive to society. As Chrysalde pointed out, truth, being

relative, often amounts to the face a person puts on a situation.

This skeptical position sets the stage for the main theme of

Wycherley’s comedy, the flimsiness of the ideal of honor.

The entire play is a game of keeping up appearances, and the

appearance of honor is its main prize. More, perhaps, than any

other author of cuckoldry drama, Wycherley trains a relentless

lens on the distinction between the fact of adultery and the

social report of it, in order to mock the relativity of truth

that prevails in 1670s English culture. The amoral courtly

characters who form the center of the Horner plot treat sexual

gratification and a reputation for libertinism as two entirely

different things separated by the thinnest veil, and this veil is

none other than the deep-seated hypocrisy of the age. Virtue and

honor are nothing but tricks of perspective in a game of ever-

shifting social roles. Horner sums up this commonly accepted

morality to Quack in the very first scene of the play: “[Y]our

women of honor, as you call ’em, are only chary of their

reputations, not their persons, and ’tis scandal they would

avoid, not men” (8). Later, he tells Quack, “[Y]our bigots in

honor are just like those in religion; they fear the eye of the

world more than the eye of Heaven, and think there is no virtue

but railing at vice, and no sin but giving scandal” (55). Horner

publicly poses as a spoilsport in order secretly to embark on the

game of respectable sex with the greatest enthusiasm, as a

cheater.

“The virtuous gang,” as the trio of “honorable women” call

themselves (namely, Lady Fidget, Mrs. Dainty Fidget, and Mrs.

Squeamish), spell out the rules of the game explicitly in 2.1, as

they discuss how “men of honor” perversely prefer common women to

ladies of their own rank:

MRS. DAINTY FIDGET: Nay, they do satisfy their vanity upon us sometimes; and are kind to us in their report, tell all theworld they lie with us.

LADY FIDGET: Damned rascals! That we should be only wronged by ’em; to report a man has had a person, when he has not had a person, is the greatest wrong in the whole world that can be done to a person.

MRS. SQUEAMISH: Well, ’tis an arrant shame noble personsshould be so wronged and neglected.

LADY FIDGET: But still ’tis an arranter shame for a noble person to neglect her own honor, and defame her own noble person with little inconsiderable fellows, foh!

MRS. DAINTY FIDGET: I suppose the crime against our honor isthe same with a man of quality as with another.

LADY FIDGET: How! No, sure, the man of quality is likest one’s husband, and therefore the fault should be the less.

MRS. DAINTY FIDGET: But then the pleasure should be the less.

LADY FIDGET: Fie, fie, fie, for shame, sister! Whither shallwe ramble? Be continent in your discourse, or I shall hate you.

MRS. DAINTY FIDGET: Besides, an intrigue is so much the morenotorious for the man’s quality.

MRS. SQUEAMISH: ’Tis true, nobody takes notice of a private man, and therefore with him ’tis more secret, and the crime’s the less when ’tis not known.

LADY FIDGET: You say true; i’faith, I think you are in the right on’t. ’Tis not an injury to a husband till it be an injury to our honors; so that a woman of honor loses no honor

with a private person . . . . But still my dear, dear honor.(23-24)

The ladies’ hilariously absurd reasoning in this exchange causes

them to get confused by their own hypocritical logic. Throughout

their dialogue they notably treat the terms of marital honor from

the wife’s vantage point, rather than the husband’s. Beneath

their speeches, “honor” denotes sexual gratification, though none

will never admit as much. Starting with Mrs. Dainty Fidget’s

claim that a woman attains some honor in being reported to have

lain with a man (even when she has not), honor soon shifts, by

Lady Fidget’s definition, to the reverse of that—actually lying

with a man without having anyone know about it. Socially

speaking, a lady’s honor hinges on the nobility of her lover, and

morally speaking, “the man of quality is likest one’s husband,”

which mitigates her crime. Lady Fidget’s sister frankly points

out that the same affords a woman less “pleasure,” which causes

Lady Fidget to bridle, in her usual automatic way, at the

reference to bodily matters. Mrs. Dainty and Mrs. Squeamish,

meanwhile, return to considering the publicity of the affair: the

less it is known, they argue, the less the fault. According to

Lady Fidget’s final syllogism, as long as a woman’s social

reputation remains intact, her husband suffers no dishonor; and

because a man of lower rank, as a “private person,” occasions

less scandal, he is the safest bet for securing a lady’s honor

(and, by extension, her husband’s). In this way Lady Fidget goes

from scorning “little inconsiderable fellows” to making an affair

with them a point of honor.

