Chapter 3 Cuckoldry Anxiety, Public Trial, Masculinity Restored
3.1 Obsession with the Imagined Horn of Cuckoldry
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Chapter 3
Cuckoldry Anxiety, Public Trial, Masculinity Restored
Anxieties of cuckoldry loom over the households in Renaissance drama.
The aberration of fidelity on the wife’s part, even if it appears in the form of suspicion or rumor and has not yet been proved true, has destabilizing power over the husband. In The Winter’s Tale, the image of the cuckold’s horn constantly hovers in Leontes’
imagination and is manifested in his soliloquy. As Coppélia Kahn observes in her book Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare, Leontes claims to have the “rough pash, and the shoots,” (I. ii. 127) which inevitably gives a visual form to “what’s unreal”
and his nihilistic speech of “nothing” (128). As examined in Chapter One, The Winter’s Tale is not the only Shakespearean play that deals with cuckoldry anxiety. In
Renaissance England, cuckoldry is prevalent in literature work and social events.
Particularly in Shakespearean plays, the significance of cuckoldry lies in its “masculine fantasy of female betrayal” (Kahn 120). The pervasiveness of male sexual anxiety is not so much a product of literary creativity as a reflection of contemporary social issue.
Due to the menace of cuckoldry, a pre-existent, latent anxiety inherent in the
construction of masculinity in Renaissance England, Leontes manipulates the public trial as an utmost performance to retain absolute dominance over his wife Hermione.
3.1 Obsession with the Imagined Horn of Cuckoldry
In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes’ irrational jealousy and false accusation culminate in the scene of the public trial, the false appearance and theatricality of which brings out
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the cuckoldry anxiety in Leontes. Cuckoldry anxiety is closely connected with the idea of property in patriarchal marriage, and the loss of ownership leads to dishonor.
The overwhelming shame of being cuckolded brings about interpretative crisis and anxiety over the legitimacy of his heir. Before analyzing the issue of cuckoldry in The Winter’s Tale, it is necessary to first clarify the word “cuckold” itself. OED defines cuckold as a derisive name for the husband of an unfaithful wife, dating its earliest use in The Owl and the Nightingale, written around the 13th century. However, the OED traces the word to the cuckoo, the bird who lays his eggs in another’s nests. Given the origin of the term, the word “cuckold” befits the male seducer more than the
cuckolded husband. It is thus ironical that the word cuckold later is associated with the victim husband rather than the wife’s extramarital lover.
As the embodied symbol of the cuckolded husband, the horn also has its contradictory origin. On the ambivalence of the cuckolded horns, Kahn notes,
Virile animals, such as bulls, stags, and the traditionally lecherous goat have horns and are associated with cuckoldry. Horns would thus seem inappropriate for the cuckold who has not been able to keeps his wife in his own bed: not him, but the sexually successful cuckolder should wear them. (122)
With its conflicting origin, however, the horn comes to represent the cuckolded husband instead of the cuckolder. Indeed, the horn was the unequivocal sign of the cuckold, and even the mere appearance of a set of antlers near a man’s home was considered defamatory in early modern England.4 The cuckold’s horns distinguish him from other men as “inhuman and impotent” (Balizet 66). As a husband who is
4 See D.E. Underdown, “The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England,” Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985) 128; and Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988) 131.
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afflicted with jealousy, Leontes also fears the shame of cuckold’s horns. Not long after the inception of his feverish jealousy, Leontes makes reference to the imagined horns: “’Twere / The mort o’ the deer / O, that is entertainment / My bosom likes not, nor my brows” (I. ii. 119-120). At first, Leontes makes allusion to different animals with horns, including steer, heifer, and calf. Later, Leontes gets rid of this distant allusion and centers on the metaphors of horn specifically linked with cuckoldry. The obsessive imagination of a horn spurring obtrusively from a cuckold’s head makes clear Leontes’ anxiety of cuckoldry and the effect of a wife’s infidelity could have on the husband’s public image.
