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).