This dialogue confirms the truth of Horner’s hypothesis,

proposed to Quack at the beginning of the play and proven

experientially by his careful sussing out of the women of honor,

that “he who aims by women to be priz’d, / First by the men . . .

must be despis’d” (84). This is also Margery’s lesson by the end,

that enjoying the fruits of love requires keeping up appearances

and, thus, telling lies. Yet in the style of a fabliau, the play

does not dwell on Margery’s social enlightenment, but rather on

the delightful absurdity of seeing a husband not only help his

wife into her lover’s arms, but stand by to watch as they have

sex. Like the fabliau husband who sits on the tabletop while his

wife and her lover copulate directly beneath,53 so Sir Jasper

Fidget titters encouragingly as his wife and Horner have sex in

the next room, and Pinchwife leaves Margery with Horner to

conduct her first affair. In a sense, Sparkish also enables his

own cuckolding by encouraging Harcourt to court Alithea in his

own presence. Also in the spirit of the fabliau tradition, The

53 This fabliau is one likely source for The Merchant’s Tale.

Country Wife invites the audience to sympathize with the roguish

cuckold-makers. This play will be one of the last, in the history

of the English drama, that evokes the sympathy of the audience

for the seducer, even as it asks us to laugh heartily at the

dishonored husband.

The Country Wife is the last farcical depiction of cuckoldom on

the English stage. With Congreve’s Love for Love twenty years later

(1695) we see a very ambiguous portrayal of the love triangle, in

which we have merely the lover’s (Scandal’s) word against that of

the unfaithful wife (Mrs. Foresight), and the audience scarcely

knows whom to trust. Scandal’s courting is brief, and Mrs.

Foresight, while balking at his boldness, never gives him a

definitive answer as to whether she will let him pursue her

further (3.1). Mrs. Foresight sees fit to defend her

respectability to the last (even to her seducer’s incredulous

face), and in this way she points toward modern attitudes to

adultery.

Her more libertine counterpart in The Way of the World (1700),

Mrs. Fainall, has already ended the affair with Mirabell that has

prompted her to marry her second husband, Fainall (in order to

cover up a suspected pregnancy that then never came to fruition).

Fainall’s semi-soliloquy (spoken partly to himself and partly to

Mrs. Marwood) at the end of act 3 projects a courtly attitude

toward cuckoldom that suggests that Fainall has been cured of his

earlier obsession with the theme. Where his lover Mrs. Marwood is

concerned, Fainall has always suspected her of loving Mirabell

and vice versa; with the ready jealousy and anxiety of a would-be

cuckold, Fainall has ironically blinded himself to the adulterous

affair actually going on beneath his eyes—the friendship of his

own wife with Mirabell. He reveals a surprisingly philosophic

acceptance of the situation when he hears of it from Mrs.

Marwood:

MRS. MARWOOD: Well, how do you stand affected towards your lady?

FAINALL: Why, faith, I’m thinking of it. Let me see. I am married already, so that’s over. My wife has played the jade with me; well, that’s over too. I never loved her, or if I had, why that would have been over too by this time. Jealous of her I cannot be, for I am certain; so there’s an end of jealousy. Weary of her I am, and shall be. No, there’s no end of that; no, no, that were too much to hope. Thus far concerning my repose; now for my reputation. As to my own, I married not for it; so that’s out of the question. And as to my part in my wife’s, why she had parted with hers before; so bringing none to me, she can take none from me. ’Tis against all rule of play that I should lose to one who has not wherewithal to stake.

MRS. MARWOOD: Besides, you forget, marriage is honorable.

FAINALL: Hum! Faith, and that’s well thought on. Marriage ishonorable, as you say; and if so, wherefore should cuckoldom bea discredit, being derived from so honorable a root?