On the Renaissance stage, the ubiquity of cuckold jokes, insults, and fears suggest that men constantly suffer from cuckoldry anxiety. Furthermore, the image of the husband was often “subject to elaborate degradation, violently transformed from an idealized ‘head’ or ‘king’ to a grotesque monstrosity.”5 As Kahn notes, the prevalence and controversy surrounding the issue of cuckoldry result from the following three social factors: misogyny, sexual double standard, and patriarchal marriage. Compared with the adulteress’ male lover, the husband suffers greater scale of scorn and ridicule. The cuckold, though a victim of the wife’s adultery, has to bear everlasting shame, while the cuckolder as seducer only has to sustain disapproval, which only lasts for a period of time. According to Keith Thomas, the source of this puzzling disproportion of the consequence has its roots in patriarchal marriage at that time. Central to the doctrine of patriarchal marriage is “that men have property in woman, and that the value of this property is immeasurably diminished if the woman at any time has sexual relations with anyone other than her husband” (203-04). The violation of fidelity on the wife’s part thus becomes the loss of property for husband.
5 Ariane M. Balizet, “The Bleeding Husband,” Blood and Home in Early Modern Drama: Domestic Identity on the Renaissance Stage. New York: Routledge, 2014. 53-88, especially 65-68.
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Indeed, the prevalence of the account of jealousy addresses a more material and economic aspect of early modern England, especially in terms of property and ownership. In Breitenberg’s analysis of “The blazon of jealousie” by Benedetto Varchi, the emphasis on women as property and the consequent fear of adultery are evident: “Jealousie springth from the Propertie or Right that wee have, when we (enjoying our Lady or Mistresse) would have her soly and wholy unto our selves, without being able (by any means) to suffer or endure, that another man should have any part or interest in her, any way, or at any time” (19). The possessive individual’s exclusive ownership of property is clearly noted by Varchi: the husband has a sense of entitlement to his wife as a private property.6
Aside from the influence of patriarchal marriage, Leontes’ anxious
masculinity is derived from the crisis of interpretation that he is going through. When the audience witness the enactment of Leontes’ suspicion of Hermione’s infidelity, it is clear that Leontes “reads” through not only speech but gesture of the suspected female character. Several Renaissance books record women’s words and behavior as signs to be interpreted by men. For instance, The Court of Good Counsell documents the aspects of women as “text” to be read by men and warns women against providing doubts of infidelity: “a woman should take heede, that she give not men occasion to thinke hardly of her, either by her Deeds, Wordes, Lookes, or Apparell” (25). A man’s reason and action are susceptible to women’s behavior and words. And the ambiguity of Hermione’s words frustrates Leontes. Indeed, Leontes’ cuckoldry anxiety is engendered by his desperate drive to “read” his wife and further fueled by his inability to do it with certainty.
6 For further analysis on Varchi’s perspective on jealousy, please see Natasha Korda’s Shakespeare’s Domestic Economy: Gender and Property in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: U of
Pennsylvania P, 2002.
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With jealousy activated by such uncertainty, it thus gives rise to obsessive interpretation. In examining how the fluid of the corporeal body wields influence on the mind in his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton describes the jealous
melancholic, which is fitting in the case of Leontes: “he hunts after every word he hears, every whisper, and amplifies it to himself…he pries into every corner, follows close, observes to an hair” (84). To a man suffering from insecurity, this leads to interpretative obsession over women’s speech and behavior. Breitenberg examines Nicholas Breton’s “Pasquil’s Mistresse,” which portrays this kind of interpretative tyranny engendered by jealousy:
It works, and watches, pries, and peeres about, Takes counsell, staies; yet goes on with intent, Bringes in one humour, puts another out, And finds out nothing but all discontent, And keeps the spirit still so passion-rent, That in the world, if there be a hell,
Asks, but in love, what jalousie can tell. (379)
Although men find nothing but discontent in this obsession, they are trapped by jealousy. In Mark Breitenberg’s discussion of jealousy, he also notes that this
“panoptical regulation” of female bodies and behavior is an anxiety-producing interpretative crisis (177). Such interpretative tyranny reveals not only the obsession but also the self-inflicted affliction men has imposed on oneself.
This dilemma is poignantly explored in The Winter’s Tale as well. Leontes also experiences the discrepancy between speculation and reality when he witnesses the colloquy between Hermione and Polixenes from aside:
Is whispering nothing?
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Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career Of laughing with a sigh?--a note infallible Of breaking honesty--horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? noon, midnight? and all eyes Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only, That would unseen be wicked? (I. ii. 284-92)
As a looker-on, the King of Sicilia painfully offers his commentary as he indulges in obsessive interpretation. In the beginning stage of his jealousy, Leontes already manufactures “evidence” that Hermione and Polixenes are having an affair: “But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers, / As now they are, and making practised smiles, / As in a looking-glass, and then to sigh, as 'twere / The mort o’ the deer” (I. ii. 115-18).