MRS. MARWOOD: Nay, I know not; if the root be honorable, whynot the branches?54

Fainall here frankly acknowledges that a cuckold’s worst torture

is inflicted by himself in the not knowing—once he is “certain,”

he can no longer be jealous. As Restoration dramatists were fond

of doing, Congreve constructs a metaphor comparing reputation to

currency, and love to “play” (gambling): if his wife has brought

no actual currency to the gaming table, one cannot say that he

has lost anything to her. To Mrs. Marwood’s cynically tinged

comment that “marriage is honorable,” Fainall glibly rejoins that

cuckoldom must be as well, since it is “derived from so honorable

a root.” This speech provides a resumé of all the issues at stake

for a man in cuckoldom in the late Restoration period: jealousy,

uncertainty, his own honor, his wife’s honor, and the breach of

an honorable institution, marriage. The play’s concern, towards

the end, over preserving Mrs. Fainall’s reputation squares with

Congreve’s treatment of Mrs. Foresight in the earlier comedy—the

age no longer appreciates seeing a woman’s integrity compromised.

54 McMillin 290-91.

By the end of the seventeenth century a marked change has set in

on the stage which means that cuckoldry can no longer be treated

lightly.

Shakespeare no doubt sensed the coming of this era’s

sensibilities, as he refused to show anything to the detriment of

women’s integrity and constancy in his plays.55 Not just the

emphatic near miss of Sir Peter Teazle in Sheridan’s School for

Scandal (1777)56 but a telling comment by Hazlitt in the early part

of the nineteenth century reflects the complete change in

sensibility that occurs between the Renaissance and the modern

age. Of the old English proverb “Wedding and hanging go by

destiny” the Scottish adage “hanging goes by hap” preserves only

half; as Hazlitt remarks, “that polite nation has agreed to omit

the other portion, perhaps as implying an incivility to the fair

55 In King John, Lady Faulconbridge’s “fault,” according to the Bastard (her son by Richard the Lionheart), is “not [her] folly,” but rather one of those “sins[that] do bear their privilege on earth”: “And they shall say, when Richard mebegot, / If thou hadst said him nay, it had been sin” (1.1.261-2, 274-5). Thusthe lady’s conduct is glorified rather than vilified. The strange case of Cressida’s infidelity makes Troilus and Cressida that much more of a problem “comedy.”56 Sir Peter notably takes the sting out of his enemies’ mockery of him by repeatedly acknowledging his own folly in having married a much younger, beautiful wife: “[W]hen an old bachelor marries a young wife, he deserves—no—the crime carries the punishment along with it” (Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The School for Scandal 1.2, in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy, 2nd ed., ed. ScottMcMillin [New York: W.W. Norton, 1997], 397).

sex.”57 Boswell comments, in 1791, that Samuel Johnson’s

companion Topham Beauclerk “was too polite, and valued learning

and wit too much, to offend Johnson by sallies of infidelity or

licentiousness.”58 If we now look back to the anonymous medieval

poem Sir Corneus, in which King Arthur good-humoredly accepts his

cuckold’s status only after he realizes he is in good company

among the other men at court, we can see one aspect of this

dramatic change. The poem’s concluding lines declare that Arthur

“Lyved and dyghed with honour, / As many hath don senne

[since], / Both cokwoldys and other mo” (lines 251-53). In his

introduction to this poem, the editor George Shuffelton writes,

“Cuckoldry, a crime against male honor, is by its very nature a

male obsession. But this means that men can also choose to ignore

it; the system of honor emerges as an arbitrary male game.”59 We

may consider this game concerning male honor as one that the

eighteenth century and later ages no longer found delight in

playing. Whether because it demoted marriage to a trivial,

57 Tilley’s Dictionary of Proverbs in England W232.58 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, abridged, with an introduction, by Bergen Evans (New York: Random House, 1965), 69.59 Introduction to Sir Corneus, in A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, ed. George Shuffelton (Western Michigan Univ., 2008).

undignified status, or because the hilarity of its endlessly

varied formula no longer justified mocking women’s integrity,

this particular brand of thrill at the carnival triumph of life

over death saw its own death in the early eighteenth century.