To him, the image derived from his obsessive interpretation is concrete proof of Hermione’s infidelity.
After analyzing the background of cuckoldry anxiety prevalent in Renaissance England, it is also important to examine the influence of such anxiety on men. As discussed in the earlier section of this part, sexual jealousy is constituent in the construction of masculine identity. Consequently, Leontes could not escape this cuckoldry anxiety, which is made worse when his rhetorical skills are severely
challenged by a female tongue as analyzed in Chapter 2. In the outburst of his jealousy, Leontes cries:
Too hot, too hot!
To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.
I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances,
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But not for joy; not joy. (I. ii. 108-11)
Leontes is apparently tormented by this cuckoldry anxiety. As Breitenberg notes, the self-consuming anxiety and violence of the jealous man are not an aberration but rather a “‘logical’ response to the inequalities of the same patriarchal economy that has engendered his very identity in the first place” (182). According to Harold Goddard, Leontes’ mind is like a “fiery furnace at such a temperature that everything introduced into it—combustible or not—becomes fuel” (266). Leontes’ jealous-filled soliloquy is ridden with rage and confusion:
Affection! thy intention stabs the centre:
Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicatest with dreams;--how can this be?-- With what's unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credent
Thou mayst co-join with something; and thou dost, And that beyond commission, and I find it,
And that to the infection of my brains And hardening of my brows. (I. ii. 137)
His obsession with affection and suspicion has made him see things that are originally impossible to be credible. Possessed by jealousy, Leontes is in a fanatical and
self-consuming state of mind, and he is impervious to suggestion, incapable of admitting the possibility of error (Wells 341).
Closely connected with the idea of property in the case of adultery is the loss of honor for man, which is often considered irrevocable. According to Mark
Breitenberg’s examination of a treatise written in 1599 called Fancies Ague-fittes, or Beauties Nettle-bed, the reason why jealousy does much more harm to men than
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women is because “thereby he looseth his honor” (189). What’s worse, this blemish on male honor is “in no way or at any tyme, repayreable agayne” (189). In light of the idea of possession and emphasis on female chastity essential to patriarchal marriage in the Renaissance, it is clear that male honor requires female chastity for
confirmation. Consequently, women are granted the power to cuckold men by an economy that has already “constructed male honor as contingent upon female chastity”
(Breitenberg 189). To this point, the contradiction in patriarchal ideology has been made clear: men are constantly haunted by the possibility of female adultery, the concomitant dishonor of which comes from a system grounded on the objectification and disempowerment of women. And it is within such emphasis on female chastity as constitutive of masculine subjectivity that gives rise to the anxiety and fear of
cuckoldry.
As a result, if a wife commits adultery, even if it is only supposed in the form of rumor, the husband is irrevocably dishonored, a stigma on his reputation that is hard to wipe out completely. The indelible stigma weakens the husband’s masculine identity. A cuckolded husband may pine over the loss of a wife’s affection for a while, but what constantly troubles him and will last forever is his loss of status in the community, not his wife’s supposed loss of chastity. Considering the shame and dishonor a cuckolded husband has to endure, Leontes’ unnecessary and unreasonable comprehension about his reputation and legacy expressed in his soliloquy seems to accord with Renaissance male anxiety:
… so disgraced a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave; contempt and clamor Will be my knell. (I. ii. 188-90)
What this passage reveals is not his mourning over Hermione’s supposed loss of
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chastity and loyalty but rather his obsessive concern of how his wife’s infidelity will affect his reputation and haunt him till his death. To Leontes, the cuckold’s stain is symbolized and imprinted through the visual imagination of the horn.
The fear of cuckoldry also extends to the anxiety regarding the next generation.
With the rise of Leontes’ jealousy, the traditional male fear of illegitimacy
increasingly troubles the Sicilian King. The anxiety of an illegitimate child gives rise to his several questions to Mamillius as an attempt to confirm his son’s identity as his legitimate heir. Among his feverish bouts of suspicion, Leontes makes several attempts to see his own likeness in Mamillius’s face: “Mamillius, / Art thou my boy?”
(I. ii. 119-20). Mamillius assures him that he is indeed his boy, and the father sees in him a “copy” of himself:
They say it is a copy out of mine. Come, captain, We must be neat; not neat, but cleanly, captain:
And yet the steer, the heifer and the calf Are all call'd neat.--Still virginalling
Upon his palm!—How now, you wanton calf!
Art thou my calf? (I. ii. 122-126)
As Leontes horses around with Mammilius, he keeps one eye on his wife and friend and speaks in veiled terms about being cuckolded. In spite of his son’s reassurance, Leontes’ doubt persists: “Yet they say we are / Almost as like as eggs. Women say so, / That will say anything” (I. ii. 129-31). The doubt of illegitimate child leads Leontes back to the attack on women’s unfaithfulness. If Hermione does commit adultery, not only the child she is bearing will be regarded as a bastard, the legitimacy of Mamillius, Leontes’ only male heir, will also be questioned.
After first questioning Mamillius’ legitimacy, Leontes turns again to his son
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and notes that the boy resembles him, and this reassures him that Mamillius is, in fact, his son and not someone else’s:
Looking on the lines
Of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech'd, In my green velvet coat, my dagger muzzled, Lest it should bite its master, and so prove, As ornaments oft do, too dangerous:
How like, methought, I then was to this kernel, This squash, this gentleman. (I. ii. 153-60)
Despite the physical resemblance, the agitated tone in Leontes’ speech suggests his anxiety. Leontes’ apprehension is undoubtedly associated with the political aspects of adultery. If the legitimacy of the presuming male heir is questioned, it not only brings shame to the husband, the overall stability of a country is also under its influence. In a time when male heirs were critical to dynastic survival, wifely adultery was a great fear.7 As Catherine Belsey summarizes, “female sexuality, kept under male control, guarantees masculine supremacy over nature and over time, ensuring the stability of the family and the legitimacy of heirs. Women’s sexuality unleashed is seen as able to destroy all control, undermining the institutions of society by threatening their continuity” (165). In Leontes’s festering suspicion, Hermione’s present “improper”
behavior arouses in him the anxiety of raising and passing the crown to an illegitimate heir. Despite Mamillius’ physical resemblance to him (being “as like as eggs”) and his son’s verbal assurance of their blood-tie, Leontes cannot prove his relationship as father to Mamillius. With all the power and control men have over women, women
7 Marilyn French notes the potential threat women’s regenerative power has in causing social dissolution in The War Against Women. New York: Ballantine, 1992. (204).
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were the only authority that could affirm the legitimacy of men’s offspring.
According to Kirstie Gulick Rosenfield, pregnancy, birthing, and nursing were instances of “temporary but genuine female empowerment” (107). The uncertainty regarding the progeny’s parentage lurks in marriage; when wife’s fidelity is
questioned, this concern reappears to fuel the husband’s jealousy and anxiety.
Aside from the concern of heir’s legitimacy, the cuckolded husband also fears the influence of the adulteress on the child. As Joyce Sexton points out in The
Slandered Women in Shakespeare, women’s improper social behavior is damaging to both physical and mental wholeness of her offspring (86). As a result, when the wife’s chastity is under question, the husband becomes concerned about his wife’s influence on the children. In The Winter’s Tale, once Leontes is convinced by his imagination of Hermione’s adultery, he orders to have Mamillius removed from his mother: “Give me the boy. I am glad you did not nurse him. / Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you / Have too much blood in him” (II. i. 56-58). To the cuckold husband, a wife’s adultery is contagious to the children around her, and an immediate and complete separation is a necessary call. Furthermore, the King also interprets the prince’s later ailment as related to Hermione’s supposed crime:
Slandered Women in Shakespeare, women’s improper social behavior is damaging to both physical and mental wholeness of her offspring (86). As a result, when the wife’s chastity is under question, the husband becomes concerned about his wife’s influence on the children. In The Winter’s Tale, once Leontes is convinced by his imagination of Hermione’s adultery, he orders to have Mamillius removed from his mother: “Give me the boy. I am glad you did not nurse him. / Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you / Have too much blood in him” (II. i. 56-58). To the cuckold husband, a wife’s adultery is contagious to the children around her, and an immediate and complete separation is a necessary call. Furthermore, the King also interprets the prince’s later ailment as related to Hermione’s supposed crime: